In what some are calling the Japanese cognate of the American subprime fiasco, poorer residents of Japan have recently started defaulting on their mortgage payments, prompting banks to foreclose and put their homes up for auction. As in the U.S., a large portion of these unfortunates are immigrants who were simply trying to buy into the Japanese dream, as it were. They were mostly lured into coming here to fill low-paying blue collar jobs that Japanese people no longer wanted to fill. Now they’ve been dumped without a safety net.

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One of the enduring peculiarities of Japan’s employment situation is the idea of company housing. Though since the bubble era and the subsequent erosion of the lifetime employment system most large companies have scaled down their housing benefits, dormitories and company apartments still exist, especially for those in the public sector. And one of the more important features of the growth of nonregular employment over the past decade is company housing for part-time and contract workers. This housing is either owned by the temporary employment agencies that contract with employers, or by employers for use by contract workers. So when these workers are let go, they also have to vacate their company residences, and because they are nonregular workers–meaning they have no job security or guarantor–they have nowhere to go. This situation has given rise to a new phrase, “housing poor.”

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If, like me, you don’t appreciate those real estate salespeople interrupting your dinner with cold calls trying to push new condominiums (“mansions”) being built in your neighborhood, you may occasionally feel inclined to hang up on them. Though I know they’re just doing their job, often their refusal to take my disinterest in their product is just downright annoying. I’ll sometimes try to explain my disinterest, but they always have something prepared to keep me on the line, and eventually I just get frustrated and hang up. Because I’m a foreigner I can sort of get away with this.

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A research group attached to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s Residential Land Committee took up the subject of housing loans on Mar. 12. The main concern of the committee was increasing the funding for the Flat 35 plan, a long-term fixed loan provided by the government to home buyers that links housing support financing organizations with banks and other financial institutions.

At present, Flat 35 provides loans for up to 90% of a house’s value, but the new proposal would increase the elegible value to 100%, which would essentially mean that home buyers who are approved for the plan do not have to pay a down payment on their home. The plan has yet to be approved, but it’s obvious the government is desperate to get home sales moving. Read More

In Japan there is a phenomenon called gomi-yashiki, which is probably not limited to Japan. The phrase literally means “garbage residence,” and describes a house and its property overflowing with refuse. What makes the situation special is that the refuse is there on purpose. The owners of the property tend to have a packrat mentality–they pick up stuff everywhere, especially from other people’s garbage, and just scatter it both inside their houses and outside. Tabloid TV news shows are always on the lookout for such houses because they and their usually eccentric owners make for such amusing stories. But according to a recent article in the Asahi Shimbun, this sort of packrat mentality may point to more than just eccentricity.

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Since 2005 the general feeling has been that the used condominium market in Japan is crap. Actually, it’s always been crap, and this blog will eventually get to that, but in 2005 it was officially crap thanks to Hidetsugu Aneha, the structural architect who was found to have falsified earthquake-resistance data on a number of buildings he helped design. Consequently, these buildings were deemed unsafe and some have since been rebuilt at great expense to condo owners and builders. Another consequence is that people realized that Aneha probably wasn’t the only one falsifying data to save money on things like steel support beams. In 2006 Susumu Ojima, the president of condo developer Huser Ltd., was arrested for allegedly selling units that he knew had been built with faked earthquake-resistance data. 

Ojima was eventually convicted and appealed the decision. His second trial just ended today with the judge upholding the conviction, but no one seems to be paying attention anymore, what with the recession and all. Used condominiums saw a pretty big jump in sales last year.

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Greetings. This blog is about Japanese housing. It is not an advisory guide, nor is it a professional survey of markets and trends, though over time such matters will certainly be addressed. Mainly, it is a means of coming to grips with the peculiarities of Japanese housing in all its iterations–economic, stylistic, cultural–from the standpoint of people who actually live in Japan, namely the authors, one of whom is a resident alien, the other a Japanese national.