jpatokal

Can you name a European city that has anything approaching the homeless problem of SF, Seattle or NYC?

The agreement is about "property and claims" between the two states. Of course, individuals can and have sued various Japanese entities, some successfully.

> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens

That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc) as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.

Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:

According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.

Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

Variable, but generally worse. It's much more tightly censored than Wikipedia: for example, edits are manually reviewed by admins before going live. Also, most community features (talk pages etc) have been removed, so it's constantly gamed to push spam, copy pastes etc and the mods don't really care unless it touches a red line topic like politics.

They generally cannot, which is why so many users resort to high-risk, high-reward ways to make money like prostitution, theft, etc.

Because their site is relevant to the question asked?

Melbourne is a mecca of coffee snobbery, and most locals wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks. (Although you need to try pretty hard even to find one.)

Lavish and impressive is also relative. Your original statement about "these things are all rather unimpressive to those that actually have them within reach" is tautological: having a yacht with a helipad is not going to be particularly impressive to anyone else docked next to me in St Tropez, even if it puts all of us in the global 0.01%.

It's all relative. I spent six years at university without ever taking a single taxi and I still consider Uber rides a luxury, because I can also take the bus for a quarter of the price or bike for free.

Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite painfully.