Considering how expensive housing is in Japan, foreigners just off the boat tend to be surprised that there isn’t more communal living going on. Usually the only shared residences outside of company and student dormitories are those occupied by foreigners just off the boat, those little oases of non-Japanese manners and mores known as “gaijin houses.” Of course, most Japanese apartments, even the larger ones, are not really adequate for communal living the way apartments in the West are, and in any case Japanese landlords tend to frown on renting out properties to multiple persons if those persons are not married or otherwise related. Consequently, there’s no vocabulary for shared dwellings, much less a market.

That is until now, and it appears to be a market-driven development. The explosion of vacant rental properties in the larger cities have prompted some real estate companies to take it upon themselves to offer what is being calle “share rooms,” meaning houses and apartment buildings with communal living rooms, kitchens and bathrooms. These companies rent out the bedrooms as they would apartments, and the practice has caught on so much so that the media is covering it as a fashionable trend. The internet is overflowing with share room bulletin boards. Read More

On Mar. 18 the land ministry released its latest list of property values throughout Japan. For at least two years running land prices, both for residential areas and commercial areas, have been dropping nationwide. Of the approximately 27,000 localities checked only 7 recorded any increase in land values. Though the government says the economy continues to show signs of recovery, property values remain stagnant, which means the economy can never recover fully.

The average price decrease for residential areas was 4.2 percent. The drop in the same period a year ago was 3.2 percent. Similarly, the drop for commercial land was 6.1 percent compared to 4.7 percent a year earlier. The drop for commercial land was even steeper in the three metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya: about 7.1 percent. This greater drop was blamed on a mini-bubble for commercial property in some areas of Tokyo in 2006. Read More