New Safe Settlements Help Totsukawa Rebuild Fifteen Years After Devastating Floods
Fifteen years after the 2011 Kii Peninsula floods, Totsukawa village is shifting residents to newly built, safer settlements while some older hamlets face abandonment.
When Typhoon Talas struck the Kii Peninsula in 2011, landslides and floodwaters caused 88 deaths or disappearances in the region. Since then, Totsukawa—Japan's largest village by area—has pursued a relocation strategy, building three "new settlements" on safer terrain. The Takamori settlement, completed in 2017, houses eight elderly households in single-story homes, a communal hall that doubles as an evacuation centre, and agricultural plots.
Residents now meet each morning for radio-broadcast calisthenics and rely on a mobile supermarket that visits every ten days. The village mayor emphasizes the need to attract younger families while preserving disaster-ready infrastructure. Conversely, the Imanishi settlement, cut off by landslides in 2011, has become virtually deserted, with only a few registered residents who live elsewhere and use a low-cost taxi service to maintain ties to their ancestral homes.
Why it matters
The story shows how rural Japan is adapting to disaster risk and depopulation by building resilient, community-focused housing.
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