It would be interesting for the Japanese government to rent some of these properties out short term. I’m sure lots of tourists would be willing to rent them for short periods of time. Although it’s a lot of overhead to facilitate, maybe it would allow for enough revenue to keep the properties maintained and managed.
There's also the question of if these homes are located near where tourists go. If someone's looking to visit Tokyo, they're not going to be interested in staying in Wakayama.
These are not in touristy areas. There would be little to no demand. If you want to stay in small town rural nowhere there is no reason to go all the way to Japan for that.
I spent 2 weeks biking around rural Japan, away from touristy areas, and it was fantastic, to say the least.
Easy access to Japanese food, small town Japanese aesthetics, and unique landscapes are what made it worth it.
Not to mention that even if you want to go to some of the more popular areas of Japan, it's rather easy to get to them from the rural areas with the excellent public transit infrastructure they have, so if you have a job that you can work remotely, and you like the rural daily lifestyle but occasional urban fun and weekend trips to the city, Japan is just about as ideal as a place as you can get to have that lifestyle.
I think this is an important point. I would consider living in a remote area, but usually the internet access there goes from very slow to non-existing.
If the house is in the few thousand to tens of thousands of USD range, you could probably afford to pay for a fibre run out to your property with the money saved compared to the cost of a house in the US or EU.
This is Japan we're talking about. Remote isn't that remote. Like numpad0 mentioned above, even in the outskirts of small towns, you can typically expect aerial fiber pretty much everywhere, and the actual broadband options will depend on the last few meters.
I see utility poles and neighboring homes in the photos, so most likely gigabit wired and LTE wireless are available. Amazon Prime next day delivery probably works too.
Japan has extremely good fiber connectivity. You can live in a small cottage high up on the mountainside of a small village and have the NTT monopoly get you near-1Gbps installed for 20,000 yen and ~5,000 per month. You can usually get cable for cheaper and even the LTE can be good enough for many.
I'm not sure where you have this impression from, but I can assure you that in many non-urban areas getting fiber (hikari) is a non-option.
Many folks resort to LTE or WiMax to compensate, which has poor performance in general and even worse in poor weather.
For context, even in Tokyo, you would be surprised at the number of apartment buildings that come with shared 100Mbit lines for 30+ units, with no way of installing faster direct lines (in large part due to owner/agency refusal).
It’s NTT policy or something to lay only single 1Gbps fiber per building, ever, so if you’re living in a single family home with nice front yard you’re forced to share the fiber with — no one else. But for 30 units apartment your connection is at mercy of 25 kids trying to download Apex Legends in background while taking remote schooling classes.
If you’re desperate find a place that already has or allows Sony Nuro installation. They lay fibers given owners’ permission, whereas NTT won’t and just send you a Fast Ethernet VDSL modem(with a blue Cat.5 8P4C cable to match!)
No. 1Gbps FTTH is very common choice even in rural area. Fibre covers 98.3% of family in 2020 [1], thanks to NTT Flets. Sometimes FTTH internet in rural residence is better than VDSL or crap internet service in urban apartment because of some apartments won't allow to sign up another fibre line instead of those crap.
> For context, even in Tokyo, you would be surprised at the number of apartment buildings that come with shared 100Mbit lines for 30+ units, with no way of installing faster direct lines (in large part due to owner/agency refusal).
This is almost always the owner/agency actually. The above discussion is in context of being the owner.
Agree with previous commenter - not sure where are you getting your data from. Numbers are misleading as well - set up will cost you 200,000++ ans usually a month of waiting. Fiber (hikari) + ISP will cost at least 65,000/mo. Declared speed doesn't mean anything, actual speed will be quite poor, plus they shape traffic depending on type.
NTT networks are extremely congested, so speed you get will be either just ok or bad.
This is all applicable to greater Tokyo.
Needless to say, 4G is nothing of impressive with spot coverage, if you go mountainside.
> Fiber (hikari) + ISP will cost at least 65,000/mo
That's one 0 too much as long as we're talking residential/"family". Or you'd have to provide sources/quotes.
I just had fiber installed (no previous connection here or to the closer neighboring houses) in a small house in a rural area. It was indeed 1.5 months of waiting, but the costs are 10% of what you're claiming.
One of the things that has led to widespread gigabit class FTTH in Japan is that they're not averse to using overhead utility poles and lines almost everywhere. As an ISP it's much less costly and complicated to do real FTTH if your infrastructure can be purely aerial.
I wonder how this works in the context of the fact that Japanese houses, unlike those in the rest of the world, supposedly depreciate to $0 in just 25 years.
For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it?
The land is seemingly worth nothing and the building itself worth zero or really a liability.
> For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it?
If they're being sold for $500 why would you expect a bank to want to lend money against it? It already has no value as collateral.
The bank could take collateral in something else than the house. But if you have that kind of collateral, you might not need a loan in the first place...
It can actually be even weirder. The land might be worth -$money (in some cases like Detroit, tax liens and other issues meant the ‘$1 house’ was actually $50k+ because of the liens.)
