J @Tokyo comments

Hate to break it to all of you but Japan is going to be forced to swallow the immigration pill just as the Western world has over the past 2 decades. Japan will not be "Japanese" in the way it is today in 20 years and it will be unrecognizable in 50. The party is over for the Japanese as a homogenous state; hope you all enjoyed being the token gaijin like I did.

Prediction: Japan kicks the can yet another year down the road with pretend zero interest rates. Upper class make new fortunes in real estate and tourism boom while regular Japanese continue to slide off into the abyss of middle income country status. Quality of life declines overall for Japanese due to yet another yet of negative real wage growth. Food still tastes better in Japan so everyone stays happy.

It's a good "nation building" play for earning business from and supplying steel to the JP Auto companies which will be increasingly pressured to manufacture vehicles in the US. But my goodness what a horrendous play from a timing and currency perspective. Making huge all cash deals when the JPY is at 30 YEAR LOWS. Japanese investors should have been shopping like crazy back when the yen was closer to 100 to 1 USD. They've lost serious purchasing power and now they are shopping while assets are at all time highs and their home currency is at generational lows. Classic Japan Inc move; too slow and declining into irrelevance.

As someone living in the US, we didn't even hear about this incident in US news. I find these days that tells you US mainstream media was instructed to not promote this story.

Japan claiming to digitize anything since the Sony CD-Walkman is a joke and everyone here knows it.

X is the last major free speech platform in America. Even Japan times is a satellite of the New York Times and is deeply rooted in the American approved propaganda machine. Try it, read the NYT one morning, and then read the JT. It's the same language, same stories, same everything when it comes to USA news. X is actual free speech. You can say whatever you want, no matter who you are offending. Try that on FB, IG, Reddit or the NYT comment board. The comment will never make it to daylight, that's censorship and America is on its way CCP levels of it.

Just like the Americans, the Japanese are owned and controlled by their big domestic corporations. Their passive, polite nature is walked upon by the likes of Mitsubishi Estate, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Hulic, Nomura, etc. The gov't is 100% on board with the arrangement and does nothing but pay lipservice to these injustices. Cutting down thousands of trees in a city with a severe lack of green spaces, only to put more concrete, steel and pavement... and the gov't wants people to care about climate change or their "green agenda"? What a joke. Tokyo is less and less interesting every year since I've been living there in the early 2000s. I now only view it as a place of work and have no intention to live there with my family. I will choose somewhere far away that is greener for them to live.

Japan's top income national tax rate is 45% (above 40 million yen aka $289k). The second tier is 40% above 18 million yen (just USD 130K!). After you pay your national income tax, then you need to pay a 10% resident tax. Then there is a 2.1% Great Tohoku earthquake surtax. So income tax is roughly 46%-56% for higher earers that would be "middle to upper-middle class" in the USA. Then there are 14.355% in social insurance taxes (there is a ~16.7 million yen cap on this to be fair). Then despite the "national health insurance", you still pay 30% of all healthcare costs. Then there is 10% consumption tax on everything you buy. If you die, your heirs will be taxed 40-55% on any substanstial wealth above $1 million. It's clear from the above that Japan govt, through the various web of taxatation, is taking more than 100% of the income of its highest earning people. And despite all of this, Japan has the worst fiscal debt to GDP ratios in the entire developed world.

And they want MORE taxes? Enough is enough Japan.

Unless your talent is specific to Japan, why would anyone with the skill set to earn a JPY 40 million+ base salary choose to permanently work in Japan where the income tax on that level of income is 50%. You can take the same salary in Singapore and walk away paying less than 14%. Sure, Japan is a "nicer" place to live than Singapore, but if you're still in the wealth accumulation phase of your life/career, Japan is NOT the place to do it as a salary worker with no tax breaks. As an entrepreneur, you can deduct darn near everything and pay near 0% tax, but that wouldn't qualify you for this (not so) "special" visa.

Aside from this seemingly minor incident, there is nothing reciprocal about PRC’s relationship with the rest of this planet. They want to buy your land, but you cannot buy theirs. They want to enter your market freely, but you cannot enter theirs (without a local partner who has free reign to control and steal your technology rather than commit to R&D to build their own. They are happy to sell us endless junk made in sweatshops with a massive ecologically damaging footprint, but don’t want to change their human rights or climate policies. Simply put, nothing about PRC says to me that we can coexist over the long run unless we completely decouple. So far, our relationship has been a one way street where they primarily take and only give when forced or when giving benefits in them taking more in the end.

Japan is turning into a place to be raided by wealthier Asian business players seeking to capitalize on the declining yen and declining purchasing power of the Japanese people. The government seems to have no issues at all with this, but the relationship is starting to become "lords and serfs"-like. Just look at the number of large portfolios of rental apartments that have been purchased in recent years and is perhaps one of the most sought after strategies for cash flow generation in the entire world at the moment. Foreign capital (and the largest Japanese corporations) have essentially become the landlord for salarymen across Japan's major cities. Each year demanding higher rents despite stagnating wages. It's a grim picture of a nation getting poorer, ever so slowly.

Commercial RE professional here - In case you're not paying attention this is the most clear sign yet to get out of the Tokyo residential property bubble... it's totally over inflated and entirely predicated on increasing rents. First you have zero wage growth for decades within the rank and file salarymen and second you now have a gov't initiative to stem the flow of population growth in Tokyo... time to EXIT that trade if you or your company is in it.

