Where to Live in Japan as a Foreigner: Cities Compared

Where to live in Japan: four profiles, four answers

There is no single best Japanese city. There is a city that fits your income, your residence status and how much travel time you can stand. Before comparing neighbourhoods on a map, settle three questions: where your money will come from once you are there, how many minutes of daily commuting you accept, and whether you are buying to live in the property or to rent it out.

Those three answers rule out ninety per cent of the country straight away. The table below sums up the four profiles we meet most often among foreign buyers, with the purchase budget we actually observe in each case.

Profile	What decides	Areas to look at first	Observed purchase budget
Employee hired or relocated in Japan	Commute, schooling, access to a local mortgage	Tokyo and Kanagawa, Osaka, Aichi, Fukuoka	¥25M to ¥60M ($167,000 to $400,000)
Freelancer or remote worker paid from abroad	Housing cost, fibre, international airport under two hours	Fukuoka, Okayama, Hyōgo, Nagano, Wakayama	¥4M to ¥15M ($27,000 to $100,000)
Non-resident investor (short-term rental)	Tourist flow, obtainable licence, on-site management	Kyoto, Osaka, Atami, Nagano, Okinawa	¥8M to ¥40M ($53,000 to $267,000)
Second home or retirement plan	Climate, hospital, quiet, remote upkeep	Ehime, Kagawa, Ōita, Miyazaki, Wakayama	¥3M to ¥10M ($20,000 to $67,000)

The rule that changes everything: buying gives you no right to stay

This is the single most misunderstood point of the whole subject. No Japanese residence status follows from buying a home: Japan has no golden visa. You may own a house outright with no residence permit and no visa, but you will only stay for as long as your status allows, often ninety days under a short-stay waiver. We cover this in detail in our article on buying a house in Japan without a visa.

The practical consequence for choosing a location: if your presence on site will be intermittent, the question is not which city you like but which city you can manage from six thousand miles away. A property in the centre of a mid-sized city, next to a station, is far easier to run than an isolated farmhouse forty minutes up a mountain road.

Three filters to apply before you ever visit

• The income filter. A Japanese salaried income opens the local mortgage market; foreign income means paying cash. That single point moves your budget by a factor of three to five, and therefore the geography available to you.
• The station filter. In Japan, a property's value and its liquidity are read in walking minutes to the station. Beyond twenty to thirty minutes from a served station, resale becomes slow whatever the charm of the house.
• The climate filter. Two metres of snow in Aomori or three typhoons a year in Miyazaki cannot be fixed by any renovation. Apply this filter first, not last.

What a house really costs, prefecture by prefecture

Most online comparisons pit rents or national indices against each other. We prefer to publish what we measure ourselves: as of 21 August 2026 our catalogue holds 4,946 published listings across 46 prefectures (Okinawa is the only prefecture with no municipal akiya bank registered in the national scheme). The medians below are computed on listings whose price is published, prefecture by prefecture.

An important methodological note: our catalogue is weighted towards older houses, akiya (akiya, vacant homes) and countryside properties. It therefore reads the bottom of the Japanese market, not a national all-housing index. These figures answer the question "what do I get for five million yen", not "what is a square metre worth in Tokyo".

Prefecture	Listings tracked	Median published price	Approx. USD	Dominant character
Niigata	289	¥2,900,000	$19,300	Heavy snow, large houses, Sea of Japan coast
Aomori	223	¥3,000,000	$20,000	Extreme winters, lowest prices in the country
Shimane	71	¥3,000,000	$20,000	Rural, very thinly populated, intact heritage
Wakayama	342	¥3,500,000	$23,300	Mild coastline, close to Osaka, our largest stock
Nara	126	¥3,500,000	$23,300	Historic, Kansai access, isolated valleys
Kagoshima	173	¥3,800,000	$25,300	Subtropical south, active volcano, islands
Okayama	190	¥4,000,000	$26,700	Dry climate, few natural disasters, Shinkansen stop
Hokkaidō	56	¥4,200,000	$28,000	Large plots, long winters, ski access
Fukuoka	145	¥4,800,000	$32,000	Dynamic metropolis plus rural hinterland
Ōita	174	¥5,000,000	$33,300	Hot springs country, Beppu and Yufuin
Nagano	80	¥5,000,000	$33,300	Mountains, skiing, second homes
Hyōgo	91	¥5,770,000	$38,500	Kobe and its hinterland, Kansai access
Shizuoka	86	¥8,800,000	$58,700	Atami, Izu, Tokyo forty minutes by Shinkansen
Chiba	80	¥11,000,000	$73,300	Outer Tokyo commuter belt, Narita airport
Kyoto	171	¥35,800,000	$238,700	Urban machiya, tight tourist market

