Japan Has Millions of Empty Houses. Want to Buy One for $25,000?

13 comments

1. As long as it’s not haunted, sure!

2. Most of them aren’t livable or have all sorts of absurd covenants.

3. Given that Japanese houses aren’t built to last the cost of up keep has to be something, no?

4. In the case of Japan, loans are used in most cases as a means of payment when purchasing a home.But what if we consider the interest rate?

5. I remember there was a BBC reporter who offered to move into a rural municipality in Chiba with his family. He thought the village would welcome him. Their reply “You’d have to adjust to the way things work here,” astonished him, and he interpreted it as a mistrust of outsiders, even those such as himself who were “known and liked” in the community.

   I would agree with him that it displays mistrust of outsiders, but disagree with the cause of the mistrust. Obviously, issues like burakumin are widely known, but and additional unstated reason why many of these rural municipalities (and even rural areas of major cities) have declining populations while rejecting outsiders is that they are under the control of (literal or metaphorical) mafia, ie “anti-social forces.” There are reasons why many are so desperate to leave, even if it means moving to a city where they can never hope to have a family of their own. Life in some of these rural areas is unbearable.

   (I don’t think this is just Japan, btw, there are several towns in southern Italy for example where membership in ‘Ndrangheta is ubiquitous. That is an extreme example, but it’s a sociological certainty that small isolated villages will start acting like parochial mafias if left to their own devices. It’s just human nature.)

   TLDR: Be careful moving or traveling where the first allegiance of public officials (local and national) is to their locality. They will expect and exact the same allegiance from you, and you might not know what they’re asking until it’s too late.

6. I did. Now I need $100k US to fix everything.

   Roof, floors, major crack in brick wall, paint, all their stuff they left behind to send to the dump, electrical, etc, etc.

   Other than that, it’s great.

7. Ah yes abandoned homes that have 100 issues and absurd stipulation to live there along with being foreign adverse.

8. Rephrase:

   “Want to buy a rotten, termite-infested shit-hole for $25,000?”

9. tldr

   Reiko, left, and Takahiro Okada in the home they’re selling through Akiya & Inaka in the Hacioji area of Tokyo, March 11, 2023. (
   The entrance hall had its own gable tile roof.
   Owners feel little incentive to maintain an aging house, and buyers often seek to demolish them and start fresh.
   “In many cases, the parents die without making clear their wishes regarding the family home, or they develop dementia and find it difficult to discuss these things,” Wada said. “
   One person it did not dawn on recently is Alex Kerr, an author and Japanologist originally from Maryland, who became an akiya owner in 1973 when he acquired an abandoned country house (known as a minka) in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, for $1,800.
   He has spent decades and roughly $700,000 (“about half” of which came from a government grant, he said) maintaining it, and now rents it out as a guesthouse.

10. I see it’s that time of the week again.

11. No

12. Another day, another akiya article. Is this the new obsession for foreign news outlets to focus on about Japan?

    I guess it’s an improvement over “Japanese people don’t have sex”…

13. I’m going to disagree with some of these posts that all the communities are unwelcoming or houses are in just terrible shape. It’s really easy in Japan to find houses for less than $100k US. A similar condition home would be $300-500k US in my home town in America.

    The difference is that in America someone wants to actually buy that house, in Japan, NOBODY wants to buy that house. They cannot sell the homes to foreigners because owning the houses gives you not right of entry to Japan and there are no loans available for foreign investments in Japan.