Nah, it isn't. But that's a conversation for PWEC.

Currency is just a tool anyways.

QFT

If I was a younger man Japan would be on my priority list for a vacation, but alas, I am too old now for that malarkey.

At risk of being
Killed by poison shuriken
Thrown from the shadows

I humbly submit that an enterprising gentlemen is better off engaging with those bold Korean ladies if one is onto that kind of thing.

Many previous cultures have disintegrated and disappeared over the millennia. While it is unusual for one of that size today, if you express their population in terms of percentage of global I bet it's really not that different from when one would go out 2000 years ago.

While on occasion it was due to war or disease, I think more often it's been from within, as this appears to be.



The Jedi Master

I've always heard it's incredibly expensive to live in Japan. I wonder if that's part of the problem? If I lived in a high cost area, like Japan, New York etc, I'd be tempted to sell the house and move somewhere normal, buy a nicer house and put away the rest. It blows my mind that people pay millions for tiny houses or apartments when in other parts of the country you could have your pick of lakeside or beachfront property and still have plenty left. Not that I would wish MS on anyone, but there are other options with similar cost of living. Maybe the Japanese have figured out it's smarter to move out of the country when they grow up and get married?

cheaper to live in tokyo than it is to live in anywhere in canada, at least in my 10 years of living here (in tokyo)

the apartments are a lot smaller, but people tend to accumulate a lot less stuff.

the ideal for city people is to get as high up in a building as they can - the higher your floor, the more desirable the apartment, even if it's only 20 meters square, which is the average apartment size for a single person in tokyo. 40m square if you're well-to-do or living with 2 people.

i used to rent a 24sqm apartment along the busy yamanote line (most centralized rail line in tokyo) on the 7th floor and it cost me about 1,000$ a month if converted to usd. pretty nice apartment with a view of the city, but once i woke up from the city-life-brain-fog that clouded my priorities in life, i realized how shallow and worthless it was and ditched it for a huge house in the countryside.


young people are ALL abandoning the countryside. there are literally houses all over the place just collapsing from disuse and neglect. the government has punitive land tax rates so people just let land sit abandoned forever without claiming it after the original owner dies and wills it on to someone else. big tracts of land just sit unused, rusting steel structures are everywhere.

most areas of japan are like detroit is right now (without the crime). but it's getting worse and in 2040-2050 it's going to reach the peak of the population collapse. i can't even imagine how bad it's going to be then if it's this bad now. the bright city lights are a far cry from what exists in the countryside. just down the road from me there is a house that literally collapsed on itself since it was abandoned for too long. you'd think the city would clean it up but they don't.

Hmm, interesting. This is all a new perspective on Japan for me... my previous view of that nation is apparently long out of date!

That's very interesting, I was looking at buying a house in Canada and was amazed at what I could get for just a little money.

This plus about 50 hectares in Nova Scotia was about �30,000 at the time of looking in 2003, my car cost more!
Food was about half the price I was used to paying in the UK at the time, you could almost just change the $ to a �, fuel was way cheaper too

We took a detour for a few days to a rural town outside Fukuyama, and I immediately found it a lot more attractive to have a house out there where it's fairly close to nature. What are the prices like in these supposedly unattractive areas? Even with its idiosyncracies, Japan is fast becoming more attractive to me than Sweden because of the onset of crime and disorder here.

My impression of Canada is that real estate and the cost of living is astronomical mostly in the large urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto. Is that wrong?

Nova Scotia is one of the cheapest places to live
in the country, only outdone by some less resource
rich regions of the "near" north (farther north,
land is often cheap, but supplies get expensive). Lots
of arts types live there, those whose income is independent
of geography. Cost of living rises quickly as you move
west, where the jobs are.

It's a big, sparsely populated country, so it's easy to
find places far enough from people that land is cheap, but
that means impractically far from things you need to live
comfortably, and often such absence of people is a result
of a climate with few redeeming features. Nova Scotia has
a fairly benign climate, but it just hasn't had much in the
way of economic muscle for many decades, maybe since the end
of the war.

There is so much BS in this thread. But reading has been almost as much fun as watching robots fight in a bar.

Robots only get into bar fights in Tokyo silly.

I do find it odd how the article posted by the OP seems to be equating lack of sexual activity with a low birth rate. I guess the author hasn't heard of birth control?

I'm sure there are stats that show the amount of birth control used per capita. I get the feeling its use is not as prevalent over there as in the West.

It does say that 2/3-3/4 of the unmarried population are not in a relationship. I don't think there's a huge one-night-stand culture over there, I'm sure the majority of people having sex are in a relationship of one type or another.


The Jedi Master

Isn't that true anywhere?

Downtown Miami or downtown Sebring?

i think you'll find housing prices in vancouver higher than anywhere like miami or los angeles

i can get a better appartment in tokyo's most prestigious areas for cheaper than it would cost to buy one in vancouver. the real estate prices there are out of control.

High end housing in Vancouver is actually a lot cheaper than some American cities, heck in dollar figure terms, you can actually rent an entire mansion in the most expensive part of Vancouver for about the same as what some San Francisco apartments cost...

My ex GF in L.A. pays more to live in a dumpy 1 bedroom in sketchy Hollywood than you could expect to pay for a 2 bedroom in a nice area here.

The biggest problem in Canada is that the price of less desirable real estate is relatively high. I swear if Detroit was part of Canada, you'd still be paying $200K for a house in the worst part of it. The other thing is that average wages, at least in the cities, are very low considering the cost of real estate, a function of most Canadian cities being brutally underpowered when it comes to any industry that's not real estate.