alt.hn

5/3/2026 at 1:38:38 AM

Care homes and hotels in Japan shut as expansion strategy unravels

 https://www.newsonjapan.com/article/149075.php

by mikhael

5/3/2026 at 5:01:12 AM

Oh, a visa scam. Title is misleading.

by Animats

5/3/2026 at 2:21:03 PM

My old little home county/region in Sweden fell victim to a similar scam about 20 years ago. It also originated from China.

Use browser based translation tools on https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/smaland/fanerdun-1.

Lots of promised investments, naive local politicians (the same guy is still municipal councilor, gah), lack of critical thinking.

The end result was just a lot of Swedish/EU visas. They had been advertised for $20-30k per family in China. Oh, and also about 100 "investors" + families who had "paid for visas" but not received anything before it all crumbled.

by lysace

5/3/2026 at 2:57:47 PM

Mmm my browser tools fail on that page, what was the tldr regarding the visa scam? I am in China and there is a huge business scamming foreigners to open a business and get a work-residence permits. EDIT: see comments below, yeah, it seems a similar scam

by thenthenthen

5/3/2026 at 7:35:36 AM

> facilities were purchased for between 1 million yen and 5 million yen and resold to Chinese buyers for between 40 million yen and as much as 100 million yen depending on location

Those prices seem weird. They were buying entire care homes and hotels for less than the price of a car? I understand they come with obligations, but these businesses were apparently financially ok before the acquisition.

by jorams

5/3/2026 at 8:20:12 AM

I'm familiar with Japan and find it quite believable.

You may be familiar with the "akiya" phenomenon, where empty houses in the Japanese countryside are sold for a song. The same applies not just to residential homes, but to other buildings as well, and their price tag is very low for the same reason: the property has serious issues and/or has been vacant for years, and will require far more than the initial investment to make habitable.

Here's a fascinating blog post by someone who went poking around the ruins of one hot spring town (Kinugawa) that went through a particularly dramatic boom and bust cycle: https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/983/

This particular hotel at least appears to have been open until fairly recently, but Google reviews describe the "Showa-era" furnishings (read: 1980s at best), and it's on the fairly grim slate grey Kujukurihama beach 3.5 hours from Tokyo by train: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G53KWyCsmeUy8JyR9

by decimalenough

5/3/2026 at 5:34:25 PM

I get that there is undesirable real estate in Japan that gets sold "for a song".

But then how does it quickly get resold at 40x?

by acchow

5/3/2026 at 10:01:06 PM

> But then how does it quickly get resold at 40x?

Because the new "owners" are buying the Business Manager visa, not the actual property.

by overfeed

5/3/2026 at 5:44:23 PM

Performing 40 songs in exchange for a property does seem like serious effort...

by ludwik

5/3/2026 at 7:43:29 PM

Suckers who don't realize it's not worth what they're paying.

by LorenPechtel

5/3/2026 at 8:51:19 AM

This really is a great blogpost, I'm really glad you shared it.

by omcnoe

5/3/2026 at 8:37:09 AM

We are not taking about akiya here but actual businesses. A thriving business would never sell for one million yen.

by ekianjo

5/3/2026 at 8:39:27 AM

What makes you think these businesses are thriving? It's scams upon scams: the Japanese mastermind buys failing businesses on the cheap, pumps up the price and sells them to Chinese people, who then proceed to use them to essentially scam residence visas from the Japanese government.

by decimalenough

5/3/2026 at 12:35:18 PM

> these businesses are thriving

Maybe not thriving but they were paying salaries and bills before they were bought. They were not in a bankrupt state.

by ekianjo

5/3/2026 at 2:42:48 PM

Not bankrupt doesn’t mean the company is actually worth anything. A large number of tiny business are still in operation because the owner is willing to work at below market rates to keep it operating.

by Retric

5/3/2026 at 10:30:49 AM

[flagged]

by spking

5/3/2026 at 2:35:46 PM

Re the spikejapan blog: The author’s About page includes this line which describes my experience of the article very accurately, having bailed after a couple of minutes:

“It's a species of anti-blog, as there is no way that you'll get through a post if you suffer from any kind of attention-deficit disorder; even then, you may need a strong cup of coffee and an hour to kill.”

by foundart

5/3/2026 at 2:51:36 PM

Yeesh - interesting blog post, but terribly sophomoric prose, distracting and clumsy. The author is at least 40 and should know better.

by eudamoniac

5/4/2026 at 12:22:06 PM

I respect the attempt at belletristic writing, even if it falls a bit short. If they had an editor to rein in some of the thesaurus usage it’d be fine. Not everyone appreciates the style, though.

by antonvs

5/3/2026 at 7:38:42 AM

> Those prices seem weird.

I was thinking the same thing. In many parts of the world, even a failing / debt laden business would be worth much more than that.

by protimewaster

5/3/2026 at 12:11:56 PM

And yet companies file for bankruptcy and get liquidated all the time versus being bought.

by bob001

5/3/2026 at 11:05:50 AM

In at least some parts of the world real estate isn't the ridiculous "investment" it is in the US.

by colechristensen

5/3/2026 at 12:38:29 PM

Real estate in good location is an investment almost everywhere

Good location being the key here

I doubt a house the price of a new car qualifies as being in a good location.

