The "return" on your investment in a home in Japan is best measured in terms of the pleasure it will yield and the doorway to the intimacies of community and the Japanese mind it will lure you into.
The fire that killed at least 80 people in London's Grenfell Tower in June, as well as similar apartment building blazes that recently occured in Dubai and Hawaii, has brought the world's attention to the issue of safety in high-rise residences. Grenfell Tower was relatively ...
As everyone knows, Japan has an unmanageable surplus of vacant housing. According to the latest government surveys there are more than 8 million unoccupied houses and apartment units in Japan and that number will increase to the point where one in four or five ...
A reader writes to Lifelines about Japan's recently introduced inheritance tax law, which he calls "one of the most punitive in the world."
Until the postwar growth period, the majority of Japanese rented rather than owned the places where they lived, but renters in Japan have never had much in the way of rights. Still, it is difficult to evict someone from a home they rent, even ...
Nearly 27 percent of land in rural areas does not have identified owners, according to the Justice Ministry's first survey on the current state of land ownership. The survey released Tuesday was conducted after the issue of unclear land ownership emerged as a challenge for ...
In the 1990s when we rented an old house in Saitama Prefecture, we needed a parking space since we had a car at the time. There was none on the property and so we talked the landlord into tearing down a decrepit prefabricated storage ...
On April 19, the Lower House of the Diet unanimously passed a revision to the Safety Net Law. The revision creates a new system that will register vacant properties with local governments and, ideally, these properties will be renovated and then rented out to ...
The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake left 110,000 people in three prefectures without shelter. Most of these people moved into emergency evacuation centers while the authorities prepared temporary housing for them. About 53,000 prefabricated housing units, called kasetsu, were built in accordance with a national ...
Infrastructure in Japan is up to world standards in most areas, and in terms of public transportation it often surpasses those standards — but there's one field it falls way behind: utility poles and overhead cables that carry electrical power and telecommunications. In London, Paris ...
In its Dec. 20 issue, Asahi Shimbun reported on a couple in their 60s living in Saitama City. Two years ago their neighbor installed an Eco Cute system that uses heat pump technology to heat water more efficiently and, thus, reduce electricity costs. But ...
