Is the Osaka Expo going to be a huge bust?
I saw the other day that the Osaka Expo is starting in less than three months. Is anyone planning to go?
The website to buy tickets is a complicated mess (you need to book in order to enter a lottery in order to book?). I couldn’t be bothered to even try to understand how it worked.
And I am not at all interested.
I don’t even know what the Expo is about, or what is going to be exhibited there.
I see it is also fully cashless, a trend I am not a fan of (not allowing people to pay with cash really makes things difficult for the poor, the elderly, children, people with disabilities).
Am I just out of the loop? Or is it going to be another colossal waste of money?
The future of our email list
For anyone receiving our weekly email, I’m afraid we are going to be closing our Aweber account soon (the service is not worth over $1,000 a year, which is what we’ve been paying).
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YouTube
Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We published a short video about cryptocurrency. Enjoy!
(the comments were… fun)
The Forum
Speaking of which, the Forum is doing well (we went over 40,000 posts this week!). The forum rules are here. In essence, they are:
- Be nice
- Ask any question you like
- Only answer questions when you have relevant knowledge or experience
Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s books
I am still on my Terry Pratchett binge! Bought all of his Discworld books on Kindle and have got to Reaper Man, one of my favourites.
This week’s links
- Young people need more support, and to know that there are alternatives to the normal path to success: Japan sees record number of young suicides
- I broadly agree with this: Are rich people miserable?
- Society is changing: Depopulation prompts Japan convenience store chain to introduce sole-manager system
- Maybe? Is This a Bubble?
- I’ll be doing a YouTube video about crypto soon: No bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard? Here’s why
- This is encouraging, not just because they are doing it, but because they are also making it cheaper and more efficient: China surpasses 2030 renewables target six years early
- Another corker from Trung Phan: DeepSeek: Links and Memes (So Many Memes)
- Wasn’t aware of this about the mortgage tax break: Do you qualify
- Horrible accident. Don’t really understand why they couldn’t have used helicopters or something to get people in to help the driver, but I don’t pretend to be an expert. RIP at this point. Why it’s taking so long to reach the driver trapped in a Saitama sinkhole
- So she was 12? I struggle to understand the Japanese justice system: Ex-Japan lawmaker gets suspended term for raping middle school girl
- My ridiculous goal is a billion yen. Seems to be in the range he proposes: The Perfect Level of Wealth
- More great content from Daniel: What’s in The FI Professor’s Portfolio?
- And Martin: What’s your Japan plan?
- Eeek: Prices of 1,656 food items to increase in Japan in February
- Interesting documentary (from the year I came to Japan). YouTube: Bubble Trouble in Japan
- I don’t see the yen getting much stronger any time soon: Predictions Of Yen At ¥95 Per Dollar Are Based On False Logic
- This just seems parasitic on the part of TableCheck: More ramen restaurants in Japan introducing entry passes to curb long lines
- This was very interesting (YouTube): Japanese law overview – American lawyer explains
- This YouTube channel about someone moving from the US to Japan and buying an akiya is interesting. I wonder how this story will turn out: Matsukawa Zaraki
- Depressing. I’ll be 68 in 2045. Wonder how different life will be then: Climate change target of 2C is ‘dead’, says renowned climate scientist
- Genius (Twitter): British mobile operator 02 created an AI voice bot called “Daisy” to combat phone scammers
- I very much disagree with this for people in Japan, but important to understand the other side of the argument: The benefits of living mortgage free
- I remember this case. Happened just after I came to Japan: The Haunted House in Setagaya
- Interesting blog post about a possible future for rural Japan. Personally I think we should abandon much of Japan and concentrate the population in towns and cities: The Death of Rural?
- I think the numbers are too low to qualify for these. We are a (barely) HNWI household now, and could possibly become a UHNWI household in the future, just from normal salaries and saving/investing. Feels like it should be harder to qualify: Record Number of Japanese HNWIs
- Scott Galloway on AI companies: A New AI World
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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(#11) I drew up a simple spreadsheet and calculated that if you’re starting at ¥150m (you said you were at something similar a little while ago), with 7% interest a year, you’d need to save ¥10m a year to reach a billion after 20 years. So…good luck! :-))
My spreadsheet (8% return, investing 4m a year) gets us there in just under 20 years. But I suspect we’ll get there a bit quicker.
Doesn’t really matter either way, but I like having goals.
I went to the Aich World Expo in 2005. All it is is basically a whole lot of countries trying to promote themselves, some food stalls with food from around the world, and a couple of big drawcards. At Aichi the biggest drawcard was a mummified Woolly Mammoth. I was interested in seeing that but it was about a 3hr line. Instead, I only ended up going to about 3 pavillions and they were pretty unimpressive.
It’s one of those things that if its right next door it might be worth going as it’s something different but I wouldn’t go far for it. I saw on TV yesterday though that about 80% of people in Osaka have no interest in going. I think they’ll be more interested in going to the new casino(s) that are going to be built around the site afterwards instead.