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I live in rural northern Japan so... not great? Everything keeps concentrating to Tokyo. We were promised "work from anywhere in Japan" and "remote-first", but the company tried to revoke that. A couple of us joined a union and are fighting it, but most people just rolled over and took it. Still don't know what things will look like come next year.
There are very few remote backend software engineering jobs in Japan now. The situation is pretty dire. No US or Canadian company wants me in this time zone (even if it allowed them to have people available around the clock). No one wants to sponsor a visa in another country.
I have a small farm, but it's not profitable. Most of the other jobs around here are forestry, fishery, and factory and pay less than half of what I make now which my family cannot survive on. Things are rusty and falling apart all over in the countryside.
Here in Tokyo, I feel things are pretty rough financially too. I cannot imagine how hard it is in inaka. It’s quite sad that everything seems to be pulled towards a few cities. This feels different than America where the draw is to bigger local cities whereas here it’s mostly to only the biggest cities.
I really wish I could go back to my northern (urban) Japan cost of living, though. Not sure how things are now over a decade later, but I was paying 700円 per month for cellular + data, 2000円 per month on gigabit internet, and 33000円 per month for a 1LDK apartment...
Excluding food and utilities, that was just a hair over 200 Euro per month for expenses in today's currency (but conversion rate may also be more favorable to Euro today than back then).
I have a cell provider with a pretty small data limit, but I almost never use it. They no longer even take new customers. ~2400/mo. My internet is with NTT and fiber to the home at 5500 a month + servicer fee -> about 6500 a month after price increases in 2027 they announced.
When I lived in a sharehouse in 2013, it was over double what you were paying and about 12 minutes from a station in suburban tokyo. My first apartment about 8 minutes away was 115,000 ish plus all utils just inside the 23ku and was 33sqm IIRC.
Cost of living including groceries and such have gone up like crazy since corona. Everything is undergoing shrinkflation and raises aren't keeping up unless you're at a really good company.
Even living in the countryside now, costs are still way over what they were for Tohoku. My prices here are more than even Tokyo when I moved here for a lot of groceries and such.
My mortgage on its own is over 85,000 in the deep countryside almost an hour walk to a station. I'm sure apartments are cheaper, but this is on a used house built in '96 IIRC (though with some rennovation and a new roof not long before I bought it).
I can't day I'm very well-informed on the issue as an outsider, but I've heard that the central government (at least in the recent past) have tried to encourage people to move out into inakas in an attempt to slow down or even reverse the migration trend. Some carrots, like housing subsidies if I remember correctly, are even offered, but there hasn't been many sticks, eg actually encouraging able firms to keep their jobs remote, from what I know.
So I guess my question is, has this sentiment / tone changed from the government (esp since the LDP has had a few leadership changes in the last few years)? I did hear of the intention to have a second capital, likely in Osaka, but that seems only tangentially related.
That may sometimes be the case. However, companies like mine (and no I won't name it since I don't want to be sued) say "work from anywhere in Japan" and then go "J/K, we now require you in the office with no relocation expenses and a monthly travel budget of 20k JPY (which is less than a single trip for me which also takes 8 hours round trip with buffer). My union is fighting this and we are willing to go to court since I was never required to be in the office except for about 3 days of orientation. The results are spotty in cases like this with some courts favoring the contract which, as a permanent employee, has traditionally means the company more or less owns you. On the other hand, there are protections against undue hardship which is one way in which we would fight it. However, because of things like this, no one is willing to move to the middle of nowhere with zero job opportunities.
I got a subsidy to move with my wife and buy a house. 1.3 million JPY to be paid back if we leave in < 5 years. Families could get more. We used it to buy a used car since I was a bit optimistic in thinking my motorbike and taxis would get us by. Almost no taxis after 6pm without prior reservation. No easy rental places right in the area to go that route when we would need a vehicle.
The lip service doesn't change, but concrete actions, especially for people not doing low-paid manual labor, is missing. Add to that that companies still abuse laws and hope not to get caught, it's worthless. Much like many places in the US, we have lots of other immigrants, particularly from SE Asia, moving in to do ag work as well as nurses and carers for the elderly that are in high demand.
Yeah, that's a thing. The LDP was trying to pay back the loyalty of those that worked with them. I don't have any problem in principal with Osaka functioning more like Tokyo in terms of governance (though this is not definitely Osaka last time I heard, but I don't follow it closely), though I don't know what this accomplishes other than people saying "yay, Osaka is great!" feel better and maybe solve some redundancy (which is not necessarily bad). Then again, I'm not following closely.
My problem with things like this: Osaka also has big natural disasters; the world is getting hotter all the time, why not do this somewhere more north; it's still performative more than anything as best I can tell (though I'm just a dude who can't vote living on the other side of the country). It doesn't actually decentralize and take pressure off the real estate market and other things that are facing increasing difficulty, and causing foreigner backlash (specifically AirBnB-type places and (often allegedly Chinese) illegal short-term accommodations buying up buildings illegally).
I'm sorry to hear about all that. I hope you and your union can win the case, if not find a path for you and your wife to go through the ordeal in one piece, cause it sounds like you're basically trapped financially because of the repayment clause of the subsidy.
I imagine this is also partly the responsibility of the local government, given that they would be responsible for building the town to properly support the expected population growth? Though it also seems like it would be difficult for them to do much in really rural places in the short term, where there already is a lack of the necessary structures to provide these jobs, not to mention sustain these structures themselves.
And it's fine not to dox yourself by naming your employer. This sort of rug-pulling move is reminiscent of companies here in North America though. To be fair, given that remote working is a fairly new phenomenon, it's understandable that there simply isn't a lot of protections in place against such nasty behaviours. If the different levels of governments want to decentralize to better spread the population around the country though, perhaps I'm being naive, but actually encouraging remote working, and making it a safe route for people to take, would be a really good path forward for that.
Thank you for sharing your story and perspective. I'm sure it's been quite hard on you, so hope the conflict will be resolved soon, and satisfactorily.