【大西洋月刊】我们能够阻止农村衰落吗？ [美国媒体]

Can Anything Stop Rural Decline?

我们有办法阻止农村衰落吗？

——Small towns across Japan are on the verge of collapse. Whether they can do so gracefully has consequences for societies around the globe.

——日本的小镇正处在崩溃的边缘。他们能否得体地处置，将启示全球社会。



TOCHIKUBO, Japan—The children had moved to the big city, never to return.

日本，栃洼——孩子们搬到了大城市，再也不回来了。

So their parents, both over 70, live out their days in this small town in the mountains, gazing at the rice paddies below, wondering what will become of the house they built, the garden they tended, the town they love.

他们年逾70的父母在这个山间小镇了却余生。凝视着脚下的稻田，老人不知道他们建造的屋子，他们照看的花园，他们挚爱的小镇的明天会如何。

“I don’t expect them to come back,” Kensaku Fueki, 73, told me, about his three daughters, all married and living in Tokyo. “It’s very tough to live on farming.”

“我不指望她们回来，”73岁的植木入告诉我，他三个女儿，全部嫁到了东京，“以务农为生是非常艰苦的。”

For decades, young people have been fleeing this rural village, lured by the pull of Japan’s big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Tochikubo’s school now has eight children, and more than half of the town’s 170 people are over the age of 50. “Who will come here now?” said Fueki, who grew up in this village and remembers a time when many of the houses weren’t abandoned, when more people farmed the land and children roamed the streets.

几十年以来，年轻人被日本东京、大阪这样的大城市吸引着，一直在逃离这个村庄，栃洼的学校现在只有8个孩子，镇里170口人中一半以上年过50。“现在谁还会来这儿？”植木说，他从小在这儿长大，还记得过去的时日，那时候许多房子还没被弃置，人们在田中耕种，孩子们满街打闹。

This village is not an anomaly. Japan is slowly becoming something like one big city-state, with the majority of the population centered in an urban belt that runs through the cluster of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, all located relatively near each other, along the route of Japan’s bullet train. In 1950, 53 percent of Japan’s population lived in urban regions; by 2014, 93 percent did. (In the U.S., by contrast, 81 percent of the population lives in urban regions.) It is mostly young people who move to the cities, and that means that as Japan’s population ages, the cities and towns outside the city-state are left to fade away. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs says that now, around 15,000 of Japan’s 65,000 or so communities have more than half of their population over the age of 65.

这个村庄并非个例——日本正慢慢变成一个大“城市国”，大量人口集中在新干线沿线，贯穿东京、大阪和名古屋的城市带中。1950年，日本人口中的53%生活在城市地区，到了2014年，这个数字上升到了93%(与之相比，美国为81%)。移居到城市的绝大部分是年轻人，这意味着随着日本人口老龄化，“城市国”之外的城市和村镇正逐渐消逝。日本内务省称，今天，日本65000个社区之中，有近15000个社区65岁以上人口超过一半。



In some rural regions, nature is reclaiming the land. Families are tearing down unused homes, turning the land back into fields. 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. “What will happen in the future, for most places, the only outcome will be total disappearance,” said Peter Matanle, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Sheffield, who has extensively studied Japan’s rural decline. Fields and empty lots will replace homes and farmland, and in some places, only graveyards will be left to mark the land where people once lived.

在有些农村地区，田地正在荒废。人们拆除废置的房子，退耕还林。随着不再有人修剪树木、维护田地，日本北部居住点的熊攻击事件不断增加，而野猪一直在毁坏本州岛的农田。“对于大部分地区来说，它们唯一的未来就是彻底消失。” 谢菲尔德大学日本研究学高级讲师Peter Matanle 说，他一直在广泛研究日本农村的衰落。旷野和空地将取代房屋和农田，而在某些地方，墓地将成为人类曾经生活过的唯一痕迹。

A controversial 2014 book by Hiroya Masuda, a former governor of Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, 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.

日本岩手县前县长增田宽也曾在2014年出过一本引发争论的书。他预测896座城市、城镇、农村将在2040年之前绝迹。许多城镇将面临年轻人口显着下降、老年人比例增加。总体而言，2050年，日本人口将从2010年的顶峰1.28亿下降到预计的9700万。

The disappearance of towns and cities across rural Japan is not necessarily a problem in itself. Civilizations change; towns that were once population hubs become smaller and turn into ghost towns, and then fields. The problem is getting from here to there. Japanese 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.

