Onigiri · No. 3
Bite-size Japan real estate
In Japanese property the building is a melting ice cube — the land is the whole story.
Morning. In Japan the house you buy is basically a depreciating tent — the real asset is the land underneath. So today, let's talk dirt. Let's snack.
A square meter of land in Tokyo runs about ¥510,000. The same square meter in Ibaraki? About ¥16,000 — roughly 32× cheaper for the identical patch of dirt. In Japanese property, location isn't a factor; it's basically the whole price.
The takeaway: same dirt, 32× the price — geography does almost all the work.
Where the visitors go, the land follows. Since 2019, land prices in Okinawa are up about ×1.7 and Hokkaido about ×1.7 — tourism and foreign buyers bidding up the ground itself. Out in quieter prefectures like Nagasaki, land fell about 16%.
The takeaway: buy the dirt where the tourists are headed, not where they left.
Why obsess over land? Because the structure on it barely counts. Japanese houses depreciate toward zero — a wooden home is treated as near-worthless within a few decades. The proof: since 2019, Tokyo's land rose about ×1.3, but the houses sitting on it managed only about ×1.2. The dirt outran the buildings.
The takeaway: you're not buying a house in Japan — you're buying the ground and renting time on the building.
By the numbers
Sources: 5.8M MLIT transaction-price records (不動産取引価格情報). Land = 宅地(土地); figures are median ¥/m² by prefecture, latest year vs 2019, minimum 80 sales at both ends; latest year preliminary.
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