Yaesu side is the wrong side of the tracks. Dorchester or not, the choppy land ownership on the east side of Tokyo station will take decades to consolidate and then you'll just have one bland Roppongi Hills after another. Isn't anyone getting sick of these yet? Hikarie, Hibiya Midtown, Toronomon Hills, Kyobashi Garden Square, "Torch Tower", THEY ARE ALL THE SAME.

NEWSFLASH: Shiny developments are not what makes Tokyo an interesting place. The more this real estate bubble goes on, the worse Tokyo gets.

@kurisupisu find Very simple. Get a job in Singapore. Find a company that seeks your talents apply. Assuming English is a fluent language for you, there's 10x more high paying employment opportunities in Singapore vs Tokyo. Will you have to move, probably, but that's the cost of securing your financial freedom.

QE endless money printing only works when everyone else is doing it.

Given the plummeting yen down -35% YTD vs the USD, combined with a whopping 55% top tax bracket, high healthcare and pension "tax" (that combined add up to another 10% that you'll never get back), there is virtually no reason to choose Japan as an expat destination if you are a foreigner with no connection to the country looking to gain financial freedom outside of Japan. I chose to leave Tokyo during the extremely xenophobic Covid policies of 2020-2022 and relocate my source of income to Singapore. Between the 50% higher wage in Singapore, the 70% reduction taxes, and a 35% gain in currency my take home pay is up nearly 4x in yen terms. Get out while you still can folks, Japan is a nice place to visit, but a horrible place to stake your financial future and yen at 150 is just the beginning -- it can and will go back to 200+ if the BOJ does not loosen it's Yield Curve Control (YCC) policy.

If it wasn't already obvious, the Japanese gov't is slow playing the reopening to tourists because inbound tourism is not popular with the Japanese people.

Outside of someone with direct business interests in tourism, the Japanese people don't ever want to see mass tourism here on the scale it was in 2019 - and I don't blame them. It was too much, too fast and risked destroying the places heavily frequented by tourists. Selling out to tourism under the perceived threat of losing GDP is not worth it. Just ask Thailand, the more you cater to the masses, the worse it gets. Keep tourism to Japan exclusive, high-end and overall low in quantity. It's better for the local people and the environment.

Pooh Bear's sad someone else got attention instead of him. What a loser.

most of the leaders of the South Pacific banana republics would sell out there own country for a few million bucks and a luxury condo in Singapore or London. This is child's play for CCP and China well understands the benefits of splashing out some illicit payments. Why does the West try to play a transparent game of checkers where they telegraph their every move and feel a need to justify it to the media? If the West doesn't start playing chess with the Chinese and thinking 30-50 years ahead instead of their next election, the West will lose control of the world in the long run.

The cure for high prices is high prices.

End the arrival quarantines now.

4 years playing in Japan on a high end expense account at the US tax payers' expense. A handsome reward for his loyalty to the failing Democratic party and for running the notoriously corrupt, and also failing despite taxes that will make your nose bleed, City of Chicago (just check the city's net migration stats if you disagree).

What an utter insult to the importance of Japan and its people to the Biden admin.

"...until AT LEAST the end of February"

missing these key words implies borders reopen end of Feb. False.

More people told me they had covid this week than the entire rest of the pandemic. This is going to hit almost eveyone and vaccines do not stop this variant whatsoever yet everyone says it is no more than a mild cold. Time to end 14 day quarantine in all countries and especially Japan. Covid is burning itself out and quarantine is pointless now that omicron is inside your borders.

@El Rata which metaverse and NFTs you selling? Have some more fake real estate or digital apes I could buy or have they all sold out? haha

after just one local transmission, the entire concept of a border closure is illogical and absurd. Trying to ban something that's already within your borders and spreading. Prediction: in February Japan will hit new peaks of cases, and it won't have anything to do with foreigners.

Japan treats its so-called "permanent-residents" like temporarily visiting trash. After 13 years, I grew tired of it and the Covid foreign resident "lockout" last year was the last straw. I'm still a PR holder, but I moved my job and tax residency to Singapore in 2021. I'll never formally work in Japan again and they will miss out on millions of dollars in tax revenue if they hadn't made it so difficult to be a foreigner in their country. No hard feelings Japan, it's just business - and I as a high earning tax payer was just another customer you lost.

The goalposts have officially been moved ladies and gentlemen.

Once a single case of Omicron has successfully crossed the Japanese border (and it already has), the entire concept of shutting the border is pointless. The variant they fear is already amongst us. Like every other variant before it, detection lags too far behind detection to stop it.

After years of Western "cancel culture" taking down everything from comedians, to business people, athletes to historical figures one has to ask... how on earth does global cancel culture not take aim at the Chinese Communist Party. It has committed eggregious crimes against humanity including mainly its own citizens, but it also is a group of homogenous Han Chinese men with virtually no real authority in the hands of China's women or its many minority groups. It's simply disgusting and hypocritical that the world of woke, cancel culture internet ethusiasts decides to give these people a "pass". Even more mind-boggling to me is that the Western companies that kowtow to the CCP in order to do business in China also are getting a pass. The irony is that these companies are some of the most outspoken and progressive on western issues such as Black Lives Matter and liberal American politics: (I'm looking at you Nike, Apple, Google, Airbnb all Beijing 2022 Olympic sponsors and many more), but these companies have absolutely nothing to say on the human rights violations committed by the CCP. Simply hypocritical, shameful and disgusting.