Japan: the harbinger state
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A good example is housing. Japan had a gigantic housing bubble a decade in advance than the USA and Europe. It is also interesting to see that meanwhile declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city, it has made many town houses almost free. I would expect this to be replicated elsewhere.
Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Japan is not the world, but it seems reasonable that can give a heads up for many problems that other places will experience in the future.
I think housing is a bad example to use wrt Japan.
Japan is one of the few markets in the world where, for the most part, only land has value. Buildings LOSE value over time. This is for multiple reasons but mostly due to ever-changing earthquake-related construction regulations such that it's almost always cheaper to rebuild from scratch than keep an edifice and retrofit to regulations.
This is also why Japan has more architects than any other country- if buildings are not kept and are almost always destroyed after a 30 year mortgage, the owner can build whatever they want and not have to be concerned about resale value- so lots of unique residential architecture.
Alastair Townsend first covered this in ArchDaily years ago and it went on to be covered extensively by NPR and other outlets.
https://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-ho...
Here’s an example of a listing of a 39 year old home where renovation is still in progress. They include product links to the new appliances they are installing now, and will update the listing once remodeling is completed. This is super common to see in used homes listings these days.
https://suumo.jp/chukoikkodate/gumma/sc_takasaki/nc_71189001...
I do still see a lot of houses being torn down. But they are more like 50+ years old, and in such a state of disrepair that they are not worth saving.
The neighbours have been unexpectedly wonderful. Very kind. I live there most of the time and wish to contribute. I actually think it's advantageous to be a (European) foreigner. They realise all the little nit-picks that Japanese do to each other in the service of community would be mostly lost on me. YMMV.
Getting a loan is also fairly easy provided you are employed and have permanent residency (or a spouse who is a permanent resident or citizen). Shinsei Bank (recently acquired by SBI) seems to specialize in loaning to foreigners.
Neighbor situation is highly variable. I have some neighbors who I am quite friendly with, and others I literally have never seen. Typically neigbors will at least be polite, but you do hear horror stories of neighbors quarreling about taking out the trash, snow falling from the roof onto the neighbor's property, etc. My next-door neighbors live with their aging parents, and the grandfather (who has dementia) once shouted at someone who was doing work on my house. And people do tend to gossip, but it's mostly harmless.
What determines the design of ones' seal as a foreigner? Just transliteration?
For less formal seals you can pretty much pick whatever you want. For those I use my family name transliterated into katakana.
Loans can also be difficult for foreigners to acquire, so prearrange financing or cash.
Accounting for inflation, or without (even approximately)?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-19/japan-s-i...
That should be the case. As regulations get stiffer and stiffer the amount of area under the "long tail" get smaller. Of course there's always people who want to screech about how more is needed but at some point the tail is so narrow that society just ignores them because the amortized cost per improvement is just so high it's a no-starter.
This is apparently not the case, and for some odd reason (probably government and tax policy) a house absolutely goes to $0 in 25 years and stays there.
A small, new apartment next to the old, big apartment I live in is much more expensive than mine. And mine was considered high end when it was built.
You're claiming that _relative to newer buildings_, yours has lost value.
The parent poster is claiming that _relative to the same building in the past_, prices go down in japan and up elsewhere.
Would the apartment you live in now have cost more or less 5 or 10 years ago? That's really the thing the parent poster is talking about, and other newer constructions are unrelated to that point.
This is not unique to Japan. Buildings depreciate.
You only notice it in Japan because general inflation has been close to 0% and sometimes negative.
Also - people in Japan tend to spend much less money updating their home compared to the rest of "The West". If you're sinking 1% of the value of your home into updates annually - the home isn't going to depreciate as much as if you didn't.
As you might expect given this, the town has steadily lost population.
There is surely intentional government policy behind this, and this would have significant impacts on the broader housing environment.
I recall reading at one point for example that the property transfer tax is lower for empty lots than it is for occupied lots. Another subtle housing policy that incentivizes people to tear down old houses.
Much has been written about Japan's zoning impacting its housing prices and rents, but imo it's as likely that the various tax and housing policy that creates this incentive to tear down homes is as important of a factor in creating a housing market that looks very different from other rich nations.
I think they may have escaped to evergreen technology for consumer electronics, but one might argue America is equally as trapped by historical infrastructure. Japan's infrastructure is interesting as it's clear much of it was built in the 80s and 90s, but it's still serviceable and their big bets on trains turned out to be rather future proof. When walking the streets, especially somewhere like Osaka, you can see much of the signage, bridges, pedestrian crossing buttons are very old indeed. You do often feel like you are in a future-past of some kind.
