Japan's aging population and new efforts to stanch a long-unquestioned flood of public subsidies are turning swaths of the country's hinterlands into destitute ghost towns. The result is an increasingly sensitive rift between the booming big cities that have ridden Japan's economic revival, centered on gains in high tech industries and manufacturers that can compete globally, and the rural areas left behind.
Big cities like Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka are now leading the comeback, with improved job markets and land prices. But in the small towns good times are a distant memory.
Property values are falling, unemployment is higher, incomes are lower and people are leaving in droves. All but eight of Japan's 47 prefectures saw their populations shrink in 2005.
Yubari (the town that gave it's name to Kill Bill's Japanese schoolgirl assassin, Gogo Yubari), which had 120,000 people in the 1960s, is now forecast to have only 7,000 in 16 years.
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Yahoo - Low subsidies, aging plague rural Japan