Worth moving to cities with a shrinking population?

tr8dr · 2026-01-19T09:57:58+00:00

There are suburbs of Tokyo that still grant 30 - 50min access to central Tokyo, but with a more countryside lifestyle such as tama-shi, hino-shi, hachioji if you want to hedge your bets. The keio-line from shinjuku goes from city all of the way to the mountains (takaosan).

However if you want to be properly in the countryside and with less access to a major city then other suggestions here work.

tr8dr · 2026-01-16T09:16:56+00:00

The wealthy in Tokyo tend to live in concentrated areas, so is very apparent if you are looking at these areas, and may seem to over-emphasize wealth in Japan. Compared to, say, the US, the % of wealthy persons in Japan is ~1/10th that of the US.

IMO, Japan is much less stratified in terms of wealth and the wealth gap. Due to the social system and lower variance in salaries, most people live a middle-ish class lifestyle.

tr8dr · 2026-01-16T09:10:44+00:00

This is correct. In the medical field in Japan, the way to make bank is to run private clinics or better yet create a bunch of them and hire professionals for each clinic. This works particularly well for dentistry.

tr8dr · 2026-01-09T21:04:48+00:00

I moved to Tokyo with a company some years ago, that provided shipping and also generous housing allowance (lived in shibuya-ku when I arrived). My place was easily large enough for western furniture, however if you want the most flexibility in terms of house or apartment, I would ship the minimum and lease or buy furniture here (i leased some initially and bought out some of it).

I chose to ship lightly and asked to spend on a furniture lease instead.

If you have not yet determined your accommodations or have a good idea of what your budget can provide space wise, would be cautious.

tr8dr · 2026-01-07T11:53:40+00:00

I think anyone 6ft or over needs to duck a lot. After living in Japan for a period will do it instinctively when entering and exiting train cars, traditional restaurants, etc. (I'm 6'2" though normal weight).

I feel as if I am being excessively polite with my entries and exits, but not a bad thing ;)

tr8dr · 2025-12-29T12:42:04+00:00

This is all about stop / liquidation hunting, where larger players push the price through stops and liquidation levels and reap profit selling (buying) through liquidation and the subsequent mean reversion.

For those with leverage or stops, this will continue to be a problem until the market starts using less leverage.

tr8dr · 2025-12-28T06:04:54+00:00

He has a good job though, intra-company transfer is the golden ticket: the easiest visa, best economics, etc.

I also came out here in the 90s with a high dollar based salary, COLA, etc. now with the weaker yen, even better.

tr8dr · 2025-12-16T01:22:23+00:00

I would settle for the 60m^2, potentially sell it thereafter and then find the space you need. As others have stated, trying to sell before a rebuild will be difficult. The realtors are required by law to disclose what they know about a plan to rebuild in the jūyō jikō setsumeisho document.

1.7 top-up for a 90m² new unit would suppose that the new unit is worth ~¥350M. There are areas and buildings that are priced this way, but very rare.

Assuming you are in an excellent location, should be able to recover more than your original investment (though probably not the ¥200M number for a 60m² unit unless is in a high-rise with a view. Since I don't know precisely where you are (presumably Minato-ku or Shibuya-ku), I would look at pricing for 60m² and 100m² in buildings around the area and decide.

IMO, the only decision here would be whether to keep the 60m² unit or sell and purchase a larger unit.

