The Carter Education schoolhouse is ready to rock! We have finally finished the remodel of our Japanese akiya farmhouse in rural Iwate. It has been an amazing journey to get to this point and it is humbling (and scary!) to admit that this life has barely started! But first….
What is an Akiya?
Akiya (空き家) – directly translated, akiya means simply ‘vacant house’. It is empty, nobody living there. But it is the history of how it became empty that gives the name ‘akiya’ instead of just a used house on the market.
To understand the concept captured by ‘akiya’, you need a couple of background points:
1. Japan is experiencing a ‘worst case’ population crisis. Seriously. Last year, 2022, less than 800,000 babies where born. In a country of ~126 million, Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world at 1.30 babies per female. In comparison, the US birthrate is ~1.64, and the global average is around 2.30. Japan’s Prime Minister, Kishida Fumio, has sounded the alarm that the birth rate has fallen “to the brink of not being able to maintain a functioning society,”.
What does this mean?
It means, among other things, that the population is rapidly aging, with the elderly not having kids and grand-kids to pass down their belongings, including their houses.
2. Urbanization. Post WW2, Japan’s population keeps fleeing the rural countryside in favor of the urban (and suburban) life. Many socioeconomic reasons for this, but the majority are working age, and child-bearing age, people looking for work.
So, there are not enough children to inherit property, and what children are left are moving to the cities and not interested in country life.
Thus, akiya – vacant house. It is house where the elderly owners have passed away and their children, if they have any, aren’t interested in moving back to their country house, or in maintaining their parent’s home, or in paying taxes on the property. And due to the inheritance laws in Japan, and very patchwork record keeping, the countryside city and prefectural governments often can’t even find the ‘rightful’ owners, nor could they ‘make’ them take ownership if they could.
So the vacant house stays empty for 10-20 years as the city tries to find the owner, then reluctantly takes possession of a now un-maintained and decayed country farmhouse, any associated farmland.
That is akiya.
So what does the city do with their ‘new’ house?
They sell it. Cheap. As in, VERY CHEAP. To anybody who wants it. Problem is, nobody usually does. By the time the city has gone through the process of trying to find the owner, or failing to convince the known owner to take possession, a very long time has likely elapsed. Like 10-20 years of long time. In that time, the already old, very used, house as fallen into serious disrepair. Usually not recoverable. Most purchasers of akiya end up knocking the the house down, if it hasn’t fallen down already, and starting over. The price you pay is usually just the price of the bare land, even cheaper since it comes with a fallen down shack of an akiya on it for a project.
But!
Sometimes, every once in while… a gem sneaks through. Why? A couple of reasons – some of these akiyas are very well built, good bones so to speak. So when the tatami mats are dried up, the wall paper is all peeled away, and the pipes are rusted – the structure itself is still solid. Massive Japanese timber-frame houses don’t just ‘fall down’, even when neglected. Another reason, some cities are forward looking and when they see one of their elderly citizens pass away, they quickly contact the heirs and work with them to get the house on the market before it decays into worthless.
And… for the truly fortunate, both are true. In our case, we found a very solid, well built with massive timber-frames, akiya where the local city had been very proactive about working with the heirs to have it listed as ‘akiya’ BEFORE it decayed into the ground. We were lucky!
How do you find these ‘gems’?
Well, it takes some digging. Until recently you had to go to each town’s city hall and in-person request for their list. Not too difficult if you are dead-set on an area and not considering anything else. For Japanese people, who rarely move away from the area they were born, this works fine. Japanese people are extremely family and community minded. Moving away from where they were born is almost unthinkable. Literally, they just don’t consider the possibility of doing that unless economic hardship forces the consideration. Or, for girls especially, they get married. But since everybody is local, moving into your new husband’s family circle means moving 5-10 miles away into the next village/town/city. For us, going to every.single.town was just not feasible. However, Japan’s population crisis, with attendant akiya explosion, has forced Japanese towns to more fully address the problem. Thus, akiya banks can be found throughout the country.
Two of the ‘nationwide’ akiya bank websites are:
Lifull Home’s
and
They are a good place to start, and where we found our akiya.
However, there are still a lot of individual cities that have not uploaded their own akiya lists with these national akiya banks. But most of these cities do have their own akiya bank listed on their website. If you know the area you want to look in, you can start digging your way through that prefectures town websites to look for akiya listings. A good place to start that, much more labor intensive, search is:
Why did we go with akiya?
Must be the cost, right? I mean, picking up an akiya house with a bit of agriculture land for a few thousand dollars must be the cheapest path? Nope. Remodeling these old houses is expensive. Especially out here in the countryside where you have only one MAYBE two choices of contractors to do the work. You can save considerably by doing as much work yourself, but I caution you on getting too ambitious in that arena. Japanese building code is complex, and you probably don’t know everything you have to do in order to bring your project up to code.
Did you catch that? I didn’t call it your house, your farm, or your home… I called it your project.
And that is why akiyas are so hard to unload. Yes, you will certainly have to remodel the house. Or knock it down and rebuild it. But there is also a barn, and a shed, and a rice barn, and 200 years of old Japanese farmer’s ‘stuff’ scattered around the place. And that is the magic! You are buying a slice of history. Yes, it is junk, yes it is a project that will take you YEARS to clean up and rebuild, but when you have 6 kids and want to show them country life in their Japanese homeland… that project becomes a homeschool project. Each step is learning, for both you and your kids. Remodeling an old timber-frame, tearing down old sheds/barns and rebuilding new ones, going through the mountains of old agriculture tools, carting loads and loads of ‘stuff’ to the dump. Embedded in all that is an incalculable wealth of lessons, both for yourself (as a foreigner in Japan) and for your kids, whose friends only know tik-tok and video games!
We went with akiya for the chance to peak into the Japanese old life, to help preserve a bit of that old world in a remodeled timber-frame kominka – instead of just knocking it down and starting over with a new, character-less, passion-less, dead, modern ‘house’. We want to homeschool our kids in Japan, teach them their heritage, show them a Japan outside of Tokyo and Osaka.
Why akiya? Because it is home.
Part 2!
In Part 2, I will go into the the specifics of our akiya home. The up-front ‘presentation, the challenges, what we did right and, truth be told, what we did wrong. How we want to use our slice of inaka (countryside) for our homeschooling life.
I have a couple of lesson plans to write, so I plan to knock those out next week. Plan on seeing Part 2 in mid-March!