Why Kyoto comes out ten times above Aomori

Because these are not the same properties. Our Kyoto stock consists of machiya (machiya, traditional wooden townhouses) in the central wards, often already restored and aimed at tourist operation. Our Aomori stock consists of post-war family houses on the outskirts. Comparing the two medians does not compare two cities: it compares two markets whose only common feature is the country. That is precisely why we print the dominant nature of each stock next to the number.

To explore for yourself, the full grid is filterable by prefecture, price and type on our page of akiya listings we track, and two budget selections exist: Japanese houses under 50,000 euros and houses under 100,000 euros. If your project is about heritage rather than budget, look instead at kominka for sale and machiya for sale.

What the asking price does not tell you

A house listed at ¥3M never costs ¥3M. Add acquisition costs, capped at 6 % of the price in Japan (registration tax, acquisition tax, agency fee, shihō shoshi shihō shoshi, the judicial scrivener who registers the transfer), then the works. On a neglected countryside property, the renovation provision frequently exceeds the purchase price itself. Our article on closing costs when buying property in Japan breaks down every line, and what a house in Japan really costs runs the full calculation.

The big cities: what you are actually buying

Living in a Japanese metropolis means buying access: to jobs, to international schools, to hospitals, to long-haul flights. It also means giving up floor space. In the eleven central wards of Tokyo, a detached house with a garden is a heritage exception, not standard supply.

City	Population (order of magnitude)	What you gain	What you give up	Listings in our catalogue
Tokyo	14M (metro area 37M)	Jobs, international schools, maximum resale liquidity	Space, price, quiet	10
Osaka	2.7M (prefecture 8.7M)	Lower entry cost than Tokyo, tourism, special minpaku zone	Density, air quality downtown	14
Nagoya (Aichi)	2.3M	Industry, stable employment, moderate prices	Low tourist appeal, slower resale	35
Fukuoka	1.6M	Young city, airport ten minutes from downtown, low cost of living	Market already spotted, typhoons	145
Sapporo (Hokkaidō)	2.0M	Space, skiing, affordable for a major city	Long winter, expensive heating	56
Kobe (Hyōgo)	1.5M	Coastal setting, long tradition of hosting foreigners	Steep plots, known seismic risk	91
Hiroshima	1.2M	Well-equipped mid-size city, contained prices	Little structured foreign-facing supply	75

The listing counts in the last column cover the whole prefecture, countryside included: the 145 Fukuoka listings are not 145 houses in central Hakata. That is in fact the useful signal: the pricier the metropolis, the thinner our catalogue there, because we track the segment of affordable older houses.

Tokyo: the only market where resale is a given

If your horizon is uncertain, Tokyo remains defensible despite the price: it is the only Japanese market where a decent property sells in weeks rather than years. The ward then does all the work, and it varies threefold: our comparison of which Tokyo wards to buy in and the article on buying near a Yamanote line station cover that level of detail, while our Tokyo page gathers the properties we track there.

Fukuoka, Osaka, Sapporo: the genuinely credible alternatives

Fukuoka is the metropolis we see rising fastest among foreign buyers: young population, international airport ten subway minutes from the centre, cost of living well below Tokyo. Osaka combines a cheaper entry point with a regulatory framework favourable to short-term rental inside its special zone. Sapporo offers space and direct access to ski resorts. Our detailed analyses: investing in Fukuoka, investing in Osaka, investing in Sapporo and investing in Nagoya.

Mid-sized cities: the best trade-off, and the least known

This is the segment foreign buyers discover last, and often the one they end up choosing. A Japanese city of 200,000 to 700,000 people gives you a referral hospital, a served railway station, supermarkets open late, fibre broadband, and houses at prices that exist nowhere in western Europe.

