Japan's abandoned villages | Hacker News Reader

Japan's abandoned villages

japantimes.co.jp

171 pointsbenbreen126 comments

If you are interested in buying an abandoned home in the Japan countryside highly recommend the YouTube channel Tokyo Llama. He's spent the last four years renovating a beautiful traditional style Japanese house and property about an hour outside of Tokyo. He talks about the renovation aspects, taxes, paperwork process, and the pros and cons of doing this with a family. Lots of videos the watch.

https://youtu.be/TwRjO3kHxU4?si=a9rw7FbwpiXEQLjr

Unless you're Japanese or half-Japanese I wouldn't really recommend that - The Japanese culture is known for being a closed sort where people from anywhere else in the world are only always considered "visitors" and never ever one of their own.

This is true of any neighbors over the age of about 60 in my california neighborhood and none of them are of any particular ethnicity.

I was referring to the entire country, not just a specific neighborhood or city

That's current situation in UK, and way less in Japan.

I find a lot of people that say something like this, especially Americans, they totally ignore the colonial history and how poorly the Japanese were (and still are) treated by Americans and other outsiders.

They may be closed off, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s some cultural trait.

You mean they ignore the seven or so years that the Americans were in charge of Japan after the Japanese state went on a 30 year rampage through East Asia and the Pacific where Americans have supposedly treated the Japanese poorly during that time?

Never heard of this before - regarding colonial history and treatment towards other races, please refer to the WW2 diaries of the imperial Japanese army for how they treated civilians in China, Korea and (to some extent) America.

this seems to be an internet trope because it's completely wrong in reality or completely lacking in nuance? the japanese usually have some kind of decorum when interacting with people they are not familiar with but once you get through that layer you'll find they are actually individuals with preferences and they can be friendly or unfriendly just like anyone else in the world.

i wonder if those who simply spout things like this expect to be treated as an insider on first meet? is this the same sort of people who also go to places like paris or stockholm and wonder why those sort of people are unfriendly too? "why don't these people smile at strangers" and "why is restaurant service so poor?". i see this opinion a lot and i just don't get where this is coming from.

Please stop extrapolating your anecdotal personal experience. Japanese people are eccentric (at least relatively to the rest of the world cultures); and anyone living there will have to consider that nuance when dealing with them.

That being said, your odds of getting into trouble in Japan are close to nil. It's a quiet safe and friendly environment.

My experience with Japanese people have been largely positive. But again, you have to take their eccentricity into a large context to reconcile their behavior with your expectations.

When I first started traveling in Japan, the dilapidated countryside was very disconcerting to me, almost felt like I'd stumbled into some sort of back room. The more time I spent there, however, the more I came to appreciate the aesthetics of the lonely restaurants, the rusted steel-sided buildings, almost abandoned shrines, etc. Hard to say what exactly is so appealing about it, but it sticks with you.

Could it be the quiet and calmness?

It reminds me of the forest passage concept described by Ernst Jünger.

He was writing about sovereignty within one's own consciousness and I'm not referencing this particular context in this case (although they probably are related) but more generally how "the hinterlands" provide a place away from the beam of focus that a society maintains.

Almost by definition these places feel forgotten but once you get over the unnerving sense of separation and isolation from everything, your imagination seems to recover some of its creativity. That creativity then fills in the gaps visually to create an aesthetically pleasing setting even if it didn't feel that way at first.

I felt this calmness in Iceland and in bush country in Alaska in December.

IME it’s not just the quiet and calmness. There’s few children and families (mostly elderly folks), what few people there are mostly keep to themselves and won’t initiate conversation with you, and abandoned places are left to degrade without being vandalized or littered with trash. There are roads and shrines that are still maintained but most likely empty when you visit. There’s nothing, and very little even “regular abandoned stuff” like broken glass or boarded up windows, to make you feel on-edge or unsafe.

There's an amazing (and depressing) blog called Spike Japan that's all about this aesthetic, with a special focus on the Bubble of the 80s and the detritus it left behind:

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

Sadly it seems a lot of the images are gone?

Ah, I remember reading Spike Japan! It has some pretty amazing writing but hasn't been updated since 2014. Still worth a read if you're interested in this sort of thing. Also makes me wonder how things have changed since then.

It’s nice to see nature taking things back and making something beautiful again…forest.

In a way an abandoned village is just another type of zen garden…

I find it wonderful that they are learning to live with a nice successful society that is not in a state of constant exponential growth, and they've resisted doomers and deranged neoliberal calls to keep massively expanding population. Truly a leader in sustainability, a shining beacon to the world for what is actually possible as opposed to what "experts" (aka shills for billionaires) claim to be the case.

I think youre are romanticizing this far too much here.

They have a massively ageing population, which is the true problem.

In 2060, over 40% of the population will be pensioners requiring payouts, according to the japanese health ministry.

And yes, they have low birth rates and no population growth (whether via immigration or otherwise). This is actually going to bite them at some point.

I'm not "romanticizing" anything. I think you are just repeating talking points that have never really been challenged and made to stand up to scrutiny.

