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preface
The problem of housing prices is one of the most common and most concerned topics of people's livelihood. The rise and fall of housing prices is undoubtedly a double-edged sword that affects the economy.
Japan, however, has used more than half a century of history and 30 years of experience to prove to us that there are no winners but only losers when house prices plummet.
The lower the house price, the better. On the contrary, it may lead to a major crisis.
What the hell is going on here?
The Rise of Japan's "House Price Bubble"
For a long time after Japan signed the letter of surrender in 1945, the Japanese had no concept of "living" and "traveling" at all.
After the war, a large number of Japanese were displaced and settled in temporary sheds and refugee camps. "Building a house" was just a dream, but Japan was slightly different in this matter.
One is that the Japanese government, which launched the World War II first, would have faced huge war reparations, which would have been enough to suppress a country for decades.
But at that time, the Kuomintang government actually voluntarily gave up the compensation, the Soviet Union obtained territorial benefits and did not claim compensation, and the United States also exempted war compensation because of the garrison occupation of Japan.
In this way, Japan began its national reconstruction under the premise of "zero pressure" of only symbolic compensation after the war.
The second is that the United States is eager to find the "bridgehead" of the Cold War in Asia after World War II.
So they helped Japan start to recover its economy in the 1950s, and transferred American technology and a few industrial chains to Japan. Japan also immediately seized the opportunity to invest in domestic education and manufacturing.
The rise of manufacturing industry has directly driven the flow and migration of population. Renting and buying houses have become one of the most urgent needs.
At this time, the housing price in Japan had begun to rise. After the expansion of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, the Japanese government funded the construction of rows of residential areas in the areas bombed by the US military and listed them for sale.
Of course, during this period, most Japanese people were still in a state of "extreme poverty", and most of the real estate in Tokyo and other places was purchased by the Japanese comprador rich class and foreign businessmen.
The rapidly expanding manufacturing labor force can only choose to live in collective dormitories or rent houses. The perennial "housing depression" has also contributed to Japan's future retaliatory consumption of buying houses, but they have no money at all.
After 1960, with the help of industrial upgrading and the second wave of assistance from the United States, Japan completed its economic "take-off".
The average growth rate of Japan's economy reached 11.6% throughout the 1960s, and the National Income Doubling Plan (also known as the "Japan Ten Year Plan") issued by the government has been implemented.
This country began to become rich, and at the same time, the products in the Japanese market began to become initially competitive and go global.
It can be said that the 1960s was the beginning of the rise of the "housing bubble" in Japan. Many handicraftsmen and businessmen from the civilian class began to change their living conditions for better, which contributed to the rise of the "housing boom".
The housing price in Japan doubled several times in the 1960s. However, at this stage, most people only bought houses for their basic life, not for commercial purposes. The housing price in Japan is still under control on the whole.
Fantastic and crazy housing "rush buying"
The 1970s and 1980s can be said to be the turning point of Japan's economy. When the proportion of its domestic independent intellectual property rights increased rapidly due to the upgrading of the manufacturing industry, Japan caught up with the global "semiconductor trend".
Intel took the lead in completing the transformation of semiconductor memory. The electronic industry and transistor technology are the most cutting-edge and best-selling products in the world.
As the United States needs to expand its market in Asia, Japan has also been allowed to introduce some American technologies and factories and establish its own independent company.
Later, Japan seized the opportunity to follow the example of the United States and set up Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu and other large companies that developed and produced semiconductors.
At this stage, the US government was also willing to cooperate with Japanese enterprises, and the products jointly developed were sold in large quantities around the world.
In addition, since 1972, Japan began to focus on building a wage and social security system, and Japanese people's savings soon expanded.
As Japanese economists said, East Asians have a natural "dependency enthusiasm" for housing.
The first thing that Japanese people have done since they were well off is to find ways to buy real estate.
At this time, the purpose of many Japanese people to buy a house is not just to live on their own. Some people regard buying a house as an investment to wait for appreciation, while others buy a property to rent to businessmen and residents for profit.
