Wealthy Chinese, Fed Up at Home, Find a Haven in Japan

19 comments

1. text is paywall but they provide a 2 min podcast of the article

2. Paywall haven’t read, but didn’t it come up recently that Jack Ma has been here for a while?

3. OTARU, Japan—A growing number of affluent Chinese are coming to Japan to live, according to real-estate brokers and people in the Chinese community here, in an indication of social and political tensions back home.

   Hideyuki Ishii, a real-estate broker on the northern island of Hokkaido, says he has been inundated recently with requests from Chinese nationals who want to buy property that they can use as a foothold to move to Japan.

   One client is Amanda Wu, 62. She said she is a former executive at a state-owned company who became wealthy through international property investment. Covid-19 restrictions in China and general concerns about limited freedoms—among other reasons—led her to look to Japan, she said.

   “The lockdowns were harsh,” Ms. Wu said. Now that the restrictions have largely been lifted, she said she would take the opportunity to return to Beijing more often but still planned to stay in Japan. And she said the interest among her friends in moving to Japan was greater than ever.

   “I can tell for sure that there is going to be a swarm of people traveling to Japan as long as China lifts the current border controls, either for a short-term stay or long-term immigration,” said Ms. Wu, who agreed to be identified by her surname and the English given name she uses abroad.

   She spoke ahead of China’s announcement Monday that it would end quarantine requirements for people entering the country.

   Since November, she has been living in a four-bedroom house in Otaru, a snow-covered port town, while keeping an eye on a portfolio of about a dozen properties in the area that she purchased for the equivalent of about $300,000.

   Ms. Wu used to visit Japan as a tourist, but this time she entered the country with a business-management visa.

   In the first 10 months of this year, 2,133 Chinese newly entered Japan with that type of visa, exceeding the annual record of 1,417 set in all of 2019, just before the pandemic halted most travel between the two countries. The visa generally lasts at least a year and is renewable.

   Though Japanese people sometimes resist foreigners moving into their neighborhoods, the country offers attractions including low crime, generally clean air and bargain properties, aided by a decline in the yen against the dollar and China’s yuan.

   Wang Qing, a Chinese businesswoman who has lived in Japan for nearly three decades, said that based on conversations with friends in China who want to move to Japan, she believes Covid restrictions and heavy-handed government policies have pushed some people over the edge.

   She cited an example of officials barging into the luxury condo of a friend and spraying disinfectant on the friend’s belongings, damaging an expensive bag.

   “Their human rights weren’t protected no matter how rich they were,” Ms. Wang said.

   Even with the lifting of Covid restrictions, Ms. Wang said she believed many of the forces pushing Chinese people to consider moving to Japan remained unchanged. She said looser post-Covid travel rules would make it easier for people to act on their emigration plans.

   Japan isn’t the only country receiving expats from China. United Nations data from 2019 tabulated by the Center for China & Globalization, a Beijing think tank, showed the U.S. had the largest number of Chinese migrants at around 2.9 million, followed by Japan with 780,000, and then Canada and Australia. The figures, which are the most recent available, show the number of Chinese nationals and don’t include those nations’ citizens of Chinese descent.

   These days, tighter American immigration controls are pushing more people to consider Japan. If a foreigner puts the equivalent of around $40,000 or more in capital into a Japan-based business—such as by purchasing real estate and setting up a property-management business—he or she may be eligible for a business visa.

   Ms. Wang said she believed many of the forces pushing Chinese people to consider moving to Japan remained unchanged.

   By contrast, the minimum investment for a similar visa to enter the U.S. is $800,000. Singapore, another popular destination for Chinese, requires a minimum that is equivalent to about $1.85 million.

   Chinese culture brought by immigrants from the continent and the Korean Peninsula formed the basis of much of Japanese civilization, including the writing system, rice farming and Buddhism. In the early 20th century, another period of political and social instability in China, many educated Chinese—including revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen—lived in Japan.

