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with the majority of the population centered in an urban belt that runs through the cluster of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya,

bullet train.

n 1950, 53 percent of Japan’s population lived in urban regions; by 2014, 93 percent did.

It is mostly young people who move to the cities

Bear attacks near settlements in Japan’s north are increasing as humans stop pruning back trees and maintaining their land. Wild boars have been ravaging farmland across the island of Honshu.

predicted that 896 cities, towns, and villages would be extinct by 2040. Dozens of towns will see the number of young people drop significantly, as the share of elderly people grows, he predicted. Overall, Japan’s population is expected to shrink from a peak of 128 million in 2010 to 97 million by 2050.

apanese towns are wrestling with dilemmas like how to run their governments with fewer tax dollars, and how to provide services for an increasingly needy population with fewer workers. To make this all the more challenging, governance is strained by the population decline as well: In Yamagata Prefecture, 45 percent of seats in the local assembly race in 2015 were uncontested because of a lack of candidates.

Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest

The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking

Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,

Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return.

“They graduate high school, they go to university in Tokyo, they start working in Tokyo, and they set up their lives in Tokyo and never come back,

Of the 500 or so teenagers who graduate high school in Minamiuonuma every year, only about 100 remain in the city after graduating. Everybody else goes off to college, and only 40 come back after graduating from college on average, the mayor, Shigeo Hayashi, told me.

the country’s falling fertility rate. Japan's fertility rate fell by a third between 1972 and 2015;

When a population is shrinking and most of that population lives in urban centers, that spells problems for rural areas like Tochikubo and Minamiuonuma, unless there is a lot of immigration.

The problem is not necessarily that Japan will run out of money t

someone needs to be around to provide these services.

Right now, the decline of these places is happening fast, within a generation or two. If it can be a more gradual process, perhaps then basic social services can at least survive for long enough to provide for the remaining residents.

One obvious solution to reversing, or at least slowing, rural Japan’s decline would be to open up the country to immigration

Just 1.8 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to 13 percent of the population in the United States.

But Japan is a country whose national identity is, in some ways, based upon racial homogeneity. Proposals to significantly increase immigration have gone nowhere, and polls consistently find that two-thirds of Japanese are against large-scale immigration.

And it’s unlikely that immigrants, even if they were allowed in, would move to rural areas where there are few jobs even for the people who want to stay.

In Minamiuonuma, for instance, city leaders talk about their newly-built global IT park, where start-ups can set up offices for low rent, and a business academy for people interested in creating their own business. They built a brand-new hospital and medical college to attract doctors and nurses, and are in the process of building a series of homes for active retired people in the hope that retirees will want to relocate to the city. Like almost every other shrinking city, Minamiuonuma sends brochures to young people from the region to try to get them to come home. But still, the population continues to shrink

Other areas are trying to grow the population they have by increasing the birth rate.

Niigata Prefecture, which is expected to be among the regions hardest-hit by population decline.

Niigata will lose 40 percent of its women aged 20 to 40 by 2040

Declining Birthrate Countermeasures Division

Niigata sponsors matchmaking events for its young people, and even invited a matchmaking company to come in and pair rural men with women living in cities like Tokyo. “For our division, one of the most important things is making couples,”

The fertility rate of women in Niigata has fallen from nearly four babies per woman in 1950 to 1.43 babies per woman in more recent years.

Niigata is focusing on making it easier for women to have babies and still work. The prefecture is giving certifications to companies that have good parental leave policies in the hope that doing so will motivate companies to be more flexible, but it has no real sway over what companies decide

reducing interest payments for families who borrow money to pay for their children’s education

But the prefecture hasn’t seen a significant uptick in marriages,

or in births.

When I asked them about supporting births outside of marriage, officials told me such a thing wouldn’t be acceptable in Japan. Even telling couples to get married doesn’t necessarily go over well. “We are the public sector. It’s difficult for us to say, ‘You should marry as soon as possible, you’re mature enough to have babies,’” she said.

Yubari, for instance, a town on the northern island of Hokkaido, which lost 90 percent of its population between 1960 and 2014, declared bankruptcy in 2007

Since then, it has drastically cut back on services such as public buses and snow removal, merged schools, laid off government employees, and cut funds for public parks. It relocated residents from public housing on the outskirts of town to apartments close to the city center.

In some places, adapting has meant that elderly people are working for longer

people who might have wanted to retire at 65 are still tilling the fields at 75.

“Sixty is the new 40. The question is, will 80 be the new 60?”

They’re most concerned about the disappearance of a way of life—that no young people will come to the village and learn how to farm rice without machines or how to weave cloth or make sake. “It’s difficult for us to give knowledge to the younger generation,” F