Inside Japan's happiest town

Sitting atop a lushly forested hill in the rural outskirts of Tokyo is a picturesque community that didn't exist half a century ago.

Row upon row of nondescript two-story houses line the quiet, well-maintained streets, connected by a careful web of narrow lanes interspersed with parks and greenery.

There’s a labyrinthine quality to the seemingly identical alleys crisscrossing the town. It’s almost like wandering into a miniature version of American suburbia, minus the spacious lawns and garages. It’s definitely not your typical Japanese town or village, which usually feature a ramshackle mix of traditional wooden homes and prefab housing with little or no aesthetic unity.

For one thing, there are very few overhead power lines — an eyesore observed in most parts of the nation — and a notable lack of shrines and temples. The settlement is clean and organized to the point of feeling alien.

Welcome to Hatoyama New Town, a residential project that’s no longer very new, and a neighborhood that’s home to approximately half the population of its namesake town of Hatoyama, a small municipality in central Saitama Prefecture that’s been labeled the happiest town in Japan.

Hatoyama is a rare hybrid where old-timers who have inhabited their land for generations live across town from relative newcomers drawn to a Western utopian vision and the promise of a modern, healthy lifestyle embodied by the postwar “new town” projects that sprang up from the 1960s to the 1980s and beyond.

These new towns offered hopeful alternatives to a growing middle class looking to escape the pressing housing and environmental crisis erupting in rapidly developing urban centers during Japan’s economic boom years. It gave them a chance to live in larger homes in upscale communities with abundant nature that weren’t too isolated from larger cities.

But as the population aged and began declining, so did the new towns and the municipalities they belonged to.

At its peak in 1995, Hatoyama was home to 18,000 residents. Now it’s down to 13,200, with 45.5% of its population age 65 or older — far higher than the national average of 29.1%. When only looking at residents of Hatoyama New Town, that ratio becomes even larger as first generation migrants who moved into the housing project in the 1970s reach their twilight years.

What’s more, Hatoyama doesn’t have its own railway station, meaning people rely on cars and bus services for their primary means of transportation. Commuters to Tokyo typically catch a bus to reach neighboring Takasaka Station to access trains to the capital.

As is the case with the rest of the nation, the ebbing population has also seen a growing number of abandoned homes. According to the latest study the town conducted in 2015, 211 of the 5,850 homes in Hatoyama were uninhabited.

This steady, seemingly irreversible demographic decline has seen Hatoyama New Town top the list of similar residential projects in Saitama Prefecture at risk of disappearing. And while all these factors would appear to paint a bleak picture of a community fading into obscurity, its residents, in fact, seem quite content.

“Excluding transportation issues, life here is very comfortable,” says Shinjiro Araki, a 75-year-old resident of Hatoyama New Town who moved into the housing project in 1982.

“Nature is plentiful and there are many parks,” Araki says. “And it’s very safe — there aren’t any suspicious people or strangers in the neighborhood. As far as I know, there hasn’t been any serious crime in the community since its inception."

In December, construction and real estate giant Daito Trust Construction Co. released the results of a major survey to determine the happiest town in Japan, with more than 500,000 adults living in all of the nation’s 1,883 municipalities across 47 prefectures taking part. Respondents were asked to rate their happiness on a scale of one to 10, and their answers were then multiplied by 10. Hatoyama came in first place with 74.2 points, with public safety and serenity noted as being primary factors.

In late June, I visited the town to take a closer look into the secret of living a longer, more fulfilling life in Japan. Perhaps Hatoyama could offer clues on how personal happiness can be obtained while confronting the myriad demographic hurdles weighing on the world's most rapidly aging nation.

Nutrition, exercise and social engagement

Takao Komine remembers when construction began on a 140-hectare plot of land on top of a nearby mountain in 1971.

“I recall it was during a school field trip. I must have been in my second or third year of middle school,” says the 65-year-old Komine, who is now serving his fourth term as mayor of Hatoyama.

