A roadside hamlet in the Iya Valley where the people you notice sitting at the bus stop and working in the field, are not actually people. From Route 439 the village is a thin string of houses, fields, a closed school, and of course – a bus stop. There used to be about 300 residents, but that has been reduced to roughly 25. The scarecrows now make up the difference. Life-sized ‘kakashi’ in work clothes, sitting at desks, on benches, appearing to wait; as if the last conversation only paused.The weirder part: is that most of the scarecrows are modelled on real life people, that used to live in the village.
The first dolls appeared in 2003, when Ayano Tsukimi returned from Osaka around to care for her father, and made a scarecrow in his likeness after birds took the seed from her field. She noticed neighbours greeted it, so she kept making more: newspaper-stuffed frames, sewn faces, old clothes. Since then, more than 400 have been built, and around 350 stand in the village at a given time. Some portraits of the dead or departed, some invented. The elementary school closed in 2012; but the classrooms still hold doll pupils, including two dressed in the last students’ own clothes.
The village sits somewhere between the macabre and a Studio Ghibli film – creepy but wholesome, where one would be forgiven for expecting the scarecrows to all animate after dark and live out their secret lives.
Key features include:
- Over 350 life-sized handmade scarecrows
- Closed elementary school classroom of doll pupils
- “Scarecrow bus stop” and figures posed at work, rest, and waiting
- Annual scarecrow festival around the first Sunday in October
Photo credits: https://shikoku-tourism.com/en/see-and-do/10043 , Google Maps
