Real Estate and the Legal System of Japan
Authors: Fukui Hideo 
Published: February 2021

In Part I, entitled Real Estate and the Legal System, we analyze owner-unknown land issues, land acquisitions, and real estate auctions.

The use and value of real estate such as land and buildings are significantly affected by public laws and regulations related to urban planning and construction, the environment, and taxation; for example, contract laws such as the Act on Land and Building Leases; private laws regulating torts, collateral enforcement, and so on; tax laws that regulate transfer taxes, ownership taxes, and transaction taxes; and regulations surrounding land use and urban infrastructure development. This paper discusses, therefore, the relationships between these laws and real estate, identifies problems in the laws associated with real estate in Japan, and proposes improvements.

First, in recent years, owner-unknown land issues have become a serious concern in Japan. The Japanese registry does not always reflect the actual rightful owner, primarily because such registration is only a perfection requirement in civil law and registration involves a great deal of time and money. For example, because a large extent of land is registered to owners from nearly 100 years ago, it has changed hands many times through inheritance, which means that today, it is extremely difficult to determine the actual owner (inheritor) without spending a great deal of time and money. However, if the profits to be obtained from the land do not justify such expense, the land remains unused as “owner-unknown land.”

Buying and selling land under Japanese civil law requires an agreement from all landowners including in the case of shared ownerships; therefore, even if the land has high returns, if it is “owner-unknown land,” it cannot be used effectively. With a focus on unknown-owner land, in this section, four writers provide multifaceted perspectives on the causes thereof, the defects in the current system, and the possible solutions.

Eminent domain, the system which allows the acquisition of land against the land owner’s will for public projects, is widely institutionalized in many countries. It works to mitigate the owner-unknown land issues as far as lands are acquired by public projects.

Further, real estate auctions are often held when liens are placed on land and/or residences for housing loan defaults. The Japanese civil auction system, which was institutionalized at the end of the nineteenth century, stipulates that a tenancy that is behind on a mortgage may resist a purchase unconditionally as long as the mortgage default period is within 3 years (short-term lease protection system/former Civil Code Article 395). This system was intended to avoid the unstable use of mortgaged properties and to promote the effective use of real estate; however, because the majority of users and the beneficiaries of this system were in fact anti-social groups, it was used to demand money unjustly from debtors and buyers, thus preventing the effective use of the mortgaged properties.

When the protection of short-term leases was abolished in 2004, these types of interferences are said to have decreased drastically. However, successful bids for auctioned real estate properties continue to be lower than in general transactions. Therefore, here, we provide a quantitative analysis of these situations and propose further auction system improvements.

Below, we introduce the outlines of each theory in Part I.