60 Minutes - 08/17/2025: The Promise and The Land of Declining Sons

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Twenty-three years later, over 1,000 families are still waiting for news of loved ones lost in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. Correspondent Scott Pelley looks at how efforts to search for and identify their remains have never stopped, driven by the promise made by the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Pelley visits their laboratory, which is using new advancements in DNA research and breakthrough techniques to provide answers for families holding on to hope. This is a double-length segment. The world’s population may have recently surpassed 8 billion, but it’s a misleading figure. Growth is unevenly distributed, and many countries are experiencing a decline in population – in some cases, steeply. Consider Japan. The country is now facing a rapidly declining birth rate, and a population projected to shrink in half by this century’s end. Correspondent Jon Wertheim reports from Japan, examining how these demographic changes are affecting the country and its culture. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms in history are clues. You saved her life. We're doctors and with detectives. I kinda love it if I'm being honest.

Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson, all episodes, Now streaming on Paramount Plus. Now streaming. When people go missing, I get hired to help find them. When lives are on the line. Coulter, please find my daughter. He's the man for the job.

I'm going to do everything you can. Don't miss a moment. Coulter's in trouble. I can feel it. Of TV's number one show. These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all. Every bad man got to have their robin. Coulter!

Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise. I would never stop looking. In Tracker. All episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus and returning CBS Fall. When the police officer said, we've found your husband's DNA, I mean, that must have hit you as quite a shock. It was a shock that they'd been looking all these 22 years. Not many are aware, but more than a thousand families still wait for word of a missing loved one from 9-11.

and the work to identify their remains has never stopped. These remains went through every possible thing that could destroy DNA at Crown Zero, making this not only the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States, but the most difficult. Some of these World Trade Center remains have been tested. How many times? 10, 15 times, yeah. Without a result.

Without a result. But if there's DNA yet, we're going to find it. We're going to find it. We're going to generate a profile. It may take us a while. Itchino-No Japan sits regally, wedged between mountains an hour-and-a-half west of Kyoto. Its listed population, just shy of 50. But if it seems like more, it's for good reason. The village comes embroidered with 40 lifelike puppets,

in the middle of town, on a playground, pedaling off toward the woods. It's lonely here. Back in my day, the village was full of kids. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alphonsey. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelly. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms in history are clues.

You saved your life. We're doctors and with detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle. Save the patient. Watson. All episodes. Now streaming. On Paramount Plus. Now streaming. When people go missing, I get hired to help find them.

When lives are on the line. Coulter. Please find my daughter. He's the man for the job. I'm going to do everything you can. Don't miss a moment. Culture's in trouble. I can feel it.

Of TV's number one show. These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all. Every bad man got to have their routing. Culture! Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise.

I would never stop looking. In Tracker. All episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus and returning CBS Fall. This month, against all odds and expectations, the remains of three. victims of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center were identified for the first time. After nearly a quarter century, the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner announced that it had put names to fragmentary remains using the latest advances in DNA technology.

As we first reported last year, not many are aware, but the medical examiner made a promise to identify the lost souls of 9-11, and that work has never stopped, because more than 1,000 families still wait for word. You're about to meet two for whom the promise was kept. For Ellen Niven, the moment came in December, 2003. She was decorating her Christmas tree when two police officers came to her door with news of her husband John, who had been. been missing 22 years. John was my husband. I met him when I was 24 years old and had moved to New York.

Incredible person described by people who knew him as a real gentleman, very old school, old soul, wonderful father. Very happy when we had our young son and spent a lot of time with him. Great friend to a lot of people. John Niven was a 44-year-old insurance executive bound for his office on the 105th floor of the South Tower as the terrorist attack began. The first building was hit. John was in the second building.

The South Tower, yes. And he had an opportunity to call you. Yes, he said, hi, honey, it's me. If you hear anything on the news, don't worry, I'm okay. It was the other building. In the other building, a different family tragedy was unfolding. 25-year-old Haberman, Andrea L. had just received a visitor pass on her first trip to her company's headquarters on the 92nd floor.

Back home in Chicago, Andy, as her family called her, had just been fitted for her wedding dress. In Wisconsin, her mother, Kathy, was watching the news. I was shocked, and I ran upstairs to wake up Gordy to tell him. And then I came back downstairs just in time to see the second plane hit. That was United Flight 175 as Gordon Haberman joined his wife. I threw a cup against a wall. I remember that. The thing is, we didn't know what tower she was in. We didn't know where she lived. The search for Andrea Haberman, John Niven, and nearly 3,000 others would become the passion of Dr. Charles Hirsch, the city's chief medical examiner.

