Japanese houses in particular are basically a consumable. They are designed for a very short lifetime compared to pretty much any other developed country.
Lol, yeah, I was trying to find a source for the average home age, and an article in English cited this as the official government statistics, which i thought would be more responsible to cite, even if I couldn’t understand it. I did auto-translate it to double check, though.
I watched a video on this and while it does vary widely by prefecture one of the big reasons is their waste management/recycling rules.
Often, to demolish a house, theres usually a flat fee and its just bulldozed, put into a truck and dumped. To renovate, you have to dispose of every type of waste according to the class of that waste. Which is labour intensive and time consuming.
