Rusting Civilisations: The End of Everything, and a New Hope
Fading iron cities, empty towns, and the global myth of permanence — what rust can teach us about ownership, ageing, and purpose in a crumbling world.
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At the Edge of Time and Salt!
Somewhere near the edge of Onjuku Beach, on the Pacific Coast of Chiba, Japan beside a sun-faded vending machine that still clunks out cans of lukewarm Boss Coffee, a rusted railing curls like dried kelp. Nobody remembers when it was installed. Nobody is responsible for removing it. And yet, day after day, it holds the same chipped stance against the Pacific wind, its metal flaking into powder with every shift of humidity.
Rust does not hurry. That is what makes it unsettling.
I have been thinking a lot about rust lately, not as an engineering problem but as a kind of quiet truth-teller. It shows up uninvited, stains everything it touches, and slowly reminds us that ownership is temporary, maintenance is eternal, and most of the things we think we possess are simply on loan until the elements take them back.
Rust is not here to depress us. It is here to focus us. To sharpen the value of what remains, like a frame around a photograph.
Japan, of course, is rust-friendly. The air is wet, the coasts are salted, and there is more ageing infrastructure here than most places know what to do with. Trains do run on time, of course, with immediate apology announcements on the intercom if a Shinkansen is even a few seconds late. But the rural stations served by local trains are often ghostly: corrugated roofs held up by posts corroding from the inside out. Behind them, forgotten bicycles lean like skeletons in long grass. You do not have to look hard to see it. Rust is Japan’s second skin, especially out here, where the sheen of Tokyo does not quite reach. On some back roads around Chiba’s Minami Boso, a row of old guardrails has sagged into the weeds, their once-white paint a memory. A fisherman in Wakayama ties his boat with rope patched three times over, beside cleats that crumble at the edges. Even the signs warning of landslides bear the freckles of brown, as if time itself has begun to erase the warning.
The Politics of Oxidation
In a way, rust is more honest than most governments. It does not promise to make anything great again. It does not hide behind branding or legacy. It simply shows up and tells the truth: this will not last. Your flags, your condos, your high-speed internet, your sovereign currency. Give it time. Give it weather. It will decay.
It can be seen in the suburbs of Detroit, the sinking edges of Venice, the fishing docks in Vladivostok, and the alleys of Yokohama’s Chinatown. Not total collapse, but corrosion. One door that no longer shuts. One shutter that has not opened in years. Cities do not fall apart dramatically, they fade. And in a world still obsessed with GDP graphs and innovation indexes, rust quietly laughs and goes about its business.
“Where is the ministry for maintenance? Who funds the Department of Things We Already Have That Need Looking After?”
I saw it in Manila years ago, on my way to eat and be entertained at The Singing Cooks and Waiters on Roxas Boulevard. A new mall had recently opened beside a crumbling overpass, the two structures separated by a single decade and yet worlds apart in optimism. In Lisbon, the tiles on old houses lose their glaze, a gentle surrender to Atlantic storms. This is not disaster. It is the slow, daily retreat of ambition.
The Ownership Illusion
There is a strange confidence in how people talk about what they own. My house. My land. My country. My legacy. But rust knows better. Rust reminds us: we are not the final owner. You and I are the interim tenants. We are the one watering the plants before the next person forgets to.
Walk through an old industrial port, it does not matter where, and you will find the remains of empires that once spoke in spreadsheets and steel. Now they speak in oxidation. In Kobe, rust creeps along decommissioned shipyards. In Baltimore, the old grain elevators glow orange under a low sun, barely upright. In Sardinia, where my own family roots run deep into the Ghilarza rock, the olive presses are long silent, their iron bellies bloated and split by time. In Perth, Australia, where I grew up, a half‑dismantled factory fence in one of the eastern industrial suburbs rattles in the Fremantle Doctor’s afternoon breeze, its paint blistered by decades of searing summer heat.
“Permanence is fiction. The best we can do is use what we have wisely before it flakes back into earth, just like we will.”
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Japan’s Quiet Collapse
Here is the thing about Japan: it is not dying loudly. There is no revolution, no riots, no dystopian futurescape. It is just ageing. Shrinking. Rusting, in the way that all highly developed things eventually do.
