Where have all the young men gone?

摘要

In the hamlet of Ogama, a scattering of traditional wooden houses in a steep-sided valley just a ridge away from the Sea of Japan, the forest is claiming back land that had been cleared generations ago for rice and vegetables. By her small patch of mountain potatoes, 71-year-old Setsu Ya-chida sits down to rub her arthritic hands. Quite frankly, she says, she's lonely. Her husband is dead. Two elderly neighbours she had nursed have also died, and now she lives on her own a long way from the hamlet's few other members. Her children, town-dwellers, beg her to spend a night or two with them, but she refuses, because she would only feel more lonely when she came back. No, she says, she is going to wait for that day, in a couple of years' time, when the whole hamlet moves—lock, stock and ancestral graves-out of the valley for good. No need ever to come back then.