Korea and Japan also have these. The Japanese ones are covered extensively on youtube, however, my favs are by Tokyo Lens, I like his style and his voice is very calming. Here are some of my faves:
I was hiking in the outskirts of HK a while ago and was amazed to wander into the middle of a massive airsoft game that was being played in these abandoned villages. The players were decked out to 100% realism, where I couldn't tell that it wasn't a military exercise. Pretty surreal
You just unlocked a childhood memory of my time in Hong Kong. There was an “abandoned” anti-aircraft battery on one of the mountains on the island. We would occasionally go there for airsoft games. Not fully decked out like you’re talking about (but I’ve seen those too).
There's a scene in a James May show where he visits a town in Japan that isn't quite abandoned yet, but very sparsely populated. One or several of the villagers were taken to making puppets and placing them around the empty buildings like the school.
A shame, but also a natural progression if there are no jobs around anymore, and / or the jobs in the cities pay better and seem more attractive. We're lucky that in the software industry, a lot of jobs can be done remote now so people don't have to live in the cities unless they choose to, but that's only a fraction of the workforce.
As a peer post hit on, this sort of stuff is mostly related to collapsing birth rates. Japan's lost about 6 million people since 2009 [1], and the rate of decline is still accelerating. That's millions of homes, businesses, and so on that no longer serve any purpose. And the wild thing is that, due to the way fertility works, they will keep losing at least the same ratio of people per year (currently about 1 in 200) until they either start having children, or go extinct.
This, in turn, causes economic problems. When a country has high fertility rates, their market naturally grows year by year. And vice versa, when they have a low fertility rate. So it's likely to become a vicious cycle. The population declining because of low fertility rate drives economic chaos resulting in even lower fertility rates. And this same future awaits every country with sub-replacement fertility rates. It's like watching a train wreck unfold in ultra slow-mo, but being no more capable of independently stopping it.
>When a country has high fertility rates, their market naturally grows year by year.
But that market, can't grow forever. Population can't grow forever. You will hit the wall at one point unless you want your population living in cramped and impoverished conditions like in India. Is it bad they hit it now instead of 10-20 years down the line?
But there were plenty of other major wars and crashes. That brief boom phase only appeared after WW2. It seems fairly safe to say it was an aberration.
Given that fertility is negatively correlated with income until you start reaching very high levels, economic disaster might actually boost fertility. That's not to say it's entirely an economic issue, it's also social, but it's definitely a factor.
The problem with that correlation is that it fails all over the place. In the past, people of high and low income alike were having healthy, large families. And even in the present places like Thailand, with a nominal GDP/capita of $9,300, has a catastrophically low fertility rate, lower than even the US and most of Europe.
IMO there's a really simple explanation for what it's "really" observing - consumerism. Poor individuals don't have enough money to fall into consumerism, the ultra wealthy have so much that there's no carrot to be dangled in front of them that they couldn't grab on a whim. The correlation captures the remaining middle class that has just enough money to always have a carrot just slightly out of reach.
And so that drives different motivations for this group of people. They'd rather chase the carrot, rather than go through the sacrifice involved in raising a family. This not only explains the past, when consumerism was much less of a thing, but also the present when even poor countries can be disproportionately driven by consumerism. This is probably why religion is correlated strongly with fertility. It's simply anti-consumerist by nature, so religious individuals become somewhat less likely to fall into the carrot loop.
Birth control dates back at least 3800 years, and probably much longer, as that 3800 year old reference comes from documentation accurately referring to various substances with spermicidal characteristics. [1] The same is true of abortion and ways to induce it.
And anybody who's had a child can tell you that getting pregnant is not as easy as you might think. In general women are only fertile for a window of several days per month, which they are capable of also determining due to various physiological changes that happen during that window (and also the fact that the window occurs during the, more or less, exact same time each month following their period). And even if you nail that window, the chances of a successful pregnancy are relatively low - only about 20% per month for young couples, and then rapidly decreasing for women beyond the age of 30.
Notably, in the century prior to the Roman Empire's collapse, fertility rates collapsed for reasons that are still unclear. Anyhow, this is all a very long-winded way of saying that the higher birth rates of the past weren't simply because of unplanned pregnancies. If they wanted to lower their fertility rates, they would have been fully capable of doing so.
While lack of jobs is one factor, I think a much bigger factor is the imminent colony collapse - birth rate being below the replacement level (which, if I remember correctly, is 2.1).
And with the relatively wide availability of internet even in rural areas via satellites, the job factor is even lower. Of course, most jobs aren't computer/internet based, but there are still many jobs there, and some could say that the job market in those areas is growing (I'm aware of record-breaking lay-offs in the tech sector this year, but I think that has more to do with the current economy, I could be wrong)
With a declining population, the number of occupied residential units must fall. Japan's fertility rate is 1.34.
I suspect that residential units can be converted into commercial space in cities, or combined with other units to make bigger homes. Neither of those are easy in rural areas, so properties might need to be abandoned.
Nice, the real questions I had about the Abandoned Japanese School (like how he gets power and money) were answered in a part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwGx4lXTWfw
City or state? Because while HK is a city, the area is not just the city but a whole "special administrative region" containing a peninsula + islands, where these pictures were taken from. Compare: https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/new-york-state/aba...
Even then, the Hong Kong Administrative Region has about 430 square miles of land, compared to New York City’s 300 square miles of land. This is a more reasonable comparison than New York States 55,000 square miles of land. (The city of Hong Kong itself is more comparable in size to the Manhattan Island portion of New York City)
There are formerly inhabited islands in Boston harbor that are similar to these fishing villages, and they're mostly used now as stops on tourist day trips to explore ruins. It's a PITA to live in a place only accessibly by ferry.
I assume everywhere has them, the US has tons. Some were abandoned long ago, some still have residents but are slowly dying out.
I had a friend who liked to go visit them, and I went with a few times. They look like the original post, old looking on the outside and falling apart on the inside.
This Man Lives in an Abandoned Japanese School - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i2Ndgrgcu8
(cont. I Spent 72 Hours in a Japanese School - Abandoned in the Mountains - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvPxJBiDgp8)
Why Was This Japanese Village Abandoned? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDPT6q_4OHY
Inside a free tiny house in Japan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tneLNsV3oXQ
Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtflILeTBlX-Klzfudsxp...