And yes, no sane bank is going to lend against collateral that is fundamentally worthless. Construction loans are problematic because the property can be worth -$$$ if
say the work isn’t finished and the builder starts putting (western concept, not sure how
it maps to Japan) builders liens on the property for all the work they did, and then it all rots because no one put windows or a roof on it.
These properties are at these prices because they are currently fundamentally not worth more. They sit on the market because they won’t even sell at that price.
This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for resale.
Also high summer humidity which basically gives the choice between extensive maintenance requirements (which requires that the house was built to allow for it) or… just tearing down the house before it's gotten to rot.
I also expect the situation is different in Hokkaido: it's drier with lots of winter precipitation (spring is the driest season in sapporo versus winter for tokyo), and the more extreme winter weather probably leads to higher quality construction (for instance central heating and extensive insulation is common in hokkaido while it's quite rare on honshu which tends to go by "tactical heating" and quite drafty houses).
well, if they sell the houses for $500, it is because that statement is true, over time, they worth nothing because nobody wants to live in the country side, what you buy for $500 is worth $500
Lots of houses are liabilities. If you've ever been to a place like detroit, where they are abandoned, the roofs are half collapsed, there is water damage everywhere, etc. The cost to repair is higher than destroying it and building something new.
Some good peer links. There are several ways to value things
- economic value (how much money it produces or how much money it saves by having it), both current and projected/speculative.
- emotional value (this is my grandfathers house, I wouldn’t part with it for anything)! Or FOMO, or ‘being established’. How much is it worth to feel that way?
- scarcity value. You need x or something terrible will happen, it’s in a bidding war, how much can you spend to win? This can also be current or projected.
The signal you’re seeing is that for people eligible to buy the property, it is near zero value on all these axis.
It's rare that the land is actually worth nothing, but it can be worth less than the loss of liquidity + the cost pf demolishing the current house (which you're right on).
> The land is seemingly worth nothing and the building itself worth zero or really a liability.
The land is worth as much as it otherwise is. This is essentially a very large subsidy towards interesting people in living in rural areas (which is where most of those houses would be).
> For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it?
The bank doesn't care about the house if the building is considered to have no value either way.
I may be mistaken but my understanding is that japanese houses depreciate quickly because they're considered largely disposable, at least when it comes to "modern" homes.
I really wonder how the lending against houses/land works in Japan.
It seems like the timing of things is such that by the end of your 25 year mortgage the house is worth $0. Ok.
So what happens if after this point you want to borrow against your house?
In NA nbd since the bank knows it can sell the house. In Japan is the bank squeamish about whether they can sell the house because the house is "worth $0."
Similarly I wonder if you wanted to buy a house that is "worth $0" is the bank only going to give you a mortgage if you are going to knock it down and build a new house?
> It seems like the timing of things is such that by the end of your 25 year mortgage the house is worth $0. Ok.
> So what happens if after this point you want to borrow against your house?
You… don't? You never did? What do you fail to understand in "the land is worth money, the house is not"?
> In NA nbd since the bank knows it can sell the house. In Japan is the bank squeamish about whether they can sell the house because the house is "worth $0."
Japanese banks are squeamish either way, but they can sell the land. The land is not worth $0.
> Similarly I wonder if you wanted to buy a house that is "worth $0" is the bank only going to give you a mortgage if you are going to knock it down and build a new house?
You're not buying a house, you're buying land, which has a house on top of it, which you may want to replace.
When you buy a car you buy a car, you don't buy the seat upholstery, and you can replace that. Well the land's the car, it's the actual thing.
It's easier to sell land with a building on it that is immediately useable. This impacts bank decision making.
For example when you buy bare land recreational property you often have to pay cash because no lender wants to have bare land on their books.
You will struggle to get a lender to give you any money for a condemned building (I've tried).
In Canada it is simple to get a mortgage on on a property with a house on it because there's a "usable" house on it and the bank can easily sell the property.
Perhaps this is the same in Japan as well, even if the house is 25 years old, but it depends on how they look at that 25 year old "worth $0" property. Perhaps as long as it's "livable" lenders don't mind and one doesn't run into the road blocks one would run into if they were trying to buy bare land.
Or perhaps it's simply much easier to buy bare land in Japan than it is in Canada!
The average Japanese “home buyer” will, upon purchasing the lot they wish to live, immediately demolish the previous house and set about getting the house they just ordered from one of a multitude of builders/designers/brands (Muji sells houses!) built within about a 3-4 months so they can move in.
As siblings have already said, the land is not worth nothing, but the article doesn't seem to say, from a quick glance, whether property of the land is included in the transaction. Because in Japan, land can be rented too (yes, you can rent land to build something on top of it, that's called shakuchiken (借地権)).
Not in every case naturally, but land can also be worth nothing in circumstances where it has become unstable. Japan has places where old homes exist and new home building is not permitted because it has become a hazard zone for landslide. No wells can be dug, no foundations, it may trigger a collapse which affects your surrounding neighbors. Eventually, earthquake will take the place and no one will buy in the area with this knowledge.
