A woman who goes by "Scarecrow Mother" has filled a deserted Japanese village with life-sized dolls

Nagoro is a village on Japan’s Shikoku island that would be pretty much entirely deserted if it wasn’t for the work of Tsukimi Ayano, a woman who’s decided that the best way to deal with a dwindling local population is to replace living, breathing humans with hundreds of people-sized dolls.

YouTube channel Tokyo Lens visited Nagoro—also referred to as Kakashi no Sato or “Scarecrow Village”—to take a look at the more than 300 friends Ayano has quite literally made over the years. Host Norm Nakamura explains that Ayano returned to Nagoro in 2002 after a long time away and found that many residents had left during her absence. With only 27, largely retirement-age people still living in a village that had lost most of its population not to a scarecrow-animating curse but to the lure of nearby cities, Ayano began to hand-make dolls that each have their own name and personalized life story.

Now, thanks to her work, there are dolls outside of stores, dolls at bus stops, and, because no children live in Nagoro anymore, an entire elementary school gymnasium filled with dolls attending a very subdued doll festival.