“My schoolmates and I were hiking and we could see Hatoyama New Town in the works. My friend joked that he’d use his allowance to make a downpayment of ¥500 ($3.65) to buy a house there.”

The project was led by developer Nihon Shintoshi Kaihatsu, an entity that filed for special liquidation in 2003. Approximately 3,200 new homes were sold in three stages from 1974 to 1997, starting with a district in the southeast during the 1970s, the western portion in the 1980s and finally a luxury residential neighborhood to the north in the 1990s.

These projects essentially created an entirely new community in what was then called Hatoyama Village, where Komine’s family has lived for eight generations since the Edo Period (1603-1868). The population soared as thousands of baby boomers purchased homes and moved in.

“These people came to Hatoyama dreaming of a happy retirement surrounded by nature,” Komine says. “And I believe they’ve achieved what they sought to a certain extent, and that’s behind the strong showing in the survey.”

Of note is Hatoyama’s unusually high healthy life expectancy, or the average number of years people can spend in good health. While the national average stood at 72.68 for men and 75.38 for women in 2019, it was 84.16 for men and 86.12 for women living in Hatoyama. That has also seen the town’s ratio of those age 65 and over and certified as requiring nursing care stand at only 11.01% in 2019, or the second lowest in Saitama Prefecture.

Behind the success is a decadelong program the town has been promoting to enhance its healthy life expectancy, dubbed the “Hatoyama model.” In partnership with the Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital and Institute of Gerontology, the town has been hosting health-related events and seminars for its residents with the help of neighboring Daito Bunka University’s sports and health science department and the Kagawa Education Institute of Nutrition.

“Strength training is essential to prevent trips and falls, while routine cardio exercise and a balanced diet is necessary to stay healthy,” says Komine, an avid walker himself and an amateur astronomer who displays photographs of the night skies he has captured in his office. Coincidentally, Hatoyama is also home to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Earth Observation Center.

“What’s more,” he says, “it’s important for people to go out and participate in social activities to retain a sense of belonging in the community.”

When Komine won his first term back in 2008, he campaigned on the promise of introducing a demand-responsive shared taxi service to his town to solve its transportation conundrum and in anticipation of citizens giving up their driving licenses as they reach old age.

For ¥200 a ride, residents can reserve taxis to take them from their homes to their destination of choice — be it the local hospital, a supermarket or community facility — as long as it’s within the town’s premises. And for an extra few hundred yen, taxis can take them on longer journeys to a major hospital or to Kita Sakado Station in the neighboring city of Sakado.

As rural depopulation accelerates and regional railways bleed red ink, Hatoyama’s venture made headlines in Japan as an effective measure to repair transport gaps.

“Thanks in part to the service, we haven’t seen a single fatal traffic accident since the shared taxis were introduced in 2009,” says Hiroki Matsunomoto, a town official responsible for the program. And that, he adds, may be another reason behind the sense of safety shared by the town’s residents.

Injecting diversity into uniformity

Early pressure patterns created record-setting heat waves in late June. In Hatoyama, the mercury climbed to 39.9 degrees Celsius, making the happiest town in Japan the hottest in the nation on that particular day.

The streets of Hatoyama New Town were mostly empty under the scorching sun, except for a few residents with parasols braving the intense heat to make their way toward the main drag featuring essential outlets such as a post office, a hair salon, a Seiyu supermarket and a FamilyMart convenience store.

In one corner of a slick public facility called the Hatoyama Community Marche, senior citizens could be seen participating in a weekly exercise regimen sponsored by the town’s social welfare council. Across the partition from the cheerful group is a cafe and souvenir shop selling goods produced by local artists, as well as carts filled with fresh onions, cabbages, carrots and cherry tomatoes, among other items.

“These are all organic vegetables that we harvested,” says Mayumi Yoshizawa, who heads a farming operation called Genki Partners based in Hatoyama.

Tanned and talkative, Yoshizawa says she married into a family in the old part of town 35 years ago, and now offers fresh produce to vendors and markets both in and out of Hatoyama.

