It's probably not as romanticizing as you expect.

Watch the beginning of Totoro to get an idea of what an abandoned house in rural Japan looks like (rundown, in the middle of nowhere). Vacation homes anywhere get quite dusty in a mere week, so you'd be looking at a spring cleaning event on every trip (very much like in the movie).

Bear in mind also that flight tickets to Japan aren't exactly cheap either; you can get a week worth of hotel stays in the US for the price of the round trip flight from US to Japan.

That's funny, I always think of the house in My Neighbour Totoro as probably the most idyllic place I could imagine. I'd swap my place in relatively central London for it in a heartbeat.

Idyllic yes, but my point was that it took a good scrubbing to get to that point

I mean yes, they aren't cheap, I've been there a couple of times before, but lodging costs in Japan are sky high as well, which is more my intention.

Well, if your idea of chilling is being away from civilization w/ moderate amounts of physical labor, then rather than acquiring a rural abandoned property, a possibly less committed option with more flexibility for tourism is camping.

You can, but it may collapse in an earthquake or landslide before you arrive. Common wisdom in Japan is an empty home will begin to collapse within two years. Then you need to pay for disposal, which is a major expense. Buying a $500 home will be like adopting an old shelter dog. It requires lots of care and will still die soon. If you want to move in and make it a great place it might be possible. As a vacation home for one week a year to see sakura flowers? No, bad idea.

Just as a counterbalance to the nay-sayers without information: I'm also extremely curious about this. Before covid I traveled to Japan about 3-4 times per year, and the hotel fees definitely add up. The tickets are usually manageable if ordered early enough in advance imo.

It's not like the "spring cleaning" mentioned by others is a deal breaker either, it's probably possible to find someone to do some of that for pay if you speak enough Japanese.

Obviously having something close enough to trains / relevant cities might be a long shot, but the payoff would be huge if anything like this existed.

Fingers crossed that someone with insight responds

Can't speak from personal insight, but I recommend checking out the Tokyo Llama channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBQ3TEq5SrUuTJuMl1S_4ig (also linked elsewhere in the thread) to see what the experience of buying and fixing up an akiya is really like.

In their case, they had fairly specific location requirements and thus restricted themselves to Ibaraki prefecture. So fairly close to Tokyo (1 hour train ride I believe?), but they paid much more than $500 -- more like $20-30k if I recall. Once you go through the bureaucracy of buying it (making sure it doesn't have a tax lien, etc.), you're basically faced with a falling-down hoarder house that you have to clean out and likely tear down and rebuild completely. Theirs was also a quite large lot and a nice traditional Japanese farmhouse called a minka or kominka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minka). So, not typical of these $500 houses -- those are probably going to be further out from the cities, much smaller lots, and complete teardowns. But do expect to invest significant time and money to get it to a habitable state. And you'll likely need to speak much more than tourist Japanese to deal with the local bureaucracy and builders.

But if you're willing to put in the effort, and you do like the quiet Japanese country life as a getaway, it could well be a good investment. This is pretty much my plan for (semi-)retirement in a few years.

Do you think these $500 homes are habitable?