Japan’s ‘death-tainted’ homes gain appeal as property prices soar

Image credit: Reuters

It’s early summer in Chiba, near Tokyo, Japan, and a young man is hard at work scraping a thick, oily substance off the kitchen floor of a house.

“When I started, the smell used to stick in my nose and throat, but I feel like I’ve gotten used to it recently,” the cleaner, Tatsumasa Morikagi, said.

What Morikagi is cleaning up are the last physical remains of the building’s former occupant, an elderly man who was living alone. After he died, his body was only discovered more than six months later.

“That’s why this is a ‘jiko bukken’,” explained Akira Ookuma, a property expert specialising in Japan’s growing number of what are commonly called “stigmatised homes”.

In Japan, houses or apartments where murders or suicides have occurred are classified as jiko bukken, or stigmatised homes.

The most common type of stigmatised properties, however, is one with a history of a “socially isolated” death, where the bodies of the occupants are not found for some time and sufficient decay has set in to warrant specialised cleaning services or even the replacement of floors and wallpaper.

Such properties come with a social stigma attached, but that stigma can offer an opportunity for willing buyers, with massive discounts for a home where a murder took place, brokers told Reuters.

“In the case of this house, it’s priced at around a 20 per cent discount because it’s a stigmatised property. It’ll be renovated before it’s handed over to the new owner, which I think makes it very attractive to prospective buyers,” Ookuma said.

Japan’s attitude towards death is shaped by the Shinto belief that when a person dies with regrets, their spirit lingers on earth, often at the site of their death, becoming ghosts that bear grudges or are overwhelmed by grief, said Taisuke Sadayuki, an associate professor of economics at Tokyo’s Seijo University, who researches the impact such deaths have on the property market.

It is this widespread fear of lingering spirits that prompted property consultant Kazutoshi Kodama to get into the ghost hunting business, carrying out surveys to certify whether a property is experiencing paranormal activity or not.

“I spend eight hours at a location, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., carrying out a full survey of video, sound, electromagnetic waves, temperature and humidity, atmospheric pressure, and using a thermal camera in order to be able to certify that there’s nothing present at the property,” he said.

The house that Kodama is currently working on has a grim history. Seven years ago, an elderly woman hanged herself in the bathroom and last year her son died alone, his body left undiscovered for about 10 days.

Despite this, Kodama believes the home could find a new occupant, or even a new owner.

“Property prices are going up so people want to buy them as cheaply as they can, and I think that makes these kinds of stigmatised properties an option for them,” he said.

Japan’s property prices have rocketed as construction materials and labour costs jump. Overseas investors, attracted by the cheap yen and the relatively low cost of Japanese homes, are pouring in.

The average price for a second-hand 70-square-metre condominium in Tokyo’s 23 wards, for example, jumped by more than a third in May from a year earlier to 100.9 million yen ($697,000), according to real estate research firm Tokyo Kantei.

Japan’s rapidly ageing population has led to more socially isolated deaths. The national policy agency’s first-ever report on the issue said there were nearly 21,900 cases last year where the death was not discovered for eight or more days.

And the number of stigmatised properties is only going to rise, real estate brokers say.

That means a growing market for jiko bukken specialists like Jobutsu Fudosan, or “Nirvana Estate Agency”, which offers services that include a ceremony for lost souls carried out by a Buddhist monk.

“From an investor’s perspective you can buy cheaply, and as they don’t intend to live there themselves, they don’t feel worried,” said property specialist Yuki Sato.

Reuters