That's probably not the case of the land attached to the houses mentioned in the article, though.
That said, I also read somewhere else that the $500 are not actually a sell price, but a rent price. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Japan is very difficult to immigrate into, and I'm not sure what foreign ownership of property is like - I'm guessing unfriendly. Someone will likely comment in reply if they know better.
These are also very barely within the definition of a house by Western standards. Houses in Japan, especially these ones are less permanent affairs. Poor construction quality, no central heating, etc.
This is not a good opportunity for people outside of Japan.
This is one of those factoids people constantly repeat because it sounds like it would be true. Japan is far easier to immigrate to them most other developed nations, especially the US, which most on this site will be comparing to.
When most people say "immigrate", they are not referring to foreign worker status that allows for long term residency, but actual naturalization.
Japan has some pretty high bars and the number of naturalized people is quite small -- about 10,000 per year, and these are primarily Koreans of Japanese descent. The high bar is not the "good moral character" bit (which is also required but that is common) but rather financial stability. So if you are from a wealthy nation and a high earner you will be fine, but that is not the typical immigrant profile, and so for this reason there are very few naturalized immigrants in Japan compared to US or other nations that do not have financial stability as a criteria for naturalization.
In English at least, "immigration" and "immigrants", refer to permanently moving to a new country, not long term residency or guest worker programs. I.e. you are intending to never return to your original country. If you are intending to return, then you are a long term resident, but not a permanent resident.
e.g. Merriam-Webster:
"a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence"
OED online:
"a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country."
This is just playing with grammar. You can live somewhere permanently (in the grammar sense) while on a temporary permit (in the legal sense) and most people who emigrate go through various stages of (legal) temporary permits before being granted permanent residence (eg often requires 5 years of uninterrupted "temporary" residency) or citizenship (often 10-15 years).
The majority of migrants don't permanently move to a new country. And really, does it make sense to categorize people on their unknowable intention?
Especially since this can clash with legal reality. Undocumented migrants sometimes intend to stay permanently, but as soon as immigration laws are enforced, they will leave. And many foreign workers who intend to return to their home country never do so, rendering the distinction moot.
> When most people say "immigrate", they are not referring to foreign worker status that allows for long term residency, but actual naturalization.
It depends on how the country defines it, but to "immigrate" doesn't generally mean naturalization.
Immigration means to obtain permanent residency (in the U.S., a green card or LPR status; in Canada, Australia, NZ, landed immigrant or permanent resident status; in the UK, indefinitely leave to remain). Permanent residency generally confers most rights of citizenship, apart from a few like the right to hold a passport of that country, to vote (exceptions exist), etc.
Naturalization means to obtain full citizenship. It's the step that comes after immigration, and it is optional. Not all immigrants elect to naturalize for various reasons (e.g. wanting to keep original citizenship in cases where dual citizenship is prohibited, tax rules, military service, etc.). Some choose to remain permanent residents forever, and they can. It's their choice.
And you're right -- if someone has a temporary status like a foreign worker status (even if it's infinitely renewable), that would be considered neither immigration nor naturalization.
I'm not sure how things work in Japan, but it is possible for a country to be easy to immigrate into, but hard to naturalize in. These two things can be simultaneously true.
(in other words, easy to get permanent resident status, but hard to get citizenship)
Immigration doesn't imply permanency. Indeed, most migrants don't aim for permanent residency.
There is a widespread idea to count permanent migrants only, but in practice, that's impossible to determine in the first place, and has no tangible consequences either.
Think about undocumented migrants, who do not have the right to abode, permanent or otherwise. Think about nations that don't offer permanent residency to newly arriving immigrants, or at all. Think about people who already have the right to abode (e.g. a citizen of Ireland in the UK) - are they immigrants without setting foot in the country?
Tying migration to a permanent status just doesn't make sense. Indeed, the UN Migration Agency (IOM) defines a migrant as:
> any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of
(1) the person’s legal status;
(2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary;
I don't. Immigrants and emigrants are the same just seen from different perspectives, with migrants describing both.
Please note that general dictionaries are always a poor source when discussing word definitions. Their aim is to clarify word usage, not to define terms.
Wiktionary is also sadly of garbage quality, and I say that as a former very active wiktionary editor.
> This is one of those factoids people constantly repeat because it sounds like it would be true
Preventing immigration (both permanent and temporary) has been a political priority in Japan for centuries. Are you saying this has changed recently? The US is a bit special because even with the hurdles it has it still receives a lot of immigrants. Japan, to my knowledge, would never accept being in such a position.
I am also surprised but you can check and it does indeed seem the majority (90%+) that apply for citizenship every year are accepted...
I would hazard a guess this is because of their population crisis, maybe? They have one of the oldest populations in the world and their birth rate is still less than 1.5. That's a recipe for social and economic disorder, with current levels of automation.
