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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Yes. A seldom discussed aspect of this is the ability to open a business in a residential area.

Many of these small self-owned shop are the first floor of a house or building, and more often than not the owner lives upstairs, so it's less of an issue to keep it open with low frequentation as they're no paying extra rent or suffering hours of transit to get there.

That also tremendously helps with the community aspect and customers putting a face on the shop and staff as they'll meet them in their daily life as well.

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I lived in Tokyo and it was years ago, so I don't know if I'm describing the current situation. It was very common to see largish buildings in residential areas which would have some barely functioning retail shop on the ground floor. Some elderly relative of the building owner would maintain the shop, and would have practically nothing to do since the shop got almost no business. I heard the whole motivation for this setup was that the building owner got a significant tax break for keeping the shop open. Income from the shop was not considered.

That's not a bad thing though. It allows for the opportunity to keep it going at worst, at best, maybe they can try new things or hold on until it does become profitable.

Either way, it works out to help keep the environment welcoming through culture conservation.

yeah, I like the vibe of these shops too but maybe there’s a bit of japan fetishization for a kind of commerce that anywhere else wouldn’t make sense to have.

One of the reasons for the Japanese economy’s stagnation over the last 20+ years is a lot of government spending on things that are not contributing to a healthy economy. I’m thinking about huge infrastructure projects but I’m sure this extends too many other aspects of how the economy is run.

Like extending the Shinkansen to Hokkaido?

That comes to mind anyways as "Big Infrastructure".

That at least has some economic justification; Tokyo-Sapporo is one of the busiest air routes in the world, and more trains means free slots at chronically congested Haneda.

Wasteful Big Infrastructure would more be doubling down on the seawalls that did not work in 2011 in Tohoku; in some cases those seawalls actively made things worse.

The Bridge to Hamada bridge to "nowhere" in The Sea of Japan, is a better example.

The book "Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan" by Alex Kerr covers this well. It's over 20 years old but not much has really changed. The Japanese government is still engaging in major capital misallocation through unnecessary infrastructure projects, and they allow insolvent companies to continue operating.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781466804500/dogsanddemons

Also gives Grandma or Grandpa something to do. Keeps multi-generational families together.

Seems economically inefficient though that’s not really the goal.

Japanese families are largely not multigenerational in the same house.

Coresidence of parents and children have fallen in half over two decades from 50% to 24%: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/62/5/S3...

Here's the wikipedia article about elderly dying in Japan and being undiscovered due to being lonely and forgotten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

Thanks for sharing! My experience is dated, and (like everywhere) Japan evolves.

Japan is changing very rapidly due to its demographic transition.

It is close to 50 years after the fall of fertility rate below replacement in Japan; so soon there will be increasing numbers of elders that not only do not have grandchildren, but don't have children either.

I have a weird interest in houses around my city that clearly used to have businesses in them when people didn't travel as far all the time. Some operate as cofffee shops, small specialty retail, or services like therapists/accountants. But others are fully homes now, just with a front room area that was aimed at having customers and sometimes a residence in the back or above. They feel like little markers of another time.

You may have heard (I read it somewhere) that replacing the aging shop-owners with a new, younger generation is often met with a loss of customers.

Maybe it was regarding a sushi restaurant that I saw this about? The young'en had to apprentice for some time for the customers to get used to the new face before the owner could hand over the reigns. Maybe you need the old customers to age-out, new customers to age-in, ha ha.

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