In the Village of the Dolls

Ayano Tsukimi with some of her creations

Nagoro, Japan (aka the Village of the Dolls)

 

 

The Japanese city of Nara might be the city of the deer [1], but the little village of Nagoro, located in the Iya valley on Shikoku, the smallest of the four main Japanese islands, is home to an ever-shrinking human population who have been replaced by life-sized dolls made of straw and dressed in old clothes [2] ... 

 

Positioned throughout the village, these effigies have made Nagoro a popular tourist destination, despite being in a remote mountainous region. 

 

Nagoro was never a big place; the villagers never numbered more than a few hundred at most. But now there are just a handful of human inhabitants [3] and over 350 dolls made by Ayano Tsukimi, who moved back to her birthplace from Osaka in 2002, to look after her elderly and recently widowed father.

 

When he died, Ayano made a doll in his likeness (and in memory of him), which she placed in a field near his home. Then she began to make dolls of other deceased family members and former residents, along with some that were born entirely of her imagination. 

 

Soon, other villagers copied her and, before long, there were more dolls than people; including a classroom full of child-sized dolls dressed in school uniforms; a group of dolls waiting at a bus stop for a bus that never arrives; worker-dolls pretending to dig up the road or repair phone lines; and a solitary doll fishing on a riverbank.     

 

Whilst some might find the idea of a doll village creepy in the extreme, others - particularly those with a fetish for dolls - will imagine it a kind of paradise (though I have to say, the dolls seem entirely devoid of erotic allure). 

 

Now in her 70s, one wonders if someone will eventually make a doll of Ms Tsukimi. 

 

And one also can't help thinking that as the population of Japan rapidly shrinks over the next thirty or forty years [4], they will either have to start producing significantly more children or radically rethink their attitude to immigration. 

 

Otherwise they are going to need to manufacture an awful lot more dolls ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post dated 10 December 2024: click here. 

 

[2] In Japanese these figures are called kakashi, which usually translates into English as scarecrow, although in this case they were made to combat loneliness and commemorate the dead, rather than deter birds.

 

[3] There are only about two dozen people left in Nagoro and there hasn't been a baby born there for over twenty years.

 

[4] Whilst Japan remains just outside the top ten of most populous countries on earth, it is estimated by the Japanese Health Ministry that the population will decrease from its current level of c. 126 million people to c. 86 million by the year 2060. There are already more than 10,000 ghost towns and deserted villages in Japan.