mikkyang

A lot of the recent “cheapness” of Japan is due to the drastic drop in value of the yen. Two years ago these workers would cost like 50% more.

Japan also has better worker protections, so hiring and firing is more difficult I imagine than India. One way I’ve heard American firms fire is to force employees to relocate to another Asia office with more lax protections. The employee gets relocation costs covered but if they get fired within a year they have to pay those expenses back. The employee knows they’re just going to get fired so they quit.

On top of that, English is probably not as good. It’s taught in schools but you don’t need it for most jobs.

A lot of people can’t move to the US. Plenty of my friends were moved to Canada after they couldn’t get H1B renewals and now even non-India/China waitlists for green card applications are so long that you can’t just switch from a student visa to an application for permanent residence like you used to.

Permanent residency has been increasingly easy to get in the past few years, and can be had in significantly less time than citizenship.

One year of residency is enough if you’re young enough and make enough money. Three years if you just miss those standards, or if you’re married (I think).

The article highlights some great points about why Tokyo is so livable, but having been in the market for a home here last year, I also think the depreciation of Japanese real estate (at least the physical structures) is a big factor.

New houses and apartments depreciate significantly once bought, and old homes can even trend into negative territory. Land that someone has cleared for you can be more expensive than the same land with an old home on it that they presume you will later pay to demolish.

The land itself in Tokyo can appreciate, but not enough to offset the rapid depreciation of the structure. A lot of the avoidance around old homes is cultural (maybe because of frequent natural disasters), and it’s started a self-fulfilling prophecy where old homes can actually not be livable. People build homes with the depreciation in mind and don’t generally use long—lasting materials, leading to homes that aren’t actually livable a few decades later when they might be sold.

On the bright side, this leads to a lot of opportunities for architects to build new homes, so it’s also part of the reason why you see so many uniquely designed homes out of Japan.

The grammar is very similar (use of particles, word order) and a large amount of vocabulary, especially technical vocabulary, is derived from shared Chinese words.