Tucked away in Japan’s countryside, millions of abandoned homes – known as akiya – sit empty, waiting for a second life. With ...

An akiya bank is a database maintained by ... the cofounder of Blackship Realty, a Tokyo-based real-estate agency, told BI. The local municipal governments may prioritize potential buyers who ...

and predicts that akiya could exceed 30% of all houses in Japan by 2033. The Thursfields’ house, which sits among the paddies in southern Ibaraki Prefecture, about 45 minutes from central Tokyo ...

Thanks to a multitude of factors — the weak yen, inbound tourism and the proliferation of YouTube channels on the subject, to name a few — akiya, or abandoned houses, are more prominent than ...

Others are launching akiya banks — websites that list abandoned homes for as little as 50,000 ... couldn't find work in the prefecture and had to move to Tokyo to get a job.

Swedish national Anton Wormann learned about an “akiya” abandoned vacant home in Tokyo and immediately requested a viewing. The wooden house showed clear signs it had been empty and ...

The number of these “akiya” (vacant) houses has reached 9 million nationwide, or 13.8 percent of the total number of homes in Japan, a government survey released on April 30 showed.

These wildly cheap homes can come with a serious ... Mr Thursfield, 48, and his wife snapped up an akiya farmhouse in Ibaraki prefecture, roughly an hour north of Tokyo. “We wanted to live ...