We’ve written about Yusuke Yoshikawa, a YouTuber who covers what he calls “genkai new towns,” which are difficult to describe, but anyone who has followed our blog for any extended amount of time should be familiar with the concept. Essentially, Yoshikawa seeks out derelict housing developments, mainly in Chiba Prefecture where he lives (and where we live, too). He makes videos of these subdivisions, which contain not only abandoned houses, but plots of land that have never had anything built on them and thus are usually overgrown with vegetation because the people who own them have given up on whatever plans they had for the land. According to Yoshikawa, most of these plots were bought for investment purposes during or shortly after the bubble period of the late 80s and early 90s. His well researched and very funny videos have garnered him enough followers to allow him to make a living off this pastime, and he has recently been in demand as a paid speaker and published a book that is selling well. He’s a self-made success, but not in material terms. As he has pointed out, he himself lives in one of these genkai new towns, somewhere past Narita, because he could no longer afford to live in Tokyo, where he was a cab driver. In a sense, he’s stuck where he is but says he nevertheless can blog from a unique perspective about the state of Japanese real estate. He’s the most honest, clear-headed critic in the field, and he’s totally a layman. 

On Dec. 6, Asahi Shimbun ran an interview with Yoshikawa conducted at his home. The interviewer sounds a bit naive about Japan’s property situation, but maybe he’s just taking the role of the average reader. In any case, if we were doing the interviewing (and we hope to someday) we’d have more pointed questions, but this will do for now and, we hope, steer more people to Yoshikawa’s blog.

As the reporter points out in the introduction, Yoshikawa lives on the edge of the Tokyo metropolitan are, meaning a place where you can sense the population dropping off and nature taking over places where people were supposed to be living. He notes “land that was prepared for residences” but which contain “no buildings.” Infrastructure is either non-existent or “in very bad condition.” He hopes these descriptions help the reader gain a better understanding of Yoshikawa’s term, genkai new town, which has entered the vocabulary thanks to the internet. When he meets Yoshikawa at his home in one of these developments, he remarks how lonely it is. The paved streets and retaining walls make it clear that this area was prepared for residences, but there are no people. 

Yoshikawa explains that the area was developed “several decades ago” but for the most part very few people built houses on the land they bought. The interviewer mentions very old signs with the names of real estate companies that, presumably, are trying to sell particular plots, and Yoshikawa responds that in most of these cases the seller has given up and doesn’t even come to keep the plot tidy. These developments are what he calls “small scale new towns,” new towns being, in the public’s mind, large residential projects carried out with the help of public entities to develop tracts of land. Most of the more well-known new towns were built in the 60s and 70s, but these small scale new towns were built by developers as subdivisions of land that was no longer being used for agriculture, mainly during the bubble period, when real estate values skyrocketed and commercial entities were convinced that people who couldn’t afford homes in the major cities would flock to the outskirts of suburbia to live. These companies were overzealous and so were the small-time investors who bought plots in the belief that they could sell them later for more money. At some point, however, there were just too many small scale developments being built and the whole endeavor just collapsed. 

He goes on to explain how he was living in Tokyo’s Koto Ward in 2017 and having a tough time making ends meet because the cost of living kept rising. Both he and his wife worked, but they had no savings or assets and assumed if they remained in Tokyo they would just be living hand-to-mouth in small rental properties for the rest of their lives. So they looked for a place to buy that they could afford and this derelict property was the closest thing they could find. Though the development has 64 lots, only 7 contain houses.

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