Name: Why are there millions of empty houses in Japan? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2025-06-21T08:30:08.000Z
Duration: 18 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story.

In Japan, the number of abandoned homes is at an all-time high.

Nine million properties sit empty, blighting city streets and turning some rural communities into ghost towns.

So what do these crumbling houses say about Japan's existential crisis and its ageing, shrinking population?

And could a new breed of homeowners, young, foreign, and eager for a bargain, help to solve the problem?

With me today is our Tokyo correspondent, Shaima Halil.

Now, if I'm out and about in a big city in like Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto, or even in the countryside, am I going to see some of these abandoned homes?

Yes, and some of them are more obvious than others.

So if you're in the countryside, for example, there are homes where nature has pretty much taken over.

So that's a very obvious sign of an abandoned home.

I think here in Tokyo, for example, there are also obvious older ones.

But if you're like me and you're a big avid home programs fan and you walk around looking at houses and wondering how people live inside them, some will be more obvious to you.

You walk around and they look perfectly normal, but you find out from a broker or a real estate agent or those who bought them that they've been abandoned for years and years and years.

So some are more obvious than others, for sure.

And the obvious ones, it's obvious because they're decaying and decrepit or they have sort of foliage growing out of them.

How can you tell?  They're in a really bad state.

Yeah, so sometimes you can tell by the state of it that it's a wooden, very traditional-looking Japanese home that has seen better days in the middle of a main street where there are many other buildings around it.

And you could tell that it's been abandoned for many years.

Is this generally, though, a time that's seen as a more rural issue?

Japan is really suffering when it comes to urbanization.

And there are villages that are literally dying out.

For example, there's this remarkable story of a village called Nagoro.

It's literally just 20-something people, a couple dozen people.

And what they've done, they've made human-sized dolls to replace people and just put them around the village in schools and bus stops and different areas.

And while on the face of it, it's a cute and innovative idea, it's actually quite unsettling because you can see that it's literally running out of people.

The majority of the abandoned homes are in villages.

However, there are actually more abandoned homes in cities here in Tokyo even, more than I imagined.

Do the Japanese have a word for these abandoned homes,  Yes, akiyas.

Essentially, it means empty home, but right now it's used interchangeably with abandoned homes as well, homes that have been empty for many, many years.

If you're sitting anywhere in the world right now where there is a housing problem, where young people are finding it very, very difficult to get on the property market, to actually think there's a place in the world where there are 9 million homes that are empty, ready for someone to occupy them, it's quite, I still try to get my head around it, but essentially it's an aging population, it's a shrinking population.

More people are dying than there are people being born here.

Combine that with people leaving villages and coming to the city, so the urbanization, and you get those villages of people dying out of homes that are not worth much, that are just left abandoned.

So for these akiyas, it's not so much a problem of too many houses, it's a problem of not enough people.

But Japan's not the only country experiencing this, Shaila.

I mean, they're neighboring countries with low birth rates as well.

I think the majority of Japanese people tend to want to live in brand new homes.

This is a country that has many, many earthquakes with different strengths.

But let's just say there are homes that get affected by earthquakes or get destroyed by earthquakes.

Instead of renovating, people would prefer to just build and use.

I think economically as well, there is a depreciation in the value of homes, unlike the West, and unlike anywhere else in the world, actually.

And so you have this picture in Japan where homes are not worth much.

People who live in them and then die, and they leave them to family members.

And everything about that house then is more costly than it is profitable because it costs money to empty it.

Putting it on the market, trying to sell it, all the paperwork that comes with that, it just becomes not worth it for family members.

So it becomes cheaper for people just to leave them abandoned.

And that's why you get that large number.

And presumably, Shaima, if you're leaving your home to the next generation and there isn't anyone to leave it to, there's no heirs, what do you do with it?

This is a country that suffers or that is suffering with the phenomenon of lonely deaths, of people who die alone and then they don't have family members.

So people don't claim their remains, for example.

So it's almost like the homes die when the people die.

It must have been interesting as well, just the whole culture of older homes, Shaima.

Living in London, everyone wants to live in a historic property.

And yet in Japan, it's the exact opposite.

Yeah, it's a completely different culture.

The fact that a value of a home is of how new it is, how structurally robust it is.

And so, yeah, the concept of older homes here is not as valued or is not as romanticised, if you will, as it is in the West.

One thing that is the same all over the world, the West and it sounds like Japan too, is that young people don't want to go and live in the country.

And I think that's one thing that you see more acutely here in Japan and in rural areas is that when you go, you can see them shrinking.

I think the concept on its own of an empty home seems benign, but actually it's not.

Because if you're a village that's emptying out, it's almost like you're going extinct because it becomes a ghost town and it becomes more off-putting the emptier it is.

And it becomes less of a good option for a young family to go live in an area that's emptying out.

Why do the local councils not just knock these homes down?

When you knock them down, you need permissions from family members and from those who inherit.

And I think this is where it gets complicated because the homes themselves are not valuable.

The land is valuable, but who gets the land?

How do you track people down, for example?

Because again, if people die and leave a home, you need to track those family members down.

And if they haven't followed up and if they're hard to find, because for example, they're not in Japan or they live in Tokyo somewhere and not in the village, that becomes a very difficult proposition.

So as long as they're homes, it's almost like it's a contained problem.

When they become land, that becomes a different problem.

Any conversation about Japan, it doesn't matter how short or long earthquakes come up.

It's come up a few times already in our conversation, Shaima, but given how earthquake-prone Japan is, empty houses sitting there surely also present some kind of hazard.

You know, in the new year, when an earthquake happened in the Noto Peninsula, when you go there and you see the smaller villages and you see older houses that have either been completely destroyed or they've been affected and they're kind of like leaning on their side, waiting to be destroyed or waiting to completely collapse, that is actually dangerous for the houses next to them and the houses on the other side of the road.

And I've seen that in many of the streets where people have trouble getting into their own home, not because the home itself has been affected, but because these older houses are in danger of collapsing.