- It’s in bumfuck nowhere
- I don’t speak Japanese
- Building it up to a modern living standard will be expensive
- I’d have to move to Japan
Unsorted list of reasons why not from the top of my head
Still need to be ble to do the paperwork and go get groceries though. So I doubt it cancels out.
It’s not that bad
Looking on maps it’s in a rural area but not that rural. The house is situated on the outskirts of a town, basically
Local middle schools website says they had 185 students in 2020, that’s pretty good for rural Japan
About a 30m walk from the town/school. Train station there, bunch of cafes, konbini.
It’s not going to be living in Tokyo obviously but there are rural areas in Japan that are far worse, where the school is 7 kids that all share a classroom even though they’re mixed grade 2-9 because the district has 1 teacher
Bigger reason for me: that house is decrepit and Japan experiences more natural disasters than pretty much any other country. Like I’m not living in a crap shack when the next earthquake, typhoon, or tsunami inevitably hits
The language isn’t that hard though. プラス、それからもっと漫画を読めるよ。
The language isn’t that hard though
Gonna go ahead and press X to doubt on that. Japanese is consistently ranked among the hardest languages to learn for English speakers, alongside Mandarin and Arabic.
If I can learn it anyone can. I am straight up stupid. Full disclosure though: while I can write it pretty well (with a phone or pc, no fucking way I can do it by hand) my speech is mixed. When I talk to Japanese people they say “wow! Your Japanese is so good!” Which means it’s not very good hahah
Mandarin is way harder because it’s alllll kanji and the speaking in tones stuff is so much more nuanced
I’m pretty sure it’s ranked hard because you have to learn an alternative alphabet. But this is not really that tough. You can learn hiragana fairly quickly. Katakana is not nearly as necessary as you might think. Then learning kanji does admittedly take forever but often you’ll see things are either written in hiragana, only use the most basic of kanji, or if they use fancy kanji they have the hiragana next to it anyway (like a phonetic spelling)
The grammar is a little challenging:
Subject verb object - I sushi eat instead of I eat sushi
The subject gets dropped and implied; the language is heavily contextual. I eat it - 食べます (tabemasu) - i (implied) eat it (implied). This is why llm and machine language translation stinks at Japanese, because it can’t really know context from a single line (though it’s improving, chatgpt got that right though deepl said “I’ll eat”, which isn’t wrong, strictly and did give both I’ll eat it and I’ll have some as alternatives)
Then there’s particles like は wa and が ga which mark the subject and topic, respectively. English doesn’t really have an equivalent.
But this isn’t harder as much as it’s nuance imo. The writing system and alphabet is harder, objectively. There’s 46 hiragana and over 100 if you include the additional forms (which is misleading a bit) then basically the same number of katakana, then about 2,000 kanji in use. That’s a lot to learn but it’s basically an extension of learning vocab
Now should you learn Japanese? That’s a tough one. Stagnant economy, falling birth rate year after year, etc. but your goals are your own and don’t have to be practical
Spoken japanese is realistically like a 2. It’s the written form (3 separate forms) that’s difficult, bringing it to a level 4. Speaking is quite easy compared to other languages.
About a 30m walk from the town/school.
I interpreted this as 30 meters and wondered why anyone would care about a walk that reasonable.
not living in a crap shack when the next earthquake, typhoon, or tsunami inevitably hits
I imagine this would work out pretty great if you can just lift off the roof if it collapses on you in an earthquake. The other two, not so much.
I mean, this crap shack has been standing for more than a hundred years now
I remember seeing an article on these houses. The biggest issue is this house was built before the 1980’s, so it was built before modern earthquake (?) proofing standards. This makes the house unlivable and technically condemned, and the Japanese government won’t let anyone (including owner) from being able to live there until it’s been modernized to the standards.
While this sounds easy, you need to get the supplies and crew out there (no easy road access), which is expensive, and possibly not a real option (again, remote area and trucks might not be able to reach it).
So you end up with a house no one can legally live in, in an area that can’t be reached to repair/build anything. It’s just a lose/lose situation and causes the value of the property to be very low.
That 30 minute walk is going to suck in Hanamaki’s winters. I assume they get it worse than the more central area that I know which has no shortage of snow.
Sure, it looks cheap. It’s cheap for a reason. Buying abandoned property in a remote place is often the most expensive way to find out why.
Japanese houses in particular are basically a consumable. They are designed for a very short lifetime compared to pretty much any other developed country.
Lol, yeah, I was trying to find a source for the average home age, and an article in English cited this as the official government statistics, which i thought would be more responsible to cite, even if I couldn’t understand it. I did auto-translate it to double check, though.
I watched a video on this and while it does vary widely by prefecture one of the big reasons is their waste management/recycling rules.
Often, to demolish a house, theres usually a flat fee and its just bulldozed, put into a truck and dumped. To renovate, you have to dispose of every type of waste according to the class of that waste. Which is labour intensive and time consuming.
Japan is in the middle of a population crisis. These houses are empty because there’s not enough people. They’re desperate for people to immigrate.
They’re an isolationist society… they’re not looking for people to immigrate at all, they’re trying to get their own citizens to have kids. They’re also quite xenophobic and racist as well.
Japan is cool as hell, but people put way to much of their knowledge from animes… being a tourist is gonna give you a completely different perspective than actively living there would.
Don’t buy these old japanese houses, they’re literally made of mud and sticks and have absolutely fuck all for insulation.
Living in nature is all fun and games until you’re expected to sleep in 50 degree weather while your split unit struggles to keep your paper box of a bedroom cool.
Most of the time the closest hospital is like 2-3 hours away on a bus that only comes twice a day, so you better hope you never get in an accident cause the ambulance won’t come for hours and your only other hope is the only other person in neighborhood: your 90 year old neighbor who you’re not sure is even still alive.
Source: lived in one for multiple years.
Edit: also when I say old I mean as soon as 1995 Before they majorly overhauled the earthquake and insulation codes nationally
for $3k i’d buy it just for the land it sits on. who cares about the house
Right? That’d be a solid investment for someone with enough money to replace/remodel the house
Land in Japan only appreciates in large cities. If you buy it now at 3k it’ll be worth 2k in 30 years.
There are way more complexities than meet the eye here.
Not the least of which: just buying property doesn’t give you a way to extend a visa beyond the normal tourist period (usually 90 days per 6-month period). Japan ultimately is still an isolationist country, and it shows the most in its immigration policies.
I mean its remote, if you don’t interact with any gov’t agencies then how they gunna know you living there longer than the visa?
They know. They know when you entered and what kind of visa you carry.
I guess you could hide out in the woods, but… then why be in Japan?
Edit: and if they idea is to hide out in the house that you bought, well… may as well put a sign up that says “check here.”
But they’re japanese, so the most they can do is knock insistently on the door; something like kicking the door down would be rude. And if you marry, you solve the visa problem and help repopulate. Two birds one stone. Jokes aside, the place is really rundown and also not much “classic/picturesque”, looks more like an old factory or warehouse.
I guess you could hide out in the woods, but… then why be in Japan?
Are there large, carnivorous predators in Japanese forests?
Because Japan can be extremely xenophobic.
going to nightclubs as a foreigner in japan: everyone loves you and wants to talk to you
getting a job (other than teaching english to kids) as a foreigner in japan: good luck
Ehhh. My experience in some bars was not like that. I had a couple where they where the bouncer clearly didn’t want me inside and I was told a place was closed several times when clearly they were not. It was just closed to me.