农村地区城镇的消失可能会引发一些其他问题。人类文明在不断变化；曾人口聚集中心的城镇不断萎缩、沦为鬼城，最终回归旷野。这过程中的问题层出不穷。日本的城镇正全力应对种种困境，例如在税收更少的情况下提供公共服务，如何用更少的工人满足需求日益增加的老年人服务需求，更糟糕的是，政府本身也受人口衰减影响：在山形县，2015年地方议会选举中，有45%的席位是无人竞争的，因为缺少参选者。

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. Its solutions to combating this decline may be significant for the rest of the world. So, too, may its failures.

世界上其他地区很快将面对同样的挑战。几乎每个发达国家都在老龄化和城市化，而日本是进程最快的。日本的解决方案可能对其他国家有深远的启示意义——当然，有启示意义的也可能是它的失败。

The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking and aging mirror those in the United States and other developed countries. 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,” John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan campus, told me. Unlike the United States, which has colleges and universities located across the country, 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.

导致日本农村人口萎缩和老龄化的原因同样反映在美国等其他发达国家身上。工作机会日益集中在城市，而乡下的工作相比半个世纪前所需要的工人更少了。“大城市之外的经济机遇少得可怜。” 坦普尔大学日本学院的人类学家John Mock 告诉我，与美国不同的是，美国的大学和学院分散在全国各地，而日本的知识中心绝大部分集中在大城市。这意味着随着年轻人对大学教育需求的与日俱增，他们将前往城市，通常不再返乡。

——Seventy-year-olds like Fueki and his wife Kura care for 80-year-olds like their neighbor——

——70多岁的植木入和妻子照看他们80多岁的邻居——

“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,” said Hiroko Seki, a 76-year old woman who runs a stationery store in a small city called Minamiuonuma, 20 minutes down the hill from Tochikubo by car. Seki’s store, which was founded by her grandparents 86 years ago, was one of the few businesses open on a street full of shuttered shops. She lives upstairs with her son, who is helping to run the store, and his family, but her two other children live in Tokyo and aren’t planning on coming 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.

“他们从高中毕业，去东京上大学，然后留在东京工作，在那儿建立自己的生活，不会再回来了。”76岁的关弘子说，她在一个叫做南鱼沼的小城市开着一家文具店，距离山上的栃洼有20分钟车程。她的小店是她祖辈86年前开建的，现在是萧条的街上为数不多的生意。她和儿子住在小店楼上，而另外两个孩子都住在东京，也不打算回来。市长林茂朗告诉我，南鱼沼市每年约500名高中毕业生中，只有100人左右在毕业后留了下来，其他人都去上大学了，而这些人中平均只有40人大学毕业后选择返乡。

There’s another reason that rural areas in Japan have a faster-growing share of elderly people than those in the rest of the world: the country’s falling fertility rate. Japan's fertility rate fell by a third between 1972 and 2015; the U.S.’s fell by 8 percent during that same period. 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. “It's a mathematical, cast-iron certainty under national population decline that as Tokyo continues to grow, everywhere else continues to shrink,” Matanle said.

另一个导致日本农村地区迅速老龄化的原因是其不断下降的出生率。从1972年到2015年，日本的出生率下降了三分之一，而同期美国下降了8%。人口萎缩加上向城市聚集，共同促成了栃洼和南鱼沼市的问题——除非有大量移民。“随着国家人口衰减，东京将不断扩大，其他地方将继续萎缩，这可以通过数学模型预测出来，它的发生是注定的。” Matanle 说。

The problem is not necessarily that Japan will run out of money to care for its growing elderly population. In 2000, the country implemented a mandatory long-term care insurance program that is paid into by everyone over 40. Elderly people, even in rural areas, can receive services like home help and adult day care for moderate fees.  But someone needs to be around to provide these services.

日本未必会面临无钱支付养老金的问题。2000年，日本政府实施了一项强制的长期护理保险项目，所有40岁以上者都参加了。因此老年人，即便是农村地区的也能以低廉的费用获取服务，例如家政服务和成人日托。但问题是，要有人去提供这些服务。

The question, for rural regions, isn’t so much how to prevent the inevitable as to how to slow it down, slow enough that the pain it causes is less severe. 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.

