This photo taken on Feb. 15, 2025, shows a vacant building in Kushiro, Hokkaido, which housed the Marui Imai Kushiro department store until 2006.(Kyodo)
KUSHIRO, Japan (Kyodo) — Seeing vacant buildings and houses in disrepair in Japan is becoming more commonplace with the aging and decline of the country’s population.
The phenomenon is being acutely felt in some small and midsize regional cities struggling to cope with a continuous outflow of population. One of them is Kushiro, a fishing port city located on the Pacific Ocean coast of the northern main island of Hokkaido.
With commercial facilities switching to suburban areas, the area around JR Kushiro Station has lost much of its vitality, with many buildings abandoned and left to go to seed due to a lack of funds for their demolition.
In the city’s restaurant district, a huge vacant six-story building is stained with graffiti. It used to house Marui Imai Kushiro, a department store that once symbolized the city’s prosperity but closed in 2006. The panels of the sheathing are peeling off, revealing the interior plumbing.
This photo taken on Feb. 15, 2025, shows a vacant building in Kushiro, Hokkaido, which housed the Marui Imai Kushiro department store until 2006.(Kyodo)
According to the city, after Marui Imai closed, a company from the prefectural capital Sapporo acquired the land and building before conducting exterior wall work in an attempt to open a new commercial facility. However, unable to find any tenants, it canceled the plan.
The city has been sending letters to the company since around 2016 asking that it properly manage the property, but there has been no response.
“I remember Kushiro as a city full of people and growing, so it is really sad to see all the ruins,” said Hiroaki Kimura, an 84-year-old local tour guide who used to work in the same building.
Experts warning of the problem of “ghost towns” spreading around the country are calling for legislation to make it mandatory for building owners to factor in demolition costs when constructing large buildings.
In addition to being a blight on the landscape, there is also concern in the case of Kushiro that abandoned buildings could pose an added danger in the event of a major earthquake and tsunami hitting the coastal city.
In Kushiro, which has a population of about 153,000, an earthquake around the Japan Trench or Kuril Trench, where the Pacific plate collides with the Eurasian plate, is expected to kill up to 84,000 people.
“I’m scared. The buildings are just getting weaker, and we need the government to get started tearing them down,” Kimura said.
According to the city, as of March this year, there were 19 vacant buildings around Kushiro Station. Two of them, including the former department store, have been designated as “special vacant buildings” of high risk.
However, there are no plans to forcibly demolish the buildings through “administrative subrogation,” which allows the city authorities to take the measure when the owner does not comply with an order.
“It is difficult for government to get its hands on private property,” a city official acknowledged. “Outside explanations and procedures are needed” to fully convince the people involved to take such action.
The city also faces the problem of the huge costs of demolishing buildings, which can run into the billions of yen for a single structure. Even as a temporary fix, it is a huge sum, and there is a fear that the money will be unrecoverable even if the owner is billed.
Still, Chie Nozawa, a professor of urban policy at Meiji University, noted the importance of preventing the emergence of more abandoned buildings. “There will be no choice but to demolish some of the vacant buildings now abandoned in various locations under administrative initiatives,” she said.
“It is necessary to legislate not only the rights of owners but also their ‘duty to manage,’ for example by requiring them to set aside the demolition costs when constructing large buildings,” Nozawa added.
Kimura says that he is often told by people to whom he gives tours of the city from around Japan that they too have many decaying, abandoned buildings and vacant houses in their own hometowns.
Nozawa warned that with the increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, abandoned, half-destroyed buildings only act as a hindrance to relief efforts. “We have to act quickly,” she said.
AloJapan.com