Some people buy houses in metropolitan areas waiting for the government to requisition subsidies, and some foreign enterprises even flock to buy Japanese properties simply because of "bullish".
As a result of this "rush to buy", the house prices in Japan had risen more than 40 times in 1975 compared with 20 years ago.
In the 1980s, Japanese house prices rose by an average of about 130% (affected by the economic crisis and the Middle East war, there were great changes during this period, for example, the growth rate was about 70% before 1985, and 170% in the following six years).
At that time, real estate seemed to have become Japan's "wealth expander", the most secure investment.
At that time, Japanese people could call buying houses "crazy". Many people borrowed money to buy houses in metropolitan areas. Banks and foreign enterprises took the opportunity to issue large loans to people to stimulate and encourage their consumption.
The rise of house prices in Japan is a "serial phenomenon", which makes people in the periphery unable to resist the temptation to enter the market. Some owners even sold all their industries and bought houses in the Tokyo metropolitan area to speculate.
By 1990, the most expensive area in Tokyo had been fried to nearly 15 million yen per square meter, and Osaka, Yokohama, Sapporo and other cities were not far behind. All parts of the country were competing for the "king of land prices".
During this period, the Japanese government was also worried that such an irrational "rush to buy" would bring instability to the national economy, and had introduced some stability measures to regulate house prices.
However, there are still more and more house buyers and speculators for their own use. A large number of Japanese have moved from rural areas to urban areas, which has also contributed to this upsurge.
At the same time, the development of Japan's semiconductor industry in the 1980s brought more wealth to the people.
At that time, the market value and sales volume of several leading semiconductor enterprises in Japan had completely exceeded that of the United States. While the United States was jealous, it also regarded Japanese enterprises as their biggest "job hunters".
At this time, Japan did not expect that there was a huge international conspiracy and crisis targeting them.
The property market bubble is broken, and the government is driving the waves
In 1985, the United States summoned Japan, France and other four countries to sign the famous Plaza Agreement in New York Square.
The agreement has different provisions for each country's currency, and the yen is forced to appreciate.
To put it simply, the United States believes that Japanese goods are sold too cheaply in the world, affecting the sales of American products, so they must raise the price.
The next year, the United States signed the Japan US Semiconductor Agreement with Japan by force.
This is a "hegemonic treaty". The agreement requires that Japan must reduce its export market in the United States to a certain extent, while allowing the United States to expand its market share in Japan.
Soon after, the United States unilaterally imposed high retaliatory tariffs on many Japanese electronic products.
The United States is Japan's garrison. Obviously, the unequal status of the two countries has made Japan have no room to fight back in this matter, and can only accept the United States plan.
After the double blows of appreciation and tax increase, the export industry of Japan's proud semiconductor industry began to decline. The decline of the semiconductor economy also drove other industries to the bottom, and people could get less and less money.
The Japanese government kept cutting interest rates. In order to increase the circulation of wealth, it appeared that the economy was "balanced", but interest rate cuts and deflation could not be used all the time. Finally, Japan ushered in the "economic winter" around 1991.
The situation during this period was very complicated. To sum up, Japan's economy had been unable to rise. The gap between the prosperity of the top and the bottom was too large. The banks had been unable to maintain the economic bubble. They had to raise interest rates and deflation to play a "life-saving needle".
The government recovered money and wealth in a large amount. For a time, many enterprises experienced a "cold current" when their capital chain was broken. Factories went bankrupt, and workers lost their jobs and debt.
At this time, many people began to sell their houses for survival, and the "run" led to a sharp drop of more than 20% in Japanese house prices within a year.
However, at that time, the Japanese government also made a serious mistake: it introduced policies to encourage the decline of housing prices.
In the 1990s, Japanese foreign enterprises involved in real estate withdrew funds and fled, selling their buildings.
The Japanese government not only refused to reduce debt and drag down debt to pay for the decline in housing prices, but also imposed heavy taxes on land holders, leading more people to sell their houses (some people think that the government is deliberately cracking down on high housing prices).
At that time, real estate enterprises went bankrupt in succession, and ordinary people "gambled" their lives to buy houses and wait for appreciation, but they lost their money.
