All while just 3 hours away by car, beautiful houses are crumbling into dust. You literally can get them for the price of the land tax, and there are even companies that specialize in finding them.
Ah yes, a micro-apartment the same size as the average American kitchen [1], how affordable!
For comparison, Seattle WA has a minimum wage around 2.5x higher than Tokyo. Here is a larger apartment [2] that is only 1.33x more expensive than your Tokyo broom closet.
Go ahead and find something more akin to the American sized apartments (500sq+ for 1 bd) and you'll see that the prices are almost the same, with much lower wages across the board.
