A Japanese Hamlet Is Now an Economics Lab

Tomiyoshi Kurogoushi sighs as he looks over the terraced rice fields that generations of his family tended in the mountains of central Japan. Most are now covered in weeds and grass. The area of land Kurogoushi still farms in Yabu, Hyogo prefecture, has shrunk to a small plot around his house where he and his wife, Yoko, grow potatoes, cabbages, and carrots to feed themselves and his mother. Rather than sow rice, the 66-year-old Kurogoushi works at a ski resort as a general manager.

“Farmland is deteriorating as people here are getting old,” says Kurogoushi, whose two daughters have married and moved away. “Even though we have the land for farming, we can’t really keep doing it. Paddy fields have to be tilled or they’ll be ruined.” The amount of abandoned arable land throughout Japan has almost doubled in the past 20 years.