Nine Million Empty Houses

The house in the Kiso valley has a tiled roof, a genkan with the step worn into a shallow curve, and a persimmon tree in the yard that fruited last autumn and dropped the lot. Nobody picked them. Nobody has lived here since 2009, when the last occupant went into care in Nagano and her son, who works in Nagoya, decided that the two-hour drive was not sustainable.

The house is not for sale, exactly. It is on a municipal akiya bank at a nominal price, and the municipality would be pleased if someone took it. Japan has somewhere around nine million such houses — the 2023 housing survey counted 9 million vacant dwellings, about 14% of the total stock — and the number rises every year.

How a country ends up with nine million empty houses

The demographics are the obvious half. Japan's population peaked in 2008 and has been falling since; the fertility rate is around 1.2 and deaths outnumber births by several hundred thousand a year. Rural prefectures have been losing people to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya continuously since the 1960s, and the people who left were young.

The less obvious half is the tax and building code. Japanese houses depreciate on a schedule that treats a wooden dwelling as worth essentially nothing after about thirty years, which means the resale market for old houses barely exists — the value is in the land, and a building on it is often a liability to be cleared. But clearing it triggers a property tax increase of up to six times, because land with a residential structure on it gets a substantial break. The rational move for an heir who cannot sell is to leave the house standing and pay the low rate.

Add inheritance. Japanese land registries were not systematically updated for generations, and an estimated area of the country larger than Kyushu now has ownership that cannot be established — the registered owner died decades ago, the estate was never formally divided, and tracing every descendant who holds a fractional claim is a legal project nobody will fund. A 2024 law finally made inheritance registration compulsory. It will take a generation to work through.

The empty house is not a market failure. It is what a tax code, a building code and a registry designed for a growing population produce when the population stops growing.

The municipalities that are trying

Akiya banks are municipal registries listing vacant properties, and there are now hundreds of them. Some are little more than a spreadsheet. Others come with renovation subsidies, relocation grants, and in a few cases a house transferred for free to anyone who commits to living in it and restoring it.

The foreign interest in this has been considerable and mostly misdirected. The listings that circulate online as "free houses in Japan" are real, and the conditions attached to them are also real: residency, a renovation budget that routinely exceeds what the house would cost in a functioning market, and in many cases a requirement to participate in the community — which in a village of forty people over seventy means the fire brigade, the shrine festival and the drainage ditches, in Japanese.

The municipalities are not trying to sell houses. They are trying to acquire residents, and specifically residents who will still be there in ten years. An akiya bank is a recruitment tool with a property attached.

What it looks like in Tsumago

The Kiso valley is the useful counter-example, because it went through this earlier and did something about it. Tsumago was a post town on the Nakasendō, the Edo-period highway between Edo and Kyoto, and when the railway went elsewhere in 1911 the town simply stopped. By the 1960s it was emptying out in the ordinary way.

In 1968 the residents adopted a charter with three rules: do not sell, do not rent out, do not destroy. Power lines went underground. Vending machines and parked cars were removed from the main street. Television aerials came off the roofs. The town restored itself as a working settlement rather than a museum, and the people who live there now largely make their living from the visitors who walk the eight kilometres over the pass from Magome.

It worked, and it is worth being clear about the terms on which it worked. Tsumago traded a good deal of individual property freedom for collective survival, and it did so with an asset — a preserved Edo streetscape on a walkable historic route — that almost no other emptying village has. The charter is not a template. It is proof that the outcome is not inevitable.

What a traveller actually sees

You see it most clearly on the local trains. Ride any regional line an hour out of a prefectural capital and count the closed shutters along the platform-side shopping streets, the primary schools converted to community centres, the bus timetables with four services a day. The Japan that visitors experience — Tokyo, Kyoto, the shinkansen corridor — is the fifth of the country that is still filling up.

It is also, increasingly, what the tourism strategy is built on. Rural revitalisation money has funded farmstays, satoyama walking routes, restored minka guesthouses and the whole apparatus of what is marketed abroad as authentic rural Japan. Some of it is excellent and genuinely community-run. Some of it is a subsidised guesthouse in a village where the guesthouse is the last business.

Stay in one anyway, and ask who owns it. The answer is often a person in their thirties who moved from a city, took the grant, spent three years on the roof, and is now the youngest resident by two decades. That conversation is the story, and it is available in a few hundred villages between Hokkaido and Kyushu to anyone willing to get off the main line.