You can hear it in the silence of rural towns. Hardly any kids, no new businesses. Just a kojin shōten — a half-stocked variety store with a taped-up window and a stereo still playing Enka from 1977. The streets are clean. The buses are still running (mostly). But something is missing and it is not coming back.
On the Shikoku coast, a once-busy ferry terminal is now a shelter for stray cats, the ticket windows dusted in salt. In the mountains of Akita, a ski lodge stands empty every winter, its roof streaked brown, waiting for skiers who will likely never return.
And in Kiyosato, Nagano, once famous for its ice cream and packed with throngs of teenagers on school trips in the 1990s, the footpaths now echo. Shops stand shuttered, souvenir signs fading, and the once-busy lookout is silent but for the wind off the plateau. What was once a summer pilgrimage in my racing green Mazda Roadster, top down, Sweet Soul Revue by Pizzicato Five blasting from the FM radio, is now a postcard of absence.
More than 1,200 towns and villages across Japan are now considered marginal communities, where over half of the population is 65 or older. Some are on the brink of disappearing altogether. Houses, known as Akiya, stand empty and unsold, not because no one wants them but because there is no one left who can. This is not a collapse. It is a slow vanishing. Rust is just the most visible narrator. And it is not Japan’s burden alone.
Rust Around the World
Rust is borderless. In India, abandoned railway sidings blend into red earth, trains overtaken by weeds. In America’s Midwest, towns live in the shadows of old silos and smokestacks, relics of production lines that no longer produce. Even in the tech-obsessed corners of China, ghost cities sprawl with buildings unfinished or unoccupied, iron fittings already flaking before the windows are installed. On the edges of Athens, a stadium built for an Olympic moment now lies cracked and rust-streaked, weeds claiming its bleachers.
Rust does not erase life. It just roughens its edges.
Maintenance as Resistance
There is a quiet nobility in fixing things that are already breaking. Not upgrading them, fixing them. Wiping the dust off an old tool. Replacing a hinge. Repainting a railing you know will peel again next year.
Nobody celebrates this kind of labour. It is too slow. Too humble. Too unmarketable. But in a rusting world, maintenance might be one of the last meaningful acts left to us.
“What if the real counterculture now is the opposite? Staying put. Looking after things. Choosing not to abandon them just because they are no longer shiny.”
Living With the Rust
Of course, we cannot stop decay. That is not the point. But we can live inside of it, mindfully. We can learn to see the beauty in surfaces that have lived a little. A kettle with a faint ring of rust still boils water. A bicycle with scuffed paint still carries a child to school. A footbridge with a stained railing still crosses the river, linking lives that would otherwise remain apart.
I think about my father’s Sardinia sometimes, not the postcards, but the rhythm. The way things age there and are allowed to age. The gates that screech, the walls that crumble in the corners, the wine presses made before electricity. There is a kind of dignity in it. Things are not constantly replaced, they are accepted. A kind of everyday intimacy with time.
In Oristano, a small coastal city on Sardinia’s western shore, there's an ancient chest still in use in an old fisherman’s house, its hinges well-oiled but rusted with age, yet the lid closing true, a quiet emblem of the island’s long memory and salt‑of‑the‑earth people.
Where Does the Rust Leave Us?
If everything is rusting, our cities, our bodies, our democracies, what is the point?
The answer, I think, is to do what people have always done: make something of the time we get. Build less, tend more. Pay attention to what is already here. We do not get to keep the world. But we do get to shape it while we are here. If nothing lasts forever, then everything matters now. Every conversation, every act of care, every small decision not to walk away. A mended fence, a cleaned window, a remembered story, they are all resistance against forgetting.
In my slow reading of a favourite collection, the Archaeological Study Bible (NIV, 2011), I came across these words:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”
— Matthew 6:19
Those words sit quietly alongside these thoughts, a reminder that what we hold too tightly will always slip away, but what we tend in love and memory may endure far beyond us.
Rust isn’t ugly. There is a kind of beauty about it, a softness that only appears after years of hard weather and human absence. Walk down a Shutter Dori on the Pacific coast here in Chiba, the kind of street where every shopfront is sealed behind a corrugated shutter, and you see it. The steel is flaking, the paint has gone, but the surfaces have bloomed into streaks of orange and brown, accidental abstract paintings made by salt air and time.
