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This week I’ve gathered data about the housing market in Japan. This article includes an overview of occupation rates, a break down of the unoccupied homes, and where they are concentrated at. All data from today is from Japan’s Housing and Land Survey (2023)

Total Occupation Rate

Japan boasts an occupation rate of 86%. This is about equal with or a little higher than America’s rate, depending on the source. The bright side is that with Japan’s shrinking population they aren’t likely to be reaching capacity. Now nearly 15% of homes in Japan being unoccupied may sound concerning, but lets break down the unoccupied homes.

Breakdown of Unoccupied Homes

When broken down further, we see that less than half of the homes are actually abandoned and that about 50% are just for rent. Japan also includes second homes or vacation homes as unoccupied homes, making the number seem even higher. While researching this, I found many articles tend to clickbait this by making it seem like all the homes are abandoned, but the reality isn’t as bad. Actually about 6% of Japan’s homes are vacant, while 3.5% of the United States's homes are vacant.

Where The Abandoned Homes Are

I personally would have thought most abandoned homes would be in rural prefectures due to people leaving to the large cities, but high housing numbers make up for it. The larger prefectures, namely Tokyo and Osaka have so many homes that even though a higher percent of homes are abandoned in smaller prefectures, they still have the highest number of them. In a future article I will go through the abandoned homes as a ratio to total homes to see which areas are suffering the most.

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