None of these statements apply universally across both countries mind you, there is good rail in the US and modern infra in Japan as well.
I believe that their mindset and stance towards technology is simply different.
Japan had a history of "gadget technology", which was revolutional in the 90's before the Internet became ubiquious.
I am guessing that they (myself included) were dissapointed in the direction technological advances went. Their vision maybe didn't happen, but that doesn't make it wrong, or that the current technological trends are right.
Nicely put. Perhaps the smartphone era will be seen as a odd blip in a long history of gadgets. Who knows what the future might bring?
Compared to prices there's a much bigger decrease in new construction, which I'd interpret as people increasingly not pursuing houses and instead piling onto the rent market. Urban/suburban/"sprawl" houses were basically a DI(preferably-NK-and-wealthy-parents-chipping-in) and beyond thing before, I'd suspect houses will continue to shrink while drifting even further up the income distribution and everyone else must rent for life - at an average rent/income ratio of around one third which has only ever been going up, and is of course much higher for non-DI households.
Home ownership rate has always been falling and continues to do so (fell below 50 % in 2022). It'll get a lot lower when boomers start leaving their houses (feet first most likely), because baby boomers have far high home ownership rate than following generations. And with recent changes to the way houses are legally valuated and inheritance taxation I'd suspect many kids of baby boomers can't actually afford to inherit their parents houses and will have to sell.
I dunno where this is supposed to converge to. Everyone renting at >50 % of net income (which is already not at all uncommon, especially for singles in cities) from huge housing companies?
in the UK new builds are inflated due to gvt shenanigans
In cities like Munich, where the real estate is extremly valuable, definitely. The increase in inheritance tax you mentioned makes it very unattractive to not just sell the house to the highest bidder immediately, which in most cases will be one of the large housing companies.
For small tenements, it's very challenging to generate enough rental income to offset the inheritance tax in a single lifetime, especially if the new owners want to keep rents low.
That's the case in NL as well; the causes are multi-fold, housing prices have consistently gone up in the past decade, while mortgage interest rates have gone down, meaning it's more attractive and interesting to get a house and mortgage now and fix the interest rate.
But the other issue there is a housing shortage, because population increase is not slowing down.
But the other issue is that houses aren't being built fast enough, for diverse reasons - NIMBY, having to give up farmland or nature for houses, counties that want pretty housing estates instead of functional apartment buildings (because 'ugly' houses attract undesireables), and new nitrogen laws making getting licenses more difficult.
And now there's sudden inflation due to a sudden change in situation (to put it mildly), which triggered the EU to rapidly increase interest rates (I'm no economist, I'm not sure how the two are related), which triggered mortgage rates to increase.
Given people were already borrowing the max amount they could, if the interest rates suddenly go up, a gap appears which caused the reduction in interest in buying a house, lowering demand. The other one is that people stopped looking for houses because their energy bill suddenly tripled or worse.
high quality housing stock at decent prices, compared to the UK / US etc.
The government decided what to build, where to build and for how much.
You are looking at nominal prices. Inflation adjusted real estate prices crashed hard. They literally went down when everything else rose 8%.
Thank you :)
The fax machine in Japan is always treated like it's proof they're stuck in a timewarp, an earlier age, and just haven't moved on.
But I think it makes sense. Japan was introduced to fax technology early on. Japanese is traditionally written vertically. It is written with Chinese characters. In handwritten Japanese, people actually invent/modify characters on the spot. (Much as how Engl. text might be littered with randomly-invented abbr'vns.) They're not going to be able to enter those into a computer easily.
Some Japanese newspapers were using traditional typesetting techniques right into the 21st century because vertical text support was, and largely still is, an afterthought in most publishing software. Software has only recently gotten to the point where it can replace a fax machine and handwriting, for reproducing Japanese texts in the manner the Japanese expect. Besides scanning/taking a photo of a page and emailing it, which isn't enough of an improvement to motivate the change. (Particularly as business faxes just end up digitized and emailed anyway.)
You already see it in some countries that just skipped cable TV, desktop PCs and wired internet, and that went straight to smartphones with mobile internet (or wifi). These are countries where you can do everything with your phone, whereas here some (e.g. government, banking organizations) are still trying to catch up and adjust.
