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The story
Hiroyuki appeared on YouTube on the 29th and answered a viewer’s question about “what percentile Japan ranks in as a birth lottery (kokugacha),” saying that in Japan people rarely starve to death or get killed just for being alive. The remark, reported on the 29th, set off a 5ch thread where posters first split over how to read the crime statistics — is public safety actually improving or getting worse — before the discussion branched out into Japan’s middling world happiness rankings, the quality of its tap water, and the realities of homelessness and “net cafe refugees.” One camp argued that “good numbers don’t mean much if happiness is low,” while the other insisted “you should go by statistics, not gut feeling.”
August 29, 2026, 9:45 PM — Sports Nippon Newspaper (Sponichi Annex)
Businessman Hiroyuki Nishimura (49) updated his official YouTube channel by the 29th, discussing Japan from a “birth lottery” perspective.
A viewer asked him, “About what percentile do you think Japan ranks in as a birth lottery?”
Source: news.livedoor.com / Original article here
What people said
Japan's homicide rate per 100,000 people has dropped massively from its peak.
The Reiwa era is the safest period since WWII.
Reminder: it hasn't gotten worse.
Even crime stats show the early 2000s were noticeably worse for public safety.
Though "Kanto" (a slur combining "Korea" and "thief") still seems unsafe.
Maybe you should at least learn to read statistical data.
I think you need to go back and redo elementary math.
Though who knows what it'll look like in 10 or 20 years.
At the national level the scale is just too big.
Like, compared to China, more than half of Japanese people already live below the standard of China's top 30%.
Speaking from personal impressions, crime in the Reiwa era has plummeted compared to the Showa and Heisei eras, yet people's subjective sense that "public safety has worsened" keeps creeping in. That's why you have to judge by objective statistics, not gut feeling.
Wasn't that from some commercial?
Meanwhile in Japan, more and more kids can't even afford to drink that "water."
Guess that makes it a happy country, in a way.
Plenty of countries have drinkable tap water.
Even South Korea and Taiwan officially say theirs is drinkable.
It's just hard water, so Japanese people used to soft water can't handle it.
Even though they never said a word about it before.
Isn't that a good thing, though?
Way better than them coming back looking down on Japan just because they've seen other countries.
That's just the frog in the well finally seeing the ocean (a proverb for someone realizing how narrow their world used to be).
If you change, the world changes.
Well, good luck with that.
Apparently Japanese people carry more of the "anxiety gene" that makes them prone to seeing everything negatively, so it can't be helped.
Though that trait supposedly also helps with surviving natural disasters, so I guess every upside has a downside.
That's a separate issue.
What's even good about Japan these days?
Manufacturing has fallen way behind Taiwan and South Korea now.
And right along with it, exports and GDP are losing out too.
Not if you live a normal life.
Anyone who'd starve to death in Japan would starve to death anywhere else too.
Japan is cold to people who fall outside that "normal."
There's no real safety net.
It's this weird national mindset of "you're not allowed to be anything but normal."
Japan's headed that way too.
Japan might actually have more.
Things like net cafe refugees (people effectively living in internet cafes) don't even get counted as homeless.
Net cafe refugees are just something TV likes to sensationalize — in reality there's hardly anyone like that. If you've got that kind of money, you could just rent a cheap apartment.
Do you seriously think money alone is enough to rent an apartment?
They can't afford the deposit and key money (upfront non-refundable fees required to rent in Japan). On top of that, no guarantor either.
Working day-labor or temp jobs, their pay barely covers living costs, so they can't save up enough for the deposit and key money.
Do the math on a net cafe and it comes to about ¥60,000 a month, including breakfast, drinks, showers, internet, the NHK fee, and cleaning.
But once Bhutan got connected to the internet and people could see how other countries were living, its happiness score plummeted.
Bhutan's king maxed out his likability with his personality when he visited Japan, so hopefully that helps their happiness recover somehow.
The garbage media that basically ignored the Bhutanese king's visit to Japan is a cancer on this country.
This is basically the answer on happiness.
The more people who feel a big sense of inequality, the lower happiness drops.
And that "inequality" isn't really about money — a big part of it comes down to whether you feel connected to anyone.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
According to National Police Agency statistics, Japan’s homicide rate sits at its lowest level since WWII, and the mismatch between the gut feeling that “public safety is worsening” and the actual statistical trend is a recurring point of debate — the same split showed up in this thread. At the same time, Japan consistently ranks around 50th in the UN’s World Happiness Report each year, and the fact that economic security and subjective happiness don’t necessarily line up came up as a separate angle from the crime-rate argument. One thing readers might misread is that “kokugacha” (“country gacha,” or birth lottery) is slang for talking about the disparities created by which country you happen to be born into — Hiroyuki’s comment wasn’t meant as unconditional praise of Japan, but as an answer about one aspect of its relative safety. The thread did veer off into topics like immigration policy and other political tangents, but this article focuses specifically on reactions to the “kokugacha” remark itself.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “Hiroyuki: What percentile does Japan rank at as a “country gacha”? “You don’t starve to death, and you’re rarely killed just for being alive”.”
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