At least for meta, its employees, and its customers (advertisers), and its users, you can infer easily why they are involved. Researchers have other motivations like currying favor via an opinion or paper with a particular benefactor, or the tenure game, or 1000 other hidden things you cannot reason about without disclosure on their part.
5 million yen is the company capital requirement. They would form a company, invest 5 million yen into it, then the company would lease an apartment and rent it out on Airbnb.
Rent would cost ¥60,000–120,000/month, they would list it on Airbnb for ¥20,000/night, then assuming 50% occupancy the return is ~¥200,000/month.
It was very profitable. The payback period for the ¥5 million was 1.5 - 2 years.
>all aside from the cost of purchasing a home in Osaka
Which they were almost certainly divvying up. A bunch of people invest $32k each. Some management company buys the home, pays them all a cut of airBNB proceeds, etc. You don't "do" anything beyond put up $32k for your $31k piece of paper.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably not in most cases.
A lot of Chinese are cash rich (perhaps not on average but with 1.3 billion people the absolute number is large compared to other countries) and want to invest abroad, and are buying properties all over the place.
Another piece of evidence is the huge number of Chinese students in UK universities (from my experience) although the tuition fee alone is about £35k ($46k) a year.
On top of that, we have to continually tend to our bodies, feed them fuel (sometimes at risk of life and limb), exercise them, clean them, tend to them, visit the doctor, take medicine/drugs, etc., just to keep them in good shape. And they eventually have a 100% failure rate.