农村地区所面临的问题，不是如何阻止不可避免的衰落，而是如何减缓其趋势——减缓到所造成的痛苦不那么严重。现在，这些地区的衰落非常迅速，基本在一到两代人之内。如果这个过程能更平缓的话，也许基本的社会服务能够满足余下的居民。



(Villagers in places like Tochikubo farm rice in the mountains; the average age of active farmers in Japan is now 66. )

(栃洼山区的村民种植水稻；现在日本依然务农的农民的平均年龄是66岁)

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.

有一种明显的解决方案，能够逆转形式，最起码能减缓趋势——那就是向移民开放国门。日本只有1.8%的人口是在国外出生的，而美国是13%。但日本这个国家的国家认同感，在某种程度上建立在种族同质性上。大量增加移民的提案没有市场，民意调查始终显示三分之二的日本人反对大规模移民。而且即便移民被允许进入，他们也不大可能前往农村地区，因为即便想待在那儿，也没有足够的工作机会。

Many areas have focused on attracting new residents with attractions like new community centers, schools, and medical facilities, but they’re all competing against each other as they do so. 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. City leaders told me their initiatives are simply hoping to slow the rate of decline, so that the city of 60,000 will have 43,000 residents in 2060, rather than the 37,000 it is currently projected to have.

许多地区都专注于用各种手段吸引新居民，例如新的社区中心、学校、医疗设施。但大家都这么做的话难免会相互竞争。例如，南鱼沼市的领导谈起他们新建的国际IT园——创业公司可以在那儿低价租到写字楼。还有一所为对创业感兴趣者创办的商业学院。他们还建了一家崭新的医院和医学院以吸引医生和护士。还正在为主动退休人员建设一系列的住房，希望这些人愿意重新定居这里。与几乎所有萎缩中的城市一样，南鱼沼市向该地区的年轻人发宣传册，劝说他们返乡。但种种措施之下，人口的萎缩丝毫没有停缓。该市领导人告诉我，他们采取措施仅仅是希望放慢衰落的速度，使得现有60000人口的南鱼沼市2060年能有43000人，而不是现在预计的37000人。

Other areas are trying to grow the population they have by increasing the birth rate. Both Minamiuonuma and Tochikubo sit in Niigata Prefecture, which is expected to be among the regions hardest-hit by population decline. Masuda, the Iwate governor, predicted that Niigata will lose 40 percent of its women aged 20 to 40 by 2040. I visited the Declining Birthrate Countermeasures Division in Niigata, a small office overlooking the ocean in one of Niigata City’s only tall buildings. Yukiko Tamaki, the division’s director, told me that 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,” she told me. 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.

其他一些地区在努力提高人口出生率。岩手县长官增田预测到2040年，新泻20岁到40岁之间女性数量将下降40%。我访问了新泻的“应对出生率下降部门”，这间小办公室位于新泻唯一的高楼里，可以眺望到大海。部门主管珠妃雪子告诉我，新泻为年轻人举办了许多婚配活动，甚至邀请了一家婚介公司为农村男性和生活在城市的女性做媒。“对我们的部门来说，最重要的事情之一就是做媒搭线，”她对我说。新泻的女性生育率从1950年代的近4个婴儿下降到了近年来的1.43个。

Women in Niigata want more babies, Tamaki told me. A survey the prefecture conducted found that while, on average, women want 2.4 children, they have 1.8. So 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. And it is 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.

雪子告诉我，新泻的女性想生更多的孩子。政府组织的调查发现平均下来，女性想生2.4个孩子，而她们实际上有1.8个。所以新泻致力于为女性生育以及不影响工作提供便利。政府为那些有优良产假政策的公司颁发资质证明，希望这样能鼓励公司更加人性化，然而这对公司没有产生实质性影响。另外，政府还为贷款支付孩子教育费用的家庭减少利息。但是，政府至今没有发现婚姻率或出生率明显提升。当我问他们是否会支持婚外孕时，官员们告诉我这种事情在日本不被接受。甚至劝说大家结婚也很困难。“我们是公共部门，我们很难对别人说‘你们应该尽早结婚，你们已经到了生孩子的成熟期了’，”她说。

Barring a dramatic turnaround, what are these towns to do? Some are trying to simply adapt to the new reality. What “adapting” looks like, however, is pretty grim—more sacrifice than triumph. 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. “Population isn’t everything,” the town’s mayor told Bloomberg last year.