Out here in the countryside, an old train carriage sits in a field of weeds, its panels split and stained. On paper it is a ruin, but stand there in the late afternoon light and you see something else: the colour of rust glowing like lacquer, the quiet dignity of a machine allowed to age. Rust takes away, yes, but it also gives, texture, depth, a reminder that even endings can be beautiful.
Inheritance vs. Stewardship
There is this peculiar fantasy we all buy into at some point, usually between mortgage paperwork and an online will template, that we will one day pass things down. That our stuff, our land, our legacy, will mean something because we managed to hoard it for so long.
But here is the twist: almost nobody actually owns anything. We are just borrowing it until we die, or until the rust eats through the floorboards. Try telling that to a man showing off a meticulously cased coin collection in his narrow upstairs shop in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō, the kind of place where rust is the enemy and provenance is everything, and it will not go down well.
But stewardship? That is different. Stewardship says: I do not own this, but I will look after it while it is mine. It is less glamorous. It does not make for a brag-worthy inheritance party or a third vacation home. But it is how things last longer than they should. It is what separates the rusted ruins from the lived-in relics.
Stewardship is repainting the old family gate not because it will sell better, but because it squeaks when your grandmother walks past it and she complains about it each time she does.
It is teaching your child how to fix something instead of replacing it. It is not legacy in the grand, marble plaque sense. It is quieter. More useful. Less tax-deductible. And it asks harder questions: Do we care for what we cannot keep? Can we pass on more than property, like values, attention, patience, or at the very least, a working kettle?
The modern world is addicted to inheritance. But maybe it is stewardship that holds us together. Especially when rust is always watching.
Rust and Time: Where Endings Are Beginnings
So maybe the rust is not the enemy. Maybe it is the reminder. That everything is borrowed. That nothing works forever. That beauty fades and wood splinters and metal oxidises and yes, even vending machines grow old. But also, that while we are here, we can tend to the rusting things. Not to stop the decay, but to show we noticed. That we cared. That even as it all corrodes, we still found time to live.
And perhaps it is in the smallest acts that we keep that care alive. I think of the time it takes to handwrite a letter with my favourite Venetian Bortoletti glass pen, dipping the nib into an ink pot encased in ancient white bronze, waiting as the words dry, then melting a stick of wax and pressing down my seal until it cools. It is a small ritual, imperfect and deliberate, and somehow it feels like tending something beyond the page. These are not grand gestures. They are quiet resistances, reminders that even in a world that rusts, there are beginnings to be found in how we choose to spend our time.
To Everything There Is a Season
We do not need to panic. Decay is not a cliff edge; it is a slow slope. Rust works patiently, and most of what surrounds us does not collapse overnight. That realisation changes how we might choose to live.
It is not only a way of thinking, it is something we can practice. A different rhythm, even in a world that rewards urgency. Some reclaim it in small, deliberate ways: sitting with a printed newspaper at the weekend instead of another flick-scroll through smartphone notifications, turning the pages of a book rather than clicking between tabs on a browser window, taking time to write letters instead of firing off another disposable message.
A letter written by hand carries a deeper thought than any email, because we must pause to imagine the person half a world away who will hold it between their fingers.
On a sloping writing board, a simple slice of wood, aged and darkened by hand, resting on an old leaf-top desk, writing becomes a ritual. A vintage letter rack holds the paper. The twisted nib of a glass pen dips into ink, and each line takes time. Even errors remain, because they belong. It is a kind of wabi-sabi in practice, the Japanese acceptance that nothing needs to be perfect, because everything is moving, slowly, toward imperfection anyway.
“Perhaps this is what living alongside rust can teach: that slowness is not indulgence but care.”
And it raises another question: why do we, as humans, seem to love the old? Why are we still moved by the crackle of a record needle biting the groove of a spinning vinyl disc, the memory of that faded yellow Chrysler Valiant we once rode in as children, or the feel of an old push bike beneath our feet on the pedals? It’s not just nostalgia. It’s the recognition that age carries a texture newness never can.
Rust reminds us that beauty lives not only in what is preserved, but also in what has weathered.
A world that is rusting, slowly and beautifully, invites us to slow down too — to notice, to care, and to live with a gentler sense of passing time.
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Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.
Great article really enjoyed it