A few weeks ago I traveled around the Noto Peninsula to see how the area was recovering from the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck March 25. Some buildings had already been razed in the small, picturesque town of Monzen, though the coastal city of Wajima, which on the day I arrived was receiving a "visit of encouragement" from enka star Saburo Kitajima, experienced less damage than I expected.

Getting around wasn't easy, but it had nothing to do with the earthquake. Wajima was once the terminal for a Japan National Railways line (which connected to a ship that went to Vladivostok), but it closed down after JNR's privatization. The region has plenty of empty, well-maintained roads. On the peninsula, you either drive or travel by bus, and I wasn't driving. Buses are few and far between — in some hamlets there are only two or three a day — and every one I rode was used almost exclusively by the elderly. I noticed that the terminal stops for some lines were hospitals, a logical destination for the rural demographic, which is aging more rapidly than that in the cities and suburbs.

Right now, the reason has less to do with longer lifespans and stalling birthrates than it does with statistical averaging. Young people leave the countryside and move to metropolitan areas like Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, where the universities and jobs are. The central government estimates that localities spend an average of 16 million yen per child from birth to high-school graduation. So when these young people leave their hometowns for the cities, where they will get jobs and pay taxes to those cities' local governments, their hometowns lose out on their investment.