“Residents of the new town are very open to outsiders compared to people from the old part of the village,” she says. “I guess that’s only natural since new town folks also came from elsewhere. But they’re getting very old now, although we’ve been seeing more younger people moving in.”

At 38, Toyohiro Motoie is among the “younger” residents. He is the director of the Community Marche, which is managed by Tokyo-based architecture firm RFA and is intended to promote migration to Hatoyama and to support its enterprises.

Motoie moved to Hatoyama from Tokyo in 2017 when the facility opened, and has since bought a second-hand property in the new town for ¥5 million ($36,500) with his wife, Tomoka Suganuma, who is an artist. His job involves helping run Hatoyama Community Marche, as well as managing a shared housing facility for university students that RFA was commissioned by the town to renovate in an effort to utilize abandoned homes.

“When I first arrived, this building was pretty much empty,” he says, gesturing toward the Community Marche. “But now we have several projects up and running, and there are more people moving in. In fact, most of the cheaper homes on sale have already been taken,” he says. According to the town, 361 people moved into Hatoyama last year, of which 261 were 40 years old or younger.

Around a five-minute walk from the facility is Motoie and Suganuma’s modest two-story house. A room facing a small garden on the first floor has been renovated into a Showa-themed cafe decorated with psychedelic wallpaper and vintage records, ornaments and an old-school television set.

“I grew up in an identical new town in the city of Toyota in Aichi Prefecture, where almost all the residents were employees of the car company,” Suganuma says from behind the counter, donning a beret. “I absolutely hated that uniformity.”

However, she still found herself inextricably attracted to the Showa Era pop songs and retro home electronics and furniture typical of the 1970s and 1980s, often referred to as Japan’s postwar economic miracle when the booming population seldom doubted a better, prosperous future.

“I realized that these new towns were also the byproduct of that period in modern history,” she says. According to the land ministry’s “new town list,” there are more than 2,000 such housing projects nationwide, dating back to the Senri New Town project in northern Osaka that was approved in 1958.

Upon the strong recommendation of Ryuji Fujimura, the architect who heads RFA and also an associate professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Suganuma decided to relocate to Hatoyama New Town and pursue her creative endeavors from the center of the type of suburban sprawl she used to despise.

The 36-year-old has since been involved in multiple projects, including the promotion of what she calls “akiya sweets” — baked confectionery made using seasonal fruits picked from the gardens of empty akiya homes dotting the community. Meanwhile, her cafe welcomes regulars of all ages.

“When we first arrived five years ago we were among the youngest residents here, but that’s changing,” Suganuma says. “There are people in their 20s and 30s who have moved in, and it's getting a lot more fun.”

In its happiness survey, Daito Trust noted the relative affluence of residents of the new town as a large factor in contributing to Hatoyama’s high score. These people were wealthy enough to purchase a house in what used to be a high-end residential district, it said, which meant they were likely to be recipients of generous retirement pensions allowing them to pursue a comfortable old age.

Suganuma and a new generation of residents moving into the community, however, have grown up during an extended period of economic stagnation Japan has endured since the burst of the asset-price bubble in the early 1990s. For them, the affordability of homes and the laid-back atmosphere are major draws, suggesting a slow change in the community’s demographic.

Emiko Takahashi, head of the new town’s neighborhood association, moved to Hatoyama with her husband, a Tokyo banker, and four children in 1989, at the height of the bubble economy. They purchased a home for around ¥47 million, nearly 10 times what Suganuma and Motoie dished out for their house three decades later.

“All in all I think people here are quite satisfied with their lives, although it can get quite hot during the summer,” she says.

This year, Hatoyama New Town is preparing to host its annual summer festival for the first time in three years since the onset of the pandemic.

Takahashi is busy coordinating with different branches of the neighborhood association to realize the event. In her office is a large portable shrine waiting to be dusted off and carried out into the sun.

Residents of all ages are expected to participate in the festivities — unless another wave of COVID-19 forces a cancellation.

“When I first moved here, my youngest child was still a baby,” Takahashi says. “Now they’re all grown up. After all these years, I consider this place my home.”