Is it or isn’t it? Last week the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) finally released its latest survey of the Japanese housing situation. We say “finally” because the survey is conducted every five years and the last one came out in 2018, so we’d been waiting for it since last fall. The big news is that the number of vacant houses, or akiya, has grown to more than 9 million, or 13 percent of all homes in Japan, a statistic that’s earned headlines all over the world, though the last time the survey was published the number was already way over 8 million, so it’s not as if it ..read more

In December, the Chiba city office of East Japan Railways (JR East) announced a change in the timetable for the Keiyo Line that would start in March. The Keiyo runs from Tokyo Station parallel to the Tokyo Bay shoreline south to Soga Station in Chiba city. It is the train line that services Tokyo Disneyland and the Makuhari district of Chiba, which is the home of Makuhari Messe, one of the metro area’s biggest exhibition and convention facilities. The reason for the timetable change was the removal of the Commuter Express train, which does not make any stops between Shin Kiba Station in Tokyo ..read more

Heita Kawakatsu At the end of March, JR Tokai admitted something that we have been writing about for a number of years, which is that the inaugural Shinagawa-Nagoya leg of the Chuo Shinkansen, more popularly known as the linear motorcar in Japanese and the maglev in English, will not open in 2027 as originally planned. JR Tokai, the railway company in charge of the project (often referred to as JR Central in English), had already submitted a notification to the transport ministry in December saying that the maglev wouldn’t open until “after 2027,” but didn’t announce the revision publicly unti ..read more

One of the fees that condominium owners have to pay every month is called shuzenhi, which are contributions to a fund that will go toward large-scale repairs of common property in the overall structure, such as exterior walls and some plumbing shared by all the residents. This fee is separate from the management fee, which goes toward operation of the building and more immediate maintenance, including mandatory elevator inspections. Ideally, large-scale repairs should be carried out every dozen years or so, but they usually aren’t owing to difficulty in gaining approval from the needed majori ..read more

We use storage heaters in the winter, and they do a good job of keeping our two-story house uniformly warm, but the technology was partially based on the idea of off-peak electricity, meaning the ceramic bricks inside the storage units are heated in the middle of the night when electricity is cheaper and we’re asleep. Unfortunately, when our utility raised rates more than a year ago it also did away with off-peak discounts and last winter our electricity bills almost doubled. This year it’s been a bit better owing to government intervention, but anyone who lives in Japan, especially if they g ..read more

One more 2023 story about living in Tokyo, mainly from a Tokyo Shimbun article published on Dec. 14. Counter-intuitively (if you read some of the more recent posts on this blog), statistics show that the number of households with children is rapidly increasing in the city’s 23 wards, and that more than half of these households have annual incomes that exceed ¥10 million. More to the point, between 2017 and 2022, the number of households in the 23 wards where the breadwinner(s) is in their 30s increased by 20 percent, with median income being ¥9.86 million. The main reason for the increase is ..read more

One of the prime purposes of this blog is to explain the paradox of Japan’s housing situation. The country’s residential real estate market is one of the liveliest in the world, and yet most homeowners can’t count on their properties being net assets in the long run. And then there’s those 8.5 million empty residences, which, despite the occasional media story about some foreigner swooping in and turning a derelict kominka into a dream home, will likely remain empty forever without a concerted effort on the part of the central and local goverments to either find a way to make them desirable o ..read more

The most perplexing part of writing about housing in Japan is the mass media’s fixation on Tokyo. As we’ve said in this blog many times before, Tokyo is distinct from the rest of Japan when it comes to real estate, and while trends in the capital can often be extrapolated to cover Japan as a whole, many specific aspects don’t apply, the most obvious one being that people who own or are looking to buy property in Tokyo can always expect at least some return on their investment, if not an actual profit; whereas those who live in the rest of Japan, not counting certain regional urban centers, ca ..read more

Here is a link to our November column in the FCCJ’s Number 1 Shimbun, which is about how people without cars are finding it more and more difficult to access transportation options in Japan ..read more

The news that land prices throughout Japan have risen 0.3 percent over last year’s prices was covered extensively by the media last month. Though 0.3 might sound negligible, it’s the first time in 30 years that the change was in the positive direction. Of course, land values in the three major metropolises have always gone up in a net fashion to a certain extent, but prices in what are called “regional areas,” meaning the countryside and smaller urban metropolises far from Tokyo, have either gone down or remained stagnant. The big news is that this increase has happened two years in a row, th ..read more