Residential houses are often built using wooden frames, or a metal frame with everything else made of wood. Japan is humid, so if there's poor drainage the wood

Residential houses are often built using wooden frames, or a metal frame with everything else made of wood. Japan is humid, so if there's poor drainage the wood rots. Japan has Earthquakes, I guess that causes subsidence and other structural issues. Construction is of varying quality. I've seen houses in the countryside (Showa era, maybe 70s 80s?) which literally look like they found a nice rock and decided to use it as a foundation for a house. Mostly the foundations are not as I'd expect to see them in the UK (where I'm from). If you remove the Tatami flooring, there's a thinish piece of wood, under that there's Earth. So what it comes down to is that because many houses are made of wood, and because of Earthquakes, houses kind of get structurally unsound over time. At some point it's just more economical to pull the house down and build a new one than it is to renovate it. This is my understanding anyway. I don't understand planning permission in Japan well, but it seems easier to get than I'm used to seeing (in the UK). Perhaps that helps depress land value. People seem to find moving not wanting a house someone has died in weird. I think it's more understandable with houses that last a relatively short time... deaths, and suicides that have occurred in a house need to be declared when the house is sold. It decreases the value of the house somewhat. Somehow all of this has contributed resulted in much more (to my mind) reasonable housing prices, at least outside central Tokyo. I've just bought a house in Japan (with my wife) so a lot of this stuff is on my mind. If anybody would like to talk further, my email is in my profile.