NPR This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Darien Woods, and I'm here with

Anthony Kuhn, NPR's international correspondent in Seoul, South Korea.

Welcome to the show, Anthony.

Hi, good to be here.

Darien, I'm going to give you a glimpse into our possible future today, one that Japan

and other countries in East Asia like China and South Korea are already facing.

Their populations are aging and shrinking and that makes it hard to grow their economies.

And we've covered aging workforces before on the indicator, but your reporting trip to the most

aged village in the world's most aged country really brought these issues into focus.

Yes, I visited the village of Nanmoku.

It's a little hamlet built on both sides of a river which you're hearing and a two-lane

road that runs through the lush green mountains of Gunma Prefecture about 80 miles northwest of

Tokyo. I would love to have joined you but instead I sat here and learned a bunch of facts, including

that aging and depopulation are seen in Japan as this national crisis that's already affecting

many aspects of life in Japan.

It's threatening continued economic stagnation,

labor shortages, and difficulty in caring for the growing number of elderly.

Yes, so today on the show we're going to zero in on rural depopulation in Japan.

And the tiny village of Nanmoku is one of Japan's most closely watched cases in its decades-long struggle to deal with this issue.

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