Would you live in a so-called “ghost village” if you only had to pay $500 for a house? Here in the United States, you can barely even get a studio apartment for that price. So why are these akiya ...

Dani and Evan Benton moved to Japan on a startup business visa in 2023. They bought an abandoned house for about $6,500 and turned it into a guesthouse. The couple have also started a homestead with a ...

On a late October morning in Nakano, the rhythmic thwack of pickleball paddles echoed through a local gymnasium, where around ...

Local authorities are offering people the chance to buy a house in Japan for as little as $500. In some cases, they’re even giving the houses away for free. The only catch? You have to be willing to ...

Get these $500 fixer-uppers — so long as you can read a Japanese construction manual. Japan is riddled with millions of vacant homes, called akiya, that local governments hope will sell for next to ...

Akita Prefecture has Japan's most aged population, lowest birthrate and fastest declining population. Rigid gender roles are prompting young women... Rigid gender roles are prompting women to leave ...

Violet Pacileo left her job in finance in Tokyo to open a CrossFit gym in rural Japan. She discovered moving to the countryside didn't necessarily mean a slower pace of life, she said. She said that ...

Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR's series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing ...