"A House Alone" (ABC TV/TV Asahi, Sundays 7:54 PM) is a variety show that uses satellite photos to find a remote house. The January 25th broadcast follows the life of a 74-year-old woman from Okayama Prefecture who inherited and protects a place loved by her late father. The guests are actors Risa Sudo and Mitsuomi Takahashi.
A single house was captured on satellite photographs. There was a cleared plot of land on the mountain side, but it looked like wasteland and no vegetables were being grown there. The search team stopped off at the nearest village. It was a historic townscape with many traditional Japanese houses lined up. A woman who used to work at the local information center checked the satellite photographs and, although the house was deep in the mountains, quite far from the village, she seemed to recognize it.
As I turned onto the road heading up the mountain from the national highway that runs alongside the village, I found myself on a long, narrow mountain path that cuts through the valley. The road quickly narrows. Suddenly, a magnificent Japanese house came into view. I was greeted by a 74-year-old woman with a striking, cheerful smile who said she lives alone in the area. Her parents' home used to be in a village closer to the foot of the mountain than it is now, but 28 years ago, following the construction of a multipurpose dam, they built a house here and moved.
"My father hated towns and was a stubborn old man (laughs). He worked in forestry, so he probably preferred this place deep in the mountains (rather than going to a village at the foot of the mountain)," the woman said, smiling. Then she went on to tell us about her strange fate.
