Houses in Japan are going for as little as $500
travelpirates.com
travelpirates.com
Typically these will require the use of licensed craftsmen who can restore the building if they are the older style, and almost all will require 5-10 year occupation agreements and/or agreements to productively farm the land it comes with.
Further, there are strict restrictions on ownership by foreigners, and most of the akiya bank properties aren't eligible last I looked. Those that are will have little to no internet, you will be an hour or more away from a decent sized city, and you'd better be fluent in Japanese because noone in these communities will be fluent in anything else. Even signage in many of these places is lacking the English foreigners that have traveled there will be used to.
For reference I've lived in Japan, have a Japanese spouse, and my children are dual citizens. We have investigated this going on 15 years now and it's just not something you'd want to take on, if you were able to, most of the time.
Source: unfortunately I can relate...
I can (almost) understand that you don't want foreigners in the apartment that you own, but in this case they don't even want to receive money -- the same amount -- from foreign buyers, and in this case it's clearly because they want to protect their village from "being invaded". Yes pretty ridiculous, but unfortunately very common.
Then not knowing procedures or having a Hanko is extremely detrimental to doing any paperwork in Japan.
Internet is not an issue, NTT will give you internet within 3 months, and there is always unlimited 4g/5g subscriptions.
Being in the Inaka is an experience itself, and you need to know the language. I agree.
I was not aware of NTT getting you internet; thanks for that info!
I seem to recall the wireless unlimited plans being rather expensive, but it's been a while.
Yes, Japanese government is it's own special issue. Hanko being an always fun issue for people!
I absolutely LOVE being in the Inaka. When my in-laws shut down their business they moved a little ways out, and we regularly visit their family friends in the mountains at their Onsen, which is a solid 40 minutes from anyone else at all.
It is much easier if it has a pre-existing phone line active, or sometime per-existing. Considering these properties were most likely occupied during the 1970's-1990's, a phone line most likely is present so it is on the "books" as serviceable.
If not, you get the phone line service first if you must.
Alternatively you can also look in TOWNPAGE for the address and see if it shows up.
(I would note that white people aren't likely to be hardest-hit by these "restrictions." Consider which ethnic groups an elderly Japanese person would remember directly fighting against in a previous war. Those same elderly Japanese people now form the inaka's governments, so AFAICT those same ethnic groups are most resisted.)
You're right, in that the people holding grudges today aren't likely to have directly experienced these events, but more likely are those who saw their fathers/brothers shipped to the front and never return, and so who hold a vague-but-strong grudge against whatever nebulous enemy the Japanese propaganda machine represented as being on the other side of those particular battles.
(Sadly, this can be a stronger foundation for xenophobia than actually having fought an enemy corps-a-corps, as these folks have never actually been exposed to the experience of seeing enemy soldiers hurting/dying, grieving, wishing they weren't at the front, and just generally being human.)
You were saying? 2+ million 90 year olds in Japan. Maybe not old enough to have fought in the war, but definitely old enough to remember the bombings, for example.
Not impossible, but quite unlikely.
Do you have a reference for this?
In the early 2000s I spent a cumulative ten months out so bicycling along Japan, attending graduate school, and being well-cared-for by strangers (I’m a male from the US with Western European ancestors). Several hosts who had ancestors from the mainland (Korea, China) said life in Japan was the more difficult for it.
They don't speak to the particular law, but they are speaking of the patrilinear transmission of Japanese-ness. I'll keep digging - my source was a Zainichi family in Japan in 2004.
Absolutely no requirements besides an email, and money.
(I don't understand why their isn't more of an uproar, especially when the stock is so low to begin with, and housing is our biggest expense.)
When in doubt, think money.
It's always money.
Two economists are walking down the street. One spots a $20 bill on the sidewalk. He bends to pick it up, but his companion stops him. "If there really were free money in the street," the companion says, "then somebody else would've picked it up before now."
Because:
- In somewhat professional bussiness areas there is in general no free mony, but not because no one picked it up but because no one would place the money down/accidentally let it fall down without noticing.
- But in specific contexts there is "free money" it's just that "in general" this context doesn't apply to you, e.g. there if you are Japanese person who wants to spend the next decade farming in the country side this might be a awesome deal for you.
