If you visit Japan during a week, you want to write later a whole book about the country. If you visit Japan and stay there for several weeks, you limit your writings to an article. But if you stay months or longer, you perhaps realize that even many books won't be enough to describe the country and that any shorter length may be misleading to the readers. That was one among many good advices I learned as a young journalist and later tried not to forget. Without even visiting Japan, but with some knowledge about it, taken from the worldwide mind called Internet, I must hurry up to produce at least an article before it's getting too late. Let the following be understood not as an insider's point of view but as an outsider's first impressions. Let those who are more immersed into the Japanese reality produce their versions of the topics discussed here. Japan is too interesting and too important country to be limited within one perspective only.

To limit as much as possible the topic of this article, I'll discuss how this country's real estate market and some of its practices look like seen from western perspective. Familiar to find thousands of agents offering different and sometimes one and the same property in America, the western customers with plans to go and stay in Japan or just to have a general impression or to compare different regions in terms of prices are perplexed. With population of almost 130 million and economy as much developed as to be called the second in the world (although it has already slipped to third place behind China), Japan offers remarkably few real estate web sites if we apply our standard approach: location, brokers, listings, prices. As a matter of fact it seems at first sight that the problems with this shortage of western-style sites are more than one and that all of them deserve some attention.

Most of the Japanese companies specialized on the real estate market have virtually no web sites, at least no sites with English versions. Perhaps the main reason is that they rely mainly on customers that are already accustomed with their activity. There could be other reasons but at first sight this looks most probable. Second, most of the companies that have created web sites prefer to keep them only in Japanese, with no foreign language versions. Perhaps the reason for this little attention to the foreign speaking customers comes from the same direction. Companies are aiming only at the customers that are familiar with them, i.e. those who live in the same area, i.e. those who are fluent in Japanese.

Interesting fact that was observed more than once was that companies that have already produced bilingual web sites, witnessed by several search engines, have decided later to skip altogether the English versions. Why the English versions were erased? Perhaps the foreign customers were not so numerous to deserve so special attention and additional expenditures or perhaps the foreigners going to Japan were assumed to have some basic Japanese knowledge. Whatever the real cause is, the few specially built English-language real estate sites for a huge country like Japan aren't representative for the number of companies on the real estate market in this country.

Another point that goes against the western perception of how a real estate site should look like is the role of the broker, or rather the lack of a personalized approach that makes western sites so effective. In America and Europe it's the individual who charms the customers by applying all advertising techniques known till our time, beginning with taking down stars from the sky and ending with defending his or her personal integrity and long professional experience.

On the other hand, expressions like "I'm selling Tokyo" can't be found at all. As was said earlier, there was no lack of agents that in reality did exactly that, selling properties in Tokyo. But they won't say it loudly; they won't say that they are the best, the most trustful, and the most experienced. It seems that in Japan such professional boastings are not allowed, at least not in public. What in the West is called individualism and considered as normal way of behaving, in Japan it seems to be relegated to second position far behind the collective spirit of work.

My understanding is that like in every collective activity, in Japan people have different tasks and that perhaps there are some that take more responsibility than others. On the other hand, in America many brokers rely on the help of their staff, so in a sense they don't produce alone and without any help what they claim in their web sites they are doing. What seems at first sight as one of the main differences between the western and the Japanese business culture is that in the west it's better for the business to show that someone in person is caring for your order as customer. In Japan, on the contrary, it's "we" instead of "I" who cares better about your interests. It seems that in Japan perhaps if you're putting your interests in the impersonalized hands of a large structure you feel more secure about the good outcomes of your project.

Regarding the larger structures that deal with the real estate matters in Japan, it's surprising how one large corporation can perform many different tasks. Without going into much details and reveal names, it's enough to mention that some corporations that work on the one hand in the construction industry, make also international trade with consumer goods, provide commercial and retail spaces, manage residential buildings and produce spare parts for car industry among many other different activities. It's surprising that some of these large corporations have only one e-mail, phone or fax for contact. It may seem like a black box for the outside customers, a structure without clear individual responsibilities, but it seems that the system works.

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See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of Japan.