The northernmost island of Japan, Hokkaido, was settled by the Japanese after the Meiji restoration in a pattern that was influenced by the American West. It is something like the canary in the coal mine for Japan’s depopulation, and the reconquering of human settlement by Mother Nature.
I found this 2021 essay (and photo essay) by an American who is as fascinated by this land and by this phenomenon as I am:
When I first arrived in Tokyo, I studied under an elderly rural geographer at Waseda University. In his lectures, he would show us slide after slide of settlements deep in the mountains of regions across Japan, with rice paddies carved high onto hillsides, sometimes watered by absurdly long irrigation systems. His point was about the homogenizing drive in Japanese culture: that well into the latter half of the 20th century, people living as far north as Tohoku would sometimes go to unreasonable lengths to replicate a mode of life centered on rice cultivation that has been practiced in the country’s cultural heartland for more than a thousand years. Even in cold climates, there were few architectural adaptations like the ondol floor heating common in Korea.
“Hokkaido is different,” he said. People insulate their homes, live far apart from one another, and practice large-scale agriculture suitable to the climate. Whereas people in most of Japan tend to stubbornly hold onto land, a farmer in Hokkaido who can no longer turn a profit will sell to his neighbor and move to the city like an American. It is a settler society at its core, with the rationalist mindset that entails.
Hokkaido’s period of extensive development has long since come to an end, and the island now faces the same unipolar concentration as Japan as a whole — like Tokyo, Sapporo swallows up all the young people and economic activity, with the population on the rest of the island rapidly shriveling. This means Hokkaido is now strewn with ruins.
Go check out the whole thing.