West Coast baby
Japan has declining population, unlike basically every county in the world.
20 years ago, Japan’s population was basically flat. It has the same population today as it did in 1995, having gone up and then down by only a couple million people in between.
Land prices in the US were also low 20 years ago, before we added another 45 million people to the demand side of the equation.
You can’t just take the average value for a variable and assume it’s representative of all values at all times. If you take two cities, one with 100 people and another with 900, the average population is 500, but that doesn’t mean half of the people live in each city.