The American Who Manages the Decline of a Japanese Hamlet | Hacker News Reader

The American Who Manages the Decline of a Japanese Hamlet

online.wsj.com

59 pointscwan10 comments

Mr. Irish moved to Japan in the 1980s after studying the language and history at Yale. He landed a job at Japanese construction firm Shimizu Corp. in Tokyo, rising through the ranks to become a vice president in the New York office. But he wanted to see a different part of the country: the vestiges of "Japan of the past."
He left Shimizu and moved to a fishing village of 1,000 people in Kagoshima prefecture at the southwestern tip of Kyushu. He spent the next three years on a fishing boat catching mackerel, sardines and squid, an experience he described as "an anthropological field study."

After publishing a book about life in the fishing village, Mr. Irish landed a job writing a column, in Japanese, for a local Kagoshima newspaper. Having decided that he wanted to live in a farming community, he hopped on a scooter and rode around the prefecture until, in 1998, he came across a hilltop cabin with breathtaking views in Tsuchikure.

Always good to see someone make a career out of being interesting.

Since the prefecture owned the property, he negotiated with government officials a yearly rent of 2,500 yen, or $28

What

Many of the rural Japanese prefectures will give property away for a song just to get you to live there. My previous job (technology incubator in central Japan) had a deal with the government where we got housed in the apartments normally used for government employees. My rent was $20 a month -- which "skyrocketed" to $60 in my second year.

Think of it as the modern Japanese analog to the Homestead Act.

It makes excellent sense to the prefecture: they have the property whether someone is living in it or not. If renting it out (free to them) induces one professional at the margin to live there, they get roughly ~20% of his wages in taxes and much of the remainder gets spent in the prefecture.

P.S. If any of you want to start a startup in Central Japan, and have some way of finangling your own visa, I can give you the forms to essentially make you ramen profitable for two years by government fiat.

I'd like to take you up on the offer for the forms. Tokyo is getting old, and I find the city quite depressing; wouldn't mind spending some time in the country side. Are you in Japan at the moment?

Yes, I live in a sleepy town in central Japan and have for the last five years. Please feel free to email me -- my address is easily discoverable.

How hard was it to organise a visa?

My brother has been living in China on short term tourist visas for close to 5 years. In the mean time he has built and sold one (non-technology) business and claims not to feel worried about the possibility that one day they will stop letting him back in despite substantial real assets in the country.

I'd been considering it, but in my case everything I own is easy to transport across borders :-)

It makes excellent sense to the prefecture: they have the property whether someone is living in it or not.

Is it common/standard for rural housing to be owned by the state in Japan? In the United Kingdom, at least, such property would be trading at sky high prices thanks to prospectors and overcrowding.. :-)

Much Japanese property was trading at sky high prices during their property bubble.

Japanese communities don't always see things the way that others might:

"The remaining villagers have made a remarkable choice: Rather than try to come up with ways to lure new residents and keep the town alive, they have pretty much decided to let it disappear slowly, even as they do themselves.

Following the death of a 99-year-old woman, Mr. Irish proposed renting out her empty home. A younger couple had expressed interest, and Mr. Irish thought bringing in new blood could extend the village's life. The villagers balked. Newcomers, they said, could upset the delicate harmony of the close-knit community. Mr. Irish had no choice but to turn the disappointed couple away."

Somehow, this reminds me of an Asimov tale. A planet called Solaria, in fact:

The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds. Solarian robots were noted for their variety and excellence. They also exported their grain, which was used to make a delicacy known as the pachinka.-- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria

No offense to the Japanese of course; all I'm saying is fiction is often an extrapolation of stuff all around us.

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