As with last year’s impromptu tent city in Hibiya Park, this New Years saw another attempt to give the newly destitute a chance to get through the holidays in one piece, though in this case the government actually initiated the plan. The national government, that is, which let 831 homeless, jobless men stay at the National Olympics Memorial Youth Center in Sendagaya from Dec. 29 to Jan. 4, during which the tenants were supposed to receive job counseling. About a half dozen actually left with references, according to reports.

It was no skin off the nose of the facility, since it is officially closed during the holidays. And while the charitable gesture was paid for by the federal government (Prime Minister Hatoyama even showed up for a sympathetic show of commiseration), the place had to be staffed by municipal employees. After everyone was kicked out on the 4th and some were moved to other facilities, Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara commented that the prime minister shouldn’t have visited. “I wouldn’t have gone,” he said. Apparently, he was pissed that the government had strong-armed Tokyo into participating in what he saw as a useless and ill-advised PR gambit. Read More

Some of the surest bargains on the real estate market are so-called besso manshon, or resort condos. When most people in Tokyo think of second homes or weekend homes, they think of Karuizawa or the Izu peninsula or maybe the five lakes area around Mt. Fuji, where prices tend to be uniformly expensive. The thing is, second homes almost anywhere else are quite affordable, and I often check resort-net.com, which is run by Recruit, to see what’s available, and one of the most intriguing areas is actually the Boso peninsula, meaning Chiba Prefecture. A few weeks ago on the site I found 73 properties on the Boso peninsula that were priced at less than 5 million. Though Chiba has a reputation as a bedroom region it’s got lots of hills and forests and Kujukuri sea coast is cleaner and less crowded than the stretch of beach that leads from Shonan in Kanagawa to the tip of Izu. In fact, diehard surfers say Kujukuri has the best waves on the Pacific side of Honshu. More significantly, it’s cooler than Tokyo in the summer and warmer in the winter, sometimes by as much as three degrees.

Consequently, there are a lot of second homes and resort condos on sale in seaside towns like Onjuku and Katsuura for as little as 2 million yen for about 40 square meters. These two resort towns are quaint but large enough to supply all the amenities you’d want in walking distance to wherever you happen to live. Many of the resort condos are close to the main train stations, and both towns are less than 90 minutes from central Tokyo by express. If you don’t have a car this is important, since most second homes tend to be far from central business area and train lines. Read More

The government wants to increase the tax exemption on gifts that parents give to their children, so if your folks were inspired by the largesse of Yasuko Hatoyama to her three kids–one of whom is the prime minster and got into hot water because of that largesse–they’ll be able to give you up to ¥20 million tax free, if land minister Seiji Maehara gets his way. Read More

Deflation isn’t necessarily supposed to affect housing or transportation, but the Japanese media keeps harping on how the prices of condominiums in the major cities are dropping along with the number of housing starts. Obviously, now is the time to buy, though experts always say that if you wait until others start buying in a so-called buyers market, then you’re already too late.

According to a recent article in Shukan Asahi, many condo developers are stuck with inventory that they can’t get rid of, no matter how much they lower the price. Many of these companies are selling their unsold condos to outside agents for as little as 70 percent off. In many cases, these agencies have to sell the units for even less money than what they paid for them, basically “dumping” these units onto the housing market. Needless to say there are many people who may be interested in such cheap housing but finding these units takes more time and effort than a lot of people have. Read More

One of the lesser known customs related to housing in Japan is the idea of owning a house on rented land. It’s less common today than it used to be but nevertheless common enough. Traditionally, leases on lots are about 50 years. A person can build a house on this land and have title to the structure, but the land is still owned by somebody else and the homeowner has to pay rent on it. Read More

Finance minister Shizuka Kamei has stopped giving lip service to the idea of a moratorium for housing loan defaulters. Could it have anything to do with the fact that back in the early 90s, when the housing policy that led to all the current foreclosures, he was in the Miyazawa cabinet and was instrumental in bringing it about? Probably not. Kamei sort of prides himself on the way he shoots from the hip. Read More

Tokyo’s five big real estate companies released their midterm accounting figures last week. Mitsui, Sumitomo, Tokyu, and Nomura all reported increased sales for the past fiscal half-year, while Mitsubishi Jissho showed a decline. However, only three of the five predict that they will show a profit for the next half-year ending in March. The profits for the four all came from sales of high-end condos. Sales of lower-priced condos and office buildings remain very sluggish, like the economy itself. Read More

The Minowa Apartments, located in the shitamachi or old residential area of Tokyo, are currently being demolished. Built in 1928, the Minowa complex was one of 16 Dojunkai public apartment buildings constructed throughout Tokyo following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. These structures were the first concrete-and-steel-bar collective housing buildings in Japan, and some historians consider them valuable cultural assets. The Minowa Apartments, for instance, survived the US firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 (though they were definitely damaged), and architects have often said they represent the best in terms of Japanese design ideas that were developed before the war. Read More

Designer homes are a luxury anywhere in the world, but in Japan they are even more so given the price of land and the cost of construction. And until not too long ago homes that were considered “distinctive,” meaning that they were obviously designed and built to the specifications of their original owners, were considered risky by bank lenders, who believed their distinction would make them difficult to resell, regardless of their quality. Read More

The Nihon Keizai newspaper reports that the land ministry is seriously “studying” yet another housing-related tax reform that will effectively increase the tax exemption for inheritances from parents to children if the inheritance is used to buy/build a home or reform an existing home. Currently, up to ¥6.1 million of an inheritance is exempt from tax if it is used for housing. The ministry wants to increase it to ¥20 million. Read More