Realistically Japan is very close to being a second tier economy. It's quite plausible that Croatia and Latvia will pass them on GDP per capita over the next decade. 7-11 Japan would be relatively inexpensive for the citizens of any affluent nation, because Japan is so much poorer than it used to be.
I used 'exchange rate' because not only is the yen weak, but the USD seems pretty strong - I guess it depends on where in the US you are from, but as a Brit, US feels expensive to me, Japan feels cheap, ergo Americans must find Japan even cheaper than I do.
Unrelated but another tip unknown to tourists is to get cold drinks (even alcohol) at pharmacies instead of convenience stores: their beverage fridges tend to be set much colder.
Re Poland and Lithuania: USSR collapsed in early 90s, and many would have been forgiven for thinking that these countries would continue to live in poverty, which they obviously didn't. Notably, USSR was a donut empire where the peripheral regions were richer and more educated than the heartland. That's also why the collapse of USSR started there. Sarah Paine talks about that.
I guess one could point to various policies, especially with pseudo- protectionist benefits given to the Japanese mega conglomerates, which like in Korea are kind of just an extension of the government.
But I wonder if such economic policy fumbling is in an evil outgrowth as people try to deal with the underlying collapse.
It is not that Japan has fallen to their level, it’s that they have experienced an economic boom in the last decades, and are not that far behind western Europe now.
FWIW Japanese people living there tell me combinis are expensive based on their salaries and I believe them.
I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
Exactly. Housing and the housing market in Japan is an interesting beast. Based on my limited understanding as someone who has sort-of briefly looked at buying a home in Japan, houses are not really financial investments. For example, compare house prices in Japan (including the land) with a house in Australia.
The difference is partly the attitude towards houses, but it also has to do with how difficult it is for foreign investors to speculate in the market, the ubiquity of public transit (which makes accessibility as a value-driving feature mostly moot), the way the building code precludes a "missing middle" (or "missing cheap place"), and other features of modern Japanese society that are alien to Americans (and Canadians, but weirdly not always to Britons).
The point is that there are lots of ways to chip away at the affordability issue. It's just that ALL of them necessarily attack RE investors' ability to exploit their property to the fullest extent possible.
One last anecdote: South Korea is similarly situated to Japan, but is also facing an extreme affordability crisis. So, there is the suggestion that NONE of the material aspects matter if the owner class is determined to wring every cent out of you. The changes disincentivize gouging, but in the end, you just have to have property owners willing to acknowledge housing as a an affordable necessity and not a profit center built on the backs of a captive audience...
I have to take issue with the ".. out of wood and paper". Because that's not the cause. There are buildings here literally a thousand years old and built of wood, still standing, after centuries of sometimes unbelievably big earthquakes. And wooden homes built properly these days handle earthquakes as good as anything else. It's not the material, it's how it's done which matters.
Source: Researched a lot of house building companies the last couple of years. Some of them, building wooden houses, have been in business for a long time and haven't had a single house as a victim of earthquakes for half a century, with the occasional exception where the earth has literally flipped over. Nothing can handle that. But "ordinary" earthquakes? All still standing. There are photos around showing certain houses alone on a field of flattened buildings. These guys.