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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Japan has all these things. The Tokyo metro area has quite affordable housing by global standards, and housing can be downright cheap in many cities outside Tokyo. Japan has affordable health care and comparatively lenient zoning laws. Japan is famous for its Shinkansen, and there’s a maglev train under construction that will be even faster than existing Shinkansen lines. For local transit Tokyo’s subway and train system continues to improve.

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And what they then lack is a young and growing populous, which are who all the previously mentioned benefits should be for. Nothing is perfect.

The US also has an increasingly geriatric population. Japan has a lead in declining birth rate and increasingly aged population, but the US and western Europe (and China) have the same problem.

The US compensates its declining birth rate by a large influx of immigrants. In comparison, Japan's immigration numbers are tiny: https://data.oecd.org/chart/5StJ

Immigration won't make future generations of Americans larger than the generation before them. We're just losing ground slower than Japan. Much studied and commented on. Tl;dr immigrants have lower birth rate than 100 or 50 years ago.

https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Among-Immigrants-and-Native...

Japan has started to encourage immigration, but probably too little, too late.

Almost every country in Asia has a declining birth rate.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171367/apac-total-ferti...

That is precisely the point. All is cheap and nice because there isn't a young population to buy it. Otherwise it would turn expensive because of simple supply and demand.

it's still possible to realize those gains by moving there though, there's plenty of for example Indians who move to Japan straight out of uni (Japanese companies go recruit Indian grads with 3 or 5 year contracts). Don't even need to be an established professional to move there.

Japan isn’t known for being the most open to immigration. But ya, they have a lot of Indians, Chinese, Filipino immigrants.

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