The Economic Times

In the early 2000s, a village lost 90% of its residents. Then someone began replacing the vanished people with dolls

Nagoro, a remote Japanese village that has lost about 90% of its residents, has found an eerie way to preserve its vanished community. Since the early 2000s, artist Tsukimi Ayano has created more than 350 life-size dolls modelled on people who died or moved away, filling the village with their likenesses.