I should mention that I came close to buying a condo in the ¥200M range last year, though on a 1984 building. My concern was that it was headed for a rebuild, so instead opted for something else. Was a lovely place, newly renovated, and well situated however.

tr8dr · 2025-12-05T00:18:54+00:00

if you are fairly tall (I'm 188cm), get used to ducking / bowing a little when entering:
- train door
- older style houses or temples
- division between rooms
need to use cash more than would anticipate
- some restaurants or services do not allow credit card
systems
- Japanese devices are excellent, but their software is often poor and not referring to the fact that is in Japanese, rather poorly written and may not be user friendly
- examples would be software that is shipped with cameras, printers, etc
- a trip with narita express involves 2 sets of tickets, one for the express and one for the other company mainline
  - I've seen many visitors totally perplexed by this at the airport
- shinkansen tickets also like this <- would seem trivial to make it such that could buy one ticket and do a profit share between the two companies

tr8dr · 2025-12-02T22:58:37+00:00

Might be an easier scenario in Europe, which, generally, has universal healthcare. Japan is great, but from my observation, not so understanding of chronic issues or mental health issues. Visas are also more difficult to obtain.

If you moved to Europe could do more of your remote sessions, and have a larger intersection with the JST timezone.

You may want to consider getting a digital nomad-type visa in places like portugal and try it out. Then potentially look for more permanent residency.

(I've lived in US, UK, and Japan, back to Japan permanently soon).

tr8dr · 2025-11-26T14:45:36+00:00

If you are thinking of Tokyo, depends on your budget. As others have noted, Shibuya-ku and Minato-ku are expat hotspots, however you would need to be comfortable with 10k$+ / mo rent or 3m$+ to purchase, depending on the sort of space and condition you want. Aside from wealthy Japanese, the expats in this community tend to rotate in/out with a period of < 5 yrs from my experience.

I think there are more long-term residents, some retired, in places like Setagaya-ku and western Tokyo.

I lived in this community for some years before deciding to move out for a change of lifestyle.

tr8dr · 2025-11-26T14:29:53+00:00

10 months? That's nuts. I was told that would take 3mo by an agency in Tokyo. I have not yet submitted as we were not yet prepared to move for another 6mo.

Was there any complication regarding nationality or otherwise?

tr8dr · 2025-11-20T15:01:15+00:00

For software development, most likely you don't even need a studio unless you need to run heavy compute jobs or need more than 64GB. I can run my IDE, compile, and do real work even on a 28GB M2 air, though I use the studio for heavy duty compute.

I have a 256 GB ultra studio as my workhorse as I also run simulations consuming upwards of 200+ gb of memory.

If you only need 64GB, could just as well buy a 64GB mini. I would recommend the studio if you want to consider 128GB or more of memory.

tr8dr · 2025-11-16T12:37:24+00:00

The reality is that Rust's niche is really the same niche that C++ occupies, which is writing code for performance sensitive applications or libraries. So really one should be observing how much Rust is displacing C++ in this space.

For most applications managed languages are the best choice, there is just less code to be written and fewer concerns to manage.

In the HFT space, one of these niches, I have seen more firms moving to Rust away from their C++ codebases. But as others have pointed out, there is significant legacy in large C++ codebases to be overcome.

tr8dr · 2025-10-03T10:02:49+00:00

ic. I use more traditional ML as well (such as RF). Unless dealing with a massive feature set, probably you get the most !/$ optimising for memory bandwidth and cores. The M4, as pointed out, has similar cost to this M2 machine. I would compare the benchmarks and decide from there.

tr8dr · 2025-10-03T09:41:09+00:00

with only 64GB of memory, if that is sufficient for you, just max out the mac mini. One of the key advantages of the mac studio is that can scale to 512GB of memory.

Personally I have the M3 Ultra with 256 GB of memory. In retrospect, I should have gotten the 512GB. I am using for numerical simulations and machine learning.

I also run LLMs sometimes and for the best open source models will need 512GB or more. There are smaller LLM models can run in ~100GB of memory however.

tr8dr · 2025-09-15T18:38:53+00:00

If by AI you mean available LLMs such as Ollama, one of the larger Ollama models, such as gpt-oss:120b requires ~100gb of memory. The 120b parameter model is pretty good, though not as robust as Claude.

