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The story
An article about Kenta Sato (pseudonym, 43), a former employee at a foreign-affiliated company who retired via FIRE with ¥120 million in assets and is now living a lonely life, became a hot topic on 5ch. The thread saw a string of comments questioning the article’s credibility, and it evolved into a discussion about semiconductor stocks after one investor confessed that a stock crash had shrunk their assets from ¥220 million down to ¥90 million.
“This way, I can live out my whole life without ever having to bow my head to anyone.”
Kenta Sato (pseudonym, 43) retired from a foreign-affiliated company in Tokyo. At the time, his assets totaled ¥120 million. It was a decision made in strict accordance with the “4% Rule” — investing his assets to earn a 4% annual return and using that income to cover a year’s living expenses.
He’d projected annual investment returns of around ¥4 million, against annual living costs of roughly ¥3 million. His rented apartment ran ¥110,000 a month, groceries about ¥30,000 a month, and even factoring in utilities and phone/internet bills, he kept his total monthly spending under ¥250,000.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
What's weird is that nothing about it feels off when you read it normally.
It's written unconvincingly enough that you couldn't be fooled even if you wanted to be.
But thanks to the recent crash, I'm down to just ¥90 million now.
Funny thing is, I'm still up compared to last year, but right now all I feel is despair.
All I do is regret not still having that ¥220 million.
Being scared to spend money — that's a real thing, I'm telling you.
What kind of portfolio were you even running?
Memory chips?
Nice.
Life's more fun when it's got that much drama, right?
Not trying to troll you here.
Kioxia.
Data Section.
SoftBank Group.
Those are my main holdings.
Still holding all of them now, too.
To make room for them, I sold off trading-house stocks I swore I'd hold for life.
That's part of what's killing me too.
Sounds like you'll be back to ¥220 million within a year.
I've been 80% NVIDIA for a few years now.
Getting crushed on performance by you memory-chip guys though.
NVIDIA's earnings this week are seriously stressing me out.
Everything's been sliding lately, and 'announce a huge investment, then crash' has basically been the trend all summer.
Yeah, it'll probably dip.
But it'll hit new highs again in a couple months, so it's probably fine.
Even if it looks like happiness from the outside, if you feel unhappy, then it's unhappiness, isn't it.
Even a dead-end part-timer wins if they feel happy.
Once your brain stops working right, you can just switch to index funds and draw down a fixed amount each year.
Does he actually meet people in person, though?
Guys like me who turned into minor stock-market nouveau riche are dying to brag about it, so finding someone to interview would be easy.
That's the reverse shoeshine-boy signal right there (the old theory that when even the shoeshine boy is giving stock tips, it's time to sell — inverted here, so universal pessimism means it's about to bottom out).
Which is exactly why it's going to go up.
However you slice it — future potential, profitability, staying power — if you're doing value investing, where else would you even put your money besides semiconductor stocks? That's how I see it.
Unlike the AI bubble, they're not overpriced at all.
But my mental state can barely handle this recent drop.
Same here.
Hold, hold, and hold some more.
Long term, semiconductors can only go up.
If it's a spot holding, just hold and forget about it.
Going forward,
there's no version of society that doesn't run on semiconductors.
Demand is never going away.
It'll just keep cycling up and down,
so hold through the dips.
And yeah, 'where else would you even invest' — I think that's exactly right.
Straight-up bragging just comes off as obnoxious, so it's not winning you any fans lol
It's a humblebrag, plain and simple. That's all this is.
End goal is ¥10 million a year in dividend income.
At that point it's basically growing on autopilot.
That's probably why this generation won't be wandering the streets looking for someone to talk to as much once they're old, unlike now.
There's this theory that FIRE drives you crazy with loneliness, but isn't it the same with regular retirement? Feels like it's just happening a bit earlier, that's all.
Which raises the question of what happens once you actually hit retirement age. Doesn't that mean this guy's fate is to eventually lose it too?
Anyone reading stuff like this isn't gonna end up happy.
It's probably comfort content for people at the bottom who'll never manage to FIRE.
Not really any different from a gambling article, at its core.
The articles themselves trickle out to match demand, but is it the same guy bringing them to nanJ every time, I wonder?
Which just proves FIRE is the right call.
Background and Key Points
The FIRE movement’s “4% Rule” comes from the 1990s Trinity Study, which tested how long a US stock/bond portfolio could sustain 4% annual withdrawals; it was never designed around Japan’s tax code or its decades of near-zero interest rates, so importing it wholesale is riskier than the thread lets on. In Japan, realized capital gains and dividends are taxed at a flat 20.315%, meaning Sato’s stated ¥4 million target return would need to be noticeably higher before tax to net ¥3 million in living expenses — a detail the article and thread both skip. Also unmentioned is NISA, Japan’s tax-exempt investment account explicitly designed for long-term individual investors; any serious FIRE planning discussion in Japan would normally center on maximizing NISA space, yet nobody in the thread brings it up.
The thread didn’t really argue about loneliness at all — commenters largely accepted or shrugged off that premise (some even noted regular retirees face the same isolation, just later). What it actually split on was authenticity: whether “Kenta Sato” is a real interview subject or a fabricated “content for envious have-nots” piece, a genre posters say is proliferating on Yahoo News. From there the thread abandoned the original topic entirely, turning into a confessional/bragging session about semiconductor holdings (Kioxia, SoftBank, memory chips, Nvidia), with genuine anxiety over recent price crashes eroding paper fortunes far larger than Sato’s ¥120 million.
Readers should also note nanJ is a rowdy, jokey subforum of 5ch, so the skepticism and bragging tone reflect that culture as much as the topic itself.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (nanJ) thread “[Tragic] 43-Year-Old Single Man Who FIRE’d With ¥120 Million Loses His Mind From Overwhelming Loneliness, Not Talking to a Soul…”.
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