There Are No Children Here. Just Lots of Life-Size Dolls.
在这个日本村庄，人偶比活人多

NAGORO, Japan — The last children were born in the remote mountain village of Nagoro 18 years ago.

日本名顷——在这个偏远的山村，最后一批新生儿出生于18年前。

Now, just over two dozen adults live in this outpost straddling a river on the Japanese island of Shikoku. The elementary school closed its doors in 2012, shortly after the last two students completed sixth grade.

现在，日本四国岛这个跨河的边远村庄里，只住了20多个成年人。在最后两名学生完成六年级的学业后不久，小学于2012年关闭。

But on a recent bright autumn Sunday, Tsukimi Ayano brought the school back to life.

但不久前，在一个明亮秋天的周日，绫野月见(Tsukimi Ayano)让学校恢复了生机。

It just so happened that she did it with dolls rather than humans.

只不过她用的不是人，而是人偶。

Ms. Ayano, 70, had arrayed more than 40 handmade dolls in a lifelike tableau on the grounds of the shuttered school. Recreating a school sports day known as “undokai,” a staple of the Japanese calendar, she had posed child-size dolls in a footrace, perched on a swing set and tossing balls.

70岁的绫野在已经关闭的学校的操场上，将40多个手工人偶摆得犹如一副活画。为了重现运动会——日本年历上的保留节目，她把真人儿童大小的人偶摆成赛跑、荡秋千和扔球的样子。

“We never see children here anymore,” said Ms. Ayano, who was born in Nagoro, and has staged an annual doll festival for the last seven years.

“这里已经看不到小朋友了，”出生在名顷的绫野说，在过去的七年间，她每年都会举办人偶节。

“I wish there were more children because it would be more cheerful,” she said. “So I made the children.”

“我希望这里能有更多孩子，那样会更热闹，”她说。“所以我制作了这些孩子。”

Japan’s population is shrinking and aging, and nowhere is the trend felt more intensively than in its rural regions, where a low birthrate is exacerbated by dwindling employment opportunities and an inconvenient lifestyle.

日本正在经历人口萎缩和老龄化，这种趋势在乡村地区尤为明显，就业机会的减少和不便的生活方式加剧了低出生率。

“There are no chances for young people here,” said Ms. Ayano, who remembers when the village had a medical clinic, a pachinko gambling parlor and a diner. Now, Nagoro does not have even one shop. “They can’t make a living.”

“年轻人在这里没有机会，”在绫野的回忆里，村里曾经有一家医疗诊所，一个老虎机游戏厅和一个餐馆。如今名顷甚至没有一家商店。“他们无法谋生。”

Some 350 dolls made by Ms. Ayano and her friends outnumber the human residents by more than 10 to 1. All around Nagoro, she has staged the dolls — made of wood and wire frames, stuffed with newspapers and dressed in old clothes donated from across Japan — in various scenes evoking the real people who once populated the village.

绫野和朋友们做的350个人偶比这里的人口多出了10倍。在名顷各处，她把这些人偶（用木头和铁丝制作，塞满报纸，穿上日本各地捐献的旧衣服）摆在各种场景中，模仿曾经居住在村子里的真实的人。

An old woman tends a roadside grave, while another rests in a wheelchair. Construction workers smoke cigarettes on break while others wait at the bus stop. A father pulls a wagon full of children. A mischief maker shakes chestnuts from a tree.

一个老妇人在路边扫墓，而另一个则坐在轮椅上。休息时抽烟的建筑工人，还有在公交站等车的乘客。一位父亲拉着一辆装着好多孩子的平板车。一个淘气鬼把栗子从树上摇下来。

Inside the school, dolls loiter on the stairwells or sit at desks in front of teachers giving eternal lessons. Ms. Ayano has a playful touch, giving many of her dolls an impish mien. The overall effect, of a town dominated by dolls, is not as eerie as it might initially sound.

在学校里，人偶在楼梯间闲逛或坐在书桌前，听面前的老师讲永无休止的课。绫野玩气十足，她的人偶有种调皮捣蛋的气质。在这样的整体效果下，一个以人偶为主的小镇并不像听上去那么诡异。

“I don’t think it’s creepy,” said Fanny Raynaud, 38, a nurse from France who was traveling through Japan on a motorcycle with her husband, Chris Monnon, 55. They stopped in Nagoro after reading about the dolls on a travel blog.

“我不觉得这怪异，”38岁的法国护士范妮·雷诺德(Fanny Raynaud)说。她与55岁的丈夫克里斯·蒙农(Chris Monnon)骑着摩托车穿越日本旅行。他们在一个旅行博客上读到关于玩偶的报道后，来到了名顷。

“I think it is a beautiful way to make the village alive again,” Ms. Raynaud said.