   Millions of Chinese visited Japan as tourists in the years before the Covid-19 pandemic. Some bought pieds-à-terre in Tokyo, Osaka or Kyoto, or they invested in commercial properties.

   Visa service providers in Japan say they saw a surge in inquiries from China this year after Shanghai lockdowns that lasted for months in the spring and the October extension of authoritarian leader Xi Jinping‘s term in office.

   “People are uneasy and frustrated because their life can be disrupted at any moment and they may be arrested in the future. So, some think, ‘Let’s get out,’” said a Chinese man who owns a real-estate firm in Tokyo.

   He said Chinese customers have recently helped him fill up rental offices he owns. Having a physical office is one condition for getting the business visa.

   In Otaru, where Ms. Wu is living, the population is declining and many homes are empty.

   “You couldn’t even get a toilet in Beijing for what it costs to buy a house in Otaru,” she said.

   Mr. Ishii, the real-estate broker, said his agency recently sold a house by the ocean to a Chinese buyer for the equivalent of $287,000, more than three times the price local brokers had quoted.

   Not everyone in town is pleased by the influx.

   Shigemi Suzuki, 90, who runs a clothing shop with her husband and son, said she recently sold a vacation home in Hokkaido to a Japanese buyer even though Chinese bidders offered more. She said she wasn’t comfortable with so many Chinese people buying properties.

   Mr. Ishii said he believed the newcomers would contribute to the local economy. Ms. Wu said she was thinking about starting a business to export Japanese merchandise to China.

   “There is huge demand for Japanese goods in China,” she said. “Everyone has been suffocating during the pandemic.”

4. I hoped I’d be able to own a property in my lifetime. Oh well. 😐

5. guess im ok with it as long as they pay their taxes… might be a good way to curb inflation

6. > “Their human rights weren’t protected no matter how rich they were”

   Absolutely stomach-turning sentiment that shows how fucked up the mindset of the upper class is – in China and elsewhere.

   These rich Chinese who think their money buys them human rights can fuuuuuuuuuuuck off. Go fight for your rights back home, not buy up real estate overseas.

7. Something something Chinese tourists ruin everything something something

8. Oh God….not the Vancouver scenario again over here too…..

9. This is not good news for the locals. A few people like mr Ishii will benefit while young families will continue to struggle even more.

10. I don’t think that they can be blamed for wanting to escape the CCP.

    However, can these astonishingly wealthy people not use their stupendous wealth to simply change their government, like what happens elsewhere?

    They probably have enough money between them to have all of the key people defenestrated.

11. Here comes the anti-Sino sentiment

12. Wealthy Chinese dissident that ran state owned company living abroad? I’ll take “Chinese Spys” for $500 Alex!

13. As someone who lives in Vancouver (and has family in Japan) – good luck, really.

14. Oh great. The people that supported the CCP’s taking of my grandparents’ assets and enriched themselves under CCP rule are now snatching up properties in Japan, and bringing along their self-serving, nouveau riche sense of entitlement.

15. Please go back to your shithole country.

16. I was in Singapore recently and I thought it was expensive compared to Japan . So I can understand why people choose Japan .

    However I ve heard from fellow foreign friends that lately they’ve been having a hard time moving becuase the brokers prefer the people who pay 2 years rent in advance (new comers mostly Chinese) versus him ,Brit and with a steady job for the last decade.( In my case I had to pay 14 months down but the situation was complicated)

17. Good for property values, which. have been death spiraling since the 90s. We need to revive the economy, and cheap yen combined with Chinese investment could be the trick.

18. Bye bye affordable housing. They are going to skyrocket the market and government ain’t going to do a thing

19. I could be an ignorant selfish prick and say this is great news as I already own my house in Sapporo. But I’m not, because I’ve seen first hand what this sort of investment does to property markets (Sydney) and how it totally fucks a once great city.
    It makes it unlivable for everyone. They should stay and fix their own problems in China. They problems they helped create there.