> Preventing immigration (both permanent and temporary) has been a political priority in Japan for centuries.
Implying that the very immigration friendly modern Japanese government is the same as Tokugawa Ieyasu is almost as absurd as implying that Britain is a divorce crazy country due to Henry VIII.
Looking at some sources the issue seems to be fairly complex, however it does indeed seem fairly easy relative to other countries like Canada to gain Japanese citizenship (though very few apply).
Looking at this and other citizenship guides, the main requirements seem to be that:
1. You live and work in Japan for 5 years (not counting student visas)
2. Are the age of majority in your country and over 20
3. Have not broken any laws while in Japan
4. Are able to support yourself financially and are willing to renounce other citizenships
It seems that about 90% of people that apply for naturalization are accepted. Yet less than ~10,000 are accepted every year, so applying for citizenship seems unpopular relative to other G7 countries.
Neat. I wonder why I was so certain that immigration was next to impossible and only visas were granted?
Sometimes in immigration, what is written down and what is reality is two different things. Ex: In panama I've heard of legit citizenship applications just rotting on the desk for many years.
In a country like japan where it's more by the book, I'm not sure although. To get PR it takes 10 years to 1 year, so that might be a barrier, or maybe it's just a place that doesn't pay well + language barriers and thus wasn't that much of a draw to immigrate to?
In addition to the points above I have heard that you need to pass the Japanese reading/writing/verbal equivalent of a TOEFL test with a fairly high score.
How so? Japan is far from alone in requiring X years of residence on a 1-5 year visa before transitioning to a permanent residence status which doesn’t require visa renewals.
Granted English is not my first language but this is the first time I hear about this supposed distinction.
I live in a Japanese small town and have been looking into this, some random thoughts:
This keeps getting resensationalized[0],
While it varies a lot per region, a lot of these can come with clauses such as making it your residence, doing certain maintenance/reparations/replacement etc.
I have been looking around a bit for something like this in the local akiyabanks, but there's just a handful of items on there, most have been there for years and the entry of new ones is really low. Not to say that there hasn't been success, but the reality is that most of these require significant investment and/or dedication to be attractive. There are also other programs, like renting them out rent-free in exchange for maintenance (really, would you invest 100,000s of yen to replace the boiler in exchange for rent on your 6-month notice rental contract?). Still, most empty homes are not part of anything like this and are left to ruin. Anywhere except the bigger cities (and sometimes even there), this has a significant impact on towns. Driving anywhere in a more remote prefecture and you see abandoned houses falling apart pretty much everywhere. It can really be nice living here, though.
that reminds about the Finland approach - bunch of years ago i read that the government specifically targeted high speed internet expansion into rural/remote areas (in particular the Baltic sea shores which are beautiful to live on) to provide jobs and thus avoid depopulation.
I wonder how long of a lasting impression this creates? I've seen videos from Japanology on Youtube about rural communities trying to come up with incentives and revitalization measures to varying success. From an outside perspective, it's commendable to see small communities care and try to be creative and "startup-y".
At the same time, this also is like the analogy "a solution looking for a problem". Supply exists, but demand does not.
For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap, but it would be rundown and not very much fun to live in a town with more inconveniences than amenities.
Unless someone is trying to do the homesteading(?) thing, having a free/cheap house somewhere is only a small part of the equation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.
> For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap
In 2021?
> Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.
According to zillow, uninhabitable \ barely habitable wood frame homes requiring substantial repairs still sell for about $30,000 in rural Missouri.
A while back I did some research related to this, and while I wouldn't want to get into the uninhabitable house part of it, there do appear to be habitable and in fairly good condition 3BD size houses in very rural areas for sale in some small midwest towns in the USA for around $40-50k. If you go look at some small towns in southern IL and set the zillow max price to 50-60k you'll see them.
At the very lowest end of the scale I found habitable houses in the 20-30k range in KS, OK and that area in small farming towns that have seen significant post-1960s exodus and population decline.
If you have the budget to build your own custom house and do something like an off grid solar setup, there's plenty of places in rural eastern WA state where you can buy 20 or 40 acres for $1k per acre.
I think the point, though, is that irrespective of the exact price in the Rust Belt, prices are a fraction of those in desirable places like SF or NYC.
You can't create demand by government fiat. People aren't living in rural Japan or Missouri because nobody wants to live there, for a littany of reasons of which the direct financial cost of home ownership is but one.
I think the bigger issue is that prices may be extremely inflated in both locations, relative to construction cost of replacing current improvements with new improvements of equal utility, due to national or global real estate credit bubbles, which have the power to wreck the economy.
The external value of the location should not be heavily capitalized into the sales price regardless of the amenities of the location. When someone asks $400,000 for a building which costs $200,000 to replace, the buyers are likely to build a new building next door for cheaper unless the land is impossible to acquire or being held off the market at high prices. The duration which private owners are allowed to hold vacant land off the market and hold out for higher prices is ultimate determined by public financial policy.
