Village of the creepy dolls
QUESTION Why is the village of Nagoro in Japan filled with creepy dolls?
Nagoro is a village in Shikoku, an island south-east of Japan’s main island Honshu. It is famous for the 350 life-sized dolls that are dotted around the streets, fields and buildings.
This village in the Iya Valley, a remote mountainous area, was once home to more than 300 people, but the decline in Japan’s population has caused that to fall to 27. Japan faces a demographic crisis. It is predicted that by 2040, nearly 900 towns and villages will no longer be viable.
Birth rates have fallen since the 1970s and stand at 1.4 children per family. The population is ageing rapidly, and the age imbalance is most acute in rural areas, compounded by the young migrating to big cities.
Former Nagoro resident Tsukimi ayano returned home to the village, where the youngest resident is 55, in 2003. Feeling lonely, she began populating the village with dolls, each representing a former resident. She made the first in the likeness of her father, and then replaced other family members with dolls.
She continued to create dolls to place throughout the town — even in the school, which has dolls poring over books. They are all made from wooden sticks. Newspapers, straw and cloth fill their bodies, while elastic fabrics are used for the skin and knitting wool for hair.
They are dressed in old clothes, and some have blusher applied to their cheeks to bring them to life — which does, indeed, make them pretty creepy.
Every doll is in a place relating to the person it represents. Strolling through the village, you might find a farmer in a field, a worker up a telegraph pole, a group of commuters at a bus shelter or a fisherman by the river. The village has become a tourist attraction.
Sophia Khan, Luton, Beds.
QUESTION Are earthworms territorial?
THE short answer is no. anyone who owns a composting farm will know this is the case. Worms are able to live close together, even on top of each other, without causing each other harm.
Indeed, their close proximity is beneficial. Earthworms have a simple brain that connects to nerves in their skin and muscles. The nerves detect light, vibrations and tastes.
The earthworm’s body is covered with chemoreceptors. These are cells that allow the earthworm to taste and detect chemicals in the soil. Their muscles make movements in response to touch and taste.
When a worm grazes on food, it is using these chemical and biological senses to ‘see’ the microbes it wants to consume. When it finds them, it pulls them into its gut like a straw.
The earthworm then breaks down the food and mixes it with beneficial organisms, allowing the worm to create further compost, which becomes an even richer food source for other worms.
The more worms in the area, the more beneficial organisms are available, which attracts more worms. In time, you can have a thick mass of worms with little space between them.
Worms don’t move far — studies have shown it takes 100 years for earthworm populations to migrate half a mile.
James Baines, Okehampton, Devon.
QUESTION Where are the world’s oldest rocks? Which are the oldest in Britain?
THE Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago from gas and dust circling the Sun. Most of the crust formed during this period has been recycled into the Earth’s interior several times by plate tectonics.
In 2001, geologists found an expanse of bedrock, known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, exposed on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in Quebec.
By measuring minor variations in the isotopes of the rare earth elements neodymium and samarium in the rocks, they determined that the samples were from 3.8 to 4.28 billion years old. The oldest rocks are thought to be ancient volcanic deposits and are ‘faux amphibolites’. amphibolites are metamorphic rocks that are composed of green, brown, or black amphibole minerals. These were dubbed ‘faux’ because of their beige colour.
The Nuvvuagittuq rocks beat the previously oldest known 4.03 billion-yearold rocks from the acasta gneiss in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
The oldest materials on Earth are isolated mineral grains called zircons, which are highly resistant to weathering and geologic processes. Those in Jack Hills, Western australia, are 4.36 billion years old.
The oldest rock in the world is not from the Earth but from the Moon, picked up during the 1972 apollo 16 mission.
Lunar sample 67215 is an igneous rock called anorthosite and is believed to be 4.46 billion years old.
Dr Ken Warren, Glasgow. THE oldest rocks in the British Isles are more than three billion years old, and are exposed on the mainland of northwest Scotland, and on the Inner and outer Hebrides.
These rocks are mainly metamorphosed igneous rocks called orthogneisses from the Lewisian Complex, named after the Isle of Lewis in the outer Hebrides.
gneiss is a type of rock formed by high temperature and high- pressure metamorphic processes acting on formations composed of igneous or sedimentary rocks. orthogneiss is gneiss derived from igneous rock such as granite. Paragneiss is gneiss derived from sedimentary rock such as sandstone.
The orthogneiss formed as the Earth’s crust became molten and then solidified, which is why you can see variations in the layers, which range from white to pale grey to dark grey.
Most of the rocks that make up the Lewisian gneiss Complex were formed more than 2.8 billion years ago. The oldest examples are 3.2 billion years old.
Fragments can be recognised along the length of a tectonic zone called the Caledonian orogeny, which stretches from Scandinavia and Scotland to greenland and North america.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT. You can also email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published, but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.