He raced to the base of the burning towers with a team that included a young scientist named Mark Desire. Both towers were standing. They were on fire. We parked our truck. We were to set up a temporary morgue and begin to preserve the evidence. It wasn't down there very long. I had just received my orders from Dr. Hirsch. I picked up our gearbox and the South Tower cracked. It was right over. That plume. They could see the steel and the fire coming down. And I thought, this is it, this is how I die. The South Tower, with John Niven inside, foundered after 56 minutes. As you're running away from the collapsing South Tower, you were heading for a door in an adjacent building,

and then you got blasted off your feet? Yeah, it just knocked me right out of my shoes. Never made it to the door, but it was enough to get me through. partially through the window, which really would save my life. If I was on the outside, everything that came down across my legs would have taken me out. The medical examiner's team survived. That's Mark Desire in the middle, in the green shirt. The North Tower, in the distance, is minutes from collapse.

Andrea Haberman is inside. Her parents, her sister Julie and fiancé Al, drove 16 hours to Manhattan, where they picked up a list of hospitals. But with those lists of medical centers, Kathy and I split up, and Julie and Al took the west side of Broadway, and we took the east side,

32 different medical centers, working our way down towards the tip of Manhattan and ground zero. Of course, the answers were... No. No. No, for Andrea Hoverman and thousands of others. Manhattan was papered in pleas for the missing,

and longing remained after Hope had washed away. Everybody has a flyer. Everybody is looking for their people. Families lined up at a National Guard armory, guard armory and waited hours to give DNA samples to the medical examiner. 17,000 reference samples, toothbrushes, razors, hair brushes, anything that the person touched when they were alive. If we couldn't get one of those samples, what living relatives do we have, moms and dads, kids? There was DNA swab done of my young son Jack's cheek,

You filled out descriptions. You gave photographs. You filled out many, many forms. They swabbed your son's cheek for DNA. Yes. How old was he? 18 months. His father was among those entombed in a mountain of misery. Nearly two million tons of debris were searched by hand for human remains. After a year, they thought they had found everything. But then, in 2006, there was a shocking revelation, bone fragments on the roof of a building across the street from Ground Zero.

The medical examiner sent anthropologist Bradley Adams. We ended up going through the whole rooftop, and we found over 700's small bone fragments on that rooftop. And then we ended up, you know, obviously if there's remains there, we need to search other areas. So we went through every floor of that building, even to the point of having vacuum cleaners and vacuuming up dust and debris. The remains on the Deutsche Bank building were from American Airlines Flight 11. The discovery prompted a new search for clues at ground zero.

Computer floppy disks or golf balls or parts of office furniture. that would be buried there. And if you're seeing that, then you know there's the potential there could be human remains mixed in with this World Trade Center debris. Five years after the attack, Brad Adams began collecting 18,000 tons

of excavation material over the course of a year. 75 anthropologists washed it through screens. How many human remains did you find in that project? There was the 700 on Deutsche Bank, and then over 1,000 more were found during the sifting operations. All together, the total World Trade Center remains came to 21,905. The recovery efforts have been monumental, and this was an unprecedented event. As you know, this is the greatest mass murder in the history of the United States.

Today, Dr. Jason Graham is New York City's chief medical examiner. He inherited this promise made by his late predecessor, Charles Hirsch. As long as there are families who are continuing to seek answers, this work will continue. What's the scope of what's left to be done? There were 2753 victims, homicide victims. 60% of those individuals have been identified. 40% are left to be identified. 40% comes to 1,100 victims with no identified remains.

So these are the steps from once remains are received. Putting a name to those remains is the job of the last original member of the medical examiner's 9-11 team. Mark Desire, now assistant director. of forensic biology. These remains went through every possible thing that could destroy DNA, from jet fuel to diesel fuel, mold, bacteria, sunlight, all kinds of chemicals that were in the building, insects, heat, fire, all these things destroyed DNA.

Everything was present at Crown Zero, making this not only the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States, but the most difficult. Some of these World Trade Center remains have been tested how many times? 10, 15 times, yeah. Without a result. Without a result. But if there's DNA yet, we're going to find it.