> They have a massively ageing population, which is the true problem.

The true problem is exponential growth resulting in exponential destruction of the environment, no matter how much you fiddle with the factors. People act like if we (by some unlikely miracle) get a handle on CO2 emissions that it will all be smooth sailing from then on. The sad reality is that pollution, destruction of species and habitat, and depletion of non-renewable resources, until now has been driven almost entirely by factors other than climate change.

> In 2060, over 40% of the population will be pensioners requiring payouts, according to the japanese health ministry.

That sounds good, good thing they have been transitioning to a sustainable society and economy rather than stacking the pyramid ever higher to delay the inevitable. You know global population is expected to level by that time then fall, right?

> And yes, they have low birth rates and no population growth (whether via immigration or otherwise). This is actually going to bite them at some point.

This is what the pyramid schemers (the "experts", the banks, the billionaires, the neolibs) have been crying wolf about for decades. Sure it isn't simple, but they are managing it. And it will bite everybody pretty soon. What would be nice is if, when it bites, we haven't driven societies and the environment to the absolute limit into a brick wall before that, but instead let populations in highly consuming countries naturally peak and decline, and manage that gracefully.

You seem to be ignoring his point.

An ever shrinking population of productive people (percentage-wise) is going to have to provide goods and services for an ever growing population of people who can no longer work.

It’s a huge burden. Taxes will be higher - which will have all the associated consequences.

The assumed burden is higher because you are trying to let the young to the shoulder the burden of the old. In Japan(or any other country tbh) the return of the tax values to the young is vastly smaller than the old. Immigration is not gonna solve this problem, that's just delaying the ponzi scheme or push the burden to the other country anyway.

What if we tip the scale to young more and treat them fairer? What if we start moving some of the services to the young instead of the old?

What does shifting the services from the old to the young actually mean?

> Older generations, who benefit most from fiscal redistribution (via taxes and transfers), are significantly wealthier than younger generations. Wealth poverty is significantly lower for older generations. Moreover, the wealth ratio of older to younger cohorts is relatively high in Japan compared with Germany and Italy, though lower than in the United States. The evidence thus points to significant wealth inequality across generations.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2020/03/shr...

It's not a unique Japan problem tbf. The young people are getting shafted all over the world.

This does not answer the question, what does the redistribution of services from the old to the young looks like.

If the issue is wealth disparity, then why only target the elderly not the young people who are wealthy as well?

Where do wealthy young people come from? You mean the one who inherited the wealth from their parents? Or do you mean income tax? Well the income tax is usually far higher than capital gain isn't it?

Speaking for myself, the motivation for such thoughts mostly stems from treating wealth as a reward for work. Which is not crazy, it's similar to the labor theory of value. Or if you prefer, incentivizing work means more work will get done, and work always needs to get done. There are valid reasons from a number of perspectives to valorize and reward work.

And the elderly largely don't work, because they can't anymore.

Shifting services means the elderly will get poorer. Which given the high wealth level they have in developed countries relative to the young is not a catastrophe. However it would be a huge adjustment to expectations downward, since the elderly would have the rug pulled out from under them. Whereas the young haven't yet had a chance to adjust their expectations up since they haven't had money yet. Hence the political settlement.

For a prosaic example, in many US states funding for public universities has been cut to pay for public sector pensions in the past thirty years. This has shifted educational costs to the young in exchange for maintaining the benefits of retirees. This is an example of shifting services from young to old.

Frankly, shifting money around might not do anything.

The actual amount of goods and services produced will be lesser and/or be stretched thinner.

The only real way to combat it is to import young people from places with a mostly young population and getting them productive to make up for the productivity shortfall.

The only way to tip the scales is to have a baby boom. When populations were youthful and there were very few elderly, democratic societies did not have pension programs. Was that because people were ignorant, selfish, etc? Or was it because the constituency for pensions was small?

Actually my rhetorical question is only half wrong. People, young and old, are selfish. They are however not at all ignorant about who butters their bread. If you want to increase spending on the young, then you need more young to vote for that.

If anything the growing ranks of the elderly guarantee a greater share of public spending will go towards them. From a growth perspective, that's a vicious cycle. From a fairness perspective... well it kinda makes sense that larger cohorts should get more spending in a democratic society. I get there's a lot of nuance, but this is the gist afaict.

I thought I did the opposite of ignore it, which was to address it directly. I acknowledged it was a difficult thing to deal with but that almost all countries will have to soon anyway, and I also also rejected the assertion that it is the "true" problem.

Japan has PPP per capita income more than twice as high as China, 5x India. The idea it can't possibly pay more to take care of its elderly and infirm otherwise its society will collapse is up there with the most ludicrous wall street craziness I've ever heard. And they've already been ousted as shysters, mind you, because they've been repeating the same thing for a generation now. Because what they are really scared of as I said is people waking up to the fact that their pyramid scheme isn't the only way to do things.

Seems to me that by the time we reach a global crunch, countries like Japan that will already be a generation or two into addressing this problem and restructuring their societies and economies to cope without ever increasing population will be in a far better position than those continuing to push unsustainable growth to defer the inevitable.

