Overall, very thoughtful post. You must be someone with a lot of experience living in Japan.
At the end:
> So despite having a better ability to pay his rent
I disagree. From the perspective of the landlord, he was suddenly much less reliable as a counterparty, after leaving his stable job with a Japanese corporation. A huge deposit will fix this issue most of the time -- six months will suffice for most conservative landlords. This amount is unheard of for Japanese nationals, but will demonstrate your resolve to the landlord.
> You must be someone with a lot of experience living in Japan.
Lived there 8 years, and worked with things Japanese for longer.
> From the perspective of the landlord, he was suddenly much less reliable as a counterparty, after leaving his stable job with a Japanese corporation.
Yeah. I wasn’t going to expand on this, but since you brought it up…
1. The landlord’s behavior was fairly typical for the time. That doesn’t mean that it was reasonable. Keep in mind that this was small town Japan, and Patrick wasn’t some unknown rando.
2. Whether Patrick himself was actually a less reliable counterparty is… highly debatable. I would put him in the “really safe” category, even as a foreigner.
3. Iirc, he did offer to make a deposit or whatever (the rent was stupid low, so a 12-month deposit was very possible).
4. Given that his income went up while he had zero costs of being a salaryman, his cash flow situation was almost certainly quite a bit better.
5. I can’t remember all of the details of the story, maybe patio11/patrick can refresh our memory.
Anyway, regardless of what was standard at the time, this anecdote (and there are many like it) was a prime example of how Japanese society did not change and how the government did not give reasonable guidance.
I will also add that this is yet another way that Japan treated entrepreneurs as second class citizens, despite the employment landscape changing dramatically. The government would have done well to address this a long time ago.
At the end:
> So despite having a better ability to pay his rent
I disagree. From the perspective of the landlord, he was suddenly much less reliable as a counterparty, after leaving his stable job with a Japanese corporation. A huge deposit will fix this issue most of the time -- six months will suffice for most conservative landlords. This amount is unheard of for Japanese nationals, but will demonstrate your resolve to the landlord.