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Drive around the Japanese countryside and you can’t miss them.

Empty homes known as akiyas are dotted throughout small villages, often abandoned after the elderly owner moves out or dies, and their relatives have little interest in maintaining a house in a remote area.

Akiyas are perhaps the most visible sign of the country’s ageing population, which has shrunk for 16 consecutive years as the fertility rate has collapsed and deaths have outpaced births. Hundreds of rural villages are at risk of disappearing in coming decades.

There are about 9 million akiyas across Japan, even in major cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, but you need to venture only an hour or two outside metro areas to find them in abundance.

In the village of Nanmoku, northwest of Tokyo, where two-thirds of residents are over 65, some 600 of the town’s 1400 houses are empty. When I visited last month, it was clear Nanmoku was fighting a losing battle for its survival, even as it tried new strategies and generous incentives to entice young families to move there.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The town of Kamiyama, nestled in the mountains on Japan’s smallest main island of Shikoku, is staging a quiet revolution against the ebbing tide of the country’s demographics.

“We call it creative depopulation,” said Shota Shindo, a recovering big tech employee, as he showed me around the town.

Shindo himself is a new recruit to Kamiyama. He arrived as a Tokyo refugee this year, having swapped a sales job with Apple for a role with Green Valley, a not-for-profit agency that has put Kamiyama on the map with its pioneering model of rural revitalisation.

“Although we cannot stop the town from dying, we can slow it down. And slow it down in a way that changes the content. You can be experimental here.”

Surrounded by lush forests and rolling mountains, Kamiyama has about 5000 residents – a fraction of its 1955 peak of 21,000. But the town has steadied the precipitous slide by setting itself up as an entrepreneurial hub for start-ups and artists.

A number of Tokyo-headquartered companies established satellite offices in Kamiyama after the local government invested in running fibre cable through the town in the mid-2000s.

Since then, Kamiyama has attracted a steady stream of software developers, engineers and digital nomads, who base themselves at a co-working space run by Green Valley. Renting a desk is cheap — around 15,000 yen ($150) a month or just 1000 yen ($10) for the day.

The town’s flagship initiative is its artist-in-residence program, which has been running for more than two decades. It is now of sufficient international clout that there’s a waitlist of creatives from around the world seeking to take up the annual three-month residency.

By fortunate happenstance, one of this year’s successful applicants, Australian artist Shirley Cho, was in studio when I visited.

“You hear a lot about these Japanese villages that are dying out, but this place is really vibrant,” Cho, who is usually based in Germany, told me.

“There’s lots of interesting people – great locals, but also foreigners come and live here, and younger Japanese people. So it feels like there’s a lot going on.”

The influx of new people and the incubator mentality fostered by Green Valley, coupled with access to government subsidy programs aimed at boosting Japan’s rural villages, has helped boutique cafes and businesses to pop up across the town, occupying once-empty premises.

The co-working space was built out of the bones of a shuttered sewing factory, while the town’s old theatre has been transformed into an exhibition space. There’s also a nascent culinary scene, with farm-to-table restaurant Kamaya keeping a roster of international guest chefs through its own residency program.

On a secluded patch of wilderness, overlooking the valley below, Irish-Japanese couple Manus Sweeney and Sayaka Abe run Kamiyama Beer, a craft brewery selling brews infused with ingredients they have foraged, such as cherry blossom and bamboo leaves.

The town’s most recent initiative is a new tech-focused boarding school for 200 students aged 15 to 20. It aims to educate the next generation of Japan’s entrepreneurs, with classes geared towards teaching students how to set up and run businesses.

It opened in 2023, and is already expanding its premises at a time when hundreds of regional schools are closing their doors in Japan each year.

Tuition is free and funded in part by donations from major Japanese companies such as Fujitsu and Sony, but admission is highly selective.

“Japan has never seen anything like this before,” says Haruki Onishi, a school spokesperson.

“This school is very unique in the way that design, entrepreneurship and technology are the focus. We have schools that focus on each of these categories, but not all three together.”

Ultimately, Kamiyama’s success is grounded in decades of initiatives aimed at keeping the flame of community alive. It may prove to be an exception to the portrait of the decline facing regional Japan, rather than serving as a model that can be easily replicated by other towns.

With its own population still in decline, the Kamiyama experiment remains very much a work in progress.

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