> most ludicrous wall street craziness I've ever heard

I have heard many more ludicrous things. Japan is already heavily indebted and as relative per capita productivity will decrease significantly while while taxes increase there won’t be necessarily that many incentives for young people to stay in the country further exacerbating the problem.

> their pyramid scheme isn't the only way to do things.

Any suggestions?

> better position than those continuing to push unsustainable growth to defer the inevitable.

Or far worse.

> without ever increasing population

Who said anything about ever increasing population? Why are you even saying that?

The problem is a severe decrease in population accompanied by a similarly severe increase in average age.

I enjoyed your comments, but my biggest point of contention would be your declaration that “banks, billionaires, and neoliberals” have been crying wolf. I find that it’s mostly MAGA and similar who have been crying wolf or downplaying the threats from climate change, demographic changes, and other related elements. Banks for example hedge risk to make money. Billionaires - which ones? Maybe we should tax them, etc.

I'm not quite sure what MAGA and similar is, or really concerned about the power or influence the lunatic fringe might weild. High level "experts" and "officials" from neoliberal economic and political institutions like the the IMF have been saying these things for a long time.

And it seems to be often times very pro-climate action positions that take this contradictory position that population must continue to increase. I don't know what to make of that other than either they don't really care about climate change, or they want commoners to have a dwindling piece of the pie while the top end continues to get richer, but either way they don't seem to really care about environmental impact of humans.

I agree with much of what you say, but I think you overestimate the effect reducing population would have on the environment.

It's one of the slowest ways to reduce our carbon emissions. If by 2070 population (in some country) is 30% lower than today that's a dramatic change. But the effect on the environment (land use, carbon emissions etc) is likely not more than 30%, and that's not much!

By 2070 most developed countries in the world are supposed to have net zero carbon emissions. That target is not going to be significantly easier to reach with 30% lower population.

> I agree with much of what you say, but I think you overestimate the effect reducing population would have on the environment.

I don't think I estimated it anywhere, so I don't think I am. And in fact I was not just talking about CO2 emissions and climate change, to the contrary I explicitly said actually that climate change is one of a long, long, long list of massive environmental problems we're facing. That's the thing, even if we do "solve" climate change somehow, we're not remotely in the clear.

Reducing (or just not growing) population makes everything easier. CO2 emissions. Land required for food, lithium and other minerals and metals required for cars and computers and batteries and buildings, farming and housing footprint, clean water. Everything. No other measure is as staggeringly effective in reducing the human footprint on the environment as not increasing population.

> It's one of the slowest ways to reduce our carbon emissions. If by 2070 population (in some country) is 30% lower than today that's a dramatic change. But the effect on the environment (land use, carbon emissions etc) is likely not more than 30%, and that's not much!

It's compounding and it certainly is an issue. US CO2 emissions peaked 50 years ago if population was stable.

I think the word “ennui” was almost invented to describe rural Japan. There is a mesmerizing, eerily graceful sense of decline.

In a lot of other rural places on Earth, even if they are in poverty, there is usually a decent amount of activity even if some buildings are abandoned. There are families (often very large ones with many kids), drunk hooligans, outgoing salt of the earth types.

Rural Japan in contrast is quiet, mostly elderly, and more culturally “refined” at least on its face. And if you go wandering around, even as a very conspicuous foreigner, because of the language barrier and general cultural introversion, the few people you do see will mostly politely ignore you or not initiate conversation. Similarly while buildings may be abandoned and overgrown with plants there is usually very little trash (not counting what was simply left there, think more like plastic bags and empty beer bottles from teens hanging out) and no graffiti.

Other places that may be obviously in decline have evidence of a future and continued habitation, even if bleak, from young people vandalizing abandoned places, families going about their day, and confused middle aged folks trying to ask why you are even visiting their place and if you’re lost. In rural Japan, especially if you don’t speak Japanese, it’s more like you are a ghost wandering around a place resigned to evaporate, whose remaining inhabitants stoically continue on their peaceful day to day.

Greece’s countryside is a little like this.

Villages with less than 10 full time residents, collapsing buildings, overgrown vegetation and roaming animals.

Parts of southern and central Spain too.

USA as well, as more people move to be in or near urban areas.

The whole center part of France is like that. Just old people, half of the houses abandoned, no families, not always too run down because it's mostly stone houses that do not break down so fast. On my last visit I met an old (maybe 85?) Lady who told me that when she was young there were 2 shops in the town. Now there was about 30 inhabitants and all above 60, apart from the castle that was owned by some rich foreign family who came a few days a year. There is just no economic activity there, the only thing you have is services in the larger towns so that all the smaller towns around can get a doctor, some supermarket, oil station etc. The land is not flat so not ideal for agriculture, you're far away from everything so not great for a factory of any kind (plus not enough working age population anyways). They used to have a thriving cheap wine production 100 years ago before the grapes died and everyone left. Good news is you can get houses nearly for free.

As a person who adores abandoned places and nature reclaiming them, god I wanna go there so much.

