Although Japan has increasingly marked Halloween, external in recent years, many Japanese people take ghosts seriously all year round. The country has a word, “yuurei”, which means a lingering, troubled spirit.
These are the ghosts of people who died in violent or tragic circumstances – those who were murdered, killed themselves, or simply were lonely and died alone. If they died at home, then the belief is that their yuurei won’t go away.
For house hunters who are not superstitious or squeamish it means there are big bargains to be found. There is a whole category of dwellings called jiko bukken, which means “stigmatised” or “incident” properties.
Under guidelines issued by the government in 2021, Japanese estate agents must disclose suicide, murder, death by fire, and any death where the body was not discovered for an extended period of time.
For rental properties this information must be disclosed for three years, and it must be revealed indefinitely for any property offered for sale.
By contrast, in the UK there is no legal requirement, external to reveal that a person died in a property. And in the US, it differs from state to state., external For example, in California you have to reveal if a person has died in the property in the past three years, while in Arizona and Oregon you do not.
Ryua was told that a man had killed himself in her apartment. It meant that she gets an almost 30% discount on her rent on her tiny, 25 sq m bedsit in the fashionable ward of Setagaya. She says she pays 45,000 yen ($285; £213) a month, instead of what should have been 62,000 yen.
While a house where there had been a murder or suicide would probably be harder to sell or rent out anywhere in the world, Tokyo estate agent Erik Oskamp says that Japanese people are particularly superstitious and averse to stigmatised properties.
“[Even] an apartment next to a cemetery will be difficult to rent out, especially if you can see the tombs from the kitchen,” explains Oskamp. “The worst thing is if a suicide has happened in the apartment. Even if somebody has jumped from the roof, many renters will move out. Other issues are a serious crime or a lonely death.”
The latter issue, that of a person dying alone, would not generally affect the price of a property in, say, the UK or the US.
But in rural Kagoshima, in Japan’s southwest, it enabled Diane Tincher to buy a large three-bedroom house for about half of what would have otherwise been the asking price.