Seven mid-sized cities we watch closely

• Okayama (about 720,000 people): known for its low rate of natural disasters, Shinkansen stop, dry climate. 190 listings tracked, median ¥4M ($26,700).
• Matsuyama (about 500,000, Ehime): the largest city on Shikoku, castle, Dōgo hot springs, mild winters. Ehime shows 140 listings and a ¥5M median ($33,300).
• Kanazawa (about 460,000, Ishikawa): intact heritage, Shinkansen from Tokyo, but heavy snow and a tight market. See investing in Kanazawa.
• Ōita and Beppu (about 470,000 and 110,000): Japan's hot-spring capital, an international university, 174 listings tracked.
• Wakayama (about 350,000): one hour from Osaka, coastline, mild climate, and our single largest source of listings with 342 properties. Detail on the Wakayama page.
• Takamatsu (about 420,000, Kagawa): gateway to the Seto Inland Sea islands, one of the lowest rainfall levels in Japan.
• Sendai (about 1.1M, Miyagi): the big city of the Tōhoku region, green, university-driven, ninety minutes from Tokyo by Shinkansen.

The tie-breaker: rail service

Between two equivalent mid-sized cities, choose the one on a Shinkansen line or on a direct express line to a metropolis. This is not a comfort, it is an asset: rail service underpins the property's value, the rental demand and your own ability to travel back and forth. A city forty-five Shinkansen minutes from a metropolis is structurally stronger than a larger but landlocked one.

To explore by area, our prefecture pages gather the real stock: Fukuoka, Hyōgo, Nagano, Shizuoka and Kyoto.

If this is a retirement plan, the criteria change order: the hospital comes before the price, and a single-storey layout before the charm. We rank them in retiring in Japan.

On the Kanagawa coast the trade-off works differently: the sea and Tokyo within an hour, but a stack of heritage protections that decides what you may build. That is the subject of our guide to buying a house in Kamakura.

The Japanese countryside: the twenty to thirty minute rule

The inaka (田舎, the countryside) is what draws most buyers to Japan in the first place: houses at two or three million yen, century-old timber frames, mountains. It is also where the expensive mistakes concentrate.

The context is structural. The 2023 national Housing and Land Survey (jūtaku tochi tōkei chōsa, Jūtaku Tochi Tōkei Chōsa, Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs) counts roughly nine million vacant homes, a vacancy rate close to 13.8 %. That stock is not randomly spread: it concentrates exactly where the population is leaving, which is to say in the municipalities you will find cheapest.

The twenty to thirty minute rule

Our position, repeated across the whole site: the real problem with an akiya is almost never its condition, it is its location. A property more than twenty to thirty minutes from a served station and a cluster of shops carries three handicaps that cannot be undone: impossible to rent, hard to resell, expensive to maintain from a distance. An unsellable house at ¥500,000 is more expensive than a decent house at ¥5M you can sell again.

What the countryside genuinely gives you

• Floor space and land at a price with no equivalent anywhere: 150 sqm of living space and 300 sqm of land are common under ¥5M.
• Municipal schemes: many town halls subsidise renovation, the settlement of young households, or the takeover of an akiya, subject to genuinely living there.
• Authentic built heritage: kominka (kominka, traditional farmhouses) are found almost exclusively there.

What it demands in return

A car is compulsory, the relationship with neighbours is active (the neighbourhood association, chōnaikai 町内会, is not optional in practice), medical services are distant, and upkeep is constant. Damp, termites and frost work on an empty house far faster than on a lived-in one: our articles on damp and mould in Japanese houses and on shiroari termites put numbers on the consequences. For the full picture, read buying in the Japanese countryside and how an akiya bank works.

Beware the shortcut: the countryside slashes the purchase price, not the monthly budget. Two cars, an older building and off-grid sanitation take back most of the saving, as the three compared budgets in our article on what a month in Japan actually costs show.

Climate, snow and natural hazards: the underrated criterion

Japan stretches 3,000 km from subarctic to subtropical. Choosing a region means choosing a climate that renovation will only correct at the margins, and an exposure to natural hazards that nothing corrects.

