Nanmoku, a mountain village in Gunma Prefecture regarded as Japan’s oldest municipality, is courting young people from the Peruvian Amazon in an effort to keep its community running, AFP reported.
Around 70% of Nanmoku’s roughly 1,300 residents are aged 65 or over, and a 2014 think tank report judged it the municipality “most at risk of disappearing”. The village signed a sister-city agreement with Belen, a district of Iquitos in northern Peru, and this month hosted Belen’s mayor and two young women on a week-long tour of Japan. Belen has more than 60,000 residents and a median age of about 27, and Peru is home to the world’s third-largest population of Nikkei, people of Japanese descent.
Mayor Saijo Hasegawa said: “Around 60 people die each year here, and just two or three babies are born.” Without newcomers, he warned, “we could reach a point where even public transportation stops operating.”
Japanese news agency Kyodo has reported that labour shortages are already straining care work and the community bus service, where many drivers are in their seventies. Nanmoku had 1,337 residents at the end of July, has offered vacant homes to prospective settlers and has handed its nursing home and roadside station to a residents’ nonprofit to allow more flexible hiring.
Belen’s mayor, Lina Arista Lopez, described the situation at home bluntly: “There is no work.”
How any young Peruvians would secure the right to live in Japan remains unclear, and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is pushing for tighter rules on foreign nationals amid growing opposition to immigration. Nanmoku’s approach sits alongside national efforts to revive the regions through tourism and remote working, with immigration largely absent from official strategy.
For rural communities in the UK and elsewhere facing ageing populations and gaps in care and transport, Nanmoku’s experiment shows a small authority looking beyond its own borders when domestic recruitment has run dry.
Sources: AFP via The Standard, 22 October 2026 · AFP via Daily Tribune · Kyodo via South China Morning Post. Featured image: Semi Valley, Nanmoku, by Qurren / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