- But the "mony on the ground" analogy represents a "general but rare" situation, not a "very specific context", but you can find money on the ground and it's always worth picking it up, BUT you should check if there is a string attached to it (in that case literally ;=)).
So for me the joke sounds like what someone would try to argue in self defense when doing a bad deal to reason that all is fine because they are not "blind sighted economists".
In my environment (or more precise that of my dad) I have seen people going in that direction of "picking up free money" and making exactly this kind of jokes only to lose all the money they had maneuvering themself into a situation of basically falling into poverty not long before they normally could have gone into a nice reasonable wealthy retirement...
Me not liking the joke doesn't necessary mean it's not funny :=/ Like a joke which makes you both laugh and feel bad at the same time...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-...
Substitute $20 bills on the ground with $500 house in Japan and it’s obvious why this joke analogy doesn’t apply.
The first economist picks up the bill anyway. It was a fake, and on the other side there's an ad for a strip club.
Visit the strip club? (Y/N): _(I'm not saying anything racist. I just know a few individuals whom shop at Safeway whom live in million plus homes that don't speak English. I feel we need more that a occupancy requirement. We need some hard requirements, a long with not allowing hedge funds to buy homes. This goes for American corporations too.)
What are your suggestions?
Either way, real estate should be a free market. In the same vein you can buy any real estate you like, a seller should be able to sell to any entity that's giving him the better price.
My parents used to pay $1000 a month in rent for a property that I know the taxes on amounted to maybe $3000 a year, and the landlord rarely did anything else than pay that tax. Sent a bargain basement repair guy out a few times to fix the heater maybe. That's 300% profit for nothing, pure rent seeking behavior. That's not good for society.
More needs to be done to encourage individual home ownership and discourage people having no choice but to send a third to half of their income into a black hole every month.
The landlord suddenly woke up with a house in his name? He might be in the red as house prices / interest rates varies from person to person. No one knows.
> That's not good for society.
Let's create laws to transfer wealth from certain individuals to other individuals that fits our profile. That's good for "society".
Well, have you heard of that old fashioned thing called feudalism? You know, with a certain land owning class?
Now, the US didn't have feudalism, but let's say that due to family, someone in your distant past managed to get lucky and buy a ton of very valuable land. Or buy very cheap properties. At this point, your family is practically a lighter version of landed gentry.
You'd be making each year a ton more than the property cost to build 60-80-whatever years ago, property taxes generally aren't that high, if the location is good people will live there even if the living conditions are crap (for example from lack of maintenance), etc.
> Let's create laws to transfer wealth from certain individuals to other individuals that fits our profile. That's good for "society".
Ummm... that's how taxes work. We generally transfer wealth from "certain individuals" (generally the well off, that can afford to have some of their wealth transferred), to "other individuals that fit our profile" (generally poor people, those without housing, etc.).
And yeah, in case that was not a rhetorical comment, yes, it's good for society. It's literally how modern societies are built.
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
138 years and counting.
If you consider the average lifespan during this period as being 60 years, it's more 2-3 generations.
By this logic, everything is experimental. Heck, we've had PCs for just 40 years, they're all just a big experiment, they might fail us soon.
For example, Germany is conducting an import deficit policy, meaning it is exporting more to Greece than it is importing from Greece leading to money flowing out of Greece. The capitalist answer is that the entire Greek population should move to Germany because that is where the jobs are. It's not just Greece, it also applies to every country that is poorer than Greece. We then get to enjoy the benefit of blaming the other nation for committing band aid policies like social welfare. Haha, they are so stupid, right?
I can list more second or third order effects of a broken monetary system but you will probably think that the demise will stem from the symptoms.
No, the capitalist answer would be to lower wages and costs by devaluing the currency and thus bringing in investment and jobs but that is impossible because Greece joined the EU and Euro. Greece's elite benefits from the EU slush fund and their money's value protected by the Euro but it's not so good for the country as a whole.
He can keep the building and usage rights to the land, but he should never own the land.
At least this watered down version of a land value tax will hit large corporations. Property taxes apply to corporations and individuals equally, but there are more home owners so they will vote for a tax policy that benefits corporations.
2. I would ban US corporations from buying homes as assets yesterday.
3. I would even put a limit on how many homes an individual could buy. Five sounds reasonable?
In this case the "spousal perspective" is that we aren't subject to many of these barriers and we STILL aren't purchasing one due to the remaining barriers and issues.