Here’s one that I found in Takasaki with very little effort.
https://suumo.jp/chukoikkodate/gumma/sc_takasaki/nc_70960514...
Most of the houses being torn down are not what I would consider “perfectly serviceable”. There are usually serious issues such that the home isn’t worth saving.
Small towns really do have programs to give away homes if you commit to remodeling them or tear them down. Even in bigger cities it isn't difficult to find abandoned properties.
(I'll also add: people see things like Cheap Houses Japan, and make incorrect assumptions about the state of the resale market. For a large portion of those "cheap" properties, you'd have to put in 2-3x the sales price just to make them livable. In other words, the owners are trying to solve their financial problem by dumping it on someone else who is more willing to deal with it. This could be appealing for someone who wants a vacation home and loves the area, but it's not a healthy housing market.)
But you’re talking more about markets where there is very little demand (due to declining population) for both new and used housing. Or homes that are in such a state of disrepair that it makes more sense to demolish them and rebuild from scratch.
In many cases a big farming company buys land with a house on it and then lets the house to rot, because they only need the farmland that's around it. And they don't bother to demolish the house, because it costs money.
Also if it was true then people wouldn't be living in any house older than 30 years since they'd fear death by earthquake. But that's not true - I know loads of Japanese people who have lived in their house for more than 30 years. It's only when the land changes hands that it suddenly becomes vitally important to implement this rule.
For instance in europe lead pipes were widely used for the internal plumbing and nowadays it’s replaced by rigid and pretty durable polymers. The plumbing goes into the walls, floors, etc. to each place where water goes.
Except that doesn’t work if your walls and floor can shake. You don’t want pipes break into your walls and leak internally. So pipes can’t be rigid, and you’ll have to compromise on durability for flexibility.
When buying an appartment, our plumbing was rated for 30 years. After that, even if everything else is in a perfect state, we’d all have to tear down the building walls and change the plumbing. It can be done, but cost wise it’s not so far from rebuilding from scratch.
Public buildings get away with way longer life by either paying for way more expensive techniques, and/or having the plumbing and any other things that could need inspection or maintenance put outside the walls. It works great, but is ugly as fuck and can have other practical issues (all pipes being exposed has weird safety issues, some europeans house do that and it’s really not great)
And that’s just plumbing.
PS: the second hand housing market is actually super healthy. In particular you get to see how the buildings and neighbors are doing after a few years, and the risk of a bad surprise is that much lower.
PS2: you can live longer than 30y in a house/appartment. Its value just plummets, except if you prove you made all the recommended updates to extend its useful life. It’s basically the same as keeping a car for 40 years. It can be done, but it’s not the generic nor recommended use case.
Going up to family size appartments in recently built middle-class complexes will usually come with pretty good insulation and you won't hear a baby crying at top volume.
And don't get me started on the lack of proper central heating and the use of the stupid portable kerosene heaters. Today I heard from a guy who is working for the village office that the most common emergency call now in winter are from elder people who suffered thermal shock inside their own houses when walking from a warm room to an almost frozen room.
I've lived in Japan for eight years and the only time I've ever been asked to fax something was by an American company. I told them no.
Perplexed that they weren't faxed directly from computers. Are the records not considered 'real' until they exist in paper form, for which there are well-established storage/ retrieval/ relocation standards?
Would beg to differ. Japan is one those nation with extremely advanced space, robotic and nuclear tech. They can be a nuclear power over night if they are allowed to legally. Far as space, they landed probe on asteroid for space mining (https://www.space.com/41898-hayabusa2-deploys-hopping-robots... ).
In terms of “core industrial competencies”—ability to design and build a nuke, ability to make advanced materials, ability to design and build a competitive microprocessor, ability to put things in space, etc.—Japan is still the second most technologically advanced country in the world.
Despite overall declining population, Japan's major urban centres are actually increasing their population. Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and more are all growing cities.
I'm not sure about that. For starters, it's easier to immigrate to Germany or the UK than to the US, and by percentage of the population, Germany does host a higher number of immigrants.
The US does accept more foreigners yearly, but it makes it a long way, if any, to stay in the country permanently.
Don’t take it from me, look at what the German government is doing with allowing foreigners to immigrate there. When a country throws open its doors the way Germany has, you must ask the question - why?