I live in the Dayton area - packages of homes have popped up listed on Zillow for a million or so for 10-20 homes. The one you linked is close to perhaps the worst, most economically depressed area in the city. Crime ridden food desert were the heroin epidemic persists.
There are a lot of really crappy streets like that in Dayton. It was once ranked as one of America's fastest dying cities. Several years ago I heard there was a multi-year backlog of abandoned houses to demolish. They also have had deals similar to the ones you hear about in rural Japan where you can get a house practically for free if you just agree to fix it up. I used to live there, which I how I knew to look there when the discussion turned to how cheap of a home you could buy.
Can I, as a citizen/resident of the US, buy one of these $500 houses and keep it as a vacation home for whenever I feel like going to Japan and chilling?
That's literally less than 3 days worth of hotel stays at a decent hotel, and it sounds like an excellent deal if there aren't other strings attached.
Watch the beginning of Totoro to get an idea of what an abandoned house in rural Japan looks like (rundown, in the middle of nowhere). Vacation homes anywhere get quite dusty in a mere week, so you'd be looking at a spring cleaning event on every trip (very much like in the movie).
Bear in mind also that flight tickets to Japan aren't exactly cheap either; you can get a week worth of hotel stays in the US for the price of the round trip flight from US to Japan.
Well, if your idea of chilling is being away from civilization w/ moderate amounts of physical labor, then rather than acquiring a rural abandoned property, a possibly less committed option with more flexibility for tourism is camping.
That's funny, I always think of the house in My Neighbour Totoro as probably the most idyllic place I could imagine. I'd swap my place in relatively central London for it in a heartbeat.
You can, but it may collapse in an earthquake or landslide before you arrive. Common wisdom in Japan is an empty home will begin to collapse within two years. Then you need to pay for disposal, which is a major expense. Buying a $500 home will be like adopting an old shelter dog. It requires lots of care and will still die soon. If you want to move in and make it a great place it might be possible. As a vacation home for one week a year to see sakura flowers? No, bad idea.
Just as a counterbalance to the nay-sayers without information:
I'm also extremely curious about this. Before covid I traveled to Japan about 3-4 times per year, and the hotel fees definitely add up. The tickets are usually manageable if ordered early enough in advance imo.
It's not like the "spring cleaning" mentioned by others is a deal breaker either, it's probably possible to find someone to do some of that for pay if you speak enough Japanese.
Obviously having something close enough to trains / relevant cities might be a long shot, but the payoff would be huge if anything like this existed.
Fingers crossed that someone with insight responds
Can't speak from personal insight, but I recommend checking out the Tokyo Llama channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBQ3TEq5SrUuTJuMl1S_4ig (also linked elsewhere in the thread) to see what the experience of buying and fixing up an akiya is really like.
In their case, they had fairly specific location requirements and thus restricted themselves to Ibaraki prefecture. So fairly close to Tokyo (1 hour train ride I believe?), but they paid much more than $500 -- more like $20-30k if I recall. Once you go through the bureaucracy of buying it (making sure it doesn't have a tax lien, etc.), you're basically faced with a falling-down hoarder house that you have to clean out and likely tear down and rebuild completely. Theirs was also a quite large lot and a nice traditional Japanese farmhouse called a minka or kominka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minka). So, not typical of these $500 houses -- those are probably going to be further out from the cities, much smaller lots, and complete teardowns. But do expect to invest significant time and money to get it to a habitable state. And you'll likely need to speak much more than tourist Japanese to deal with the local bureaucracy and builders.
But if you're willing to put in the effort, and you do like the quiet Japanese country life as a getaway, it could well be a good investment. This is pretty much my plan for (semi-)retirement in a few years.
A point is that there's almost no way to release owned lands in Japan (except died and not inherited) but taxed. That's part of why some property is released such low price.
It's very much a global phenomenon ... Above a threshold towns get bigger below that towns depopulate ... Yet with remote work this slows however once satellite internet service becomes pervasive worldwide there will be a mad rush to move to remote locations of natural beauty ... in Columbia there is a beach with a massive snow top mountain which will be an attractive remote work hotspot
The municipality of Triora, a beautiful historical town now nearly abandoned, very close to the Ligurian coast in Italy, is selling houses as low as 1 (one!) euro, in an attempt to re-populate the area and get someone to invest in restoring the historical landmarks...
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadEasy access to Japanese food, small town Japanese aesthetics, and unique landscapes are what made it worth it.
Not to mention that even if you want to go to some of the more popular areas of Japan, it's rather easy to get to them from the rural areas with the excellent public transit infrastructure they have, so if you have a job that you can work remotely, and you like the rural daily lifestyle but occasional urban fun and weekend trips to the city, Japan is just about as ideal as a place as you can get to have that lifestyle.
Go look it up for yourself.
You can't say, oh all of rural Japan gets 10mbps. Cause every different part has different options.
You need to go look at a real estate website that has internet availability information.
Many folks resort to LTE or WiMax to compensate, which has poor performance in general and even worse in poor weather.