That's not true for all but the vast majority. I don't mean any of that as a slight - my Japanese is terrible, you wouldn't find me on whatever Japan's version of HN is. (That the level is so low is perhaps a valid criticism of the education system or society in general but certainly not valid against any individual).
Source: I'm a partner of an East Asian folkperson, living in Japan, giving a spousal perspective whilst reading a site in my native language. I save struggling with a foreign language for study and finding the login button on Japanese websites (harder than it should be[1]), I can understand why a Japanese engineer would be doing similar.
Honestly, life in Japan is much more relaxed for me. I’m not as competitive, not as wrapped up in being successful. That’s a very individual thing, but that disconnect was my favorite thing. I know I was an outsider and I was fine with that.
My wife and I are naturalized US citizens. My country of origin allows me to retain dual citizenship, as does the US, but my wife was obliged to renounce her Japanese citizenship when she became a US citizen. It's annoying and unfortunate that she had to do so.
This leads to interesting issues. One such individual was in training with me but had to sit and wait 6 months until he turned 20 to renounce his Japanese citizenship so that he could obtain a clearance. This was 20 years ago, so things may have changed.
* Akiya houses come with an agreement to reside. Not just be a summer home. Their goal is to repopulate the countryside.
* You have to cultivate any farmland that comes with the deed. You cannot sell it without special permission. There is a whole lot of paperwork to deal with such situations.
* Most old Akiya will have strong regulation not to change the frontage. It isn't permitted. Architecturally these have to be consistent. Building permits are very stringent.
* Land tax is levied the day from purchase - not from the day of moving in.
* Residents have to contribute to local development funds which take care of Matsuris etc. You like it or not, local government will knock on your door with a bill.
* Connectivity is poor. Cell reception outside NTT can be spotty. Internet is even harder.
* Language proficiency is a must. No one speaks English. Not even the local government officials.
* House will need a significant amount of renovation. With the stringent restrictions - anywhere between 100 & 200 grand (depending on the disrepair)
I eventually vetoed my SO's plan. For a little more (and lesser space obviously), we can live in Tokyo suburbs.
¥200,000 is ~$2000. If it was that low, I will drop that money in without missing a beat.
"trying to have your cake and eat it too".
Nothing more than stubborn/incompetent administration of a dying village refusing to let go of the ways of thinking and lifestyle that existed 50 years ago.
That's not to say the lifestyle is bad or obsolete. It may exist again 50, or 100, or 1000 years in the future. But it doesn't exist now, and if you want to actually attract people there and not do pointless virtue signaling, you have to change these conditions. Most of them are terrible disincentives.
The Japanese society functions with a purpose of blending in, not standing out. If you play strictly by their rules, perhaps life is easy. Else you are always the outsider gaikokujin, who is looked at suspiciously very instinctively.
The population will continue to age and shrink, so cultural norms will have to make way for that to ever change.
And perhaps life really is easy. But as someone mentioned in the thread, spending $100-200k USD to renovate a property AND to basically change your career to a farmer is completely out of the question for 99.9% of the population.
At beast you would get some incredibly wealthy hobbyists who adore Japanese cultural heritage, but judging their success realistically, it doesn't look like there's many takers, so my point still stands.
Maybe the downvoters should put their money where their mouth is and go spend a few million on restoration of these properties.
Maybe it's harder for them because they look Japanese and don't get the leeway given to foreigners.
I wonder what the true market price of these places would be, without all these restrictions.
Think of zairyu (resident permit) as SSN with all personal details locked in.
Manor house model.
If you want an old time feel, allow for full fudel style living. This would mean.
* Allow frontpage / living space be expanded keeping same style - so main home could add some outbuildings.
* Allow owner to hire out labor for the farming using outbuildings.
* Allow owner to use this as a summar house as long as at least 4 other people lived on property full time (farming / caretakers etc)
* Explicitly allow (screened) sat dishes / 4G LTE extenders for internet access if needed or get fiber to property.
Modern digital nomad modal.
* Go big on connectivity. Allow easy renovations behind existing look (ie, upgrade to modern comfort).
* Make it VERY easy to live in these including quick visas etc for folks with means and only a 1 year residence requirement etc.
* Allow digital nomads to easily bring partners / kids etc.
Commercial development model.
