I started looking at Japanese property the way most Canadians probably do, which is by accident. I was reading about the weak yen, wandered onto a listing site, and found myself staring at a detached house an hour outside a major city priced at less than the annual property tax bill on some Toronto homes. Then I found an apartment in a real city, on a real train line, for the price of a parking space in Yorkville. My first reaction was the one the internet wants you to have: this has to be a mistake, or an opportunity, and either way I should keep scrolling.

The more I looked, the more I realized the cheap-property story was simultaneously true and misleading. Japan is not a poor country hiding a fire sale. It is one of the richest, safest, most functional places on earth. The trains run to the second. The rule of law is real. Foreigners can buy property with no residency or nationality requirement. Tourists arrive in record numbers. And yet large parts of the residential market behave in a way that would look like a malfunction to anyone raised on Canadian real estate, where the assumption that a house is a savings account that always goes up is baked so deep we forget it is an assumption at all.