Matsunoyama town has almost everything its residents could want: spellbinding scenery, gorgeous terraced rice paddies cloaking the hillsides, splendid new roads and magnificent public facilities.
That is, everything except young people, and hence a future.
Over the last four decades the small town in Niigata prefecture has seen its population plummet from over 10,000 to around 3,000 today. It's an old story in rural villages and towns over Japan; the pied-piper call of the big city luring away the community's young people, leaving behind an ever more aged population. Of the town's residents now, more than 40 percent are of retirement age.