JAPAN IS EMPTY

Japan: our birth rates plummeted US Liberals: …..Hold my IPA

This is astonishing. 30+ years ago, Japan was so crowded and land at such a premium that it was literally cheaper to fly to the US to play a round of golf than play golf in Japan

I heard that buying is the easy part supposedly and unless you're rich, the renovations is where you're gonna spend a lot depending on how old the house is

I went to Japan few months back, i can count the number of children i saw in the streets with one hand on my one week stay there. My Japanese friend told me the birth rate is so low in Japan that over a hundred day care centers were closed last year alone. That was insane to hear.

Been there and done that. It was a company trip and all my Japanese colleagues wanted to bounce their English off me. After our meetings, they dragged me to a half a dozen Isekai and bars in the Golden Gai, in Kabukicho. Fell in love with Tokyo that night. The Japanese people respect people that honor their culture and at least try to learn their customs and language.

lot of these homes need extensive rennovations and repairs also, and its hard to find contractors in the rural areas

Every country that allows boys and girls to be taught in the same classroom has a declining birthrate. Men and women spent their whole lives learning to COMPETE with each other instead of COMPLIMENTING.

I like Tim’s tongue in cheek explanation of how to take over Japan. A thinly disguised description of what’s happening in UK and Europe.

Yeah, sure, but here's the thing about abandoned houses in Japan (akiyas): ・ The price might only be a few thousand dollars, but that's just the price to buy it from the current owner. Once it changes ownership, the government will very likely require you to do structural renovations to the building to make it up to code with modern earthquake resistance. This will costs tens of thousands of additional dollars. And then there's taxes. You might see some home for sale for $10,000, but once you're done with fees and government-mandated renovation it's more like $80,000. ・ Or, in many cases, renovations are so expensive that it's cheaper to literally demolish the house and just build a new one on the same spot. So you spend $10,000 on the plot of land and the house, $30,000 to demolish it, and $150,000+ to build a new one. Now all of a sudden that "ten thousand dollar house" became $190,000. ・ *You need a visa to live in Japan.* This is the hard part. You *cannot* "just go to Japan" and retire. *You need a visa.* You either need to be full-time employed by a Japanese employer, and be working there, in Japanese work culture, or you need a Japanese citizen spouse. *And no, you can't do a remote job for an American company.* I mean technically you can, there's the new "digital nomad" visa, but that's only for 6 months and non-renewable. Once those 6 months are done, boom, you gotta leave. So you're not buying a house if you want to be a digital nomad in Japan. ・ These houses are unoccupied because the towns they live in usually have near zero job opportunities outside of physical labor (farmhand or fisherman), and you need to have near native Japanese language abilities to even have a chance at doing that. So again, you need a visa, you need a job for that visa, and you're not going to get a job that's within commuting distance from those hosues.

The problem with living in Midtown, Memphis is you gotta go through the hood to get there. MEM is a &hithole. I lived there 10+ years.