Someone born in France but lives in Germany vs someone born in New York but lives in California are both similarly easy from a legal standpoint. However counting the Frenchman in Germany as an immigrant seems kind of dubious given that's kind of the point of the EU.
For instance, the US has immigration quotas for pretty much everything, thus the backlogs that resulted in Chinese and Indian born people to wait for a decade or more to achieve their permanent residency status. The process is also extremely complex and, as a result of that, it is quite expensive, in the order of thousands of dollars.
An exaggerated example, but a good litmus test here is something simple like are you ok with lots of Americans moving to country X (let's use China and Norway) and making it culturally more like America? You can't say that this is a problem but then Iceland (since that's the example we're using) being weary of accepting large numbers of immigrants out of fear of culture change isn't a valid concern also.
I don't know about Norway or Iceland specifically, but I have been told that English is so trendy in Sweden that not a lot of cultural works are actually written in Swedish anymore. As for China, we've actually gotten cultural backwash from Hollywood doing so much business there. Specifically, a lot of western media companies have had to self-censor in order to retain Chinese market access.
If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls. We would need to emulate pre-Meiji Japan in every country in the world: i.e. no migration whatsoever, and heavy restriction and censorship of cultural imports. So no Internet, no imported cinema or TV shows, no international phone calls... hell, no international postal system.
Less dramatically you have countries like Canada or France that have local content quotas, but those have their own issues. But those are less "stop cultural change" and more "keep Hollywood from completely smothering our local creative industry".
> If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls.
Following this extreme reasoning we should equally just dissolve all borders. Let's start with Japan or Switzerland perhaps? I've always thought it would be cool to live in Switzerland myself. I'm disappointed I can't retire to the Scottish countryside or to Brittany. Who are they to tell me I can't live there?
Obviously this is a non-starter, but being dismissive of others wanting to hold on to their contemporary culture is ridiculous too.
The country has also signed up to accept practically unlimited immigration. It's a part of the EEA (the economic area of the EU), meaning that a population of around 500 million can move there tomorrow with very few legal hurdles. "Unlimited" in the sense that the difference between 500 million and the world population of 8 billion hardly matters for a country with a population of far less than 1/2 million.
1. https://www.hagstofa.is/utgafur/frettasafn/mannfjoldi/mannfj...
2. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
All things being equal, how many people want to flock to Iceland to work in tourism and fishing? Maybe with the right immigrants one could replicate their last financial bubble & crisis.
indeed, the dodo would agree
Talking % terms means it doesn't matter the base size.
I think wether or not it matters depends on whether the effects of an increase is linear, sub linear, exponential, etc.
If the rest of the world would agree to look the other way on those topics, I'm sure we could be persuaded to once again accept double-digit percentages of the population as sla..., ahem, immigrants every year.
This seems an odd concern to be raised in a language that can charitably be described as the bastard child of Norse and French mostly spoken by people who never sat foot in Great Britain. You also seem to assume all of those immigrants are culturally and language-wise homogeneous, which is unlikely to be the case unless, say, something catastrophic happens to Canada causing its population to flee to neighboring countries (and even then that's a bad example because Canada is heterogeneous itself).
I think there are other uses of tech far beyond it that are far better integrated in the Japanese society that in the western world.
Link:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-united-st...
I wasn't referring to some futuristic veneer like Akihabara, but overall the way a society can function with the density that is Tokyo.
"Japan's prime minister says his country is on the brink of not being able to function as a society because of its falling birth rate."
How Japan handles this will either tell the rest of the world how to do it or how not to do it. Lets hope they figure it out
Like how misc constitutions effect democratic participation. Like how misc court arrangements and criminal law impact policing. Like how land use impacts public health. Etc, etc.
Like it literally couldn't get worse for the Netherlands than 1672 and we got through that (in fact look at the mighty France and England today who's laughing now).
In Japanese politics during the nineties there were a couple of parties whose names were commonly translated as "Harbinger Party" (Sakigake) and "New Harbinger Party" (Shintō Sakigake). (Or maybe these names referred to the same party?)
This is often called "課題先進国" in Japanese discussion, translated like as "Pioneer in Taking on Challenges" or "developed country facing challenges"
Although Jaxa's last attempt was a fail consistent with the Brits.
What I couldn't understand was why Sony couldn't keep up with Apple's stellar hockey stick growth when it had the talent in hardware. Don't know about the software because Microsoft.
Apple's strength is it's software. Sony lost out because it could not compete with Apple's software.