除非奇迹发生，这些城镇还能做什么？有些就简单地认命了，选择适应新现实。然而，这种“适应”看起来相当残酷，甚至要比战胜困境牺牲更多。例如，夕张是北海道岛北部的一个小镇，1960年到2014年之间丧失了90%的人口，2007年该镇宣布破产。自那以后，它已经大幅削减公共服务，例如公交车、除雪服务，合并学校，政府裁员，削减公园经费。它将住在郊区公共住房的居民重新安置到市中心附近。“人口也不是必需的，”该镇领导去年这样对彭博社说。



(A woman rides her bike past closed stores in Minamiuonuma, which is trying to slow the rapid decline of its population by recruiting young people from big cities.）

(一个女人骑车经过南鱼沼市关门的商店，南鱼沼市试图用从大城市招募年轻人的方式，减缓人口的快速萎缩)

In some places, adapting has meant that elderly people are working for longer, or themselves taking on roles as caregivers for people who are even older. In Tochikubo, for instance, people who might have wanted to retire at 65 are still tilling the fields at 75. Older adults like Kensaku Fueki, whose three daughters live in Tokyo, still climb on their roofs every winter to shovel snow to ensure their houses won’t collapse. (Last year, an 80-year-old man died in Tochikubo after suffering a heart attack while shoveling snow.) Seventy-year-olds like Fueki and his wife Kura care for 80-year-olds like their neighbor, Ayako Kuwabara, a white-haired woman I met as she embarked on a daily constitutional around the town. “In aging societies, our whole understanding of what it means to be elderly has to be shifted upwards and adjusted,” Richard Jackson, president of the Global Aging Institute, told me. “Sixty is the new 40. The question is, will 80 be the new 60?”

在某些地方，这种适应意味着老年人要工作更长时间，或者他们要去看护比他们更老的人。例如，在栃洼，那些本打算在65岁退休的人，到了75岁高龄依然要工作在田地里。古稀之年的植木入每年冬天要亲自爬到房顶除雪，确保他们的房子不会垮塌(去年，栃洼一个80岁的男子在除雪时死于心脏病发作)。70多岁的植木入和妻子要照料他们80多岁的邻居——桑原彩子，我在她每日保健散步时碰到了这个白发苍苍的老奶奶。“在老龄化社会，我们对于‘老年’的理解必须向上调整，” 全球老龄化研究所所长Richard Jackson 对我说，“60岁相当于‘新’40岁，问题是，80岁会变成‘新’60岁吗？”

Kensaku Fueki and his wife Kura aren’t worried about their own aging, per se. They can still drive, and have no difficulties going about their daily lives. 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,” Fueki told me.

植木入和他妻子本人并不担心他们的年纪。他们还能开车，日常生活也没什么困难。他们最担心的是生活方式的消失——没有年轻人会来到这个村庄，学习传统的种稻、织布或酿米酒。“把知识传递给年轻一代，对我们来说很困难。”植入告诉我。

But they’re also facing the future by acknowledging that their own disappearance, or that of their town, is not the end of the world. Among the blood pressure cuff and pill dispensers on their kitchen table sit papers they have started to draw up. They recently began end-of-life discussions with their daughters, to decide what to do with their house and their property since their children don’t want to live in Tochikubo. It’s no use to try to sustain their home, they decided: Maintenance costs are high, and without someone left to shovel the snow off the roof, it will eventually collapse. Instead, they plan to pay to have their house knocked down after they die—returning it, and a small piece of their village, back to the land.

但他们也在直面未来——他们承认自己的消失，乃至小镇的消失不是世界末日。在他们厨房放着血压计和药片分配器的桌子上，有一些他们最近开始起草的文件。最近他们开始和女儿们讨论身后事宜，鉴于孩子们不想生活在栃洼，他们要决定如何处置房子和财产。维持房子是徒劳的，他们决定：维护费用很高，由于没有人留下来清扫屋顶积雪，它终究会倒塌，因此，他们打算去世后雇人把房子拆了——让这个小村庄的一隅，回归土地。