Home > Focus on Japan 2011 > Snow Day

Snow Day

February 11th, 2011

It’s a national holiday in Japan today (National Foundation Day), and the first snow day in Tokyo this winter (late again). I’ve commented before about how even a little snow will shut things down in Tokyo. Back in Toyama, where it really snows, where we’d get a meter or two on the ground sometimes, we’d laugh at news footage of Tokyo being paralyzed by a few centimeters, watching video of people on the street struggling to walk straight on icy patches, and train lines being shut down right and left. In fact, this nearly nixed a flight back to America for me once, as it snowed earlier than usual (in the first or second week of December) about a decade ago, dropping several centimeters just on the morning I was to leave. Half the train lines in Tokyo shut down.

Today, it doesn’t seem too bad. Frankly, I like snow. A lot better than winter rain, that’s for sure.

2011-02-11-Snowday-500

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  1. matthew
    February 11th, 2011 at 21:31 | #1

    Hi Luis! Happy Foundation Day!
    oh and your ultram friends are at it again.

  2. Troy
    February 12th, 2011 at 09:30 | #2

    How’s the place working out?

    I remember living in Iogi in 1993 that the Seibusen commute was a bit tough. Maybe the Ikebukuro line is better. I was watching a youtube video of a kyuko going from Ikebukuro to Shakujii in just 10 minutes, that seems faster than what it was in the 90s.

    I miss living in Tokyo ||

    Then again if I move back I’ll probably miss California just as much, though I guess Tokyo has gotten more livable now compared to the 90s.

    Gonna be 70F tomorrow . . .

  3. Luis
    February 12th, 2011 at 11:10 | #3

    Matthew:

    Thanks. I know that sometime soon, maybe on break, I will have to essentially rebuild the site instead of repeatedly going in and flushing the SQL modules.

    Troy:

    This place is fine. We’re looking for a house around here, in fact. The Seibu Ikebukuro line is pretty good, to be honest. Hibarigaoka is an express stop, though the local trains aren’t too bad, either. The nice thing is that you get trains going straight through to the Yurakucho and Fukutoshin lines several times an hour. There is ample shopping nearby, too, so it’s a pretty good area.

  4. Troy
    February 12th, 2011 at 15:07 | #4

    Seibu Ikebukuro line was the line I used when I was FOB, staying in Shakujii.

    I remember the wonder as if it were yesterday and not 18+ years ago.

    Probably not a bad time to buy now. You can’t wait too much longer since they want you to pay off the loan by a certain age.

    If you had mega-cash it might make sense to wait to see if interest rates start going up, which would put downward pressure on home prices, but since you need the regular loan, whatever rates do is largely orthogonal to the monthly amount you’re going to pay I think.

    The Flex 35 loan look like a pretty good deal, compared to renting.

    Though somebody said that rents are actually going down now. That’s the one danger my fixated understanding of economics gives me — that if the gov’t starts raising taxes significantly, at the end of the day this widespread loss of takehome pay will come out of rents (and land values).

    BTW, what is your current tax burden (national/ward/social/health), if you have the time to figure it out?

  5. Troy
    February 15th, 2011 at 16:02 | #5

    Hey I made two population charts:

    Japan, 2003 vs 2020:
    http://i.imgur.com/CTPqn.png

    US, 2003 vs 2020:
    http://i.imgur.com/ehBBZ.png

    Each chart compares the 2003 population to the 2020 one.
    Solid gray is common population, solid color is added population in 2020, and half-transparent color is lost population in 2020.

    ISTM that Japan’s situation in 2020 isn’t all that bad compared with the US’s.

    They’re going to have double the 80+ population, which is immense, but otherwise the baby boom doesn’t look that bad, with maybe 5M more people in their 70s than 2003.

    They will be losing an immense amount of 20-somethings, tho. Everyone from age 0-40 is going away, but the losses in the 25-34 cohorts look particularly pronounced — I count 7M people leaving that cohort between 2003 and 2020.

    I guess the next generation of freeters might be able to get a real job, maybe.

    Strangely, there’s a small island of growth of people in their 40s — this is the baby boom echo of the early 1970s.

    The US just seems to have an immense amount of people hitting retirement for the next 30 years. We’re not losing population at the lower end, but given our unemployment, that’s not necessarily a good thing!

    then we have the entire 60-74 cohort basically doubling between 2003 and 2020. Extreme!

  6. Luis
    February 17th, 2011 at 10:15 | #6

    Probably not a bad time to buy now. You can’t wait too much longer since they want you to pay off the loan by a certain age.
    Oh yeah. We actually tried once to get a shorter-term loan, but the bank would have none of it. But so long as we’re allowed to pay off faster than the loan calls for, I’m OK with it.

    The Flex 35 loan look like a pretty good deal, compared to renting.
    That’s really the thing. We pay about 160,000 per month in rent now; a home with about the same amount of floor space would be 110,000 per month in loan payments. We’d have to seriously scale down and get a much smaller apartment for the same amount. Plus, with the home purchase, we’re effectively paying rent to ourselves, and will have something of value to show at the end.

    BTW, what is your current tax burden (national/ward/social/health), if you have the time to figure it out?
    Oh, man, I barely have time to type this! Maybe sometime else, I’m afraid…

    Right now, we’re in the process of applying; we did so before, but were turned down because I didn’t have permanent residency. Now I do, so we’ll see how it’s going.

    One thing I am concerned about” earthquake insurance. It came up in a recent meeting with the real estate agent as one of the costs we should consider. The problem: a friend of mine, years ago, warned me that Japanese law allows for insurance companies to basically run away with your money if there’s a big enough quake. Say, for example, that we get the next Great Kanto Earthquake–that’s really what the insurance would be about–and Tokyo is devastated. My friend told me that should the damage be too great, then the insurance companies would pay nothing–zero. Not a single yen. They could just walk away from it.

    So I have to wonder–first, is that true? Because if it is, then it pretty much makes such insurance close to worthless, as the giant quake is the one we’d most likely need the insurance for. And second, what would be a way around that? Foreign insurance firms? Would they even cover insurance on quake damage for homes in Japan?

  7. Troy
    February 17th, 2011 at 11:17 | #7

    Rent vs buy is still a tough decision, tho, rents and land values might be going down from here.

    Or not. I have little to no idea what’s going to happen this decade or next. Only theories informing me what might happen, but theory can be trumped by new facts as they appear.

    As for EQ insurance, no clue either. Wikipedia does have this:

    関東大震災クラスの地震が発生しても全額支払可能と想定されている

    http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/地震保険

    but if I’m reading that right and the damage fund is limited to 5.5兆, split 1 million ways, that’s only 550万 per claim.

  8. Troy
    February 17th, 2011 at 11:30 | #8

    Then again, only 1/6th of Tokyo carries EQ insurance, so there won’t be 1 million claims. Apparently the payout is limited to 30-50% of the building value, so I can see how a Kobe-style catastrophe with $600B in damage would only result in $50B in payouts

    That sucks. Paying premiums to only get ~40% of the money you’d need to rebuild doesn’t seem like a wise use of that money. Better off buying some older place and then not worrying about it.

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