This wonderful photo by SHIMIZU Akira is a great way to show the reality of life at many places in Japan’s countryside.

Houses standing on short narrow strips in heavily forested mountains directly facing a narrow road which meanders through the forest. Cars and trucks speed by about a meter away from the front door.

This lifestyle is rapidly disappearing. Partly because Japan’s birth rate is collapsing, but ironically mostly because of better roads, more cars, and faster speeds.

Expected to better connect the isolated countryside with the rest of the country, the roads and cars have actually helped to slowly remove the humans from it.

Until the 1950s, these were mostly unpaved roads with at best a bus passing by every so often. Kids played on the street, people worked in front of their homes while chatting with their neighbors. It was a hard, but not necessarily bad life.

Young people today understandably want to live less constrained lives in more convenient towns and cities and escape the tight living spaces with cars constantly speeding by.

Already at many places in Japan’s countryside there are no reminders left that people ever lived there.

I wonder how many people in these hamlets foresaw the long term consequences when they welcomed cars and modern paved roads into their communities.