For context, even in Tokyo, you would be surprised at the number of apartment buildings that come with shared 100Mbit lines for 30+ units, with no way of installing faster direct lines (in large part due to owner/agency refusal).
If you’re desperate find a place that already has or allows Sony Nuro installation. They lay fibers given owners’ permission, whereas NTT won’t and just send you a Fast Ethernet VDSL modem(with a blue Cat.5 8P4C cable to match!)
[1] https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000680621.pdf
This is almost always the owner/agency actually. The above discussion is in context of being the owner.
NTT networks are extremely congested, so speed you get will be either just ok or bad.
This is all applicable to greater Tokyo.
Needless to say, 4G is nothing of impressive with spot coverage, if you go mountainside.
That's one 0 too much as long as we're talking residential/"family". Or you'd have to provide sources/quotes.
I just had fiber installed (no previous connection here or to the closer neighboring houses) in a small house in a rural area. It was indeed 1.5 months of waiting, but the costs are 10% of what you're claiming.
For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it?
The land is seemingly worth nothing and the building itself worth zero or really a liability.
If they're being sold for $500 why would you expect a bank to want to lend money against it? It already has no value as collateral.
=PMT(0.02/12, 30*12, -500)
$1.85 per month!
And yes, no sane bank is going to lend against collateral that is fundamentally worthless. Construction loans are problematic because the property can be worth -$$$ if say the work isn’t finished and the builder starts putting (western concept, not sure how it maps to Japan) builders liens on the property for all the work they did, and then it all rots because no one put windows or a roof on it.
These properties are at these prices because they are currently fundamentally not worth more. They sit on the market because they won’t even sell at that price.
This doesn't make any sense to me. What economic mechanisms cause it to be true?
> Japanese houses, unlike those in the rest of the world, supposedly depreciate to $0 in just 25 years
Same for this.
I've never heard of either of these being true; do you have a link?
>Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time, becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years.
I also expect the situation is different in Hokkaido: it's drier with lots of winter precipitation (spring is the driest season in sapporo versus winter for tokyo), and the more extreme winter weather probably leads to higher quality construction (for instance central heating and extensive insulation is common in hokkaido while it's quite rare on honshu which tends to go by "tactical heating" and quite drafty houses).
- economic value (how much money it produces or how much money it saves by having it), both current and projected/speculative.
- emotional value (this is my grandfathers house, I wouldn’t part with it for anything)! Or FOMO, or ‘being established’. How much is it worth to feel that way?
- scarcity value. You need x or something terrible will happen, it’s in a bidding war, how much can you spend to win? This can also be current or projected.
The signal you’re seeing is that for people eligible to buy the property, it is near zero value on all these axis.
The land is worth as much as it otherwise is. This is essentially a very large subsidy towards interesting people in living in rural areas (which is where most of those houses would be).
> For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it?
The bank doesn't care about the house if the building is considered to have no value either way.
I may be mistaken but my understanding is that japanese houses depreciate quickly because they're considered largely disposable, at least when it comes to "modern" homes.
It seems like the timing of things is such that by the end of your 25 year mortgage the house is worth $0. Ok.
So what happens if after this point you want to borrow against your house?
In NA nbd since the bank knows it can sell the house. In Japan is the bank squeamish about whether they can sell the house because the house is "worth $0."
Similarly I wonder if you wanted to buy a house that is "worth $0" is the bank only going to give you a mortgage if you are going to knock it down and build a new house?
> So what happens if after this point you want to borrow against your house?
You… don't? You never did? What do you fail to understand in "the land is worth money, the house is not"?
> In NA nbd since the bank knows it can sell the house. In Japan is the bank squeamish about whether they can sell the house because the house is "worth $0."
Japanese banks are squeamish either way, but they can sell the land. The land is not worth $0.
> Similarly I wonder if you wanted to buy a house that is "worth $0" is the bank only going to give you a mortgage if you are going to knock it down and build a new house?
You're not buying a house, you're buying land, which has a house on top of it, which you may want to replace.
When you buy a car you buy a car, you don't buy the seat upholstery, and you can replace that. Well the land's the car, it's the actual thing.
For example when you buy bare land recreational property you often have to pay cash because no lender wants to have bare land on their books.
You will struggle to get a lender to give you any money for a condemned building (I've tried).
In Canada it is simple to get a mortgage on on a property with a house on it because there's a "usable" house on it and the bank can easily sell the property.
Perhaps this is the same in Japan as well, even if the house is 25 years old, but it depends on how they look at that 25 year old "worth $0" property. Perhaps as long as it's "livable" lenders don't mind and one doesn't run into the road blocks one would run into if they were trying to buy bare land.
Or perhaps it's simply much easier to buy bare land in Japan than it is in Canada!
Have you considered that a country where houses are essentially never considered usable buildings would have a different outlook on the matter?
> Or perhaps it's simply much easier to buy bare land in Japan than it is in Canada!
Well yes considering it’s more or less the norm in Japan but not in Canada.
