Government figures out this week show the number of empty houses, known as akiya, as of October 2023 was up by more than half a million since the previous survey in 2018.
At the root of the issue is rural depopulation, but there are also hundreds of thousands of long-term empty houses in urban areas.
The total figure of vacant homes represents almost 14% of all houses in Japan, though the real number could be higher.
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