- 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
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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I think those first 2 cancel each other out.
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
Kanji have extremely inconsistent pronunciation. It is one of the worst things about learning the language. It's not just 2000, it's 2000, most with multiple readings, many with exceptional readings.
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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.
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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.
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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, I'll have to trust you on the source.
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.
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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."
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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.
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I think you meant "going to nightclubs as a white foreigner in Japan"
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I actually looked into that property once; there was no way it was going to happen for a number of reasons. I ended up buying a house in much better condition in another area.
I really need to do a video about the topic or something. There are many, many landmines with stuff like this. For a very TL;DR and assuming every single other thing is perfect: owning a home does not give you the right to spend any extra time in Japan nor grant a visa; you are on the hook for taxes, fees, septic maintenance (though the above property may have been a pit toilet; I don't remember), and other bills which will have to be paid from a Japanese bank account. There are also certain neighborhood association obligations, property maintenance, fire control, etc.
Essentially, there's usually good reason it was abandoned.
Additionally, houses in Japan aren't really built to last. Properties like these are usually bulldozed and rebuit when purchased.
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ghosts
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Chances of being isekaied are much higher immediately after moving to Japan.
Why are you listing benefits? They asked why not.
:P
I'm sure you could find a cheap condemned shit hole in your nearest rural area too. That doesn't mean that it's a good deal.
It's so cheap because the current owner doesn't want to spend the money on demolishing the structure before selling vacant land. And if it is still available it is because no developer has looked at it and thought that they could make money on the flip.
Can confirm.
There's properties about 2 hours drive from where I am in Western Australia that are unsellable.
There would've been 100 people living in a community there in the past but now it's just a few old people waiting to die.
When someone does die the houses just end up being abandoned because you can't even get an agent to drive out there and put up a for sale sign.
The interesting part about a bunch of the homes in more rural Japan is that they're not actually condemned or shit holes. They're old and would definitely need some love and attention but their population hasn't been at replacement levels for a long time and people would rather live in a big city where they have access to all of the things so slowly and steadily the outer Fringe population areas in Japan have ben getting more and more empty leaving perfectly good houses to sit vacant for years. That's not to say that there aren't shit holes that aren't worth the time it takes to go see them but a large portion of them are actually quite nice.
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Because they won’t sell it to a foreigner. It’s not exactly legal but they won’t sell anyway.
Unless you lawyer up beforehand.
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I wonder if there are soot sprites in the attic. Is there a giant camphor tree nearby?
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Because buying and not using land is morally wrong.
I don't know that I agree with that. I guess it depends. For example, if they bought the land and let it return to nature, is that really morally wrong, especially given the remote location? Humans aren't the only ones who might want to use that land.
That would be the best option if nobody else is trying to buy it.
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Let them discover how taxes, insurance and liabilities work.
Also immigration to Japan
Nah man they can quote Anime so they get instant citizenship.
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Because these houses are located in remote, rural areas. They have been abandoned because people are moving closer to the cities or the owners are old/dying and they can't continue maintaining them. The money you save from the initial purchase will all come out of the expenses to renovate and maintain the house because a lot of them are run-down.
Of course if you're the type who wants to live in the middle of nowhere, and you have the money and skills to renovate, this can be for you.
Will I meet the Totoro?
IIRC Japan's more or less the hardest country out there to immigrate to.
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