There was once an advertisement on the Internet:
"A little scary tokushima Kakashi Nori."
This is an advertisement for a tourist attraction, friends who love to watch anime should be familiar with the name Kakashi, is there really such a character in reality? Also built a village? What's the horror?
With three question marks, if you click on the travel advertisement and want to find out, you will have an indescribable feeling.
The first thing that catches your eye is the picture above, which literally says Kakashi Nori, but the family of three in the photo is obviously not a living human being.
The dim light, the shadow of the hat and their consistent smiles give people a very eerie feeling. Honestly, can such a picture really attract tourists?
Then look down, you will find that the village dolls are not only this family. They can be seen everywhere in the fields, roadsides, stations, and campuses, and most of them are smiling and welcoming.
What's even stranger is that there are almost no living people in the whole village, as if they were deliberately hiding when taking pictures.
Do the Japanese have any special preferences and put this thing everywhere? These dolls are somewhat similar to the paper ties used in funeral culture, but the paper ties are not messy.
Imagine the classrooms of the village primary and secondary schools filled with paper-tied children, listening carefully to the paper-tied teacher's class, what kind of a picture of hades.
However, the real situation is full of the puppet author's vision of the past and his helplessness to reality.
A village that is about to disappear
As we all know, Japan is a small country with a land area of 378,000 square kilometers, less than one-tenth of the population of the mainland, but more than twice as densely populated as the mainland.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, In order to change the geographical disadvantages of its own country's poor land and continuous natural disasters, Japan began a barbaric military invasion of the surrounding countries, but in the end it was useless, many people died, but the area did not increase, but in some places the thickness of the soil layer became thinner.
Although Japan lost the power to own its own army after World War II, it was exchanged for rapid economic and technological development. In particular, during the Korean War, as the rear of the United Nations Army, it made a fierce fortune in the country.
However, with the development of the economy, the process of rural urbanization is also getting faster and faster. This eerie Kakashi village is one of the many smaller villages scattered around the island in Japan, which are also in the face of disappearing, with an aging population.
Originally, after the death of the last group of elderly people, it will gradually be forgotten like other disappeared villages.
Unexpectedly, an old lady who returned to her hometown for the elderly rejuvenated it and became a famous local tourist attraction, suspending the pace of disappearance.
The old lady's thoughts
In 2003, Ayano Tsukimi, who was in her old age, gave up her life in Osaka to take care of her father and returned to the land where she was born and raised. At that time, people only knew that the village was called "nagoro", Chinese it was "name".
After returning to the village, Ayano Tsukimi planted a lot of crops in front of her house and lived a pastoral life. Compared to Osaka' land, there is no shortage of fertile land here, and at the same time there is no shortage of crows that call "ah~".
In order to prevent these dark thieves from digging seeds in the field, the old lady planted her elderly father in the ground to frighten the crows.
Of course, it would not be her real father, but "The Father- Lightweight Edition" made of old newspapers and straw wrapped in his father's old clothes.
The attentive old lady specially followed the appearance of her father, made a head for the dummy and sewed her facial features. But what she didn't expect was that this move had caused trouble to other old men and women in the same village.
Whenever someone passed by her house, she would greet her old father with a pestle in the field, but he never got a response.
At first, everyone always thought that the old man was old and had an older ear. It wasn't until the old lady found out the situation while working in the field and explained it to everyone that they found out that the person who greeted them in the past few days was a scarecrow, fortunately never got a response, otherwise it would be...
Inspired by this incident, the old lady had the idea of making the village lively again. To this end, she also consulted the opinions of the whole village and received their unanimous approval.
From that moment on, mingyi began the road of transformation, and this road was paved by the old lady alone.
The old lady would make a tailor-made doll for each person who had left the village or had passed away.
Refer to photos that restore their appearance as much as possible, and then wear clothes donated or abandoned by others.
Each doll has a detailed identity document, recording the time of leaving the village and some basic personal information, which is recorded in a ledger for visitors to consult.
As the dolls became more and more numerous, the deserted streets of the village also looked lively. However, this kind of bustle is only what it looks like.
The number of people living in the village is still decreasing year by year, and young people are destined to move to larger cities in order to get better education and find better jobs.
Worse
In 2011, the village's primary school was shut down due to too few students.