>but it sticks with you

Appreciate the aesthetics vs rust belt and cottage country.

Living here for more than a decade, spent first five years just working myself to death. Then I managed to finally settle, bought a car and started exploring the country. The difference between Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya and the country-side is stark.

I don't think that's a bad thing, "Abandon" is the wrong word, we simply "return" the land we no longer use to nature. We only borrowed it in the first place anyway.

As for making cities more crowded, I don't think that's a bad thing either. Tokyo is pretty nice, you can pretty much get whatever you need within walking distance, I lived there for 5 years before I had a car, and I explored the city and its every corner within that 5 years on foot, bicycles, trains and buses, never felt any inconviniences.

Yes we return anything too expensive to dispose of by official routes to nature too, old fluorescent light bulbs, car tires, microwaves, old micro vans, …

Abandon is a good word, because the return you describe seems to be passive. Many of the abandoned sites have lots of belongings left behind, with no sign of active clean-up effort. Since the intention that can be read from the signs is "leaving", the act is best described as "abandoning".

This article kind of reminds me about the opening scene in Spirited Away with the abandoned amusement park.

I kept reading thinking they were going to mention it… but no

Still very interesting article, the pictures aren’t super good, but reading about the way human society evolves is very much so

For anyone in Japan or with domain knowledge, what are the logistics for acquiring and taking up residence in an abandoned village (assuming you can legally reside in Japan of course)?

EDIT: Thank you all for the replies!

You can take a look at AkiyaBanks: https://www.akiyabanks.com/

It's a directory of municipality-specific sites and pages with lots of links to cheap akiyas, subsidy programs, and Google translations of pages for English readers. Many municipalities/prefectures have akiya matching programs where you send them what you want and they help find a house within your budget.

Getting one is really easy since there are millions of empty homes but the logistics of maintaining these houses is a whole other matter. Be prepared to do most of the work yourself because a lot of these akiyas are rarely in areas with plenty of craftsmen and construction workers.

Buying one isn't hard. They are quite cheap. A completely broken house like the ones in the OP is probably begging to be sold. A 2k+ sqft livable house in the suburb of Tokyo is about $300k.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho... https://archive.is/BDCnm

But these are traditional Japanese houses so quite a lot of renovation is needed to bring it up to a Westerner's standards. Still, all in all, if you are fine with living in a backwater village with barely any modern conveniences then 200-300k for a big house is not too bad.

Assuming you can speak Japanese and don't mind the xenophobia...

FYI for those passing by, that New York Times article above is fantastic, I was about to post it as well.

It was discussed a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606413

So a 2k sqft house here, in my European country, would be considered quite a large one, and my understanding is Japanese standards for housing sizes trend even smaller than here. I realise it's commonplace in parts of the USA, but you're likely paying a premium for getting a house that the market considers "oversized". Wikipedia seems to indicate that 1000 sqft is the average in Tokyo.

Tokyo is extremely dense and land is very expensive. The mountainous rural backblocks that contain these abandoned properties is not, and land is essentially worthless or negative value: it has no productive use, but you still need to pay taxes.

This is in fact a big reason why Japan has a big problem with abandoned rural property: there is no incentive for next of kin to sort out the inheritance paperwork, and then it's left in limbo.

Especially due to inheritance tax in Japan being very high. It can sometimes be cheaper to abandon inheritances, than actually claim them. Even if you do claim the inheritance, large expensive things like houses tend to be sold because the tax makes it unaffordable.

The amount one can inherit before having to even pay any tax is roughly 36m yen (pretend that it's USD360k equivalent). Considering that we're talking about properties in abandoned rural villages, there's nothing of value of inherit.

People are abandoning their inheritance not because they can't pay for it, but because the hassle of inheriting a worthless property only to have to spend your own money trying to sell it for less than 0 doesn't make economic sense. It gets worse when said property belongs to some grand aunt/uncle you've never heard of and thus doesn't even have any sentimental value worth forking over for.

Huh, I thought it was 10% at 1,0000,0000 yen. 15% at 3,0000,0000 and 20% at 5,0000,0000 (and so on.) That was what I was told previously at least.

But yea, the calculus is:

Total taxable amount of inheritance tax - Basic inheritance tax exemption (¥30 million + ¥6 million x number of legal heirs) = Total taxable amount of inheritance for inheritance tax purposes

From an earlier post, copying my answer which seems relevant to your query

> Being a Japanese resident (PR) now, I did look up this option for a summer home in the woods (Akita, Aichi-ken etc). This is what I learnt:

* 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 significantly. It isn't permitted. Architecturally these changes have to be consistent with the older house and rest of the community. Building permits are very stringent. (Basically, you can't build a sprawling European villa in a Japanese countryside for e.g., even if land wasn't a concern.)

* Land tax is levied the day from purchase - not from the day of moving in. (This could pinch given that time to renovate can be 1-2 years in remote places, and taxes aren't cheap necessarily)

* 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)

That seems like a very "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" setup on the part of the local municipalities. 'No summer homes' seems like an easy way for many of them to get no people at all, especially since the country as a whole has very good housing policy and so doesn't have the same kind of home affordability crisis as the US.