Tokyo on the other hand… yeah I doubt you would see anything cheaper than couple million dollars there

by juleiie

5/3/2026 at 7:55:50 PM

Your straight up guessing with zero information is ridiculous.

The average apartment cost in Tokyo is a little north of $400k (USD), since the year 2000 or so the value of Tokyo apartments has appreciated somewhere around 3% per year. Apartment prices are ALMOST back to where they were in 1989.

by colechristensen

5/4/2026 at 12:51:21 PM

> Apartment prices are ALMOST back to where they were in 1989.

You mean when Japan was in an epic price bubble (ie: the imperial palace land alone was worth more than all of California) which was followed by decades of economic stagnation? I'd guess that has impacted their view on real estate to a somewhat unique degree in the world.

by bob001

5/3/2026 at 2:42:34 PM

There are a lot of unnamed in that article. This is not journalism.

by ElijahLynn

5/3/2026 at 7:30:52 PM

If any Japanese people read this: Who cares what they say you will lose out on refusing this mass migration. It's all bullshit. Protect yourselves. Your people and your culture and your country.

by Canada

5/3/2026 at 5:13:18 AM

This new business visa thing in Japan is just so so stupid. As if people with money can't wrangle up 300k to get the business visa and then just do nefarious things like this, all the while locking out potentially millions of hard working entrepreneurial types from all over the world who would actually make good citizens, and good honest money.

by bamboozled

5/3/2026 at 8:22:54 AM

Can you elaborate?

My understanding:

Before: Need $50k in bank, register business, sponsor yourself for a visa

Result - lots of people just abusing the system for a visa

After: Need $300k, must hire at least one local, must show a profit of $200k within 2 years. Must be reviewed by the government multiple times a year to show your business is serious

I can see some issues. If you want to start a company that requires a year or more of R&D before you can ship you're S.O.L.

by socalgal2

5/3/2026 at 12:02:43 PM

Yeah, if the foreign entrepreneur argument is that they're helping the Japanese economy and not just barely sustaining another person in japan then the new requirements seem exactly in line with that?

by bob001

5/3/2026 at 7:05:26 PM

I know several young people who have migrated to Japan and due to the low cost of starting a company ended up building great businesses with pretty serious revenue and employee ten to hundreds of staff. This wouldn’t have happened if they needed such a large amount of capital just to start.

The problem I see with the new rules are it just stops entrepreneurs and rewards rich money launders. The visa applications should considered based on merit and not just about capital.

by bamboozled

5/4/2026 at 12:53:14 PM

> The visa applications should considered based on merit and not just about capital.

If it has merit then you should have no trouble getting some investors lined up...

by bob001

5/3/2026 at 2:59:45 PM

This is also a scam in China, but you just need 10k USD. Well thats not gonna work anymore. If you bring 300-500k tho…

by thenthenthen

5/3/2026 at 8:47:32 AM

This new law is doing what it's suppose to do. You can't get a business visa for $300k in the US. You need $800k in a bad area or $1m in a good area to get an investment visa.

Why should Japan allow $30k? Doesn't make sense.

I had a friend who was looking to move to Japan and abuse this visa. The business was only there to get the visa with no intention of operating it.

I'm not Japanese and I don't live in Japan but even I think this new law makes more sense than previous.

by aurareturn

5/3/2026 at 10:39:50 AM

What is the demographic looking to immigrate to Japan. I’m surprised to hear Chinese as my outsider view was that China was as good if not better place to live compared to China, is it because they’re afraid of their government and want a liberal democracy instead?

Or is folks from poorer and more distressed countries looking to come to Japan.

by sashank_1509

5/3/2026 at 11:04:20 AM

Better passport for their kids, better and more reputable, internationally connected banking system to store their wealth. The latter bit is particularly important as China limits the amount of money one can send out of the country.

by SenHeng

5/3/2026 at 11:35:11 AM

How would this give a passport to their kids? Isn’t Japanese citizenship notoriously difficult to obtain?

by decafninja

5/3/2026 at 3:01:35 PM

It was always ridiculously easy to get Japanese citizenship. 5 years of residency, don’t break any laws including traffic, pay your bills on time. Done.

It has recently been changed so that you now require 10 years of residency.

https://www.turning-japanese.info/p/misinfo.html

by SenHeng

5/3/2026 at 5:41:30 PM

So is it 5 or 10 years? Another person responding in this same branch says it used to be 10 but is now 5.

by daneel_w

5/3/2026 at 6:22:53 PM

5 years. It's fairly easy to get. Sometimes it feels like half of the Beijing intelligentsia is in Tokyo now.

Lots of Chinese academics, engineers, investment bankers, and others shifted to Tokyo in the past few years. Even the kinds of salons and meetups you used to see at Tsinghua or Peking have almost entirely transplanted in Jimbocho based on my friends account.

by alephnerd

5/3/2026 at 3:11:15 PM

I think it’s probably easier and safer for a Chinese national to obtain Japanese citizenship than American citizenship.

