alt Hacker News>closed due to depopulation
Meanwhile, there's more people in the city of Tokyo than nearly the whole continent of Australia :) Japan's population is concentrating into a handful of big cities. I mean, who wants to live in a small town when there are endless options for shopping, restaurants, etc in the big city? It's not like in the US where big cities are dangerous. There's not much of a positive tradeoff for choosing small town life in Japan. Maybe you think you want to be a big land baron as all Americans seem to desire, but then you find out that undeveloped land in Japan is heavily taxed with property taxes. If you are not doing something very productive with Japan's limited land, Japan wants you to move your arse off it and let someone with a plan work it. Anyway, as rural areas empty out, the local rail lines close. JR is however building lots of bullet trains to connect the big cities. There is a new bullet train line opening soon between Shin-Hakodate and Sapporo for instance. It will probably be extended from Sapporo up to Asahikawa after that.
I love Tokyo (I spent eight months in Kawasaki in 2010), but I can see the appeal of living in a smaller place in Japan (though I’d personally be hesitant to live in a small, isolated town with little or no public transportation). Crowded trains and long lines can get tiring after a while.
I spent last summer in Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture; I was a visiting researcher at Toyohashi University of Technology. While Toyohashi is not a small town by any means, it is far smaller than Tokyo. I found it nice for day-to-day living. Not crowded at all, and I found the bus service to be good; not world class, but comprehensive and ran frequently enough to be useful. It had plenty of grocery stores and department stores for everyday living. If I needed something unavailable in Toyohashi, Nagoya wasn’t too far away, and if I needed to be in Tokyo, I could get there in 90 minutes on a Hikari train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. I’d do it again; in fact, I’m going back to Toyohashi in a few weeks for another monthly stay.