There were plenty of vacant plots of land for Hiraku Ozawa to explore growing up in the city of Nagareyama, just outside of Tokyo, during the 1980s. Some were heavily vegetated, and others would frequently puddle after the rain. Many were home to a variety of flowers and insects he would spend hours admiring while fantasizing how, in a world devoid of humans, nature would rapidly reclaim ground lost to civilization.
These empty residential lots are called akichi (vacant land) in Japanese, and how they came to be neglected and unused are individual mysteries.
A growing number of akichi are abandoned by people who inherited them from relatives but saw little potential in maintaining them. Others are reserved for later use, have some kind of sacred connection (in the case of shrines and temples) or purposely act as a form of visual breathing space amid urban congestion. Many are eventually engulfed by the development around them, becoming part of neighboring homes, apartments and parking lots. Increasingly, though, they remain bare as the demand for new land ebbs along with the population.
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