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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It looks from the outside that the downside is "small" living spaces. They look small by UK standards so I imagine that to an American it's like living in a closet.

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It's a lifestyle difference. Americans enjoy the convenience of a home gym and paddling pool/real pool (if they can afford it). Japanese might walk to their gym or even prefer the onsen to the shower they have at home. Americans invite guests round, Japanese use cafés and love hotels. Americans stack consoles and gaming PCs, Japanese can also visit arcades. There's an equivalent for most activities, and it has lower CapEx and more variety. Maybe if your hobby is woodworking or car repair, Japan can't serve you for lack of space.

Here in the UK, it really feels like every business is taking my money and spitting me out as fast as possible (except pubs, which... are good if you want to get drunk I guess...). Vs in Japan where services felt cheap, trustworthy, and welcoming (such as clean toilets).

Are you really stating the home gyms and pools are common in the Americans that do buy homes? Huh?

It depends heavily on region, but in the suburbs most Americans have room for something that wouldn't be easily affordable in an urban Japanese home (or urban anywhere home, i suppose). Maybe a lawn or backyard, maybe a pool, maybe a garage that can fit more than one car, maybe a driveway that can fit your car while your garage is used for something else, a house big enough to have a room that you don't use every day, and so on

I personally would vastly prefer a walkable, affordable, safe, dense urban region over a lawn, a 2 car garage, and a backyard. But not everyone would agree with me, particularly for some who would say that dense and walkable is a negative rather than a positive.

They are though. This varies regionally, but they're both multimillion dollar industries that push very hard to make their goods affordable to increase their available customer base.

I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood, and every other house has a bench and some weights. Many of the families saved up for a treadmill or elliptical, and woe betide the child who thought they could use it. Someone on every block(usually more wealthy than the area average) had an above ground pool, and the neighborhood kids would go over and hang out there all summer.

Its not super crazy. When you consider the number of homes that have home gyms, or pools, or basketball hoops, trampolines, or swing sets etc. that people have, its a large number of homes. And even for those who don't, most houses in America are built such that one could buy one if they want.

I grew up in suburban Indiana, and when I went home to visit my parents, I counted it up and literally over 1/3rd of the houses I could see from their front porch had a basketball hoop in the driveway.

Desktop computers with CRT were far less popular in Japan than anywhere else, and compacity is part of the story for the TV/gaming console/computer hybrids that found more traction there than elsewhere. Perfectly usable furniture that lost its purpose are left on the curb for pickup - no space at home to store anything not in production ! The never-used formal dining room found in US homes would look bonkers to a visiting Japanese.

I remember people making fun of the Xbox for being too huge and “American”!

> The never-used formal dining room found in US homes would look bonkers to a visiting Japanese.

there’s always the never-used huge tatami room at grandpa’s house in the countryside

>never-used formal dining room

To be fair, I'm not sure how common this is with new/remodeled construction in the US. Entertainment pattens have changed for the most part and layouts tend to be a lot more open. In particular, you don't see the hard demarkation between dining area and kitchen area which dates to when the "help" worked in the kitchen and served in the dining room.

It depends where you’re coming from and where in Japan you choose to live. I moved from a small city with a high cost of living in the US to a small city with a low cost of living in Japan. My home in Japan is twice as big and a quarter of the cost of my former home in the US.

It can be very cheap if you're prepared to put the work in. There's a Youtube series about a guy who is doing up a large (even in UK/US terms) abandoned house which he bought for (IIRC) $40K: https://www.youtube.com/c/TokyoLlama/videos

Or even if you don’t want to put in any work, it can still be quite affordable.

Here’s a 10 year old, 18,000 sq ft house in Ibaraki prefecture (same prefecture as Tokyo Llama’s house) for about $220k USD. It’s not large by US standards, but definitely sufficient for a family of 4 IMO. And with interest rates in Japan being about 1%, the monthly mortgage payment would be about $625.

https://www.athome.co.jp/kodate/1039825842/

This location looks pretty rural, but similar homes can be found all over Japan.

Sort of, but the reality is that when everything is structured the way it is in Japan, you don't really feel like you need much space in your apartment. That said, I lived there when I was single, and it would be very different living there with my young family. But I knew young family with houses when I was there and it seemed comfortable. I was also in Hokkaido (mostly Sapporo), which is not quite as dense as the Tokyo area (though still very dense compared to most of the US).

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