HIROSAKI, Japan—Many areas of Japan are running so short of working-age people that local-government administrators are helping out on farms. On a recent weekend, Yoshiaki Kato joined a few elderly women in harvesting apples at an orchard in Hirosaki, a city in the country’s north. Mr. Kato also occasionally carried baskets of the fruit and loaded them onto a cart before driving them away to be sorted by size and quality.

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