It looks like their order of preferences is:

Repopulate by old standards > take the L > become vacation community

I don't think it's "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" so much as it being the same as sometimes I want something done but not if it costs too much. In that case, having it not done is better than paying too much for it.

Vacation homes might bring occasional injection of cash, but they do not really support local community and local services for most of the year. So it is understandable that unless community is build on that type of industry they do not want it and instead focus on those that bring more revenue.

I mean, you pay property tax whether you live there or not. I don't know how this works in other states or other countries, but at least in New York a primary residence has tax advantages.

That said, I'm not sure what you do with a rich municipality that has no residents. You probably want the corner store to be open when you go out there for the winter for some reason, and with no customers, that's not an economic reality.

"Paying property tax" does not fund the local business revenue needs.

Tax dollars can be used for pretty much anything. "We'll write you a check every month if you keep your store open," for example.

I think infrastructure needs to come before people will come. "Induced demand" basically.

tax valuation is almost zero.

This is not correct. The house is worth zero, but the land has value. This will generate tax revenue.

Rural land isn't technically zero tax value, but it's too minor as a revenue.

What? How else does local (rural) gov't generate revenue? It's land tax or nothing. In Japan, sales tax (VAT) is national.

Land tax would be based on value of the land. If land has very low value then the tax would have to be extremely high to generate meaningful revenue. In worst case it could be more than value of the land.

Of all the things Japan has been doing, skimping on infrastructure is not one of them.

Money is fungible you know

No income tax is paid. The central government is less likely to pay services. No economic activity happen, let's say barbers with enough users year round. And so on.

Taxes still work if you have a summer house.

Not really. Their goal is for the local community first and foremost. You know what you are getting into if you trying to buy this kind property.

My point is that for a lot of these places, unless they can figure out some way to be more appealing, there will be no local community before all that long.

Japan is in population decline and people are moving to the city. There is no reversal of this trend. Compromise would not solve the problem anyway.

Making sure the the current crops of the residents are part of the local community is a good goal. They are not gonna win, might as well preserve what they have temporarily.

> They are not gonna win, might as well preserve what they have temporarily

So they are betting on slow death. Thats a hell of a plan

How is selling vocation homes to the outsiders who refuses to comply with local communities not a slow death anyway? You conveniently ignored the bigger picture that so many ppl mentioned: ppl are moving to the cities. If the local economy is gonna gonna die, might as well die gracefully

Thats just an excuse not to try to do anything. If you have more tax money you have more options than zero.

> refusing to comply

You are always free to change the stupid rules

This may be true, but doesn't mean that all other options are better in the view of the community. They may prefer to roll the whole thing up compared to some models.

The alternative is doing what Newfoundland is doing. They're "buying out" whole communities. Residents get a substantial amount of money and all public services are permanently withdrawn. It's basically like living in the woods.

That’s always an option I suppose . Canada is huge, and its population isn’t. As a result there are unincorporated billages/whatever you want to call them, where you are on your own for services. I suppose it’s not a bad arrangement if you are up for it

Newfoundland has historically been broke as shit, and poor money management is why they ended up joining Canada instead of remaining an independent crown colony.

No? Its their land? YOU just want an ez cheap house.

Welp, those are empty houses for a reason.

Home affordability is stil an issue, people working in the metro area while being homeless is a thing, but they still probably end up better than being jobless in the emptying and infra less countryside.

You see this from a foreign, money-centric view, which may work for some locals in US maybe?

For many Japanese local government, what they want is for the outsider, that includes people from other parts of the Japan, to come, and blend in to the community.

>* 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.

Interesting how at odds this is with land use rules in Tokyo.

I think it's mostly due to these specific localities.

Countryside with no specific preservation rules and more favorable arrangements are plenty. They will have better chance to see new people moving in, or have better land reuse policies, leaving few empty homes in the first place.

> Land tax is levied the day from purchase - not from the day of moving in.

Every time I've bought a house in the US it worked the same way.

> Akiya houses come with an agreement to reside. Not just be a summer home. Their goal is to repopulate the countryside

Such villages will be long dead before it happens. There is no point living there all year round.

> 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.

In the book How Asia Works, Studwell argues that the small-plot farms that the government of Japan seems to 'encourage' don't make sense and are a hinderance:

* https://www.gatesnotes.com/How-Asia-Works

They were fine initially as developing countries have an 'excess' of labour, and small farms need more workers, but once industrialization starts, labour is better used in factories and other high value chain parts of the economy, and it's better to mechanize/automate larger farms. Japan did move up the value chain, but farm-plot consolidation didn't really happen, so a large portion of farms are run by an aging population.

While there are a fair share disposable/modern style abandoned houses, there are also these incredible traditional style properties.

While I understand some of the underlying reasons, I'm still shocked that they are just allowed to sit there falling apart. Part of me wants to spec out deconstruct/container/ship to the US for for rebuild.

Obviously it's not economically feasible, but some of them are that interesting.

I think it really comes to what is common in place and what is not. Like Detroit had plenty of homes. And many of them were left to rot. As they had no value or even negative value.

