There was an earlier post on here about municipalities in Japan offering abandoned houses for practically nothing. And I have to admit, ever since seeing that, the fantasy of building a retreat in "tropical" Kagoshima has been a constant in my mind ;)
From what I've been able to glean by reading, smaller cities and especially villages in Japan have vicious social ostracism, a lack of good jobs, and no remarkable educational institutions.
In 1995 I showed my co-workers in Japan the listing for my Grandma's house: a beautiful house on a double corner lot for $20k in rural Saskatchewan Canada. They were dumb founded. That a similar situation would occur in Japan twenty four years later seems unbelievable.
