In the last year, we’ve seen a lot of headlines on social media about how you can buy a house in Japan for a song. The usual figure quoted is about $500 US, which makes us think that all these articles spring from one source that’s likely American. We haven’t bothered tracing the articles to one source, though we read a few of them and they all say basically the same thing: local governments throughout Japan are promoting the acquisition of abandoned houses in order to get people to move into their regions and lift the tax base. In some cases, they are even giving houses away, but in any situation these structures will need a lot of work before they are at all habitable. We’ve written extensively about the problem of akiya and since you get what you pay for it follows that the lower the price the more work that will need to be done. The worst akiya, it must be said, are not even on the market, meaning they were literally abandoned by the owner for any number of reasons—either because they moved out and couldn’t be bothered to try and sell it, or they did try to sell it with no success, or they simply disappeared in order to avoid having to pay property taxes, which, in all probability, were very low to begin with. Or they died—with or without an heir. There are a lot of akiya whose owners are dead, meaning they never transferred the title to anyone, and though heirs are still legally responsible in Japan they can be difficult to contact if they don’t want to be found. Those houses are probably unihabitable since they’ve been left to rot, and the local government doesn’t want to spend the money to have them demolished.

There are more than 8 million akiya and, not counting dedicated rental units, many are not livable and fewer are even sellable due to other factors such as location. So when you read an article about somebody who bought a house for nothing and fixed it up into a nice place it’s not just an exception to the rule, but almost an anomaly. Anytime a foreign person buys an old farmhouse or kominka and turns it into a monument to traditional Japanese craftsmanship they’re bound to get it featured in the news, but, again, it’s exceedingly rare. Most people prefer new homes, and because government policy has always privileged new house construction, potential buyers can always find something they can afford that’s new; and in many cases it will even be cheaper than an older house that requires extensive renovation, which describes a substantial number of old houses that are on sale. 

The reason these articles about cheap houses have proliferated in the past year is mainly the pandemic, which, for a while, cut into new home construction. People are moving out of the cities because they can now work from home, so used houses starting selling well, but, again, a lot still aren’t selling. We know of several houses in our general vicinity that are in good condition but they’ve been on the market for months, some even years. There are just too many cheap old houses that people want to sell and not enough buyers. Of course, much of it has to do with Japan’s decreasing population, but mainly it has to do with oversupply. When construction resumes apace, those old houses will become even more difficult to sell. 

More to the point, people who do sell their homes almost never make back what they paid for them. The exception is certain areas of big cities, but even in those cases it isn’t guaranteed, and then the seller will be even less likely to see a profit, especially when you factor in the interest they paid on their loan. (You’re more likely to make a small profit if you bought an old condo in a popular area of Tokyo and resell it later.) At this point, we think most Japanese people know this, despite all the talk about “maintaining property values” at all cost. We certainly know it. Almost as soon as we moved into our new house in 2014 the assessed value dropped by almost two-thirds—and that’s for property tax purposes, which tends to be higher than market assessed value. (Assessed value for land is a different matter) So we know we will never be able to make money on this house, which is one of the reasons why we had it built the way we wanted—meaning few other people would probably want it. But the problem as we get older is: What can we do with it when we reach the age where we can no longer live here? There’s a very good chance we won’t even be able to sell it. Since we don’t have children, there’s no one to inherit it. We’ve already brought up the possibility with some younger relatives that any of them can have it for free, and while they sound interested, we’re not sure if the idea of taking on a property is something they have the wherewithal to carry out. We’ve even thought of donating it to some organization, but that might run into problems with neighbors who find out about it beforehand.