Why are there millions of empty houses in Japan? – The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
In Japan, the number of abandoned homes – known as Akiyas – is at an all-time high, with 9,000,000 million properties sitting empty on city streets and turning rural communities into ghost towns.
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Lucy Hockings is joined by BBC Tokyo correspondent Shaimaa Khalil to ask why these abandoned homes are such a problem? What they say about Japan’s existential population crisis? And whether there are any solutions?
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Spotting the abandoned homes
02:20 Dolls replace people in ‘dying’ village
02:55 Abandoned homes in cities
03:23 Why are there 9,000,000 empty homes in Japan?
04:06 Cultural and economic factors
05:22 ‘Homes die when the people die’
06:29 Impact on rural communities
07:00 Why not just knock the homes down?
07:47 Empty houses creating earthquake hazards
09:00 Foreigners buying and renovating these homes
10:53 Can tourism solve the empty home crisis?
12:42 Why foreigners are buying Akiyas
14:15 Japanese opinion on foreigners buying up empty houses
15:00 Does the Government have a plan for Akiyas
16:44 Japan’s aging population problem
17:35 ‘Akiyas tell the story of Japan’
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26 Comments
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Interesting 🎉🎉🎉
Wow, that's unbelievable how it's empty 😳 homes. Hopefully, there is people that all have housing in this shocking news 🙄. Prayers for the people of Japan
Wow! South Korea are affected by this too.
IN SHORT IT'S NOT A LIVABLE PLACE….LIKE WHAT SAID IN THE VIDEO A GHOST TOWN….
Very impressed by how fluent of the Japanese correspondent's English is.
more than 80% of japanese population are gathered to live in the straight line of fukuoka-hiroshima-osaka-nagoya-yokohama-tokyo. the scary part is nankai trough overlaps the most part of the line of major cities.
congrats, greeting from Peru
Same in many area. Maybe several years later, China will have many places like this. Not only the rural places, but also the suburban of the cities, as there are lots of high-level buildings built in these years.
Are the locals concerned about loss of culture by selling to foreigners?
This really an excellent program
すぐ住めるライフラインがなければ空き家に火災保険をかけることはできません。
放火された場合のその後の賠償責任や撤去費用をも掛かるかもしれませんのでご注意を！
Population shrinking is a problem? Since when?😅😅😅
类似的问题在中国的农村地区也是存在的，我看到过很多地方都有房屋空置，那些地方没有什么社会服务，所以住在哪些地方的生活体验会特别差，连基本的医院和学校之类的设施都没有。
Im tired to learn they language.. not easy to me
Main reason is. Less of birthrate.
Making Tokyo’s background look sepia on purpose or showing dolls that even Japanese people don’t know, as if they mean something, is just staged and biased reporting.
Western countries hate immigration but without it we would have a shrinking population also
have you tried flooding Japan with somalians?
I wonder if in the future it will be a good business to restore old houses in Japan…
Ghost town in real life
❤
A
Many children,
Many fortunes
i really welcome people all over the world who want to live in Japan
There are not 9 million abandoned houses. The majority of unoccupied dwellings are apartments. The Land and Housing Ministry survey takes place every 5 years. The results are published online in English.