JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Japan has more elderly adults than any major nation, and it is losing nearly a million people a year. By mid-century, an estimated 750 towns and villages may vanish from the map. One of the surest indicators of a village's slide toward extinction is when young women start leaving. NPR's Anthony Kuhn explains.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Crowds cheer as young men balance bamboo poles up to 40-feet high with lanterns on their hands, heads, hips and shoulders. It's a centuries-old tradition unique to Japan's Akita Prefecture. Only men are allowed to touch the poles and be sashite, or pole carriers. The women play flutes and drums. One pole carrier is New Zealand college student, Raz Tripp (ph). He says Kanto is rooted in Japan's Shinto religion.
RAZ TRIPP: The reason only men can be sashite is because the goddess resides in the pole, and she doesn't like being touched by women. She gets jealous.
KUHN: Miwa Sawano (ph) is a college senior and former Kanto club member. She accepts Kanto's gender roles as part of Akita's traditional culture, but she objects to the club's drinking parties with local residents.
MIWA SAWANO: (Through interpreter) Things like sexual harassment happen. Kanto performers wear shorts, and girls' legs get touched a lot by the local men.
KUHN: Akita has the most aged population, the lowest birth rate and the fastest rate of population decline of Japan's 47 prefectures. A government report in June said that many women are leaving rural areas due to rigid gender roles there. Even more leave for better jobs, but Chuo University sociologist Masahiro Yamada says there's a gender angle to that too.
MASAHIRO YAMADA: (Through interpreter) Middle-aged and older men in rural areas don't want to change the current situation of discrimination against women, where women are stuck in temporary or part-time jobs and only men get promoted. Women don't want to work in these places, so they move to Tokyo.
KUHN: But some women stay in or return to their hometowns to try to improve them.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAFFIC)
KUHN: I met one such person in Nirasaki, a small city of about 28,000 people, some 80 miles west of Tokyo in Yamanashi Prefecture.
So it's about 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, and this is the main street of Nirasaki. And there's a fair amount of traffic, but most of the storefronts and shops here are shuttered.
Twenty-six-year-old Ren Yamamoto (ph) wanted to make young, rural women's voices heard. She taped a hundred interviews and posted them on YouTube.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Japanese).
REN YAMAMOTO: (Through interpreter) Lots of them said that when they go back to their hometowns, they feel pressure because they're asked, when are you getting married? When are you going to have children? And they're sick of being forced into such a role.
KUHN: Yamamoto put the issue of gender inequality and depopulation on the map. Public broadcaster NHK reported on her project. Later, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba invited her to meet with him. Yamamoto told Ishiba that government policies are missing the mark.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
YAMAMOTO: (Through interpreter) Policies to support women have been centered on child care and marriage without addressing the reasons why women leave rural areas. Policymakers haven't faced the fact that women have their own choices to make. We feel like we're seen as baby-making machines.
KUHN: Japanese women's political empowerment ranks 125th out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report for 2025.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMS AND FLUTE PLAYING)
KUHN: Back in Akita, kids try drumming as the Kanto performance wraps up. Many women are pessimistic about changing Akita's conservative traditional culture. Independent Akita journalist Miwako Miura (ph) says her local newspaper boss told her not to report on gender inequality.
MIWAKO MIURA: (Through interpreter) The deeper you go into rural areas, the more people try to not talk about gender issues. People are afraid that if they say something that crosses the line, they'll be criticized. It's a taboo.
KUHN: Some rural women complain of what they call in Japanese moyamoya (ph). It's a vague feeling that something is wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. Often, it's enough to make women leave the countryside. College senior Miwa Sawano says let them go.
SAWANO: (Through interpreter) Let Akita be depopulated. There's no way of stopping it, honestly speaking. They won't realize they have a problem until the women leave.
KUHN: Sawano adds that women should not have to suffer oppression in the name of preserving traditional culture. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Akita, Japan. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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