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Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, all of this can be summed up as:

"trying to have your cake and eat it too".

Nothing more than stubborn/incompetent administration of a dying village refusing to let go of the ways of thinking and lifestyle that existed 50 years ago.

That's not to say the lifestyle is bad or obsolete. It may exist again 50, or 100, or 1000 years in the future. But it doesn't exist now, and if you want to actually attract people there and not do pointless virtue signaling, you have to change these conditions. Most of them are terrible disincentives.

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Having outsiders settle in with their ways seems a threat to their heritage. Believe it or not, locals are dead serious about it.

The Japanese society functions with a purpose of blending in, not standing out. If you play strictly by their rules, perhaps life is easy. Else you are always the outsider gaikokujin, who is looked at suspiciously very instinctively.

That's fine and I understand that these rules are aimed mostly at insiders, who are more willing to comply and have skin in the game of cultural heritage.

And perhaps life really is easy. But as someone mentioned in the thread, spending $100-200k USD to renovate a property AND to basically change your career to a farmer is completely out of the question for 99.9% of the population.

At beast you would get some incredibly wealthy hobbyists who adore Japanese cultural heritage, but judging their success realistically, it doesn't look like there's many takers, so my point still stands.

Maybe the downvoters should put their money where their mouth is and go spend a few million on restoration of these properties.

Time will only continue to reveal how unreasonable that mindset is.

The population will continue to age and shrink, so cultural norms will have to make way for that to ever change.

I have a friend of mixed Taiwanese/Japanese descent, fluent in Japanese. Living in Japan for over 10 years, striving to fit in, still an outsider.

Maybe it's harder for them because they look Japanese and don't get the leeway given to foreigners.

I agree... I'm shocked at how onerous the rules are.

I wonder what the true market price of these places would be, without all these restrictions.

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