The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 in 2025.
Large empty areas where homes and factories used to be, old billboards for stuff that no longer exists, whole school buildings and gymnasiums out of use and overgrown. Most shops closed or hardly open & few remaining occupied buildings in the middle of it.
Was a really special experience & the local coal mining museum was super interesting - just wondering for how long it can continue going...
The question really is - how does an abandoned town hurt us? Sure, there may be some sympathy and loss for "what once was" (same as the pictures of the abandoned classrooms in Prypiat).
The US has had similar things happen but the spread out population has given it some resiliency (many towns that "collapsed" when the mill/factory/whatever shut down continue in a strange afterlife as a suburb of a nearby city).
One general side effect is harder access to affected regions - with less people to serve public transport gets reduced or even abandoned entirely (affect rail lines the most, due to the necessary maintenance needed for safe operation). IIRC there are numerous rural lines scheduled to be closed in the near future in Hokkaido for example (and of course a bunch of them got abolished in the Yubari area).
Is this a problem ? I guess not really & it might actually help the nature regenerate in those areas.
Where it can be a bigger problem is various small islands - where the islands being inhabited makes a big difference in territorial claims & is a very important thing in regards to what China has been doing (building artificial islands, etc.). For that reason I suspect the Japanese government subsidizes island communities quite heavily to keep them going & keeping suverenity over those islands and the surrounding sea.
Cancun has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But I guess we shouldn't care about it because thousands of Americans fly there for vacation every day.
Or are you joking? I hope so, because it takes a certain kind of stupid to not understand the very very bad things that a shrinking population would cause.
And if you want to see how real Armageddon looks like, go visit Yubari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABbari,_Hokkaido
The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 in 2025.
Large empty areas where homes and factories used to be, old billboards for stuff that no longer exists, whole school buildings and gymnasiums out of use and overgrown. Most shops closed or hardly open & few remaining occupied buildings in the middle of it.
Was a really special experience & the local coal mining museum was super interesting - just wondering for how long it can continue going...