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After two years scouring the housing market in my city in Japan, I finally became a homeowner this month.

Here’s my advice for anyone thinking about a dive into Japanese real estate: Don’t.

I’ve written here before about the disappointing quality of Japanese housing, and that hasn’t changed. I suppose the only difference is that I now own one of those expensive, disappointing things.

Today, I’d like to take a look at what makes Japanese housing so undesirable, based on what I’ve seen in my two years deep in the market. Without further ado, I present The Ventings of a Recent Homebuyer in Japan.

1) Heating and air conditioning. Central heat and air hasn’t caught on in Japan, and in the hundreds of houses I’ve viewed online and in person, I’ve seen it exactly zero times. To keep things comfortable, a Japanese home instead relies on a ductless mini split (a wall-mounted indoor unit connected to a compressor/condenser outside) for each room.

My suspicion is that property is so cramped in Japan that architects aren’t willing to dedicate precious cubic meters to ductwork and bulkier HVAC units. Better to just slap a wall unit in the corner of every room and mount the thin outdoor component to the wall outside.

True to Japanese form, our new house has seven air conditioners. None of them in a bathroom, mind.

Through winter and summer, you can’t move comfortably through your house. Say you want to go to your bedroom in the dead of winter, you have to either a) traipse through your cold house and turn on the heater in the bedroom, teeth chattering while it warms up, or b) convince yourself that whatever you wanted in the bedroom isn’t really worth it and stay planted in the nice warm living room. We generally choose b.

Walking freely through a temperature-controlled home is not done in Japan.

2) Doors. Depending on the age of a house in Japan, the door frames may be too low for comfort. In the house I rented for the last decade (built in the 1960s), most of the doorways were between 5-foot-7-inches and 5-foot-9-inches in height. Judging by the light scarring on the top of my head, I stand about 5-foot-11-inches.

In recent years, door frames have gotten taller, and thankfully our new house (built in the 1990s), gives a generous 6-foot-8-inch clearance through the doorways. Still strange, though, that during a house hunt, you have to prioritize the ability to walk around upright.

3) Single-pane windows. In my city of Kanazawa, temperatures dip below freezing in the winter, and it gets hot as anything in the summer. Double-pane windows, however, are still in a minority of homes here.

Very new houses have gotten on board with double-pane glass, but older homes feature single-pane almost exclusively. My ‘60s-era rental house was loaded with windows, each one a thin, single layer of glass that did nothing to keep the outside temperature outside.

In the new ‘90s house, it’s a mixed bag. Some rooms have single-pane glass, others have double, and some rooms go with a strange third option that’s very popular here. To upgrade an old single-pane window, homeowners in Japan will install a second single-pane window on the same sill. We have several of these in the new place. You slide the first window open, and an inch behind it is another closed window. You slide that one open too and wonder, “Why?”

4) Garages and parking. Japan is all about city life. According to the most recent data from The World Bank, 92% of the Japanese population is considered “urban.” That means that of Japan’s roughly 125 million people, 10 million live in the countryside, and 115 million live in a city.

Geographically, Japan is a smallish country, and to make matters worse, we’re all trying to further cram ourselves into the cities. Parcels of property are therefore as expensive as they are tiny.

And when properties are small, garages and driveways are the first things to go. To make matters worse, as cramped as things are in this country, street parking is simply not possible.

Right now, on the popular Japanese real estate site athome.co.jp, I see 311 used homes for sale in my area. If I add the criteria that I want to park two cars on the property, the number drops to 175. If I need to park three cars, the number drops to 91.

Garages, like parking in general, are also hard to come by. When you do see one, they’re often a single-car concrete bunker set in the hillside under the house, or sometimes they’re a carport with corrugated tin walls lashed to the sides.

All these frustrations aside, my two-year hunt for a reasonably comfortable house with a decent garage and doors that I can walk through upright has come to an end. I wouldn’t say it was a resounding success so much as it was called for time.

I’m happy enough with our new place, though, and here’s how I cracked the market: We bought a construction company.

Or I should say the house was originally designed by the owner of a construction company as his family home/company office/workshop.

There’s a bit of extra space, and because it was for his own family, he went overboard on a few things like insulation, soundproofing, and earthquake safety. And to accommodate the employees who would come and go, the first story garage has an extravagant four cars’ worth of parking.

Not buying a “house” house in Japan is actually the best advice I can come up with. Ultimately, that would have to be my message: If you’re looking to buy a home in Japan, avoid houses.

Justin Whittinghill is an Owensboro native who works as an assistant professor of English at Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. His column runs on the last Sunday of the month in Lifestyle. He can be reached at justinwhittinghill@gmail.com.

Justin Whittinghill is an Owensboro native who works as an assistant professor of English at Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. His column runs on the last Sunday of the month in Lifestyle. He can be reached at justinwhittinghill@gmail.com.

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