“我认为这是使这个村子重现生机的美好方式。”雷诺德说。

Another visitor scrawled a more pointed message on a chalkboard in one of the school’s classrooms: “Where are the living?”

另一位访客在学校一个教室的黑板上缭乱地写下了一个尖锐的信息：“活人哪去了？”

Nagoro, which sits in what is known as the Iya Valley surrounded by vast mountainsides blanketed by cedar trees, was never a big place. Even when Ms. Ayano was a child, the population was only about 300. Shikoku is by far the smallest and least populated of Japan’s four main islands.

名顷从来都不大，位于群山环绕、雪松覆盖的祖谷。即使在绫野还是个孩子的时候，这里也只有大约300人。四国岛是日本四个主要岛屿中最小、人口最少的地区。

During the 1950s and ’60s, the region was fueled by forestry, road construction and dam building for hydroelectric plants.

在上世纪五六十年代，林业、道路建设和用于水力发电的筑坝为该地区提供了活力。

Once the dams were built, many people left. Those who stayed operate their own pumps to bring water to grow their own vegetables.

大坝建成后，很多人离开了。那些留下的人操作自己的水泵灌溉自己种植的蔬菜。

To get to a supermarket or the nearest hospital, Nagoro’s residents drive an hour and a half along narrow, winding roads.

为了去超级市场或最近的医院，名顷的居民要沿着狭窄蜿蜒的道路开车一个半小时。

“You have to really like mountain living,” said Tatsuya Matsuura, who at 38 is the youngest resident of Nagoro. “I think a lot of people would have trouble living here.”

“你必须非常喜欢在山里生活，”名顷最年轻的居民，38岁的松浦达也（Tatsuya Matsuura，音）说。“我认为很多人在这里生活会不方便。”

Mr. Matsuura is the third generation of his family to operate a guesthouse for hikers on Mt. Tsurugi, about six miles up the road from Nagoro. Three years ago, as business dwindled to nothing, the family shut down a general store and inn in Nagoro.

松浦是他家族的第三代人，经营旅馆，服务离名顷6英里的剑山(Mt. Tsurugi)上的远足者。三年前，由于生意惨淡，家族关闭了在名顷的杂货店和旅馆。

“If we continue on the path we have taken for the last 10 or 20 years, rural areas will continue to shrink and people will continue to concentrate in the cities,” said Hiroya Masuda, a professor at the University of Tokyo and a former governor of Iwate, in northern Japan. “Many communities will eventually vanish.”

“如果我们继续走10年或20年前的老路，乡村地区会继续萎缩，人们会继续集中在城市里，”曾任日本北部岩手县知事的东京大学教授增田宽也说。“很多社区会最终消失。”

Nagoro is one of several hamlets consolidated into a municipal area where more than 40 percent of the residents are 65 or older.

名顷是被合并为市辖区的几个小村庄之一，那里超过40%的居民年龄在65岁以上。

Even with child care subsidies, discounted medical bills and housing support, the area has little luck attracting new residents or luring back adults who were born in the region.

即使有育儿补贴、打折的医疗费和住房补助，该地区还是没能吸引到新居民或吸引曾经出生在这里的人回来。

The local government merged several schools together and spent more than $8 million on a spacious new set of buildings. Just 38 students are enrolled in the entire school.

当地政府将几所学校合并，并斥资逾800万美元建造宽敞的新校舍。整个学校只有38名学生。

Most students travel to bigger towns for high school, and leave the region altogether for college or work.

大多学生前往更大的城镇上高中，然后离开这个地区去上大学或工作。

“We want them to choose the life they want,” said Hiromi Mukai, principal of Higashi-Iya Elementary and Middle School. “It is unavoidable.”

“我们希望他们选择自己想要的生活，”东祖谷小学和中学的校长向井裕美（Hiromi Mukai，音）说。“这是不可避免的。”

Ms. Ayano, the eldest of four siblings, moved out of Nagoro at age 12 when her father took a job at a food company in Osaka, Japan’s third largest city. She met and married her husband and raised two children with him there.

绫野是四个孩子中的老大，12岁的时候，父亲入职日本第三大城市大阪的一家食品公司，她便搬出了名顷。她在那里遇到并嫁给了她的丈夫，养育了两个孩子。

After retiring, her father returned to Nagoro to help take care of his ailing father-in-law and to nurse his wife through kidney failure. Sixteen years ago, Ms. Ayano returned to the village to look after her father, 90, and Nagoro’s oldest resident.

退休后，她父亲回到名顷，帮助照顾生病的岳父，并护理肾衰竭的妻子。16年前，绫野回到了村子照顾她90岁的父亲，他是名顷年事最高的居民。

In the field in front of their home, she planted a few radish and pea seeds. Birds dug them out, so she made a scarecrow, fashioning it in her father’s likeness.

