Every housing topic on HN ends with the guy saying “… but Japan!”. Funny thing is that guy never lives in Japan.
The author lived in Japan
Japan has changed in important and visible ways
61–70 of 459 posts
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
2.1 is steady state of just one for one replace those dying with new people. What numbers around 1.0 are are logarithmic decline as the population functionally keeps halving which is also hard to plan an economy around paying for two old people and child on the taxes per single worker.
Then maybe the welfare state is no longer suited to the country population profile, and each person show be saving for their own retirement and children?
a very good plan right up until you fall off a ladder
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people Sorry, I need to disagree with you. The process is fairly straightforward and formal. You need to fit very few and fair formal criteria, but if you do, then there is nothing special about the process. For a sincere applicant, there should be severe reasons why citizenship is not granted. There are statistics by nationality. I thin…
https://www.turning-japanese.info/2021/06/naturalization-sto... Excerpt: [...] the seven requirements [...] . 1) Have continuously lived in Japan for 5 years or more? 2) Be 20 years of age or above, and be a legal adult in my home country? 3) Be of upright conduct? [///] 4) Have a way of supporting myself and my family? 5) Be willing to give up my other nationality/ies upon acquisition of Japanese nationality? 6) Hav…
Darn, they’ve seen through my plans, and now nr 6 won’t allow me to gain citizenship!
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#64Wingfield-Hayes is also right to decry the low-productivity menial jobs that Japan has in abundance. Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan
I’ve always felt this was a strength of Japan since it ensures employment of even unskilled workers. I remember one time walking near my hotel along a sidewalk in a construction zone, in the USA there'd be a “caution” sign (probably facing the wrong way), but in japan there were live workers at each side of the zone , and they called out a warning to pedestrians to be careful and when a construction truck needed to cross the sidewalk, the workers would physically block the sidewalk to keep pedestrians clear.
I’ve noticed around here that more road construction projects have replaced human flaggers with automated traffic lights… almost certainly better for efficiency and productivity, but probably not better for the people that would have done that job otherwise.
And maybe this leads to lower salaries in Japan, but that doesn’t necessarily mean low quality of life, I know someone in Japan that’s working as a suit salesman (retail sales, not administrative back office) and he can afford to support a family (stay at home wife plus 3 year old child) and a 2 bedroom apartment. I think that’d be much harder for an American worker selling suits at The Men’s Wearhouse
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only dual nationals I know with Japanese citizenship are operating under the argument that they were born with both citizenships and the non Japanese one is legally impossible to remove by coercion. So they claim that the Japanese state is doing the coercion and don't mention it to the authorities. This would be an interesting case in international in law, but I hope it's never a problem for them.
Many countries, like mine, France, also allow to reclaim a nationality you abandoned for social reasons (marriage being the one it aims at explicitely). So you can give up your French one, take the Japanese one, then go back to France without telling Japan and ask for the French one back, it's a few forms away.
IANAL, but from my understanding of Japanese law, technically you renounce your Japanese citizenship when you acquire a foreign citizenship. So, even though Japanese authorities might not know it yet (or ever), you lose the Japanese citizenship at the very time you recover your French one.
My understanding (again, not a lawyer) it that this could have legal implications if you do something of your Japanese citizenship after reclaiming a foreign citizenship. Although apart from running and winning an election, or maybe holding a job restricted to Japanese citizens, I'm not quite sure exactly how you could get in trouble.
The loophole dual citizens (since birth) use is actually just that: since they never acquired a foreign citizenship (they are born with it), they never lost the Japanese one... so all Japan can do is order them to make unspecified efforts to renounce their foreign citizenship. Looking it up on the internet and concluding it's complicated seems to count as "efforts".
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common misconception. The reason you don't hear more about English-speaking westerners gaining Japanese citizenship is because they don't recognize dual citizenship. Renouncing your non-Japanese citizenships is a prerequisite to gaining Japanese citizenship, which is understandably too big a hurdle for many.
Technically, it's not a prerequisite, but a requirement. You can't renounce your old citizenship before gaining new citizenship. Japan requires you to renounce within a certain time after gaining Japanese citizenship, with a few exceptions (like Iran where you can't really renounce).
> You can't renounce your old citizenship before gaining new citizenship.
Often you can and in those cases Japan generally requires you to. However it would depend on the citizenship in question.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#67I recently spent 3 months in Tokyo and I have say, that the quality of life, service, food, consumer products, safety, air/noise pollution, are the best I've seen anywhere. It's especially pleasing given that the prices are very low in comparison to other world-class cities. I did, however, witness prices rising during the time I was there. It's hard to see how Tokyo might have been stagnating given the quality of li…
In the 90s, Taiwan was much poorer than Japan, but its per capita GDP is now at parity with Japan and likely passed it last quarter.
Occasionally, I’ll visit an area I knew from 15 years ago and it will feel like a completely different city. In particular, it’s shocking how much better the infrastructure and transportation has gotten. The cities have a lot more green areas interspersed into them also.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#68I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…
As far as I know, naturalization only involves a basic language test at around the level of N3; which should be very easy if you picked up any Japanese at all during the years spent living in the country. The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent…
Dual citizenship is kind of gray area in Japan. As long as you don't talk about it, nobody really cares. (And this attitude kind of sums japan as a whole)
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#69> But in reality, depreciating real estate is one of Japan’s biggest strengths. Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway. It makes me wonder…
The property values may go to zero, but the land values only appreciate.
As land values increase and dominate the equation the house value might as well be zero anyway as it approaches irrelevancy.
(As an aside I've heard mixed things on this, with some saying that this notion of houses depreciating severely is no longer the case...)
I'd really really love someone with real, real deep knowledge of the Japanese housing market (eg. a banker, real estate agent or mortgage broker) to weigh in and go through everything in detail because it feels like all we usually get are breezy generalizations with such low detail that I only have more questions after reading.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know some people with citizenship. All it requires is fluent Japanese. They came from a d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶e̶d̶ developing country so getting citizenship was an almost no brainer for them. There's no real complicated test, it' just that the whole process is done in Japanese so you'll have to fill out paperwork and do interviews in Japanese. >Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while,…
Well, it kinda sucked when they wouldn’t let the permanent residents into the country during the first year of COVID, so you were essentially unable to visit family (or worse, unable to return to your life, home and work after such a visit).
At least they let their citizens in, unlike Australia!