If you’ve got ten years (or until recently, five) of residence and can pass the interview process, the acceptance rate for Japanese citizenship is something like 95%+.

On the other hand the process of getting American citizenship can run up to twenty years or more, it’s very expensive, and throughout the process the immigrant has few rights and can be deported for basically no reason, up to the moments before the naturalization ceremony.

If I were a freshman at Fudan thinking about my exit strategy, I know which one I would pick.

by TimorousBestie

5/4/2026 at 12:48:28 PM

20 years ago Singapore was handing out PRs and citizenships to Chinese students like candy. All of my classmates got PR a few years out of school, then citizenship again 2 years later.

And so many of them immediately moved on to the US.

by SenHeng

5/3/2026 at 2:15:46 PM

China cracks down on corruption from time to time and lots of rich Chinese got their riches through corruption, so they're always looking for places to stash their ill gotten gains, their family and an offramp for themselves.

Helping launder this dirty Chinese money is a huge business here in BC (Canada) and across the world.

by dismalaf

5/3/2026 at 5:08:48 PM

Too late to edit but to add to my comment, it's also the reason this segment of Chinese buyer will massively overpay for real estate, visa pathways, etc...

Western governments also look the other way since these people are defrauding China (our rival) and bringing money to the west.

by dismalaf

5/3/2026 at 7:16:09 PM

I feel like that’s the kind of person this new Japanese business will benefit most.

Rich money launderers who will enter at higher price point and plan to run shell businesses.

by bamboozled

5/3/2026 at 7:11:30 PM

I had a friend who was looking to move to Japan and abuse this visa. The business was only there to get the visa with no intention of operating it.

So this invalidates what ? I know many foreign people Who moved to Japan, work harder than many Japanese I know and run great businesses but it was only possible due to the low initial outlay for the visa.

If your friend came here he still had to pay taxes, present income statements and pay pension , if he didn’t his visa would be revoked. The new rule is to appease the xenophobes at voting time. It’s as simple as that. What will happen ? Rich people who will actually come here an abuse the system will be the ones they get to stay… this is country with a rapidly depreciating population and currency valuation remember…

A smarter solution is to evaluate the visa application. based on the intentions of the person wanting to start she business. Not locking out large swathes of people.

by bamboozled

5/4/2026 at 8:10:32 AM

If the US lowers investment visa to $30k, I’m sure many comers will work very hard.

So why doesn’t the US do it? Why doesn’t every country give you a visa for $30k business investment?

Japanese people are saying they no longer want mass low quality immigrants. They want fewer, higher quality ones. Nothing wrong with that. All their recent immigration policies point to toward this theme. It’s their country. Let them do what they want without calling them xenophobes.

by aurareturn

5/3/2026 at 11:58:43 AM

Does Japan need more small businesses owned by foreigners (that make so little money as to be useless for economic growth) or do they actually need more foreigners to change the adult diapers of their ever aging population?

by bob001

5/3/2026 at 7:23:41 PM

Buddy, when your population is in decline at Japan levels I think it makes sense to have all the businesses you can get. I’ll also say compared to many local businesses in Japan, I know several that make 100-200x what the local, totally outdated <insert store / business type> make.

I’m talking hospitality, bar owners , cafe, therapists, even people who have setup manufacturing businesses building anything from prefabbed affordable housing and to handmade skis. These are business that need a lot of materiel and help the economy keep moving here. Many of these businesses exist because it was cheap to get started. Young people who came here for various reasons , had visions and executed. Many being the kind of people that make the world a better place.

Would you prefer Japan just imports south East Asian slaves and boots them at will, stifles any competition and just falls apart ?

I honestly found your comment really short sighted / uninformed.

by bamboozled

5/4/2026 at 8:42:19 AM

The whole point of these investment visas is to inject large amounts of money into the country or build what the country wants to strategically. These $30k business visas, if it isn't a visa scam, is simply starting restaurants and small businesses that Japanese people can do themselves.

So what if their population is in decline? It'll just pick back up when there is plenty of space. Just because their population is in decline now doesn't mean they should import from other countries who most certainly do not share the local culture an is a disruption to their way of life.

Once again, I'm not Japanese and do not live there. What happens in Japan doesn't affect me. As a neutral bystander, the new rules make far more sense for Japan even if it hurts a few good honest foreigners.

by aurareturn

5/3/2026 at 8:04:04 AM

Sounds logical, but can you elaborate more on what is happening?

by rjzzleep

5/3/2026 at 8:07:28 AM

Essentially the amount of capital needed to get a business visa went up dramatically. It used to be about 30k USD and now it’s almost 200k. Plus other more onerous requirements:

https://www.bakermckenzie.com/en/insight/publications/2026/0...

The result seems to be that a lot of smaller restaurants and other foreign-owned businesses can’t really function and will close.

by keiferski

5/3/2026 at 6:14:03 PM

Nationalist fearmongering. Why is this frontpage HN?

by mwkaufma

5/3/2026 at 5:34:37 PM

That .php extension though

by hmokiguess

5/3/2026 at 3:47:02 PM

[dead]

by AltonGoehring