As for the situation in rural schools, friends who like to watch Japanese animation may understand that rural primary schools often have only one class, and students of all grades are mixed together to go to school.
Their teacher may be only one person, and he will also be responsible for teaching all subjects and grades at the same time.
The old lady did not want the only school in the village to become a discarded school building in a Japanese horror movie, and specially made paper tying for the children and teachers, oh no, it was a scarecrow doll, creating a scene of students taking classes seriously. But I always think she's more like that when she does that.
The suspension of schools has left the village with no conditions to retain young people, and most of the elderly have been taken to live in the city where their children live.
And the few people who are basically not accustomed to the hustle and bustle of life in the city, or who do not want to add burden to their children, are also the last glimmer of life in the village.
In about 2014, there were only 30 living people left in the village, but the number of scarecrows reached 200, and tourists who came to visit were even scared to death by the sudden appearance of living people.
Of course, this situation is not because the tourists are too timid. After all, most of the people who can travel to such a village like to hunt for curiosity or adventure. They can be scared mainly because the atmosphere in the village is so weird.
Especially in the evening, in the dim light, the old straw man will give you an inexplicable sense of vicissitudes, making people uncomfortable. What an experience would it be to suddenly have a villager come up to you and talk to you in such a situation.
Time doesn't just leave the marks of age on human faces, scarecrows age much faster than the many folds on their faces.
From the moment of its birth, it is destined to bear the baptism of nature, whether it is sun and rain or wind and snow, it must be silently endured.
Over time, the snow-white face that has just been made will become miserable, and it will have all kinds of unnatural faces. The initial posture will also be distorted by the pressure of the snow, posing in various strange poses.
According to the old lady, it usually takes 2-3 days to make a straw man. A straw man's lifespan is two years, and if it is not renovated, it will look bad.
If they are placed indoors, the shelf life is much longer, and you usually only need to dust them to make them look brand new.
The Mystery of Kakashi
Going back to the beginning question, where is Kakashi? After looking through a bunch of photos, I didn't find any straw man who looked like Kakashi, was it just a gimmick that the old lady used to attract tourists?
Actually, when I put kakashi-no-ri's Japanese (かかしの里) into the translation software, I finally solved the case, and the result was the land of the scarecrow.
It turns out that Kakashi means scarecrow in Japanese, and Japanese manga artists have given characters names that are really casual.
Travel tips
Thanks to the efforts of the old lady, the original village has a new look and name, and it is not only called the village of scarecrows, but also the village of the sky, and is now a well-known local tourist attraction.
Every year, foreigners visit this village in the deep mountains and old forests, although the traffic here is not easy.
The local government has stopped operating buses to the area. If you want to visit the village, it takes two hours by taxi from the nearest train station. However, people who have been there will usually recommend that others rent a car and drive themselves.
Because then I am not afraid to forget to go back with the driver and say that I will go back later, and there are no farms or homestays in the village.
The only people who can spend the night together are the crows in the sky and the straw people everywhere, if you find that the straw people will move, it is most likely caused by the wild animals in the mountains, and there will never be other possibilities!
Although the old lady single-handedly changed the status quo of the village, allowing it to slow down the curtain. However, her body, which is already an old age, makes her a little powerless to make a doll.
If no one is willing to take her over and continue to renovate the dolls, within three years, the Village of the Scarecrows may become the best place to hold the boldness fair, and a good place for young people to explore.
After the story
It is worth pondering that aging and urbanization are not only in Japan, but also in many rural areas on the mainland, which has accelerated the decline in fertility rates in recent years.
More than 900,000 villages disappeared in the decade from 2000 to 2010 alone, and how to protect these historic cultural heritages is also a topic that our generation needs to study.
Of course, this is not to say that every village can solve the problem by producing a paper-bound person like an old lady. Her set will certainly not work in China, and it will only scare the people who still live in the village to move out.
Moreover, there are also people in Japan who have emulated old ladies and built puppet villages, but the level cannot be compared with what other old ladies do.
Compared with the above, the old lady is obviously much more meticulous. Leaving aside those who look at the madman, some are still quite beautiful.
The old lady will even make some foreign devils who come to visit into the village as straw people, but don't misunderstand Oh, it is based on their appearance to make straw people.