It is same all around the world in these dying communities. They might be exotic from outside, but there is just too many of them in those places.

This reminds me of the abandoned village in one of the 'Scorpion' movies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_Convict_Scorpion:_Jailh...

It appeared to be abandoned because of volcanic activity. Super cool. Not sure if real village or just a set.

One such place is described as having been ‘about ten houses’, which isn’t quite what I imagined when they said ‘villages’.

Hamlet?

Japanese doesn't really have separate words to denote villages by their size. There is only City, Town and Village. (市町村) And you would really only say "Small Village" or "Big Village", etc.

The legal requirements are based on population, and vary by prefecture.

So this is likely a translation issue.

This is tangential:

I was back home at my parents' place last Christmas: a small town in rural Canada. They have a bit of a library, and I was flipping through some books before bed. I picked up a tome from one of the shelves: I remembered it from my childhood, but I'd never thought about it much. The title was "<community_name>".

It suddenly struck me as strange. Why did this little town (pop. ~600) need a great big heavy 800-page volume to document it's history? How much was there to say?

So I started flipping through it...and it was a bit surreal. The 1927 brass band? How the hell did they have 30 members? A hotrod club? How many churches _were_ there? Parades crowding the main street? A movie theatre--with lines out the door--and a drive-in theatre? Wait...what's this giant brick building? A high school? I've never seen this building in my life!

...And then I started thinking of the big old brick town hall, torn down when I was still a little kid. And the shopping mall place I halfway-remembered, like it was a dream, with the various clothing stores and the shoe store and the donut shop and the ice cream counter, that burned down shortly after...

It's hard to square those memories with the ~100 houses scattered around the lone grocery store, gas station, and bargain shop that exist today. These seemed like pictures from a vibrant little town many times the size (and before Amazon and Walmart drove all the shops out of business). It didn't make sense that such a tiny little place could have this much history!

Talked about it with my dad, and he pointed out what should have been obvious: 100 years ago, a square mile of land would have supported somewhere between 4 to 8 families--and families were bigger in those days. You might be talking dozens of people. Today, one family (with the typical 1.43 kids) can farm several square miles of land. The countryside used to be _dense_ with farming families orbiting this little town, coming in to buy food and clothing, catch a movie, hang out at the donut shop, cruise the strip...practice with the brass band.

The same was true for all the other little clusters-of-houses-passing-for-towns in the area, and across the countryside. The lucky ones have shrunk to a fraction of their original size and lost almost all their businesses. The rest are just gone, a couple picturesque abandoned houses on the horizon.

My point being: we (meaning the US & Canada) are at the tail end of this same process ourselves. We've just been at it a little longer, and our roots were less deep in the beginning.the donut shop and the ice cream counter, that burned down shortly after...

My overall point being: we (meaning the US & Canada) are at the tail end of this same process ourselves. We've just been at it a little longer, and our roots were less deep in the beginning.

Thanks for this insight

This is the inevitable result of thoughtless densification.

People _have_ to move into denser cities, because they are the only places with jobs. This in turn results in more and more jobs moving into denser cities.

And people have to live in ever-smaller apartments.

Cities are the engines of the modern economy. We can revert to an agrarian society if you please, but not without consequences.

I can’t see where GP said anything about reverting to an agrarian society. Was the post edited?

Cities are the engines of the early 20-th century economy. The modern economy is much better served by people living in comfortable suburban locations.

Work from home and cars enable that.

The modern economy is much better served by people living in comfortable locations that are walkable rather than requiring a wasteful car to merely live. (American-style) suburbs will never be the engine of anything, they're neither agriculturally productive like rural areas nor as economically efficient as urban areas.

On top of that, the car requirement is in effect a gigantic tax: every person has to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to own a car, and many thousands to tens of thousands every year to operate and insure and maintain it. And that's a direct tax on every person.

Then there's the maintenance costs for all the roadways needed to support all these cars, all the parking lots to park them in, etc. All that comes out of either direct taxes on people, or an indirect tax in the form of higher prices.

Finally, this doesn't even consider the climate consequences of everyone driving around in a 6000-pound SUV; all these cars spewing emissions are turning those suburbs into very *un*comfortable locations with deadly heat waves.

But good luck getting any Americans like the OP to understand any of this.

> On top of that, the car requirement is in effect a gigantic tax: every person has to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to own a car, and many thousands to tens of thousands every year to operate and insure and maintain it. And that's a direct tax on every person.

Wait until you hear how much public transit infrastructure costs. You'll faint from shock!

> Finally, this doesn't even consider the climate consequences of everyone driving around in a 6000-pound SUV

What if you drive a small EV instead?

And here's the CO2 footprint data for transit: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

> But good luck getting any Americans like the OP to understand any of this.

I guess you never even tried to question your assumptions.

>Wait until you hear how much public transit infrastructure costs. You'll faint from shock!

Considering how cheap it is for me to take the subway anywhere I want in Tokyo every day, it's not that much. Compared to roads, highways, etc. in sufficient size for every single person in the city to drive a car everywhere, public transit infrastructure costs are cheap.

