Haunted Homes Draw Bargain Hunters in Japan's Tight Property Market

When Ryua first stepped into a rental apartment in Tokyo, she was convinced it was haunted. During the viewing, she says, a man stood in the room glaring at her. The estate agent could not see him, so she concluded he was a ghost.

Many people would have walked out and never returned. Ryua, a young entertainer known in Japan as an aidoru, who prefers not to share her surname, went ahead and moved in. She describes herself as a contrarian and says she wanted to befriend the glaring spirit. Four years on, she still lives there and says she experiences paranormal activity daily, including endless footsteps and the sound of the ghost talking.

Japan has embraced Halloween in recent years, but many people there take ghosts seriously all year round. The word "yuurei" describes a lingering, troubled spirit. These are said to be the ghosts of people who died violently or tragically, whether through murder, suicide or dying alone. If the death happened at home, the belief is that the yuurei does not leave.

That belief creates opportunities for buyers and renters who are not superstitious. Japan has a category of homes called jiko bukken, meaning "stigmatised" or "incident" properties. Under government guidelines issued in 2021, estate agents must disclose suicide, murder, death by fire, and any death where the body went undiscovered for a long time. For rentals, the information must be shared for three years. For properties offered for sale, it must be disclosed indefinitely.

Rules elsewhere vary. The UK has no legal requirement to reveal that someone died in a property. In the US the law differs by state: California requires disclosure of deaths within the past three years, while Arizona and Oregon do not.

Ryua was told a man had killed himself in her flat. As a result she pays 45,000 yen ($285) a month for her 25 sq m bedsit in Tokyo's fashionable Setagaya ward, instead of the 62,000 yen it should have cost, a discount of almost 30%. Tokyo estate agent Erik Oskamp says Japanese people are especially averse to stigmatised homes. "[Even] an apartment next to a cemetery will be difficult to rent out, especially if you can see the tombs from the kitchen," he explains. He adds that suicide is the worst case, and that serious crime or a lonely death are also problems.

A lonely death would not normally hurt a property's price in the UK or US. In rural Kagoshima, in Japan's southwest, however, it let Diane Tincher buy a large three-bedroom house for about half the usual price. The 79-year-old American, who has lived in Japan for nearly 40 years and works as a tour guide, says the agent was upfront that an elderly woman had died alone in the house. She paid 20m yen in an area where similar homes sell for up to 45m yen. "I don't believe in ghosts," she says. "If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her every day.. to live in such a splendid and affordable home."

Tincher found the house on Oshimaland, a crowdsourced website listing jiko bukken properties and the events behind them. It launched in 2005 covering Tokyo, expanded across Japan, and went international in 2011. Founder Teru Oshima says such homes were once "not very attractive options" in Japan.

That is changing as house prices and living costs have risen. One 2025 survey found more than half of Japanese people would now rent a jiko bukken if it were cheap. Back in Setagaya, Ryua says she is content with her ghostly flatmate. "I believe that ghosts were once living human beings, so they deserve our respect," she says.