good luck trying to convince your company to pay for your multi-hour bullet train commute from Takayama or Nagasaki
The issue is the centralization pressure. Why doesn't that company have offices in those cities? Why wouldn't work people do in those cities have sufficient value to be justifiable?
The deeper reasons
do come back to attitudes towards work, lack of innovation in work culture, and excessive deference to the collective (usually the company) over the individual. The centralization of amenities is just a byproduct of that, so the fact train stations are more convenient for everything still misses the point:
why is that? There is excessive and injurious centralization pressure in Japan.
The small living spaces are just one symptom of the problem, but they also indicate the other parts of it. You cannot raise a family in a box, and you couldn't move outside the city with your family to get access to cheaper living (to accommodate them), because your job restricts it.
And that's ignoring some of the truly disgusting attitudes regarding transfers. I knew a newly married man transferred
overseas, and
without his wife, and he just took it. I explained to him that in my country, that would cause an automatic quit-on-the-spot, a boss doing something like that would destroy his reputation, and possibly even risk his safety if he did it to the wrong guy, but this Japanese guy couldn't even comprehend any of that. They just view themselves as powerless extensions of their companies.
suggesting that all issues regarding the availability and cost of housing could be solved if only the Japanese people weren't mindless office drones is just grossly oversimplifying and stereotyping the situation
Yes, in my opinion, it would fix most of them. If even 10% more started to think for themselves, express
their wants and needs, and
started to say no, all of the other problems would start to dissipate.
Problems with availability and cost of housing in a spacious country with rapidly receding population is just a sign of fundamental cultural defects that have nothing to do with real estate. And stereotypes are just pattern recognition.
I suppose to be constructive, I should raise a few ideas as to what they could do:
- Improve the focus on skills and results. Skills & results-based reputation empower the individual (decentralizing), company loyalty empowers the company (centralizing).
- Provincial rebellion (not literally). I.e. provinces and cities reducing their support and co-operation with Tokyo.
- Reducing reliance on university as a test of people's worth. Businessmen could start applying their own skills & knowledge tests, rather than deferring to degrees and big names.
- Change the child-birth incentivization schemes to tax percentage-point based rather than lump sum, and increase them. I'd imagine even the stodgy old conservative men in government could agree to that: "make a lifetime tax payer, get a lifetime tax discount".
- Increase proportions of land-value or property taxes, and devolve more income tax rate setting power to the provinces
- Get the emperor involved. He's always been a cultural leader of some variety, even back in the days of the Shogunate. If he starts handing out medals for family achievements (like in Russia), and sets out his vision for how Japanese people could fix their problems, they'd listen.
- Adopt technology. Japan is high tech and has high speed internet, and the internet is a decentralizing pressure. But they're not adopting it enough because they still place too much value in the big, long, face-to-face meeting, when the rest of the developed world sees meetings as a waste and actively fights against them.
