2024-11-16
18 分钟Hello, I'm Lucy Hawkings from the BBC World Service.
This is the global story.
In Japan, the number of abandoned homes is at an all time high.
9 million properties sit empty, blighting city streets and turning some rural communities into ghost towns.
So what do these crumbling houses say about Japan's existential crisis and its aging, shrinking population?
And could a new breed of homeowners, young, foreign and eager for a bargain, help to solve the problem?
With me today is our Tokyo correspondent, Shaima Halil.
Hi, Shaima, how are you?
I'm good, I'm good.
It's so good to speak to you, Lucy.
Shaima, lovely to see you.
Now, if I'm out and about in a big city in like Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto or even in the countryside, am I going to see some of these abandoned homes?
Yes, and some of them are more obvious than others.
So if you're in the countryside, for example, there are homes where nature has pretty much taken over.
So that's a very obvious sign of an abandoned home.
I think here in Tokyo, for example, there are also obvious older ones.
But if you're like me and you're a big avid home programs fan and you walk around looking at houses and wondering how people live inside them, some will be more obvious to you.
And then others are just so deceptive.
You walk around and they look perfectly normal, but you find out from a broker or real estate agent or those who bought them that they've been abandoned for years and years and years.
So some are more obvious than others, for sure.