Japan's 9 million akiya: what foreign buyers can actually buy

The source is the 2023 Housing and Land Survey (令和５年住宅・土地統計調査). Vacant homes nearly doubled between 1993 and 2023. The survey covers habitable dwellings and does not treat already-collapsing ruins as ordinary housing stock. Critically, it sorts vacants into four buckets — and those buckets are not interchangeable.

So already, "9 million abandoned homes for sale" fails a basic reading of the table. Rental vacants (4.44M) are mostly apartments in managed complexes — urban and suburban supply, not countryside fee-simple houses. Secondary homes (0.38M) are often intentional. For-sale vacants (0.33M) are the clearest commercial market. What remains — and what drives the social crisis — is the "other" category at 3.86 million.

One more structural fact that rarely makes headlines: of that 3.86 million "other" stock, about 2.85 million are detached houses (一戸建). Most vacant apartments sit in the rental bucket. If you are picturing a wooden countryside house, your starting universe is closer to 2.85 million than 9 million.

This is the category media usually means by akiya: dwellings with no current plan to rent, sell, or use seasonally. It grew by about 369,000 units between 2018 and 2023 — roughly 72% of all vacancy growth over that period. MLIT's 2024 Survey on Vacant House Owners (令和６年空き家所有者実態調査) explains why so much of it stays off the market.

Death of the previous resident is the single largest trigger that turns an occupied home into a vacant one (about 44% overall in the owner survey; about 58% among inherited properties). Heirs often live far away, keep the house as storage for family belongings, avoid demolition costs that can exceed residual value, and benefit from the residential-land tax reduction that can apply while a house still stands. The result is inventory that looks "available" in a national statistic but is not listed, not priced, and often not legally ready to sell.

That trigger also makes future supply unusually predictable. Over 80% of Japanese deaths are now people aged 75 and over, and the official projection has annual deaths still rising into the 2040s — which means this stock keeps growing whether or not anyone buys it. We work through what that makes predictable, and what it does not promise about resale, in why Japan will keep making akiya until the 2040s.

Geography reinforces the gap between vacancy and opportunity. Overall vacancy rates are highest in Wakayama and Tokushima (21.2%) and Yamanashi (20.5%). The abandonment rate — "other" vacants as a share of housing stock — is highest in western Japan, as the chart above shows. Major metro areas skew toward rental vacants; deep rural prefectures skew toward the long-term problem stock. High vacancy alone is not a buy signal.

Cheap listings fail for structural reasons, not because foreigners are unlucky. Every serious buyer eventually meets some combination of these five walls.

Vacancy rate and buyer opportunity are different maps. The prefectures with the highest abandonment rates are often the hardest places to create a viable use case. Foreign buyers tend to do better where vacancy meets tourism, accessibility, lifestyle demand, or a functioning commuter economy — selected parts of Nagano, Shizuoka, Kanagawa, Kyoto outskirts, Hyogo, Fukuoka, Oita, Nagasaki, and Hokkaido, among others — not simply wherever the sticker price is lowest.

Within that overlay, most workable deals fall into three archetypes. Price bands below are planning ranges, not guarantees; total cost still depends on condition and local labor markets.

The strategic takeaway is simple. The 9 million figure is a demographic byproduct of an aging, shrinking population and a housing system that still prefers new construction. Most of that inventory is un-rentable apartments, legally locked inheritances, or structurally obsolete homes in declining places. Success for foreign buyers depends on treating purchase price as a minor line item and focusing due diligence on road frontage, title integrity, renovation capex, and local use rules.

Akiya X is built around that reality. We do not pretend every vacant dwelling is a deal. We score and surface properties that are more likely to survive the filters above — so you spend time on homes worth investigating, not on noise.