We're going to find it. We're going to generate a profile. It may take us a while. All remains today are bone. In a demonstration with animal bone, Desire showed us new technologies that make breakthroughs possible. They include this cryogenic grinder, filled with liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below zero. The early days of 9-11, 2001, we were doing this all by hands with a mortar and pestle.

With high-speed vibration, individual cells in the deeply frozen bone shatter. A chemical process releases their DNA. Equipment like this has taken that to the next level, giving us so much more access to cells. We need as much DNA as possible because these samples have whole. hardly any. Other innovations chemically amplify DNA, revealing more information from the smallest fragment. Some as small as the size of a Tick-Tac. We've been able to get DNA from those and generate a DNA profile. Samples are tested every week with advanced technology. John Niven's bone fragments, 15 in all, had been tested for years. Then, in 2023, the lab made a perfect

match to the swab of the cheek of his infant son, taken 22 years before. First notifications are made in person. And the police came to the door, and my first reaction was, I said, is it my son? And they said, no, everything's okay. And these two wonderful, really kind And policemen said, we're here to deliver you the news, and they had a letter, that your husband's DNA has been discovered. When the police officer said, we found your husband's DNA, I mean, that must have hit you as quite a shock. It was a shock that they'd been looking all these 22 years.

I thought that that door had long been closed. Why open that door at all? It turns out many families don't want to know. When we come back, why others, including Andrea Haberman's family, are eager, even now, for every revelation. Risk is the podcast where people tell true stories they never thought they dare to share. after all, where Ken Cole and Tom Ballet share about the night their son had a psychotic break. And at that point, I didn't actually know I had been stabbed all over my arm. I was in shock. Find the risk episode after all on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcast.

About half of 9-11 families have told the medical examiner that if their loved one is identified, today, they don't want to know. Time has lightened their burden of grief. But the other half still hope for word, and few understand this mix of emotions like Dr. Jennifer Odeon. She's the medical examiner's World Trade Center anthropologist, a scientist, and something of a counselor to those still hoping for the promise. Shock, I would say, is the first. response, typically, just because of how many years have gone by they weren't necessarily expecting to get that new identification and identification for some families. They weren't expecting it. And then after that, it tends to be emotional, you know, some grief, because now all the memories, everything is

coming up about that. Can you give me a sense of how many families you're in touch with? Hundreds. Hundreds. Yeah. What memories have some of these families shared with you? Some of the memories are that last phone call that they received, or the last birthday they had, or, you know, a vacation, but a lot of it has to do with that last contact, whether it was in the morning before they went off to work, or if they had called while they were in the towers. A vital part of your job is to listen. Yes, and I will listen as long as they would like me to. We have phone calls sometimes and it will last an hour. and I will stay on and listen and talk to them when they have the questions. I'll answer it, but a lot of times they just want to speak to someone. I talked to Dr. Odian, Jen, who was wonderful and so kind and so nice.

Ellen Niven spoke to Jennifer Odian in 23 when the remains of her husband John were identified for the first time. So I heard nothing about John's remains for 22 years. So we just assumed that there was nothing. We buried a box of momentos, photographs, and a letter that I wrote in a drawing my son had done, and then nothing. She remarried and had two more boys. Her son, Jack, was 18 months old when his father died. Now age 25, Jack, let his mother tell the story. of how his father's identification struck them differently.

For me, it was very sad. For him, it was uplifting in a way to realize that people had been working all that time to find any piece of his dad and that of all the people that were blessed by this breakthrough, that it was his death. And that met so much to him. So it was really moving to see how moved he was.

So many people who had met John or had even not met John reached out to us, emails, letters, phone calls to me and to Jack. And I think that for Jack it really brought to life so many descriptions of his father that as a young man he could now really appreciate. So it was a great remembrance John being able to be back in a lot of people's minds. As remains are identified, the folders get bigger and bigger, because we keep adding all the information for those remains. Jennifer Odian adds new identifications to the DM files. No one knew what to call 9-11 the day it happened, so the ME settled on disaster Manhattan. There's one folder for each murder victim, 2,753. This is an inventory of all of the remains found for this one person.

Correct. Such things here as rib, vertebra, sternum found over months and years. Correct. This indicates that about 50% of this body was recovered. Roughly, yes. And it's a very rough estimate. We're trying to understand how many of the remains have been identified. How much of that individual is there?

