I'm looking at houses in Tokyo right now. Yesterday I saw a 2SLDK in the Nippori area (2 bedroom with living room, dining room, kitchen, and storage room), and

I'm looking at houses in Tokyo right now. Yesterday I saw a 2SLDK in the Nippori area (2 bedroom with living room, dining room, kitchen, and storage room), and it was $600k. This is in the city, near central subway lines. If you want to live out in Chiba or Saitama, you can get a 3 or 4 bedroom for around $400k, but that's more similar to living in the suburbs. Buying apartments here is actually more expensive than buying a standalone house, because they tend to keep their property value more than the houses (which usually are sold for the land - people tear the houses down and rebuild). If you're trying to verify what I'm saying, the apartments you'd buy here would be called a "Mansion", which is mostly a term for upscale apartment. Edit: oh, I should mention that the interest rate here is insanely low (around 1% or as low as 0.5%), and you can get 35 year mortgages.