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Onagawa, Japan. At age 39, Yoshiaki Suda, the new mayor of this town that was destroyed by last March’s tsunami, oversees a community where the votes and influence lie among its large population of graying residents.

But for Onagawa to have a future, he must rebuild it in such a way as to make it attractive to his and future generations.

“That’s the most difficult problem,” Suda said. “For whom are we rebuilding?”

The rebuilding of Onagawa and the rest of the coast where the tsunami hit is a preview of what may be the most critical test Japan faces in the decades ahead.

In a country where power rests disproportionately among older people, how does Japan, which has the world’s most rapidly aging population, use its resources to build a society that looks to the future as much as the past?

The clashing generational interests are perhaps most striking in Onagawa, a town of 8,500 residents whose average age of 49.5 is above the national average of 45. The evolving debate over Onagawa’s reconstruction underscores how older Japanese are wielding disproportionate influence and swaying local governments into reconstruction blueprints at odds with Tokyo’s goal of creating long-term sustainable communities.

The debate here centers on the future of Onagawa’s rapidly aging and depopulated fishing villages which dot peninsulas that spread east and south of the town center here. Three other villages, located on two nearby islands, depend on a ferry that runs three days a week for access to the mainland.

After the tsunami destroyed all 15 of the fishing villages that make up part of Onagawa, Nobutaka Azumi, then the mayor, proposed a consolidation plan that seemed sensible. Having just a few centralized communities would save money, Azumi said, and perhaps increase their chances of long-term survival.

But the village elders fought back, saying they wanted the government to rebuild their ancestral villages so they could spend their last years there. Younger residents supported consolidation but were far outnumbered.

After the mayor persisted, he was pushed out of office by Suda, who was backed by opponents of consolidation. Suda now says all the villages will be rebuilt, including a hamlet with 22 inhabitants and an island village whose residents are on average 74 years old.

“There were 15 locations, so there will be 15 locations,” Suda said. “We’re moving forward under the premise that there will be no centralization, but I’m thinking of asking them one last time if this is really OK, if their young relatives are in agreement.”

In Tokyo, reconstruction officials say they are aware that the voices of young people are not being heard. “It’s an extremely difficult problem,” said Yoshio Ando, an official at Reconstruction Headquarters.

But the governing Democratic Party — as sensitive to the power of aging rural voters as its predecessor, the Liberal Democratic Party — contributes to the problem. National ministries are overseeing most of the tsunami-hit area’s large reconstruction projects out of a $120 billion budget.

But Tokyo is handing $25 billion directly to regional and local governments to refashion their communities, a boon to politically connected construction companies. The thinking is that local officials understand their communities best, but local politicians and bureaucrats are also less likely to make tough decisions like sacrificing some villages to make others stronger — and to lower the reconstruction costs that are likely to sap already-strained financial resources.

Ando said Tokyo was counting on local governments to come up with plans that were in keeping with demographic realities.

“Local governments may be unable to persuade their residents, but the national government is not considering going in and doing so forcibly,” Ando said. “To put it negatively, we’re passing the buck. To put it positively, it’s not for the national government to judge.”

After the disaster, even as debris from the tsunami was still being cleared, Onagawa’s officials addressed head-on what other local governments barely whispered: rebuilding communities that had been dying before the tsunami made no sense.

Azumi pleaded several times, unsuccessfully, with villagers to consider moving to consolidated towns on higher ground.

All the district and fishing union leaders of the 15 villages — mostly men around 60 years old — opposed consolidation. Though several villages were within walking distance of one another, some said consolidation would create emotional stress and complicate fishing rights.

“Each village has its own way of doing things,” said Kiichiro Abe, 59, the leader of the fishing union in Oura, population 217. “The people in this village want to live with their own people, and so do the people in the next village.”

But the younger people in the villages, who were in the minority and tend to defer to their elders, quietly started telling town officials that they favored centralization, said Toshiaki Yaginuma, the leader of the local government’s reconstruction team. Larger towns, they said, would mean livelier communities and more classmates for their children.

A resident of Oura, Katsuyuki Suzuki, 33, said he wanted to move to a bigger community for his 3-year-old daughter. He did not see how each village’s customs were so different that residents could not live together, especially if it meant reconstruction would be faster and cheaper.

“We wouldn’t be sleeping in the same place — we would have our own houses,” Suzuki said.

Still, he had not yet shared his thoughts with his parents. “I try to avoid saying unnecessary things,” he said. Indeed, just as the young residents deferred to older ones at public meetings, they did the same inside their homes.

The youngest fisherman in Oura, Hiroaki Suzuki, 21, said he wanted to live in a centralized community away from the sea. Rebuilding in Oura, he believed, would make it harder for him to find a wife, a widespread problem in fishing villages.

“If we build a home in a place where a tsunami could come again, there’s no way that someone would come here to be my wife,” he said.

His parents believed centralization would brighten their son’s future. But they found it difficult to express their support publicly or to their own parents.

Hiroaki’s father, Katsuhiro, said: “I want to tell our grandpas and grandmas. This is hard to say, but after 10 years, I’m afraid that there will be no one left in all the villages that will be rebuilt.”

The New York Times