Seems like a baseless claim to me. Even just visually their zoning (or lack thereof) is obviously quite different.

When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

> When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

Unless… you have a land value tax

The point of the economic numbers is that what's affordable from a Western perspective is not for a Japanese person. You're talking about a country where 50% of workers earn less than $25,000 per year!

Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'

shrug. Doesn’t contradict anything I said. Japan is not a developing country.

We can argue semantics, but I specifically said that "their economy is much closer to a developing country." This contrasts sharply against, what I presume is, our youth - when they were at one point set to become the largest economy in the world, and everything Japanese was state of the art + crazy expensive while quite affordable for Japanese.

Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.

And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.