>The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese

>The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese population. What you're hearing isn't accurate. Rents are going up in Tokyo, not down. Sure, there's a bunch of abandoned houses way out in remote rural areas, but no one wants to live there (for good reason). Housing prices do seem a lot more stable than in Anglosphere nations, however, and they're constantly building new housing (and knocking down old buildings to make way for them). Just like many other places, the population is concentrating in the big cities, so the population is generally rising there. However, unlike the US in particular, the Japanese yen has fallen a lot in value during the pandemic, and combined with recent inflation, this might have something to do with the recent rise in rents.