Land has value in Japan. Houses do not.
These are also very barely within the definition of a house by Western standards. Houses in Japan, especially these ones are less permanent affairs. Poor construction quality, no central heating, etc.
This is not a good opportunity for people outside of Japan.
Also it’s very easy for anyone to buy property.
Japan has some pretty high bars and the number of naturalized people is quite small -- about 10,000 per year, and these are primarily Koreans of Japanese descent. The high bar is not the "good moral character" bit (which is also required but that is common) but rather financial stability. So if you are from a wealthy nation and a high earner you will be fine, but that is not the typical immigrant profile, and so for this reason there are very few naturalized immigrants in Japan compared to US or other nations that do not have financial stability as a criteria for naturalization.
do they? I always thought it referred to long term residency.
E.g. I consider myself an immigrant even tho I do not have the citizenship of the country I live in.
e.g. Merriam-Webster: "a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence"
OED online: "a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country."
Especially since this can clash with legal reality. Undocumented migrants sometimes intend to stay permanently, but as soon as immigration laws are enforced, they will leave. And many foreign workers who intend to return to their home country never do so, rendering the distinction moot.
It depends on how the country defines it, but to "immigrate" doesn't generally mean naturalization.
Immigration means to obtain permanent residency (in the U.S., a green card or LPR status; in Canada, Australia, NZ, landed immigrant or permanent resident status; in the UK, indefinitely leave to remain). Permanent residency generally confers most rights of citizenship, apart from a few like the right to hold a passport of that country, to vote (exceptions exist), etc.
Naturalization means to obtain full citizenship. It's the step that comes after immigration, and it is optional. Not all immigrants elect to naturalize for various reasons (e.g. wanting to keep original citizenship in cases where dual citizenship is prohibited, tax rules, military service, etc.). Some choose to remain permanent residents forever, and they can. It's their choice.
And you're right -- if someone has a temporary status like a foreign worker status (even if it's infinitely renewable), that would be considered neither immigration nor naturalization.
I'm not sure how things work in Japan, but it is possible for a country to be easy to immigrate into, but hard to naturalize in. These two things can be simultaneously true.
(in other words, easy to get permanent resident status, but hard to get citizenship)
There is a widespread idea to count permanent migrants only, but in practice, that's impossible to determine in the first place, and has no tangible consequences either.
Think about undocumented migrants, who do not have the right to abode, permanent or otherwise. Think about nations that don't offer permanent residency to newly arriving immigrants, or at all. Think about people who already have the right to abode (e.g. a citizen of Ireland in the UK) - are they immigrants without setting foot in the country?
Tying migration to a permanent status just doesn't make sense. Indeed, the UN Migration Agency (IOM) defines a migrant as:
> any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of
(1) the person’s legal status;
(2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary;
(3) what the causes for the movement are; or
(4) what the length of the stay is.
I believe you're confusing immigration[0] and migration[1]. The former aims for permanent residency or naturalization, the latter is temporary.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/immigration
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/migration
Please note that general dictionaries are always a poor source when discussing word definitions. Their aim is to clarify word usage, not to define terms.
Wiktionary is also sadly of garbage quality, and I say that as a former very active wiktionary editor.
Preventing immigration (both permanent and temporary) has been a political priority in Japan for centuries. Are you saying this has changed recently? The US is a bit special because even with the hurdles it has it still receives a lot of immigrants. Japan, to my knowledge, would never accept being in such a position.
I would hazard a guess this is because of their population crisis, maybe? They have one of the oldest populations in the world and their birth rate is still less than 1.5. That's a recipe for social and economic disorder, with current levels of automation.
Implying that the very immigration friendly modern Japanese government is the same as Tokugawa Ieyasu is almost as absurd as implying that Britain is a divorce crazy country due to Henry VIII.
Looking at some sources the issue seems to be fairly complex, however it does indeed seem fairly easy relative to other countries like Canada to gain Japanese citizenship (though very few apply).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Japan#Immigrant...
Looking at this and other citizenship guides, the main requirements seem to be that:
1. You live and work in Japan for 5 years (not counting student visas)
2. Are the age of majority in your country and over 20
3. Have not broken any laws while in Japan
4. Are able to support yourself financially and are willing to renounce other citizenships
It seems that about 90% of people that apply for naturalization are accepted. Yet less than ~10,000 are accepted every year, so applying for citizenship seems unpopular relative to other G7 countries.
Neat. I wonder why I was so certain that immigration was next to impossible and only visas were granted?
In a country like japan where it's more by the book, I'm not sure although. To get PR it takes 10 years to 1 year, so that might be a barrier, or maybe it's just a place that doesn't pay well + language barriers and thus wasn't that much of a draw to immigrate to?
https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/7143/
That puts a lot of permanent residents off - why go through that when they can already stay indefinitely anyway?
2. Use it as capital for your newly formed Japanese company
3. Rent it out to yourself or someone else, or AirBnb it
You should now be eligible for a Business Manager visa.