Strangely in America, though, drivers aren't required to pay every time they use those roads. Seems like socialism to me.

>And here's the CO2 footprint data for transit: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

Yeah, it says right in your link that transit is the greenest way to travel, other than walking or bicycling (which should be pretty obvious).

>I guess you never even tried to question your assumptions.

I guess you've never questioned yours, or ever been outside the US even.

> Considering how cheap it is for me to take the subway anywhere I want in Tokyo every day, it's not that much.

Nope. You're just free-riding on taxes paid by other hard-working people, nothing is "free".

> Strangely in America, though, drivers aren't required to pay every time they use those roads. Seems like socialism to me.

In the state where I live, most of road maintenance is done with taxes based on road usage: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur...

> Yeah, it says right in your link that transit is the greenest way to travel, other than walking or bicycling (which should be pretty obvious).

Reading comprehension much?

Bus: 105g/km, small EV: 46 g/km, national rail: 41 g/km, London underground: 31 g/km.

Basically, we just need to double the average occupancy of cars (easily doable with mild carpooling and van-type self-driving taxis), and they'll be more efficient than even subways.

> I guess you've never questioned yours, or ever been outside the US even.

LOL. I speak 5 languages (Russian, Ukrainian, English, German, Mandarin Chinese) and I got my first driving license at the age of 30. Before moving to the US, I lived in several European countries.

I know exactly how much transit sucks compared to cars in well-designed cities.

>Nope. You're just free-riding on taxes paid by other hard-working people, nothing is "free".

Tokyo's trains are paid by user fares, not taxes. You obviously know nothing about Japan.

>In the state where I live, most of road maintenance is done with taxes based on road usage

The taxes don't come from the drivers. Try putting tolls on all the highways and see what happens.

>Basically, we just need to double the average occupancy of cars (easily doable with mild carpooling and van-type self-driving taxis), and they'll be more efficient than even subways.

This is stupid. They've tried carpooling for decades in the US and it hasn't gone anywhere. Turns out that it's just too inconvenient when everyone is so spread out.

>I know exactly how much transit sucks compared to cars in well-designed cities.

You've never lived in a well-designed city.

> Tokyo's trains are paid by user fares, not taxes.

No, they are not: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-18/the-secre... - the user fees are barely a third (as usual for transit).

> The taxes don't come from the drivers. Try putting tolls on all the highways and see what happens.

The funds for road maintenance here absolutely come from drivers, in the form of fuel taxes, car tab fees, and toll lanes/bridges. See the explanation in the article.

> This is stupid. They've tried carpooling for decades in the US and it hasn't gone anywhere. Turns out that it's just too inconvenient when everyone is so spread out.

About 9% of people carpool. And this requires coordination, with driverless taxis you don't need any. Just request a "shared ride" from the app.

> You've never lived in a well-designed city.

I lived in Houston for a while. I couldn't stand the weather, but the city itself is amazingly well-designed. Nothing like miserable European cities.

You, quite clearly, have not yet dared to walk out of your assigned "15-minute neighborhood".

English obviously isn't your forte.

From your article: >That year Tokyu generated $2.63 billion in revenue en route to $587 million in profits. Rail fares brought in about a third of that figure, real estate holdings reap another third, and retail about a fifth.

Rail fares brought in 1/3 of Tokyu's entire revenue. Tokyu isn't a train company, it's a conglomerate that owns a train company, real estate, and more. The article doesn't say anything about how much of the rail operations are paid by user fares.

>You, quite clearly, have not yet dared to walk out of your assigned "15-minute neighborhood".

I grew up in the US, you moron. I've seen all types of cities. Have fun getting shot by road ragers over there.

> The modern economy is much better served by people living in comfortable locations that are walkable

Why? Walkability ties you down to your neighborhood by rote, it limits your economic prospects, and in general makes your life more miserable (you'll _waste_ a lot more time on chores).

At the same time, remote work and service-based economy allows people to avoid having to attend the office every day.

> (American-style) suburbs will never be the engine of anything

LOL. Sour grapes?

The US suburbs are _already_ the powerhouse of the country. People living there produce something like 85% of the wealth (using individual tax returns as a proxy).

What makes you think it is "thoughtless densification"? To deliver services to a given population, it is easier, faster, & cheaper if they are in more dense metropolitan areas (up to a certain point). Same trend happens in every developed country as the proportion of the labour force required for farming/forestry decreases. Land scarcity in Japan just amplifies the density in urban areas - you cant live outside the city and drive your car in, because you'll end up spending as much on a parking spot as you would on renting a small apartment.

> What makes you think it is "thoughtless densification"?

I'm writing a book about it :) I've argued a lot about it on the Internet, and people periodically tell: "but Tokyo!"

So I studied the situation there.

It's a great example of generational shittification: your grandparents live in a nice separate house, your parents live in an apartment, and you are forced to live in a "microapartment" because you can't afford anything else.

> To deliver services to a given population, it is easier, faster, & cheaper if they are in more dense metropolitan areas (up to a certain point).

