A blog about housing in Japan
After years of delays, the Shizuoka section of the ambitious Chuo Shinkansen project, better known in Japanese as the linear motorcar and in English as the maglev, which will be able to shuttle passengers from Tokyo to Nagoya in as little as 40 minutes, has finally been given the formal go-ahead by the prefecture, thus [ ]
As we ve written here numerous times, the cost of a new condominium in Tokyo has risen beyond the reach of most middle class households and even quite a few upper middle class ones. According to a recent article in the weekly magazine Aera, the average price of a new condo in the 23 wards now [ ]
The title of this blog refers to two old cliches about Japanese housing that address size. The first refers to a common rejoinder to casual inquiries about somebody buying a piece of land, wherein the buyer would answer that the purchased plot is only as big as a cat s forehead, meaning it s tiny, when, of [ ]
It says something that the big economic buzz word in Trumpworld—affordability—has entered the Japanese lexicon as a katakana term, though it seems to be restricted to real estate in Tokyo, which, as we ve mentioned so many times, is the only real estate story that the Japanese media cares about. But while everybody knows that prices [ ]
Though home prices in Tokyo occasionally drop temporarily, in general they now remain pretty much out of reach for most sentient humans, which isn t to say that most sentient humans don t try to buy a home in Tokyo when it suits their needs. Regardless of the effect of foreigners buying up properties as investments, it s [ ]
On Jan. 15, two people were stabbed in front of a rental apartment in Tokyo s Suginami Ward allegedly by the man who lived in the apartment. The two victims were part of a ten-person group who visited the apartment after a civil court decided to evict the man after the apartment s owner requested the court [ ]
January 17 marked the 31st anniversary of the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people and destroyed about 250,000 homes. Every year around this date, various media run stories about the quake and its survivors. Asahi Shimbun on Jan. 16 decided to cover a woman in her 60s from Nishinomiya who survived the [ ]
As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, we have issues with the Japanese media s coverage of real estate prices, since they almost exclusively cover Tokyo. For sure, Tokyo properties mean a lot in the scheme of things, but Tokyo real estate is exceptional in the sense that the city still charts growth while the [ ]
Japan has one of the most extensive and sophisticated sewerage systems in the world. As of 2021, slightly more than 80 percent of the population was served by sewerage systems, an impressive statistic considering that less than 10 percent of the population had access to sewerage in 1960. This increase in coverage is just another [ ]
Recent media reports say that housing starts are dropping in Japan, which is understandable but also worrying to those who gauge Japan s economic health. Japan has long promoted new housing as a prime economic stimulus to the point of downplaying sales of used homes. It s one of the reasons for the so-called akiya (vacant home) [ ]