What are the chances that more remains will be identified? Because those are questions that families will ask. Families have a choice. They can ask a funeral home to pick up a remain, vacuum-packed like this, labeled with an American flag. Or they can leave the remain in the custody of the medical examiner. I tell them that they don't have to make that decision right now. They can call back in a month, a year, two years, ten years,

and we could then have those remains transferred over to the funeral home that they choose. You are keeping track of the remains that precisely. Oh, absolutely. We know where every single remain is. How do you do that? We have numbers associated with all remains. So every remain that was recovered has a specific unique number associated with it. Number 18,756 is the most recent remain of Andrea Haberman.

Oh, Andrea. The Habermans have asked to be told of all new identifications. For them, each reminder of their daughter is a stepping stone through a void. Isn't that beautiful? That Gordon Haberman calls, missing. It's hard to describe missing to other people, but it's deep inside you. There isn't a day that I or we don't think of her. Help me understand what it means to you.

to have had Andrea's remains identify. If Andrea could face what she had to face, how could I not want to know what happened to her? Today, he's 74. His relationship with the medical examiner has spanned 11 notifications, plus the amazing discovery of the relics of Andrea. When you went through these things for the first time, what did you see? What did you think?

How terrible it must have. We met Gordon Haberman at the National September 11th Memorial Museum at Ground Zero. With the help of the museum staff, we saw artifacts from Andrea's purse, which are archived, cataloged, and handled like antiquities. He received them in 2004 from the NYPD in a meeting with officers and a priest. They wanted to know if I needed any help processing that, and I was actually more concerned at that time how I'm going to keep these from my wife. He feared his wife's pain, so he locked the bag in a desk drawer which he did not open for seven years.

In 2011, they donated to the museum the collection of a quarter century ago. This is the phone that we kept calling. Her flip phone. It didn't work. A pager, driver's license, and the last photo of her life. the visitor ID that captured Andrea's spirit minutes before she was gone. That was our Andrea.

And she was going to go on to do great things, and she wanted grandchildren. Her house was such a pride. She loved her out so much. You can see it in her smile. Oh, yes. You can see it in her face. Yes.

He brought Andrea's identified remains home to Wisconsin, but he believes her other remains, still unidentified, are in the museum behind this wall and a verse by the poet Virgil. No day shall erase you from the memory of time. Many museum visitors don't realize, but this is the outer wall of the medical examiner's repository for 9-11 remains. We're in what was the base. of the North Tower. Yes. And this is completely out of the path of the museum.

It's hidden around the corner. Yes. Next to the repository, this is the entrance to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner Family Reflection Room. The room and repository have never been seen by the public. Families only can call a number on the door which summons an escort. Often, Dr. Jennifer Odean. So the visits are different every time.

Some families are very emotional, and I'll sit in with them for an hour and just hear stories, and I'll walk around with them until I know that they're okay, and then I leave the room completely, so they have the space to themselves. This must be a burden to you. I don't consider it a burden. It's tough. I definitely have moments of feeling very emotional and needing to step back, step back, but when I talk to a family and they say, thank you, how grateful they are,

with our continued work, that a question I've answered helped them in some way, it makes it all worth it. Gordon Haberman invited us inside as his guest. No camera, but we were allowed to record the audio. We found a small sitting room and a window into the repository for human remains. The window we're looking through looks like it's about five feet wide and three feet or so tall, just a single window and a single wooden bench in front of the window. With permission, we gave our notes to an artist who sketched the view through the window

that joins the family room to the repository. A loved one, sitting on the bench, sees a deep, austere, white room, with rows of dark wooden cabinets eight feet tall. They hold about 10,000 remains, both known and unknown. It is, in a sense, a private national shrine. After you? Why do you come here after all these years? I feel close to my daughter. She wasn't meant to be here, but she's here. The repository in the museum, which stands between the reflecting pools, seems like the right place, Ellen Niven told us, for her husband, John. Have you been here often?

I have been here often. She has visited the pools over the decades to run her fingertips over her lost husband's tribute, and yet she is surprised how the endless effort to actually find him, allowed her to feel once again the embrace of a nation's devotion. My first reaction was to tell people, did you know that all this time they have been sifting through these remains and researching and researching for over 20 years? What an incredible thing. You know, John had another moment in all of our lives. So that was something I'm I'm incredibly grateful for. Hungry now.

Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are. Grab an O. Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts, covered in creamy caramel, and chewy, fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today.