Region	Winter	Summer	Dominant hazard	Effect on the annual budget
Hokkaidō	Long, down to -15 °C	Dry and pleasant	Snow, frozen pipes	High heating, snow clearing
Tōhoku and Sea of Japan coast (Aomori, Akita, Niigata)	Very snowy	Hot and humid	Heavy snow load, roofs to reinforce	Snow clearing, roof upkeep
Kantō (Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa)	Mild and dry	Very hot and humid	Earthquake, late-summer typhoons	Air conditioning, insurance
Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Wakayama)	Mild	Stifling in Kyoto	Earthquake, basin flooding	Air conditioning, ventilation
Chūgoku and Shikoku (Okayama, Kagawa, Ehime)	Mild	Hot, low rainfall on the Seto side	Lowest hazard levels in the country	The most stable budget
Kyūshū (Fukuoka, Ōita, Kagoshima, Miyazaki)	Mild	Hot and very humid	Typhoons, volcanic ash in the south	Frequent exterior maintenance
Okinawa	No winter	Subtropical	Powerful typhoons, salt corrosion	Concrete construction, high upkeep

The two non-negotiable checks

Hazard zoning. Every Japanese municipality publishes its hazard maps: flooding, landslide, liquefaction, tsunami. A lovely house in a high-hazard zone is still a house in a high-hazard zone, and that will show up in the insurance premium and at resale. We document how to read them in natural hazards and Japanese property, and every listing page in our catalogue displays the territorial context drawn from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism open data.

The build date. The reinforced seismic standard of 1981 (shin taishin, shin-taishin) is the most useful dividing line in the Japanese market. Older construction is not disqualified, but it demands a survey and often reinforcement: see the 1981 seismic standard.

Finally, Japanese cold is felt indoors: insulation in the older housing stock sits far below European standards, in every region. Read insulating a Japanese house before committing to a region with a real winter.

At the other end of the country, the subtropical climate brings its own constraints: typhoons, salt-laden air and concrete construction. Our guide to buying a house in Okinawa puts numbers on the upkeep that entails, and explains why the archipelago is Japan's tightest market.

What location does not change: mortgage, fees, taxes

Some parameters are national: trying to optimise them through your choice of city is an illusion. Better to know them before comparing neighbourhoods.

The mortgage

A Japanese mortgage assumes you are resident in Japan and employed in Japan, with some seniority and a stable residence status. A few banks work with foreign profiles under conditions, usually with a large down payment. A non-resident therefore buys cash, whichever prefecture is targeted. The detail is in mortgages in Japan for foreigners and in financing a Japanese purchase from abroad.

Fees and holding taxes

Total acquisition costs stay at or below 6 % of the price everywhere in Japan. Holding, on the other hand, is paid every year: fixed asset tax (kotei shisan zei, kotei shisan-zei) around 1.4 % of the assessed value, plus city planning tax in urbanised zones. The amount varies by municipality, but the order of magnitude does not depend on the region: on a ¥5M countryside house, expect a few tens of thousands of yen a year. See property tax in Japan.

The catch: an empty house is taxed more

A house left derelict can lose the tax abatement granted to residential land, which multiplies the fixed asset tax. Buying far away and never occupying the property is therefore not neutral. That is one more argument for choosing a rentable location rather than a merely pretty one.

Run the numbers before you arbitrate

A city-by-city comparison only makes sense once it is costed. Our interactive map and yield simulator lets you test a price, works and rental income hypothesis by area, and the complete buying guide walks through each step of the transaction. If you would rather delegate the search and the transaction, the support page describes our two packages as well as the first written exchange, with no commitment.

A costed case study, and the frequent mistakes

Two projects, fifteen months apart

Take two non-resident European buyers, both paid from abroad, with the same goal: a base they can live in part of the year and rent out the rest of the time.

Item	Project A: house in Ōita	Project B: machiya in Kyoto
Purchase price	¥5,000,000 ($33,300)	¥35,800,000 ($238,700)
Acquisition costs (6 % cap)	¥300,000 ($2,000)	¥2,148,000 ($14,300)
Estimated works	¥4,000,000 to ¥8,000,000 ($26,700 to $53,300)	¥0 to ¥5,000,000 if already restored ($0 to $33,300)
Realistic total budget	¥9,300,000 to ¥13,300,000 ($62,000 to $88,700)	¥37,900,000 to ¥42,900,000 ($252,700 to $286,000)
Rental demand	Seasonal, tied to the hot springs	Strong and year-round, but a demanding licence
Resale liquidity	Low, local buyers only	Good, international market

Project A costs four times less and leaves comfortable cash on hand; project B is a liquid asset in a city whose demand does not depend on the season. Neither is better: they answer two different questions. The mistake is to pick A for the price, then expect it to perform like B.

