Architect Mitsuru Tanabe says he is one of the lucky ones.
Now that his two grown-up daughters have left home, he has put the family house on the market and plans to move with his wife from a suburb north of Tokyo to the warmer resort area of Izu.
Thanks to his knowledge of construction, he may have avoided the trap most home owners in Japan face as they near retirement -- a house valued at zero.
Many people are forced to pay to have their homes demolished if they want to sell their land.
"I knew all along that the value of wooden houses falls to zero after 20 years. So I designed my house in reinforced concrete, which can last 60 or even 100 years. I built it in such a way that I'd be able to sell it," he said.
As the postwar baby-boom generation approaches old age, more and more elderly Japanese will find themselves stuck in unsalable houses, says Haruo Shimada, a professor at Keio University who is also an economics adviser to the Cabinet.
Dash toward modernization
The foundations of today's predicament were laid during Japan's headlong dash toward modernization in the decades after World War II, Shimada says. Encouraged by the government, construction companies focused on churning out new houses for the many left homeless by the ravages of war.
The middle class was soon able to own homes -- a privilege that had been limited to the elite before the war.
"This was a housing miracle. From the ashes of the bombing, all households had their own homes," said Shimada.
In subsequent decades, land prices and incomes rose so fast that home owners never lost sleep over the relatively minor losses they suffered on the buildings.
Few Japanese could expect to live much beyond retirement age, so they did not consider selling their houses and maintenance was largely neglected.
Miracle to debacle
As a consequence, the market for used homes never developed, turning the housing miracle into a debacle, Shimada says.
Over the past 10 years, Japan has undergone a housing glut and real estate prices have swooned with the burst of the asset-inflated bubble economy.
Changes in lifestyles as well as demographics have also brought about the need for a more evolved used-homes market.
The Japanese are now among the longest-lived in the world, meaning the non-liquid housing market often traps the elderly for decades in unsuitable homes.
Meanwhile, the tradition for the eldest son to take over the family home is fading fast.
The younger generation now tend to move out, squeezing their own families into small apartments.
One of the main reasons why trade in used homes amounts to only 0.3 percent of the overall housing market is that there is no system of assessing the condition of second-hand homes, so buyers are at the mercy of real estate agents.
"There is no industry, no service, nor any law relating to this," Shimada said.
Consequently, the average lifespan of a Japanese house is just 26 years, compared with 44 in the US.
But the ancient cottages that dot farming areas bear witness to the fact that wooden houses can be used for a century or more if well-maintained.
"People who look after their wooden houses properly ought to be able to sell them," said architect Tanabe.
Maintenance and renovation
The government has only recently begun to recognize the problem, and is discussing measures to enlarge the second-hand market by encouraging maintenance and renovation.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport also said it plans to introduce an evaluation system, modelled on the US home inspection method, some time next year.
But for the moment, even financing is harder for buyers of used homes. The publicly funded Housing Loan Corporation, which provides about 40 percent of all housing loans, offers buyers of new homes better interest rates and longer repayment periods.
Shimada says the government needs to do much more to shake up the market -- for example, by pushing construction companies to standardize the methods and measurements they use, which would make maintenance easier and cheaper.
Developing the used-home market, he says, would do much more for the overall economy than the government realizes.
For home owners, the knowledge that their biggest asset is constantly dwindling in value is a compelling reason to spend less and save more than their counterparts in other industrialized countries, Shimada says.
Household savings
"I think this is the single largest issue. On the one hand, people [in Japan] have the world's largest stock of savings ... and yet they can never be certain about their future. They refrain from spending," he said.
In fiscal 1999, Japanese households saved 11.3 percent of their income, compared with 2.3 percent in the US and 0.9 percent in the UK.
Much of the vast pool of savings is held by the elderly, who tend to cling to their cash because they know they cannot count on selling their houses to cover medical and other expenses they expect to shoulder.
Financial suicide
"In Britain, for example, when you retire you can sell your house and perhaps you want to move to a smaller, warmer house near the hospital. Then you sell that house and move into a care home ... You can go on and on without losing the value of your asset," Shimada said.
Doing that in Japan would be financial suicide.
Land remains a liquid asset, but is worth only a fraction of its value a decade ago. And while high-quality concrete apartments are salable, the many detached, wooden houses -- the type usually inhabited by the elderly -- are typically valued more or less at zero 20 years after they are built.
The cumulative effect that this has on consumption is enormous, given that about 60 percent of Japan's housing is now owner-occupied.
Shimada says it will probably take several years for most consumers to wake up to their predicament.
"The population takes that lifestyle for granted. Very few Japanese ask why their houses are valued at zero, because everyone else's is valued at zero, too," he said.
"It takes time for people to change ideas."
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