"A House Alone" (ABC TV/TV Asahi, Sundays at 7:54 PM) is a variety show that uses satellite photos to find secluded homes. The October 26th broadcast follows the life of a 70-year-old man living alone in the mountains of Tottori Prefecture. The guests are TV personality Ikue Sakakibara and actor Daisuke Fujiwara.
The search team's satellite images show a vast area of cultivated land with several buildings clustered together. The search team arrived at a large settlement at the foot of the mountain, surrounded by a rural landscape. Residents who had just finished mowing the grass in the area were holding a celebration party. When the union leader (80) checked the satellite images, he immediately replied, "This is a pig farm that went out of business about 20 years ago." The search team was feeling down, but then a member of the celebration party told them, "There's another isolated house here."
The union leader and a man (76) guided me to the house. The steep, winding mountain path continued endlessly, and beyond that was only the scenery of the deep mountains. Suddenly, at the top of the mountain path, the building came into view. The man (70) was not there that day, so when I visited the next day, he greeted me with a smile. Because it is a region with heavy snowfall, the residents have been coming down the mountain one after another, and now the man is the only one living here.
"I'm used to this environment where I was born and raised," says the man with a smile. The preview video shows the killifish the man is raising and his homemade pickled radishes, a Tottori specialty.
In the studio, Sakakibara, who had been watching the man's life and current lifestyle, had tears in her eyes and seemed moved, saying, "Why are tears overflowing?" Fujiwara also commented, "It was very cool. It made me realize once again that there are many different forms of happiness," basking in the afterglow of the video.