That's incorrect. If you use the number of municipal workers per capita as a proxy, the most efficient cities are around 50-200k in population. After that, you're starting to need transit, zoning, and all other stuff.

For example, NYC has around 200000 municipal employees (excluding schools) for the population of 8 million (2.5%). Boise, ID has the population of 240000 and 2100 employees (0.9%).

> I'm writing a book about it :)

That doesn't answer the question... what makes it thoughtless? For that matter, what makes a small urban apartment worse (or better) than a home in an abandoned village? I was certainly happier and had a better time balancing my budget living in a small apartment in Japan than trying to find out how to budget to live in north america.

> > (up to a certain point)

> That's incorrect [...] the most efficient cities are around 50-200k in population

So we agree on the fundamental, you just define the turnover point as 50-200k. I think it is inseparably tied with density - a city of 2million might be the turning point in a land constrained country like Japan, but I wouldn't be surprised in the breakeven in a suburban sprawly north american city is in the 100-200k range you mention.

> If you use the number of municipal workers per capita as a proxy,

This is a poor proxy. Capital budgets might be better, or ratio between median taxation and median income.

> After that, you're starting to need transit, zoning, and all other stuff.

Without breaking down what categories the employees work in, that's a poor comparison. Boise and NYC both have transit, zoning, etc so that alone doesn't make any difference. But for example car ownership rates are dramatically lower in NYC. If it's $2000 extra in taxes to pay for the transit drivers in NYC, but a household has an average 1 car instead of 3, then the NYC residents come out way ahead in terms of budget.

Additionally, you mention zoning - most of the smallest municipalities in the US have much more restrictive zoning than cities in Japan.

> For example, NYC [...] Boise [...]

Can you provide some Japanese examples, since we're talking about Japan?

> That doesn't answer the question... what makes it thoughtless?

Have you ever heard anybody discussing the downsides of densification? Pretty much _everything_ has upsides and downsides (yes, including sparse cities).

But if you listen to "urbanists", then it will seem like humans should be sliced, diced, and restacked into a Human Cube. While wild animals will frolic and dance outside the walls of the Dense City. With absolutely no downsides whatsoever.

This is what makes it "thoughtless".

> I was certainly happier and had a better time balancing my budget living in a small apartment in Japan than trying to find out how to budget to live in north america.

Now imagine living in a small apartment in a suburban location. For about 1/5-th of the price of a Tokyo apartment.

> I think it is inseparably tied with density - a city of 2million might be the turning point in a land constrained country like Japan

We're seeing that Japan is not so land-constrained, as it literally has houses sitting empty.

> This is a poor proxy. Capital budgets might be better, or ratio between median taxation and median income.

I tried that, but I gave up. First, the data is a mess. Second, even for several cities where I decided to dig in, it gives even _worse_ results. Third, a lot of capital funding happens through the Federal grants in larger cities, and it's not clear how to account for it.

> Boise and NYC both have transit, zoning, etc so that alone doesn't make any difference

Boise barely has zoning and transit, so it doesn't need a lot of employees. It doesn't have (or need) a subway. And to give you a perspective, one mile of Manhattan subway costs about as much as 1000 miles of a modern 6-lane freeway.

> Additionally, you mention zoning - most of the smallest municipalities in the US have much more restrictive zoning than cities in Japan.

Ironically, the only large metro location without zoning in the USA is the Greater Houston Area. The lack of zoning allowed it to build an extremely successful car-oriented city, that has commutes that are FASTER than in any large European city (or Tokyo, for that matter).

This sounds like a really interesting topic. I'd love to read your book when it's released. Would it be possible for me to sign up to some kind of newsletter or something so that I can be notified when it comes out?

What is the reason that high speed Internet is not more widely available in these locations? Could people work remotely if there was good Internet?

Maybe but not in Japan since Japan loves the workplace culture and the drinking addiction that goes with it

Actually FTTH is mostly available even in rural area, except it's very rural in the mountains. Also you know now Starlink is available. Though I rarely see story anyone use Starlink in Japan rural house, but often see enthusiasts in Tokyo use instead.

It's finding a domestic company that allows remote work five days a week that's the challenge.

That's not true though, people are not living in smaller and smaller apartments, they're just building taller apartment buildings.

Yep, apartments in Tokyo are getting bigger. Decades ago, a tiny little apartment with no toilet or bath was not uncommon: all the residents of a building shared a couple of toilets, and had to go to a public bath down the street. These days, there's no such thing as a modern apartment without these conveniences.

The one-bedrooms LDKs are available in larger sizes now, and the 3-4BR LDKs are getting quite large.

Near me, they've torn down several 50-year-old 5-story apartment buildings and are replacing them with bigger 13-story buildings.

> Yep, apartments in Tokyo are getting bigger

It's somewhat true. The average apartment in Tokyo is 66 square meters (with 40 square meters of living space). That's slightly up from 48 square meters total in 1990.

However, 1.5 million homes in Tokyo have living space smaller than 20 square meters. And that number is growing, because of new "microapartments" being built all the time.

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