Half the shopfronts on this street are shuttered. It’s the kind of place you’d drive through without stopping. And it’s sent three players to Japan’s professional baseball leagues.
I filmed this walk in a small coastal town about two hours from Nagoya. Quiet streets, older houses, a few shops that clearly aren’t opening again. Honestly, my first cut of the footage leaned hard into that — moody horror music, a spooky sound effect right at the end, the whole “abandoned Japan” treatment. And then I found out what this town actually is, and the horror edit stopped making sense.
A town of about 15,000 — punching way above its weight
The town is Owase, in Mie Prefecture, tucked along the coast where the mountains come right down to the water. It’s a fishing town first — small boats, a working harbor, the kind of place built around the sea rather than around visitors. Its population is somewhere around 15,000 people, which by Japanese-city standards is genuinely small.
And somehow, out of that: three professional baseball players, all active right now. Kyoki Yuasa pitches for the Hanshin Tigers. Taiga Ueda plays for the Saitama Seibu Lions. Yuta Ishii is with the Chunichi Dragons. Three different teams, three different corners of Japan’s professional leagues, all from the same small coastal town — and I’ve read that two of them, Yuasa and Ishii, actually grew up as childhood friends there.
Quiet towns aren’t empty towns
This is the part that reels like mine get wrong by default. A shuttered shopping street reads as “decline” or “abandonment” on camera, especially with the right music behind it. But towns like Owase aren’t ghost towns — they’re small, aging, and genuinely quiet, and also still turning out serious talent, still functioning, still someone’s whole world. The visual cliché (creepy Japan, dying Japan) flattens something that’s actually more interesting: how does a town this size produce this much?
I don’t have a tidy answer. Maybe it’s a strong local baseball program. Maybe it’s just how small, tight-knit coastal towns raise kids here. But I know I’m re-cutting that reel without the horror score.
Ever been somewhere that looked sleepy on the surface and turned out to be quietly excellent at something specific?