日本大量空置房屋免费送

Japan has so many vacant（空的） homes it's giving them away

Okutama（奥多摩，日本地名）, Japan(CNN) Four years ago, Naoko and Takayuki Ida were given a house. For free.

It's a spacious（宽敞的）, two-story（两层的）home nestled（依偎，靠着）amid trees on a winding（弯曲的）country road in the small town of Okutama,in Tokyo prefecture（辖区）. Before moving, the couple and their children -- two teenagers and a five-year-old --were all living with Naoko's parents.

"We had to do a lot of repair work（修理工作）(on our new home), but we'd always wanted to live in the countryside and have a big garden," said Naoko, 45. A free house may sound like a scam（骗局）. But Japan faces an unusual property（财产，房产）problem: it has more homes than people to live in them.

In 2013, there were 61 million houses and 52 million households, according to the Japan Policy Forum. And the situation is poised（镇定的）to get worse.

Japan's populationis expected to decline from 127 million to about 88 million by 2065,according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security, meaning even fewer people will need houses. As young people leave rural areas（农村地区）for city jobs, Japan's countryside has become haunted（担忧，缠住）by deserted（荒芜的）"ghost"（幽灵）houses, knownas "akiya."

It's predicted that by 2040, nearly 900 towns and villages across Japan will no longer exist-- and Okutama is one of them. In that context, giving away property is a bid for survival.

"In 2014, we discovered that Okutama was one of three Tokyo (prefecture) towns expected to vanish（消失） by 2040," says Kazutaka Niijima, an official with the Okutama Youth Revitalization (OYR) department, a government body set up to repopulate（重新住人）the town.

关注微信订阅号：和果果一起悦读

喜马拉雅搜索‘姐妹英文频道’收听同步音频。

请发送‘阅读材料’到订阅号后台， 获得阅读材料提取链接及密码。

我们每个工作日推送1-3篇苹果和Kalista姐妹俩的英文阅读视频。 苹果阅读的材料为牛津阅读树，Reading A-Z及一些连载小说, 希望帮助带动幼儿园和低年级的小朋友们英文阅读的兴趣。 Kalista阅读材料是来自英文报的新闻报道（USA Today及其他)，适合高年级学生及成人， 通过读报增进对时事及北美文化生活方面的了解。