We are moving to Japan | Ep 004 - Lemonade Stand π
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How affordable is Japan's housing market?
Aiden, you got back from Japan like 15 minutes ago.
About. How long?
I mean, I landed like three hours ago.
And then by the time, oh, beautiful LAX. By the time I walked to the Uber parking lot, got into the Uber, and then got here, it was about 15 minutes ago. All right, well, I did just get back from Japan. And I thought it would be nice to pick a nice, exciting topic related to Japan. And one thing that was going through my head a lot while I was there, because we actually went out into the countryside, and I've never done that before. I've been, or at least not in like mainland Japan. I've been to Hokkaido and I've done a little road trip like while it's snowing and I've been to Tokyo, but I've never been into like the countryside that you kind of see.
Do you consider yourself an honorary Nihongo?
No, I'm basically Japanese. We were calling Nick Yingling the chopped hus the entire time, if you know what that means, in Japanese the whole time we were there. We'll move on from that. A big headline that I have seen in our media in recent years is about how you can get free houses in Japan. Anyone can buy one. Literally one or zero dollar homes. And the catch being that these homes are often very broken down, old, abandoned. But it did make me want to look a little more into why housing in Japan is so relatively cheap at a time when everywhere in the world, developed countries, big cities, prices of real estate are generally going up. People are getting priced out of living places. Yeah. And that's not like an American thing necessarily.
No, like Canada, Australia, UK. It's all over the world. So the first thing I took a look at was, and as you've explained to me in the past, is Japan had this gigantic asset bubble that like largely included real estate. When their economy was exploding, they went through this huge inflationary period of assets in the country. And then I think it was in like- 89. 92 was when it really, really crashed.
It peaked in 89.
So- Wait, can I say a fun stat?
Yeah. In 89, the peak of the bubble- The land around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than all the real estate in California. You could own California for less than... They had one of the biggest real estate bubbles in human history. It was crazy. Wow.
We stayed at a hotel right next to the Imperial Palace, and have you considered that it's really nice? Yeah.
This is you trading for California with Ronald Reagan.
Have you gone to Stockton? It's not that nice. Stockton is just not as good as the Imperial Palace. And one like little video I watched as an example is even on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is like a, you know, a major, major city, right? The most populous city in the world by like metro area population. On the outskirts of Tokyo, there are large, like, you know, 1500 square foot family homes that might cost like $70,000, right? And compared to, you know, what we would be paying in L.A., right? That's crazy. L.A. is a million, I believe. You couldn't park in L.A. for something. Right.
I believe the median price for a home in L.A. is like $1.1 million. Yeah, I think it passed the mill.
Median?
Yeah.
Oh, my God. That's what I heard, too. I think... That's actually... I didn't know it was more than a million now.
But I know because it was a comparison. It was actually from the book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein, which we'll probably talk about next week. But talking about how the... price of a home in America is just obscenely overpriced, at least in most of the like blue cities right now.
The metro areas. Right. The metro areas. Yeah. So there's, there's a bunch of factors and I'll kind of layer this into two main things that I saw. So for rural Japan, where you could get these abandoned houses, right? Uh, there is a decline in population. As time has passed, a really concentrated movement of people from rural areas of Japan into cities, just like a lot of the developed world is going through in general, right? That's a general population movement that happens. But Japan, it happened earlier and more aggressively. And on top of that, really low birth rate. Really low birth rate. And one of the lowest in the world.
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