This is all true. Looking at that same reality from a different angle though:

- available housing is primarily for single persons. Family housing has become a luxury, which makes having kids all the more expensive.

- those single person apparts are flimsier and less maintained than past homes. Leopalace grade housing is becoming widespread.

- buying anything above 2 rooms apparts will land you in the 30+ years debt area. And to get those you'll have to prove a stability level that's not common anymore thse days.

Your first point is true I think.

Your second is certainly not. The baseline expectation for Japanese homes is constantly improving and something built cheap today is many times better than something built cheap 20 years ago.

Yeah, you get a 30 year loan, but that’s standard. Where do people not do that to afford housing?

On baseline expectations, there's two different standards: the one when you build/buy your primary residency, and the other when it's for rent. In most countries there's not that much of a gap, in Japan I see it as way wider.

Also, appartments can have a very solid foundation cleanly matching mandated standards and very cheap resident rooms with paper thin walls and poor insulation. On paper they will be better homes (free internet, air conditionning, automated bathtub etc), in practice the difference will be less obvious.

On 30y loans, it's fine if you are a full fledged employee of a well regarded company. It's another story if you're a contractor (roughly half of the active population! [0]), and impossible as part timer.

[0] https://www.sangyo-rodo.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/toukei/koyou/ed6fc...

One of the benefits of a shrinking population.

But also just more permissive zoning.

I live in a depopulating city, but even so, whenever a single-family home in my neighborhood is torn down, it is replaced with a 3-4 story multi-family unit, increasing densification. An old bowling alley was torn down and is being replaced with a massive 14-floor, 200-unit condo. Empty space near the train tracks has become two huge condo buildings (200 units each, built by Japan Rail, of course). And this is just in the past few years.

Even in depopulating areas, huge projects are happening to increase housing supply as multi-generational households lose favor.

Tokyo is not shrinking yet, but Tokyo housing is still plentiful and affordable.

I wondered if it was just a perception difference...I didn't get the feeling housing was still affordable, but it might depend on individual needs.

To get an external perspective, average house pricing [0] and average rent [1] have stably rose, while average wages have stayed basicslly flat [2] during these years:

[0] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-price...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202559/japan-rent-for-a...

[2] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01631/

They also do not have NIMBY legislation. They are able to build and have mixed use buildings ie business on the bottom and homes on top. The reason why there’s so much inventory is that rarely any of it is a single family home with a yard.

They’re an outlier.

Also houses depreciate there because you don’t own land.

Equivalent house in Japan is far more expensive than in Australia.

You definitely own land in Japan. Even if you buy a condo you own a fraction of the land the building is built on. It's the only thing that doesn't lose value.

People make less in Japan, population is falling (even Tokyo has tepid growth), housing depreciates (even if land appreciates, second hand houses are often seen as a liability that needs to be rebuilt) and Japan went through a horrible speculative real estate bubble burst that led to their lost decade. Still, I love what can happen when housing isn’t seen as a speculative asset.