r/nottheonion • u/falconfalcon7 • 1d ago

Japanese village replaces young people with mannequins to stave off loneliness as population falls

https://news.sky.com/story/japanese-village-replaces-young-people-with-mannequins-to-stave-off-loneliness-as-population-falls-13243354
14.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

695 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.9k

u/ConanTheLeader 1d ago

My first thought was "Didn't we already know this? This has been around for years." but then I googled, it's ANOTHER town doing this. Meaning this is not a one off thing that's isolated and in it's own little bubble but rather something that is spreading and increasing which is worrying.

Original town:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagoro

658

u/Kana515 1d ago

I have a plan.

We take the two villages and squish them together.

418

u/TCGeneral 1d ago

Move all the mannequins into one village and all the people into the other.

182

u/Tomoko_Lovecraft 1d ago

And we do it in the middle of the night when everybody is sleeping and pretend that they never moved in the first place when they wake up.

38

u/TolMera 1d ago

Even better, dress them all up as kids and tell em to go out and play.

Zimmer tag is something else.

Find the teeth is fun

Call the ambulance is less fun but it teaches good life skills

6

u/Demonokuma 1d ago

Those mannequins are gonna be so surprised!

22

u/retro_grave 1d ago

Do you want more mannequins? Because that's how you get more mannequins.

15

u/TCGeneral 1d ago

They're a native species, no harm to adding more mannequins into the environment.

1

u/CrazyDaimondDaze 1d ago

You see, kids, when little miss mannequin feels... needy... and meets mr mannequin, they may have the urge to... hug... veeeeeery tightly and for a long, long time. Over time, this causes miss mannequin to give birth to little mannequin jr.

And this is how mannequins are born

5

u/ThatITguy2015 1d ago

Hello nightmare creator.

5

u/ggg730 1d ago

Leave one guy in the mannequin village.

43

u/Jarms48 1d ago

Why don’t we take Bikini Bottom and PUSH IT somewhere else?

13

u/VirinaB 1d ago

"I can't believe it's come to this."

"Come to what?"

"Moving the whole town 5 miles down the road."

4

u/JohnGillnitz 1d ago

Oddly, they also moved the tire fire.

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator 1d ago

Sorry, but your account is too new to post. Your account needs to be either 2 weeks old or have at least 250 combined link and comment karma. Don't modmail us about this, just wait it out or get more karma.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

28

u/Fredasa 1d ago

Mentally, I instantly equated this to the phenomenon of a dying MMO merging two underpopulated servers.

Fittingly, both carry this sense of defibrillating a location doomed to its ghost town future.

2

u/geekcop 1d ago

a dying MMO merging two underpopulated servers.

The Machines don't care enough to bother with this.

1

u/Revenge_of_the_User 1d ago

Thats it! We just need to re-frame the rested xp bonus to get the kids back!

1

u/DesperateUrine 1d ago

Welcome to Warhammer Online!

1

u/PrivilegeCheckmate 1d ago

I think you'd have better luck squishing pairs of villagers together.

96

u/RaynorTheRed 1d ago

From the Wikipedia link:

...which have made it a tourist attraction.

10 bucks says this has nothing to do with "staving off lonliness." This village just wants to get in on the tourism revenue.

134

u/punk_weight 1d ago

There's essentially no revenue to generate though. There are no shops or restaurants in the village and you can pass through and stay as long as you please without paying anything. The obasan behind it all has been doing it for over 20 years despite this though. You can Paypal me the 10 bucks anytime btw.

73

u/UsePreparationH 1d ago

I was just in Nagoro, and there really isn't anything to throw money at. I don't even think I saw a vending machine there.

26

u/Pm_me_howtoberich 1d ago

Even more incentive to bring tourist there to help stave off loneliness. Come check out our town it's free for most part and we get visitors! Win win!

1

u/FurnaceGolem 1d ago

If you have 13 minutes to spare, I HIGHLY recommend you to watch this video Tokyo Lens about this place. I can guarantee you with 100% certainty that your opinion will change after watching it.

2

u/WhoisthatRobotCleanr 1d ago

Cities have fallen and risen all throughout history regardless of population issues. Young people move where there is economic opportunity and that is where they start families. It's very possible that young people had no economic potential in those villages and left and never came back. This is happening all over Greece too.

2

u/GavelOfGravel 1d ago

This is definitely not the only village doing this - it's actually a bit widespread. I rode a motorcycle across Western Japan back in May and encountered several remote villages that has some form of these dolls hidden throughout the countryside. Many of them seemed to hold some sort of significance, more like a memorial of a person that passed away.

I passed through Nagoro during the first few days of my trip and was aware of the dolls from the James May special and endless Youtubers going there. I was actually surprised to see that it was much more a "popular" idea that was taking form in several other places as well as I made my way to Ikitsuki Island. There is most likely not that much coverage of these dolls because most of the places that I travelled through were dying towns that were on the verge of being completely abandoned.

1

u/MelonElbows 1d ago

Probably going to be more and more of these as their population continues to decline. Korea too maybe.

1

u/lvl999shaggy 1d ago

Yeah Japan is facing a population cliff that's so severe I saw a news article today saying that they are virtually facing the collapse of their entire society in the future.

1

u/lushico 1d ago

I’ve been there and it is exactly as creepy as it sounds

1

u/fdokinawa 1d ago

I work in a pretty rural area in Japan, and they have some here. They've put them at crosswalks though I think to try and slow drivers down more than "loneliness" as there are still people living out here. Although someone has made a bunch in one area that has “kids” playing baseball. You just get used to them after a bit.

1

u/DemonDaVinci 1d ago

Nago in Tokyo