Rent is cheap even in Tokyo compared to virtually any American city. I'm living in a city of 800,000 and early 30s families have no trouble buying a new house if they want to. It was this way even before the population started to decline. People tell me all the time that rent is so expensive in Tokyo, because it's... about $100 more a month. Prices are fairly uniform here.
The reason prices aren't high is that nobody wants to live in an old house. "Old" being 15 years old or more. Even with renting apartments, if it's older than 7-8 years old, agents will almost warn you that the property isn't exactly fresh and sparkling, but it's still not bad. If it's a pre-90s house, it's considered basically unwanted and they'll all but try to give it away. Meanwhile, 90s homes in the US are still marketed as pretty new, and demand seems to be higher for older homes than newer ones. America also has loads of empty houses. It also has loads of property owners who refuse to lower prices because their ego is worth more than their property. Apparently about 1/8 American homes are currently vacant, and the population isn't declining. Price and desirability are the problems.
All real estate is sold in a market. The fact that prices may be too high in some places in the U.S., right now, do not change that Japan and America are both subject to supply / demand mechanisms. Foreign investment in U.S. real estate is much, much more common than Japanese real estate.
Japan, is also no stranger to real estate bubbles, having experienced perhaps the worst real estate bubble in modern history in the 90s:
"At their peak, prices in central Tokyo were such that the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds were estimated to be worth more than all the land in the entire state of California."
Yes, all housing markets are subject to supply and demand. The point I was making was that declining population has zero effect on Japan's non-rising home prices, since home prices have remained stable for decades now and even when the population was still rising. The main regulator is that there's almost zero demand for used homes, and it drops to actual zero as the years go on. The real value is in the land its on, which if you're planning on buying property in somewhere like Roppongi, it's still going to be insanely expensive. But for renting or buying elsewhere, it's not.
The reason prices aren't high is that nobody wants to live in an old house. "Old" being 15 years old or more. Even with renting apartments, if it's older than 7-8 years old, agents will almost warn you that the property isn't exactly fresh and sparkling, but it's still not bad. If it's a pre-90s house, it's considered basically unwanted and they'll all but try to give it away. Meanwhile, 90s homes in the US are still marketed as pretty new, and demand seems to be higher for older homes than newer ones. America also has loads of empty houses. It also has loads of property owners who refuse to lower prices because their ego is worth more than their property. Apparently about 1/8 American homes are currently vacant, and the population isn't declining. Price and desirability are the problems.