* Remove building / zoning restrictions. Ie, ugly modern houses OK. Tear down and replace OK. Etc. Let creativity flourish (including some horrible / weird / crazy houses or tiny shacks etc).
There is a reason folks are moving out of these areas - the tradeoffs are not worth it (currently). Maybe tweak those tradeoffs?
Japan is an INCREDIBLY safe country.
Having a charming weekend getaway is nice in rural Japan. Relocation & living full time with such restrictions in place? No thank you.
That's a big 'if' buddy. I am sure if free market capitalism worked its way, I would also have much more flexibility, which I may be possibly willing to put my dime in.
Were you fluent in Japanese when you moved there?
Also, were these hippies young Japanese people, or young people from all over the world, or were they older Japanese/gaijin hippies?
What they need is immigration. Badly. Those are the most willing people to come and economically rural areas are cheaper and thus more affordable for immigrants.
But the population that remains in rural areas is inflexible and strongly tied to ethnic identities.
EDIT: spelling
I own a home in a large Japanese city and we have to pay that to our neighborhood association. It’s not that much and the festival is good fun
He starts from how they bought a house, to the state it was in when they started (spoilers, no one had ever emptied the fridge when the last occupant died), to the work done by a local carpenter and the work he did himself.
My point was that "building more houses" is not cure for homelessness.
Because people don't want to live where abandoned homes are - because there are no jobs, no amenities and probably none of family members or friends.
Getting to hospital nowadays in the city might be hard, can't imagine how hard could it be if you are in some far away village.
I was thinking about living in some remote area if I just could get 3G internet or starlink but then as I got middle age having pharmacy or a doctor close by gets more priority than getting cheap land/getting away from people.
Building more flats in area where everyone wants to live leads to bad outcomes as well - just google Hong Kong flats. I would definitely would not like to live there as it looks like not much better than just being homeless.
It all is really complex topic.
I know this happens in many places, but it's insane to mandate this, but expect 100% of funding to come from the property owner.
Maintaining a consistent / historical style is a benefit to the community, and so the community should help pay for its own good.
There are many of these unfunded mandates all around. Usually there is a small fund but it runs out instantly.
The primary impediment to residential renovation is typically cash on hand to initiate the project.
Which, if true, seems like something like providing a loan facility, borrowed against the future tax credit, maybe with the tax credit packaged for resale on the open market to offset the cost?
Presumably nobody (the homeowner, the neighborhood, the city) wants a house that's falling apart to stay that way.
You don't have to imagine it, similar rules exist here in America too. They're called "historical districts" here; the only difference is usually it's done for the benefit of the rich owners to protect their generational wealth, rather than at the cost of poorer owners who cannot afford the high cost of historically accurate maintenance.
Germany, for what it's worth, has a lot of the same laws protecting old buildings, where it is very hard to impossible to legally modify the front.
They are literally a bunch of assholes that bunch together and patrol the streets to annoy people because they believe bullying others will keep their own property values high.
It's sad the the law even allows this.
They should not be able to have say over what happens on non-common property, including peoples' houses and yards, and financials around maintainence of that private road should be disclosed to all people who live on it.
Sure, but they pose similarly strict laws on your buildings - that's what I was going at.
Most jobs are in the city, as are schools and interesting places. Village life isn't for everyone.
I'm considering those all the time when I drive by them, but the price likely isn't low enough to get me to live there, away from everything I enjoy.
Starlink should help in this regard. You don't really have good alternatives to landline broadband today in the US generally.
Setting up a wireless ISP (posted quite often on HN) might be another solution. But, if it works for you, it's probably not worth the investment.
If I were going to be living there full-time, better Internet is something I would probably have to look into. My brother did look into options (as have others along the same road) and he concluded that a hot-spot with limited data now with hopefully Starlink in the future made the most sense.
For occasional use, limited Internet is fine. I don't depend on streaming for myself and I don't expect to work from there to any major degree. (And can always go into the town library or wherever.)
Where are you now?
Everyone has their anecdotes. The data is clear Americans pay orders of magnitude more worse care and outcomes than other OECD countries.
My worst experience with US healthcare has been with billing of anesthesiologists.
They are out of network usually, you can't find out ahead of time, and they charge a thousand dollars per hour
If the response is, “Get a better insurance company.” I agree! Hence seeking EU citizenship.