I rent and don't own any property, but I've seen people do this.
Granted English is not my first language but this is the first time I hear about this supposed distinction.
This keeps getting resensationalized[0],
While it varies a lot per region, a lot of these can come with clauses such as making it your residence, doing certain maintenance/reparations/replacement etc.
I have been looking around a bit for something like this in the local akiyabanks, but there's just a handful of items on there, most have been there for years and the entry of new ones is really low. Not to say that there hasn't been success, but the reality is that most of these require significant investment and/or dedication to be attractive. There are also other programs, like renting them out rent-free in exchange for maintenance (really, would you invest 100,000s of yen to replace the boiler in exchange for rent on your 6-month notice rental contract?). Still, most empty homes are not part of anything like this and are left to ruin. Anywhere except the bigger cities (and sometimes even there), this has a significant impact on towns. Driving anywhere in a more remote prefecture and you see abandoned houses falling apart pretty much everywhere. It can really be nice living here, though.
0: https://soranews24.com/2015/04/10/so-who-wants-a-free-house-..., https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191023-what-will-japa..., https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/05/asia/japan-vacant-akiya-g..., https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses,
Free or nominally priced homes: https://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-free-homes-cities-...
At the same time, this also is like the analogy "a solution looking for a problem". Supply exists, but demand does not.
For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap, but it would be rundown and not very much fun to live in a town with more inconveniences than amenities.
Unless someone is trying to do the homesteading(?) thing, having a free/cheap house somewhere is only a small part of the equation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.
In 2021?
> Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.
According to zillow, uninhabitable \ barely habitable wood frame homes requiring substantial repairs still sell for about $30,000 in rural Missouri.
At the very lowest end of the scale I found habitable houses in the 20-30k range in KS, OK and that area in small farming towns that have seen significant post-1960s exodus and population decline.
If you have the budget to build your own custom house and do something like an off grid solar setup, there's plenty of places in rural eastern WA state where you can buy 20 or 40 acres for $1k per acre.
You can't create demand by government fiat. People aren't living in rural Japan or Missouri because nobody wants to live there, for a littany of reasons of which the direct financial cost of home ownership is but one.
The external value of the location should not be heavily capitalized into the sales price regardless of the amenities of the location. When someone asks $400,000 for a building which costs $200,000 to replace, the buyers are likely to build a new building next door for cheaper unless the land is impossible to acquire or being held off the market at high prices. The duration which private owners are allowed to hold vacant land off the market and hold out for higher prices is ultimate determined by public financial policy.
I found some dirt cheap ones.
edit: This is a good indication of real estate bubble btw.
$11,700
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/114-S-Ardmore-Ave-Dayton-...
Can I, as a citizen/resident of the US, buy one of these $500 houses and keep it as a vacation home for whenever I feel like going to Japan and chilling?
That's literally less than 3 days worth of hotel stays at a decent hotel, and it sounds like an excellent deal if there aren't other strings attached.
Watch the beginning of Totoro to get an idea of what an abandoned house in rural Japan looks like (rundown, in the middle of nowhere). Vacation homes anywhere get quite dusty in a mere week, so you'd be looking at a spring cleaning event on every trip (very much like in the movie).
Bear in mind also that flight tickets to Japan aren't exactly cheap either; you can get a week worth of hotel stays in the US for the price of the round trip flight from US to Japan.
It's not like the "spring cleaning" mentioned by others is a deal breaker either, it's probably possible to find someone to do some of that for pay if you speak enough Japanese.
Obviously having something close enough to trains / relevant cities might be a long shot, but the payoff would be huge if anything like this existed.
Fingers crossed that someone with insight responds
In their case, they had fairly specific location requirements and thus restricted themselves to Ibaraki prefecture. So fairly close to Tokyo (1 hour train ride I believe?), but they paid much more than $500 -- more like $20-30k if I recall. Once you go through the bureaucracy of buying it (making sure it doesn't have a tax lien, etc.), you're basically faced with a falling-down hoarder house that you have to clean out and likely tear down and rebuild completely. Theirs was also a quite large lot and a nice traditional Japanese farmhouse called a minka or kominka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minka). So, not typical of these $500 houses -- those are probably going to be further out from the cities, much smaller lots, and complete teardowns. But do expect to invest significant time and money to get it to a habitable state. And you'll likely need to speak much more than tourist Japanese to deal with the local bureaucracy and builders.
But if you're willing to put in the effort, and you do like the quiet Japanese country life as a getaway, it could well be a good investment. This is pretty much my plan for (semi-)retirement in a few years.
The municipality of Triora, a beautiful historical town now nearly abandoned, very close to the Ligurian coast in Italy, is selling houses as low as 1 (one!) euro, in an attempt to re-populate the area and get someone to invest in restoring the historical landmarks...
https://1eurohouses.com/triora-imperia-liguria/
Honestly, this is a real bargain considering what this place is like and its historical significance.
Granted, you have to commit to restoring the place, but still!