From today's perspective, the Japanese media once wrote and analyzed the thoughts of the Junshu Cabinet at that time:
Japan's fertility rate has declined due to high housing prices, the cost of living in cities is too high, and it is difficult for new capital to enter the market. Even the housing needed by ordinary people for living and marriage is "hard to find".
Therefore, the government has deliberately introduced a series of measures to take advantage of this wave of deflation to bring down the "heaven" housing prices and inject vitality into Japan's future development.
However, this "reduction" does not matter. Not only did it fail to achieve its goal, it directly "collapsed" the Japanese economy.
The bursting of the real estate bubble has lost at least 8 million jobs in Japan, and many people have lost their jobs as a result, leaving no way to catch up with the economic winter.
House prices have fallen, but most people suffer unspeakably
Perhaps the Japanese government is right in its original intention to consider cracking down on the real estate industry to increase the future development potential by significantly reducing housing prices for the public, but the impact is very serious from the later results.
First of all, under the premise of the "housing bubble" in the 1970s and 1990s, most Japanese people have entered the market.
With their own houses, many people have to buy houses even by selling other belongings and loans, and the ratio of Japanese people holding houses is very high.
The first to bear the brunt of Japan's housing price slump is those civilians at the bottom and middle levels, whose wealth has shrunk substantially and their assets have suffered serious losses overnight.
These people are exactly the producers of social wealth, devaluing their buildings, which led to the "means of production" of many of them being taken away.
The house price fell to less than one third of the remaining loans, and the mortgage value plummeted; So many people directly choose to commit suicide. "High priced housing" is their only asset.
Moreover, does the fall of Japanese housing prices give latecomers a chance to enter the market? did not.
Since the 1990s, house prices in Japan have been declining by 5% - 10% every year for more than ten years, so buyers are waiting to see if they can gain more benefits after entering the market. People without houses still haven't bought houses.
In addition to the monetary policy, the marriage and low fertility problems that the government hopes to solve have not been realized. Until now, the Japanese are still "lying flat".
Another point is that many Japanese enthusiasm for "creating economy" has died out after they lost the stimulus of buying houses and increasing income.
According to the social survey, many Japanese began to be confused and unable to find a target, indulging in alcohol and entertainment, and the number of vagrants increased dramatically during this period.
Although these cannot all be classified as the bursting of the housing bubble, Japanese social institutions believe that the "lack of economic vitality" caused by this should be one of the important reasons.
The crisis in the 1990s also caused a serious consequence.
Because the collapse of the property market economy has spread to other areas in Japan, the Japanese semiconductor industry, which has always been known as "absolute advantage", began to turn against the trend because of the lack of research and development funds and the forced closure of factories.
During the period from 1990 to 2005, Japan Semiconductor was completely surpassed by the United States.
At present, the United States holds the core industrial technology of semiconductor manufacturing, while Japan's leading fields related to semiconductors are only marginal fields such as chemicals and materials.
Of course, Japan's industrial failure and society entering the era of "zero growth" cannot all be attributed to the property market
In the era of Japan's economic downturn and massive bankruptcy, most industries moved to the United States in order to find a way out. Because Japan and the United States have similar economic and industrial structures, the United States has become the big winner in this wave.
So from the social crisis caused by Japan's real estate slump, we can see an obvious result:
The real estate that is closely related to ordinary people is not "the lower the better". On the contrary, we must see the various interests involved in this industry, as well as the wealth distribution at the grass-roots level.
In addition, Japan has also used 30 years of experience to tell us that there are no winners but only losers when house prices plummet.
The Japanese government's wanton efforts to make house prices fall in an "unnatural" way are tantamount to devaluing people's wealth. The decline of people's wealth will affect not only one aspect, but also a chain reaction.
reference material:
The soaring house prices and the outflow of young people make Kyoto, Japan consider levying "empty house tax"
"Analysis Says Tokyo House Price Decline Triggers Buying Rush in Asia" Global Network
"Japan Investment Act Helps China's Real Estate Market to Avoid the Japanese Real Estate Bubble" Global Network
