In the Japanese village of Nagoro, dolls watch you from every corner

(Patria) - Shikoku is the smallest of the four main Japanese islands.

It is located south of Honshu, and covers 18,800 square kilometers between the Seto Inland Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

It encompasses four prefectures - Ehime, Kagawa, Kochi, and Tokushima, reports Punkufer.

At the same time, it is the least populated Japanese island.

It is estimated that approximately 3.8 million inhabitants live on it, and the population is constantly decreasing.

Shikoku not only seems abandoned, the island truly is.

Due to the challenging mountainous terrain, economic development is difficult - there are no large industrial centers or many jobs there, so young people leave to seek their fortune in big cities like Osaka and Tokyo.

Schools and shops are closing, and only mostly elderly people living on pensions remain in the villages.

A high concentration of residents over 65 years old is particularly visible in the isolated areas of the island.

Some of them are slowly turning into ghost towns.

Nagoro in the Iya Valley is one such place. This remote mountain village once had 300 inhabitants.

Today, there is not a living soul there - only hundreds of life-sized dolls that bear witness to what daily life once looked like in this peaceful place.

Male dolls "play" utility workers performing road work and working in the fields, and engaging in other activities.

The village school, which closed in 2012, is filled with dolls of the students who once attended it.

They were made and placed by Tsukimi Ayano, whose family left the area when she was a child. She returned to Nagoro to take care of her father.

She made a doll in his likeness and placed it in the field, and over time she also "immortalized" other residents who no longer live there.

Nagoro is called the village of dolls, and it looks like something out of a horror movie.

The team from the YouTube channel "Yes, Theory" also visited, wanting to explore why Shikoku is rarely visited and has fewer and fewer people living there.