Vision artifact · speculative · programme data invented

The Kunisaki cluster · Ōita

Japan offers you thirteen million people or a town that is disappearing. Nothing in between is being kept alive on purpose.

Every rural municipality is shrinking at roughly the same rate, so size stopped being something you choose and became something you are stuck with. Three towns forty minutes apart, held at three different sizes deliberately, would give a person somewhere to move to at each stage of their life — without ever leaving the region.

The ladder

What a population size actually buys you.

Services turn on at thresholds. This is not a preference chart — a clinic needs a catchment, a supermarket needs a catchment, a high school needs a catchment. Below each line, the thing does not sustain itself.

Under 1,000 1,000–5,000 5,000–15,000 15,000–50,000 Metropolitan

Look at the gap. Between a service town of 22,000 and Tokyo there is a stretch of the scale where almost nothing in Japan is growing on purpose. That gap is not a law of nature. It is the result of every settlement below it shrinking at the same rate at the same time.

Three sizes, forty minutes apart

Not three versions of the same town. Three different answers.

610
Tashibu
photo — terraces in late summer

A single valley of stepped paddy that has been farmed the same way for eight hundred years. Everyone knows everyone, which is the appeal and also the cost. You will be noticed, always, in both directions.

✓Shared shop, three days a week
✓Craft workshops and the apprenticeship
—No school — children bus 20 min
—No clinic, no supermarket
Suits People who want to make something with their hands, retirees who want quiet with people nearby, and anyone who already knows they do not need choice.
4,800
Yamaga
photo — school gate at 3pm

Deliberately built around the years when children are small. Every service a young family needs is inside a ten minute cycle, and the town has been holding its size rather than growing — because past about six thousand, the thing that makes it work stops working.

✓Primary school, nursery, after-school club
✓GP clinic, midwife, pharmacy
✓Grocery, two cafés, the pool
—No high school — 25 min to Kitsuki
Suits Couples deciding whether to have children, families with under-tens, and anyone who wants other parents within walking distance rather than scattered across a city.
22,810
Bungotakada
photo — the Shōwa street, Sunday

The service town for the whole peninsula. Big enough that you can be anonymous when you want to be, and big enough to carry a hospital and a high school that the smaller places depend on.

✓Hospital, high schools, specialists
✓Supermarkets, real employment market
✓Workshop, co-working, cinema at Kitsuki
—You will not know everyone. Some want that.
Suits Teenagers who need a high school, anyone running a business, people who want a community they can step out of, and households where one person works remotely and one does not.

Side by side

The trade is legible, which is the point.

TashibuYamagaBungotakada Population6104,80022,810
Rent, 3 rooms¥21,000¥38,000¥54,000 Akiya, typical¥900K¥2.4M¥4.8M
To a GP18 min, by car4 min, walk6 min, walk To a hospital40 min25 min6 min Primary schoolbus, 20 minin the townfour of them High school45 min25 minin the town
Need a car?Yes, absolutelyOne per householdOne per household Children 0–911312840 Arriving, 18 mo4 households31 households48 households
Held at550–7004,500–6,00022,000–26,000 Why that sizeOne valley of workable terracesAbove 6,000 the walk-everywhere breaksThe catchment a hospital needs

Each town states a size it is trying to hold, not a size it wants to exceed. Growth is not the goal anywhere on this page. A town that knows what it is for knows when it is full, and saying so out loud is what lets the next person choose honestly.

Moving between them

Sizing up or down should be a transfer, not a rupture.

All three are inside forty minutes of each other. Moving between them means keeping your job, your friends, your doctor and your kid's judo club. That is the difference between a region and a set of unrelated villages — and it is the thing Tokyo actually offers that nowhere else does.

The apprentice who started a family

Two years in Tashibu learning timber framing, then wanted a school gate rather than a bus stop. Same trade, same crew, twenty-five minutes away.

Tashibu 610 → Yamaga 4,800 · housing transferred, no deposit

The family whose eldest turned fifteen

Yamaga has no high school. Rather than a two-hour daily round trip for three years, they moved down the valley and kept everything else.

Yamaga 4,800 → Bungotakada 22,810 · priority on the arrival list

The couple who retired out of the town

Sold the Bungotakada house to an arriving family, took a terrace cottage, and still drive in on Thursdays for the hospital and the market.

Bungotakada 22,810 → Tashibu 610 · house passed on within the network

The one who tried small and hated it

Six months in Tashibu was five months too many. Moved up rather than going back to Osaka, which she says she would otherwise have done.

Tashibu 610 → Bungotakada 22,810 · stayed in the region

The last one matters most. Somebody who finds a village too small currently has one option, and it is Tokyo. A ladder means the failure mode of moving to the countryside is moving to a slightly larger part of the countryside.

What this changes

Five towns shrinking to nothing, or three towns holding at three sizes.

A region of five municipalities each declining from 8,000 toward 5,000 ends with five places that cannot sustain a clinic. The same population, held deliberately at 610, 4,800 and 22,810 with two more villages beside them, ends with three that can — and with somewhere for a person to go when their life changes shape.

This is not an argument for abandoning places. It is an argument that shrinking evenly is a choice nobody made on purpose, and that a region which decides what each of its settlements is for can hold more people, more happily, than one that lets all of them thin out at the same rate.