In a Town of Empty Houses,
the Young Were Gathering.

01Mitoyo, a town of empty houses

Mitoyo has a serious vacant-house problem — akiya, as we call them in Japan. The population is aging, and on paper it faces every challenge you would expect of rural Japan. Look up the statistics and it reads like "just another provincial town."

But when I actually went, I was stunned. The town was full of young people. And they were not tourists.

02Six CEOs in their twenties, from Tokyo

Some were born in Tokyo. Others had graduated from Japan's top universities — the Keio, Waseda, University-of-Tokyo class — landed good corporate jobs, then gone independent and moved here, all in their twenties. I met six of them in a single visit.

And here is the thing: none of them came as employees. Every one of them runs their own company, as its CEO.

What do they do? They solve the town's problems. Empty houses. Population decline. Labor shortages. No restaurants, poor transportation — they take the town's challenges, one by one, and turn each into a business.

03The "Akiya Street"

It isn't only the newcomers. Locals in their twenties, thirties, and forties are starting businesses too — an apparel shop in a vacant house, restaurants, izakayas. Every place we went was like that: a bar with good sake, a yakitori grill, a café.

There is a street people call the "Akiya Street" — the empty-house street. One by one, people moved their shops into the vacant houses along it, until the whole street became a single, stylish strip where young people gather.

Move into an empty house, and the street comes alive. Young people follow. This town has built that mechanism, and built it completely.

04The driving force is private, not public

What surprised me most: the whole movement is driven by a private company, not the government. That company became the catalyst, drawing in elite entrepreneurs and executives who had already made their careers in Tokyo. Board members of listed companies, serial founders — people of that caliber have actually moved here.

And what happens is matchmaking. People in their forties, fifties, and sixties who have "already won," sitting down with twenty-somethings who have the education and raw intelligence and are burning to build something. Not investing, necessarily — sparring on business ideas, making introductions. That is how businesses here move forward.

Honestly, I used to think student-led "regional revitalization" was a fashionable topic that mostly ends up as pie in the sky. Nobody actually moves, I assumed. Here, it was actually happening. That is why it shocked me.

05Zero rent, three hours of farming a day

Among more interesting ventures than I can list, let me share just one — a scheme you might call "basic infrastructure" instead of basic income.

Help a short-handed farmer for just three hours every day, and your rent is free. Young people who want to take a shot at something move here, live rent-free, and spend the rest of their day working part-time, starting companies, or enjoying their hobbies. They get to take a swing at life.

Through this scheme, young people keep arriving. I saw it with my own eyes.

06"Being involved" is not enough to change a town

Empty houses are being put to use, a street of new restaurants has formed, and the town is visibly coming back to life. More young people move in because "this town is interesting," successful executives follow, and the place keeps getting more interesting. You can feel it on your skin.

Regional revival begins only when people actually live there.

Staying in the city and "keeping a connection" with the countryside — that level of involvement is, after all, not enough. That was the biggest lesson of this visit.

07The taxi ride home

That was the daytime story. Now the story of the way home. I took a fifteen-minute taxi to my hotel, and the conversation with the driver taught me as much as the whole day had. Let me share it.

The driver was born in Mitoyo. He left for Osaka at college age and worked at one company for more than forty years. So why had he come back?

"I lost at rock-paper-scissors. So I was the one who had to come back."

He and his brothers had literally played janken for it — never mind who was the eldest. He lost. So he gave up his home in Osaka, left his children and grandchildren there, and returned alone.

Listening, I couldn't help saying: did you really need to go that far? You could visit the family grave now and then; the house itself could be sold, or let go.

His answer: a house handed down from my parents is not something I can demolish or let go of in my own generation. It means protecting the land. So I had to come back. Until I die, I feel responsible for keeping this house.

08What lies between selling and not selling

I see, I thought. "If it can be put to use, just sell it." "If akiya renovation raises the price, just sell." — Reality does not live at that level of liquidity. That is what he taught me.

And yet. If this land could be put to good use in a way he could be proud of — before his ancestors, the neighborhood, everyone around — if things had reached the point where people could say "you don't have to go that far," then an old age spent in Osaka with his children and grandchildren would have been a real option for him too.

He came back in his late sixties, facing the illness and death of parents over ninety. Past seventy, in other words, people can no longer come back at all — and the houses are simply left empty. You see it everywhere. Then the town's charm becomes hard to keep, and there is the disaster risk too.

The town I saw at noon, which uses its empty houses to the fullest — and the man I met at night, who cannot let his house go. In the delicate space between those two, I think, lies the real problem. I don't have a fundamental answer yet. But I want to keep this story where I can always reach it. That is why I wrote it down.