To your point, one should not have to optimize to be judgment proof in order to exist in their country, and that’s why (at least for myself) I’m optimizing to get out. There are so many other welcoming countries to expats, there’s no reason to stay if you have means and a network of colleagues that can ensure you can work remotely in perpetuity.
One of the issue is that a most of the healthcare issues that young, healthy people run into are surprisingly cheap. But the big costs come from chronic and elderly care. Who are the people who can't afford it. So it always seems like young, healthy people can get a better deal, but then who will pay for them when they're old?
You didn't tell us where in the EU, so why does it suddenly matter where in the US?
Because of the laws surrounding ER care [0] and the fact that most hospitals with ERs are Trauma I & last resort, almost all operate in triage all the time.
The end result is that if you're not critical, you get care once they have enough time. And they never have enough time. Because they never have enough people.
Recommendations: only consider ERs in wealthy suburbs (where they'll be less overloaded with last-resort patients), go to an urgent care center (and expect to be screwed on price), or a walk-in doctor's office (best option).
[0] EMTALA, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_...
Welcome to what thinks they are a developed country.
On my own accord I went to a cardiologist who immediately did an echo and found a very serious problem.
Maybe places in the EU don't have great healthcare, but that's not much different than the US except that in the US you can still go bankrupt paying for bad healthcare, even if you have insurance.
In rural Italy ? You are deluding yourself ... Expect to go private for a lot of stuff that isn't life threatening (source: we have a growing medical tourism sector in Croatia that caters in large part to Italy, especially for dental and physical rehab)
But even with the modest drops, rental prices in such cities are still waaaaaay above anywhere else, and the prices are already on the rise again.
Apart from that I have no clue what you're referring to.
Hey, did you know houses in the US are going for as little as $1? That's an even better deal than $500!
Japan is trying to lure people into rural areas by selling $500 homes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654817 - June 2021 (3 comments)
Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18548742 - Nov 2018 (381 comments)
Marginally related:
Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734 - Nov 2017 (43 comments)
In the Japanese construction industry, Keynes' general theory of paying people to dig holes is understood literally.
https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-ar...
So instead, they negotiate with the property owner to have them donate the property in return for forgiveness of the back taxes. This happened with a number of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, when I lived there. After the city took possession of the property, they would then setup a neighborhood group to give or sell the properties to people or businesses that they thought would help "gentrify" the neighborhood. The people requesting properties would fill out an application detailing how they would use the property, and the neighborhood council would select "deserving" applications (I put that in scare quotes because the process would sometimes be corrupted by people favoring friends.) I knew someone on one of these councils, and considered applying for a home, but decided I wasn't that committed to living there, and a year later moved west.
https://hbr.org/1990/05/power-from-the-ground-up-japans-land...
To be honest 80s Japan doesn't seem too far off from current California tax law so maybe I'll be able to afford a house here in 30 years
https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/the-1-pound-houses-br...
But then you realize that you have to renovate them according to the local architecture regulations, often with artisanal materials (the roof for instance).
I know a couple friends from Germany who inherited a castle and did not refuse the inheritage when they could . They were desperate when they realized how expensive this is.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If there are no strings attached, which I doubt (in Italy it's the mafia and lack of infrastructure), that'd be a chance to pick up cheap urban land.
Same deal as Japan; you have to pay to renovate them and live in the middle of nowhere.
You're only able to really rent other places if you have a long-term visa, because the standard lease term-length in Japan is 2 years. If your visa is less than 2 years, you don't qualify.
If you do, then everything is the same as Japanese citizens. Most apartments have a deposit, a key fee (a bribe to the landlord), and a lease renewal fee (a bribe to the agent). Lease period will be 2 years. A lot of companies will pay these bribes for their employees, which I'm sure is one of the reasons they exist (and also one of the reasons gaijin apartments don't charge them).
Good job, Japan.
tldr: if a deal seems to good to be true ...
From a national, demographic, and budget perspective, this has to happen for many countries (quickly, at large scale).
From a local, cultural perspective, I see people being very resistant (relatively speaking wealthy, culturally-ignorant foreigners moving in in large numbers?).
In democracies... that's going to be an interesting mix. Especially when current residents are the primary voters.
I expect we'll see more successful countries form political alliances between immigrants and parties pushing for more skilled worker immigration.