Small, mountainous, resource-poor island at the far end of the world meant few were interested in conquering it. That meant Japan had the luxury of maintaining their culture unhindered for a very long period of time.

The Japanese royal family is the longest continuous royal bloodline on record. Oral records say its 2600 years old while archives exist from the 6th century.

For the past hour, the PR or Issues pages would load with 0 items. Occasionally, there’s an error toast mentioning ‘failure to fetch data’.

Oh, it's even more fun than that. If you sit there hitting F5, sooner or later you will get a proper page load. So some small subset of the servers is vending the correct data, and the rest not

Many banks don’t even provide bank books anymore.

The only physical thing I’ve got from my bank is an ATM card.

Property taxes on land zoned for residential use are 6x more expensive if left bare. That’s why Japan has an akiya plague, because even a dilapidated building will keep taxes down.

I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.

https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/faq/kurashi/1001633/10016...

You're right. I'm not sure how I got mislead or misremembered the dynamic here. I thought there was a specific clear tax benefit but doesn't seem so.

There are tax benefits for new buildings for a limited time so maybe that's what I was thinking about and became confused.

Leaving aside your mistake, you raise a great point. Why are there so many empty lots in central Tokyo for sale? It makes no sense financially! Maybe they assume they can tear-down the existing structure and sell it faster than the tax penalty will hit?

A problem with privatising the railways is that unprofitable routes, ie rural villages, are deprioritised or simply shut down.

My village gets 1 train every 1.5 hours, and none between 3pm and 7pm. For several years now, there has been discussion of shutting down the upper half of the route.

So every household has 2 or more cars.

That's the same in most of Japan. Most people who over-idealize rail transit in Japan only visited or stayed short term within the Yamanote Line.

It's a great country, but using Central Tokyo as a frame of reference as most people on HN do is the equivalent of using Manhattan or Central London as your frame of reference for the US or UK.

Major urban areas like Osaka, Nagoya, and even most of Greater Tokyo are extremely car dependent with plentiful parking as well - let alone smaller towns.

The web client has a select all option, and when one or more emails is selected, two buttons pop up. Delete forever, mark as not spam.

I check my spam folder regularly and it has been this way for as far as I can remember.

I read it multiple times, read your comment and clicked on the article and I still got it wrong.

I saw Robot ear cats and couldn’t make sense of it. But clicking in the article and seeing the title in huge whatever sizes fonts made it click.

I think it’s the small font sizes in HN causing our brains to ‘fill in the blanks’.

Agree. My neighbour is too old to farm and his descendants aren't interested. He has offered to let me use his land for free but I just can’t get interested. Even just taking care of a few potted plants is too much for me.

Could also be Singapore or Taiwan.

Taiwan has waaaay more people, like 20ish million I think?

Singapore has a similar requirement called an Exit Permit. It may have changed, I don’t really know or care anymore. But the conscription was a huge driver for me to emigrate as soon as I could. I left the country 2 weeks after finishing my military service.