Oh, hungry, oh Henry. The world's population may have recently exceeded $8 billion, but it's a deceptive number. Not only is growth unevenly distributed, but in so many countries, population is in decline, in some cases, steep, deep decline. Maybe most graphically, and demographically, there's Japan. A country that since hitting a high of 128 million citizens in 2008 has lost population for 15 years running and is on pace to shrink by half by this century's end,

despite government measures to halt a decline. This has huge impacts on the economy, the health care system, education, housing, national defense, immigration, the culture at large. Governments can control interest rates, and inflation rates, stimulating birth rates is far harder. We reported in April from the land of the rising sun, now also the land of declining sons and daughters. Itchino-No Japan sits regally, wedged between mountains

an hour and a half west of Kyoto. Its listed population, just shy of 50. But if it seems like more, it's for good reason. The village comes embroidered with 40 lifelike population. In the middle of town, on a playground, pedaling off toward the woods. It's lonely here. Back in my day, the village was full of kids. Shinichi Moriama is the town puppet master,

overseeing the making and then scattering of dolls throughout A Chinono, populating a depopulating village. You say it's lonely here. Are the puppets a way to make things a little less lonely? Puppets are no substitute for people, of course, but making them cheers us up. This is as good a snapshot as any of Japan's demographic crisis. There are hundreds of communities here fading like Ichinono. Do you think there might come a day when the puppet population exceeds the human population?

So, if things keep going the way they are right now, of course our population will decrease. Maybe it'll go down to 40, or maybe 30. But at the same time, my ability to continue making puppets is finite. So, yes, I am deeply worried about the future of our village. Modern Japan sounds like a sci-fi premise, the incredible shrinking country. Go-Go Tokyo is the world's largest city. And Japan has one of the world's longest national life expectancies, 85 years. But it's also losing population at a staggering rate.

Last year, more than two people died for every new baby born. A net loss of almost a million. Today, Japanese buy more adult diapers than buy baby diapers. Is there a more urgent issue in Japan right now than this demographic crisis? There are climate change, government deficit, but if there's no people living in Japan... It's all relevant to climate change and government deficits in the military if you don't have people living here. That's right. The central door is only for the emperor.

A long-time high-ranking minister in Japan's parliament, Tarokono was nearly elected prime minister in 2021 and says he intends to seek the highest office again. What does Japan look like if it continues to shrink like this? There are less and less number of young generation, and the older burdens are on the young generation, and they won't be able to sustain. So society is going to be breaking up.

breaking up, economy is just going to stagnate. Even for self-defense force, last year, we recruited only half of what we need. The Japanese military. You feel it. Declining population is hardly unique to Japan. Name a country outside Africa, and odds are good it's losing people, or about to. In the U.S., the fertility rate is at an all-time low. Donald Trump has declared the collapse of fertility a crucial

threat to the West. Kono wishes his country had been better prepared. Every sector, even in the government, there's a labor shortage. And we really need to invest in technology to replace the human being. But we are still slow to do that. The alternative is to open up the country to foreign immigrants. But there's some psychological barrier to open up the country. What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean, the Japanese have been very homogeneous. Many Japanese don't know how to deal with non-Japanese living in society. Japan is also the world's fourth largest economy. Can it continue to be a power like that if the population keeps declining? Nope. In part, Japan's declining demographics owes to a spike in the success of women in the workforce. And in Japan, a famously punishing work culture, coupled with a men-first social culture, makes it all the more difficult to balance career and family,

still more so amid a persistently stagnant economy. Up through the 1980s, the bubble years, Japan had Omia, they had arranged marriage. You know, the corporate guys would marry the office. ladies. And this was all set up. It's gone now. And the office ladies make more money than the corporate guys. So now you have this shift in economics that has not been reflected in social norms. Roland Kelts is a Japanese-American writer. He's married, but he's well aware that he's the exception. In 2023, fewer than 500,000 Japanese couples married. The lowest number since 1917.

I'm not sure other societies in the world have an implosion of marriage. Well, Japan's, I think, ahead of the game. Japan's where we're all headed. You think this is a harbinger? I do. I do. I think it's a canary in a coal mine. It doesn't help Japan's marriage rates, and therefore birth rates, that a growing number

of businesses now cater to the rise of parties of one. I mean, you and I are not supposed to talk to each other over this thing. We met Celts at a ramen joint designed specifically. specifically for dining and solitude. There's single karaoke. We visited a bar open only to those arriving stag. There are solo weddings replete with professional photo shoots. But that's not all.