在家门口的地里，她种下一些萝卜和豌豆种子。小鸟把它们挖出来，于是她照着父亲的模样，做了一个稻草人。

“It looked like a real human, not a conventional scarecrow,” Ms. Ayano said. “That is why it really worked.”

“看起来像个真人，而不是传统的稻草人，”绫野说。“这就是它真能管用的原因。”

She added three or four dolls in the shape of women weeding the field and others on the side of the road.

她又加了三四个女性人偶，都做成在田里除草的样子，路边也放了几个。

When a few travelers passing through asked some of the dolls for directions, Ms. Ayano was so amused that she started making them full time.

当有路过的游客向其中一些人偶问路时，绫野觉得很开心，于是一心扑在了人偶的制作上。

She now gives occasional doll-making lessons in a nearby town or to visitors to her studio, set up in the village’s old nursery school.

现在，她偶尔在附近的一座小镇，或者给工作室的访客上人偶制作课程，她的工作室就设在村子原来的托儿所里。

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Ayano showed a group of women who had driven 60 miles from Tosa City how to create an angry or benevolent expression by angling fabric in different directions to make eyebrows. Extra stitching could denote cheekbones or the creases of age.

不久前的一个下午，绫野向一群从土佐市驱车60英里赶来的女人展示了如何将布料向不同方向倾斜来塑造眉毛，从而营造出或者愤怒或者和蔼的表情。加上缝线，可以表现颧骨或皱纹。

Sometimes she takes custom orders from around Japan. A doctor whose wife died of cancer asked for two replicas of his spouse, one to keep in the living room and another for his bedroom.

有时，她会接受来自日本各地的订单。一个医生的妻子因癌症去世，他想做两个娃娃，一个放在客厅，一个在卧室。

Ms. Ayano keeps a doll modeled after her grandmother in the passenger seat of her car. When driving the hour and a half to the grocery store, she said, “I’m never lonely.”

绫野在她车里的副驾驶座上放了一个外婆的人偶。她说，开一个半小时的车去杂货店，“我也不会觉得孤独。”

The day before the recreated sports festival at the old school, Ms. Ayano staged various scenes with the help of a group of college volunteers, as well as a few other villagers and her sister and brother-in-law, who had come from Kyushu in southern Japan.

在老学校重现运动会的前一天，绫野在一群大学志愿者、村民和日本南部九州过来的妹妹、妹夫的帮助下，布置了各种场景。

Up until dark, Ms. Ayano meticulously stitched arms, hair and clothing into place. After an overnight rain, she was up before dawn, refreshing her work.

绫野仔细将人偶的手臂、头发和衣服缝好，一直忙到天黑。下了一夜雨之后，天没亮她就起床了，继续忙活。

By the time the festival opened, the sun emerged. Residents set up food stalls serving soba noodles, fried potatoes and octopus balls.

运动会开幕的时候，太阳出来了。居民摆起小吃摊，供应荞麦面、炸土豆和章鱼烧。

Osamu Tsuzuki, 73, the owner of a local construction firm, gave a welcoming speech. “On behalf of staff, villagers and more than 300 dolls,” he said, “we have all been waiting for you.”

73岁的津筑修（Osamu Tsuzuki，音）致了欢迎辞，他是当地一家建筑公司的老板。“谨代表工作人员、村民和300多个人偶，”他说，“我们一直在等待你们的到来。”

A few children showed up from nearby towns or were visiting grandparents.

有从附近的城镇过来的一些小朋友，也有来这里探视长辈的。

During a tug of war, people joined dolls whose hands Ms. Ayano had sewn to the rope. There were not enough human children, so competitors in their 80s gave it their all. After a footrace, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, 82, a resident of a nursing home down the mountain, stroked the cheek of a doll in one of the running lanes.

在拔河比赛中，人跟绫野手工缝在绳子上的人偶一起比赛。由于儿童不够，所以80多岁的参赛者全力以赴。82岁的山本博之（Hiroyuki Yamamoto，音）来自山下的一家养老院，他抚摸着跑道上一个人偶的脸庞。

“She is so cute,” said Mr. Yamamoto, a retired road maintenance worker. “I wanted to talk to her.”

“真可爱啊，”退休前从事道路养护工作的山本说。“我想跟她说说话。”

Kayoko Motokawa, 67, grandmother of a toddler who resembled a doll himself, said it was sad that Nagoro was now known for dolls rather than its people.

67岁的元川佳子（Kayoko Motokawa，音）有一个在学步的孙子，本身长得就像个娃娃。她说，如今名顷以人偶而不是这里的人闻名，真是可悲。

“If these were real humans,” said Ms. Motokawa, taking in the festivities, “this would be a truly happy place.”

“如果是大活人的话，”来参加这项盛事的元川说，“这会是一个真正快乐的地方。

来源：好英语网