Are They People? No, They're Scarecrows! Japanese Town Has 350 Scarecrows and Only 35 Residents [VIDEO]

A village in Japan has four times as many scarecrows as people. That's largely in part to one woman and her obsession with the life like dolls traditionally used to scare away crows from growing crops.

According to a Reuters report, a tiny village of Nagoro in southern Japan is chock full hand-sewn scarecrows. It all began when Tsukimi Ayano made her first scarecrow in 2002 to frighten off birds that were trying to eat the seeds in her garden.

Since it is an incredibly small town with only 35 people, she decided to make more scarecrows to place around the down. Now decades later, she has made a whopping 350 of them.

The village has been affected by the migration of many of its younger residents to larger cities as they seek out better employment and education opportunities. This results in a large population of elderly in villages in the outskirts of the cities. Ayano sometimes makes the scarecrows in the likeness of young people who have left Nagoro or residents who have died.

"They're created as requests for those who've lost their grandfather or grandmother," Osamu Suzuki, a 68-year-old resident, told Reuters. "So it's something to bring back memories."

The country's population has been falling for a decade and is projected to drop from 127 million to 87 million by 2060.

Meanwhile, at 65, Ayano is among the youngest residents of Nagoro. The village school was shut in 2012 after its only two pupils graduated. Scarecrow students now sit at the desks and hang around in the school hallways.

Watch a video below of Nagoro: