Housing is also a sort of money pit in Japan because abandoned houses often aren’t considered worth repairing. Old Japanese houses tend to end up with lots of issues, to the point that it is often cheaper to bulldoze and build new. There are plenty of stories of people buying an abandoned house for like $50… But that’s only the initial property cost. It was so cheap because everyone knows that they have to actually invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in bulldozing and rebuilding before the property will be habitable again.