Yeah, as someone who lives in Japan, I agree. Since the opportunities are basically all in the big metros and remote work is far from popular, kids chasing a better future go to trade school and/or uni in the big cities and don’t come back. I do have remote work so I moved to the country to farm and live a more relaxed life. My wife’s company graciously, though for a pretty big pay cut, let her work remotely. Her job was not able to be done remotely (physical education), but some of her duties involved media and web stuff so now she does only that. We love it.

However, budgets in my municipality are tight. The population dropped severely after the tsunami came and wiped out a lot of the areas up to 2.5-3km inland. As such, this place is somewhat unique globally, but is still a depopulating area. With the money after the disaster, a lot of new infra was built. I got paid some to move us here.

However, even with the infra and programs, the opportunities and even raw numbers of people aren’t here which strains maintaining all the roads and nature trying to encroach. We have crumbling buildings from businesses that went under. Fire, emergency services, elder care, child care and more struggle. Except for forestry, farming, a paper mill, construction, and fishery, there’s not a lot of opportunity here.

Japan, and many other places, are going to need quite the cultural shift to redistribute the population to keep things from collapsing outside of the metros and to solve the increasing problems in those metros (transport, infra, etc.).

I imaging china and other countries will have the same issues, though I understand a lot of rural china is far more rough in terms of poverty and services than here which may leave them even more cut off.