Lately, alternative romance is highly in vogue. Just as robots today are helping. ease some of the national labor shortages. Inanimate objects are also making their way into the bedroom. We met Akihiko Kondo, who told us he sleeps alongside the anime character Miku, whom he married in a formal ceremony in 2018. He's one of thousands of Japanese who, unashamedly, say they are in a monogamous, romantic relationship with a fictional character.

Staggeringly, or maybe not, almost half. Half of the country's millennial singles, ages 18 to 34, self-report as virgins, compared to barely 20% in the U.S. And of course, less human copulation means less human population. AI relationships, they're going to get better and better and better, and they're going to supersede, in some ways, real physical relationships. To foster human relationships, the Tokyo government has taken action. Yuriko Koike is the city's governor. We are promoting for matchmaking by artificial intelligence.

Tokyo government is playing Omi-A, playing matchmaker. That's right. Yes, the Japanese capital city has launched its own dating app. Is it working? Yes, it's working. And number of applications is more than we expected, three or four times. Tokyo has introduced a four-day work week for government employees, designed to help working mothers and, hopefully, boost birth rates.

When the bubble economy was boosting, there was a commercial advertisement, worked 24 hours. But the longer we work, the less children we have. So demography is one of the biggest national issue that we have to tackle. But the Japanese government has rolled out a number of programs to address this declining birth rate.

Are any of them working? The total fertility rate for 2024 was reported to hit an all-time low. The continuing slide in the birth rate clearly indicates our current policy isn't working at all. Until last year, Hanukkah Okada, now 45, was a lawyer in Tokyo and primary caregiver for her two children. Overworked and under-fulfilled, she ran for. parliament on a platform of trying to alter the culture for women, even breaking down in tears on the campaign trail, describing her stress. I remembered how tough it was to raise my child and I burst into tears.

It was overwhelming. And viewers probably thought, I'm a politician who gets what ordinary people have to deal with. It was effective. She won unexpectedly, and Hana-san, as she's called, is now something of a political change agent. She says confronting the population problem requires not dating apps and shorten work weeks, but a sweeping mindset change. In particular, a rethinking of living in urban areas, as 92% of Japanese currently do. She practiced what she preaches, moving back to her rural hometown of Al-Mori, a northern prefecture known for its apple orchards. But one that is rapidly aging,

rapidly losing people. Built for 600 students, this Almory Middle School is now only one-third filled. They still learn the traditional Shammisen. But there are too few kids to field a soccer team, and a competitive snowball fight means recruiting a visiting ringer. Oh, nice! Why'd you return?

Amari's my hometown. The precipitous drop in population and vitality of this city is deeply troubling. not just personally, but from a national perspective. If our regions collapse, it imperils our country's strength. I thought we can't allow the situation to go on. You've seen the math, I'm sure. Do you believe Japan can overcome this population crisis? We need to stop the over-concentration of people in Tokyo.

In the rural areas, we need interesting jobs with decent pay that allow young people to support themselves. Her thinking, once there are more jobs, in rural areas, the younger people will come. Once they come and experience the space, the slower rhythms, the quality of life, they'll be motivated to start families. The values of our younger generation are gradually shifting. Tokyo is no longer the be-all and all. One such Japanese family that agrees, the Catoes.

They recently exchanged city life for this spacious house in Ichinono, land of puppets. Their son, Kornosuke, was the first baby born in the village in more than 20 years. We've got a mountain and a river to explore. We make our own toys and grow our own vegetables. For a kid, there's plenty of ways to have fun here. You're happy here? Yes, I truly enjoy this lifestyle. The Kato's hope others will follow that Kornoske will have friends and classmates among all the town's daughters.

It takes us back to our roots. I want Japanese people to become more aware of this lifestyle, which is closer to our traditional way of living. It might be a traditional Japanese lifestyle, but amid a population decline, it will be in a smaller, lonelier, and fundamentally different Japan. I'm Leslie Stahl.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 minutes. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms in history are clues. You saved her life.

We're doctors and with detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle. Save the patient. Watson. All episodes. Now streaming. On Paramount Now streaming. When people go missing, I get hired to help find them. When lives are on the line.

Coulter, please find my daughter. He's the man for the job. I'm going to do everything you can. Don't miss a moment. Coulter's in trouble. I can feel it. Of TV's number one show. These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all.

Every bad man got to have their routing. Coulter! Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise. I would never stop looking. In Tracker. All episodes now. streaming on Paramount Plus and returning CBS Fall.