The seven mistakes we see most often

• Choosing a region after a holiday. A week in Kyoto in April tells you nothing about Kyoto in August, nor about daily life fifteen minutes out of the centre.
• Ignoring the distance to the station. It is the first driver of value in Japan, ahead of floor space and ahead of condition.
• Believing a purchase opens a right to stay. It opens none, and that shapes everything else in the project.
• Underestimating the climate. Two metres of snow implies a frame, a snow-clearing routine and a heating bill that the asking price never hinted at.
• Confusing a low price with a bargain. A ¥300,000 house in a town with no station and no shops is a liability, not an asset.
• Overlooking the neighbourhood. In the countryside the residents' association handles refuse collection, path maintenance and collective duties.
• Buying without any viewing, even remote. A guided video viewing costs little and avoids most bad surprises: see viewing a Japanese property remotely.

The advice we give every time

Test the life before buying the place. Rent for a month outside the tourist season in the city you are considering, on weekdays, and make the real journeys: the station, the hospital, the supermarket, the school if relevant. It is the only filter that reliably removes geographic mistakes, and it costs under ¥100,000 ($670). Nobody regrets that month.

Conclusion: start with the budget, finish with the map

Where to live in Japan is decided in this order: the source of your income, your residence status, then the budget available, and only then the geography. Someone hired locally is best served staying within their employment area. A freelancer paid from abroad has everything to gain from a well-connected mid-sized city, where five million yen buys a whole house rather than a studio. A non-resident investor should choose rental demand ahead of charm, and liquidity ahead of price.

The figures in this article come from our own catalogue, refreshed every night: 4,946 listings tracked across 46 prefectures as of 21 August 2026. They give you a real scale, not a national average. To move from comparison to selection, the filterable grid of our Japanese house listings and our overview of the Japanese property market are the two starting points; our costed case studies show what a file taken all the way to the handover of the keys looks like.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest place to buy a house in Japan?

In our catalogue as of 21 August 2026, the lowest median prices are in Niigata (¥2.9M, about $19,300), Aomori and Shimane (¥3M, about $20,000). These are regions with harsh winters or very low population density: the low price pays for a real constraint, never for luck.

Can you live in Japan by buying a house?

No. No Japanese residence status follows from a property purchase: Japan has no golden visa. You can own a property outright without being a resident, but your stay is limited to whatever your status allows, often ninety days under a visa waiver.

Which Japanese city suits a foreigner working remotely?

Fukuoka and Okayama come up most often: nearby airport, fibre broadband, low cost of living, Shinkansen stop. Fukuoka brings full city life, Okayama a dry climate and one of the lowest natural-disaster rates in the country.

Big city or countryside for a first purchase?

For a first purchase without residence in Japan, a mid-sized city on a railway line is the best trade-off: affordable price, rentable property, possible resale. Isolated countryside demands either your presence on site or local management that few first-time buyers already have.

How much does it cost to maintain a house in Japan each year?

Budget for fixed asset tax (about 1.4 % of the assessed value, often a few tens of thousands of yen on a rural house), insurance, and a realistic maintenance provision of 1 % of the property value per year. In snow country, add snow clearing and roof monitoring.

Can you borrow from a Japanese bank while living abroad?

In practice, no. Japanese mortgages target residents employed in Japan with a stable residence status. Non-residents buy cash, which is exactly why the segment of older houses under ¥10M attracts so many foreign buyers.

Where are the most old houses for sale in Japan?

In our catalogue, Wakayama leads with 342 listings, ahead of Niigata (289) and Aomori (223). That ranking follows the map of depopulation: the prefectures losing residents are the ones publishing the most vacant houses.

Does the climate vary much from one Japanese region to another?

Enormously. The country spans 3,000 km, from subarctic Hokkaidō to subtropical Okinawa. Between Aomori, one of the snowiest cities on earth, and Naha, which has no winter, the heating bill, the upkeep and even the building method differ.