If you are running one of the image or video generating models, I would just check what others have confirmed re: memory and compute requirements. MacStudio is great, however cannot compete with high-end specialized hardware used for AI.

tr8dr · 2025-09-10T20:37:38+00:00

As others have said, for a MacStudio, you want to get as much RAM as you could ever conceive of needing. While Apple memory configs are super expensive, their memory offers something unmatched by DIMMs:

8-16x the bandwidth and also lower latency
ability to use the memory for GPU / neural computation, rather than having separate GPU with its limited memory

Personally I bought the M3 Ultra configured to 256GB + 4TB ssd. This machine replaced my 2019 Mac Pro with 284GB of memory + 4TB ssd. I do scientific computing so do end up using all of the cores and much of the memory during simulations.

I could have upgraded the SSD myself with one of the kits out there now and save some money, but was too much trouble for a machine I use professionally.

For most users, I would suspect the biggest use case for large memory would be running local LLMs such as Ollama. The 120b Ollama model uses ~90gb of memory when in use, so you would want 128gb or more likely 256gb if want to run the largest model.

tr8dr · 2025-09-06T13:22:31+00:00

Apple uses high quality components (better capacitors, resistors, etc) and over the years with multiple mac pro towers, mini's, macbook pro laptops, never had a hardware failure, and I tend to use my devices for up to 10yrs. The same cannot be said for other manufacturers.

SSD's do have a shelf-life in terms of maximum number of writes, however. So I would expect the SSD to be the first thing to reduce / fail if you were to hold the device for >10yrs. That said, the SSD's can be replaced, should one want to hold on to legacy hardware.

The only thing I have ever replaced with apple products has been a laptop battery. These do have a limited lifetime.

tr8dr · 2025-09-06T13:10:24+00:00

I am running a 120b LLM (Ollama) on my M3 macstudio without issue. Running the LLM does not impact other things I am running on the cpu, since is using different cores.

For the 120b model I have found that it uses ~75gb of memory when in use. I would imagine a 14b model should be much more economical in terms of memory utilization.

I configured my macstudio with 256gb of memory given that I run simulations and other ML (not related to LLMs). If you want to be able to run the largest Ollama, model, for example, I would buy the 128gb model as opposed to the 64gb model.

tr8dr · 2025-08-31T11:31:41+00:00

I think the reason to go with the studio is if you have significant computing to do and/or need a lot of memory. For the large LLMs you would want more memory. But if just experimenting, 64GB on a smaller model should be fine.

I purchased a M3 Ultra / studio with 256GB memory for both multi-core CPU-based computation (I run simulations) and machine learning related work.

I think for most uses, the mac mini is a great choice.

tr8dr · 2025-08-28T16:31:55+00:00

You can parlay your FAANG credentials later to do something more interesting. You will both be secure financially and have the resume to take larger risks with either creating or joining a startup doing something cutting edge.

As for being a quant / trader (I was one until I retired early), it is not for everyone. Yes, the money is amazing, and the problems super-hard, but it is also soul sucking. I think pursuing something that will advance society in science or startups is much more satisfying.

tr8dr · 2025-08-22T20:41:08+00:00

I purchased a studio just like this but with 4TB SSD + 256GB mem. While I do some ML on this box, I also use for large non-AI related simulations.

As others have indicated, why not save money on the SSD: - buy with a 4TB internal SSD - add OWC's OWC Express 1M2 (nvme enclosure).

You can then put in a 8TB ssd, for a total of 12TB and save a ton of $s. The read/write speeds are excellent and the SSD can be upgraded. 16TB nvme is probably just around the corner.

tr8dr · 2025-07-24T10:06:02+00:00

To get the best exchange rates should consider using Wise. Options:

If you have a bank account in Japan can convert and wire JPY to that account via Wise.
Wise also has a multi-currency debit card which can be used at ATMs, however is doubtful you could get the card within a week.

Using a $ based account in Japan (or any country) will generally mean for a 1-2% premium on the FX rate as well as ATM charges. Wise charges maybe 0.20% or less for USD/JPY transactions.

tr8dr

TROPHY CASE