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Focusing on migrants' experiences of moving house in the country of settlement, the study explores the housing pathways of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan over their life courses. This paper emphasizes the need for the anthropology of migration to consider not only the housing events but also the housing pathways experienced by cross-border migrants in receiving countries. It is argued that the act of moving from one accommodation to another plays a crucial role in how migrants develop their biographies and perceptions of self. In addition to investigating house relocation, the study borrows from the Russian formalist school of narratology to examine how migrants narrativize their experiences in stories that intertwine housing pathways and movers' identities. The study reveals how the instances of moving—and not necessarily the physical qualities of housing—emerge as dynamic forces that initiate migrants into their desired statuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative channel for elderly consumption response to housing value changes by focusing on the informal financial markets. This channel may be important, particularly in a society where the elderly are less mobile and have limited access to the formal financial markets. In such a society, elderly homeowners may leave their housing assets to their children, and in exchange receive cash to fund consumption. Japanese household-level data on the elderly are used to examine this possibility. The results indeed suggest that the consumption of the elderly responds to changes in their house values through the intrafamily finance channel alone. The marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is only 0.01. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores micro-economic aspects of owner occupation in Japan in terms of consumption practices and meanings. It considers variation in the meaningful dimensions of investment and asset building, identity practices and use values, and thus moves from a binary conceptualisation of use value versus investment value, to a more multifarious consideration of relationships between meaning and context in owner-occupied property consumption. Contrasts are made based on the empirical case of Japan, drawing explicitly from qualitative interviews with Japanese homeowners. A specific feature across societies where homeownership dominates in policy and housing demand appears to be the persistence of a set of economic values associated with owner occupation despite market volatility and substantial differences in socio-economic conditions. However, the paper also considers difference in meaningful dimensions of owner occupation, with divergent manifestations of investment, asset and use values in housing consumption. Commodification and micro-structural processes also appear more diverse than analyses of Western housing markets and homeownership consumption have assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of the residential property market is an important issue for both the macro economy and for individual households in Japan. Home ownership is the main pillar of housing policy and as a very expensive commodity it has been deeply implicated in the economic problems of the 1990s. This paper considers the role of home ownership within the broader context of the post-war Japanese social structure. The core of the paper is an assessment of the impact of the recent period of financial turbulence on the home ownership sector. This discussion is set within the broader context of the new pressures emerging around the institutional arrangements which have sustained the Japanese social system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the housing recovery policy carried out in Kobe, a disaster city heavily damaged by the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 17 January 1995. The housing problems in the earthquake-hit city resulted not only from direct damage by the disaster. Urban restructuring, underway beforehand, had been generating socio-economic polarisation and geographical disparity in housing conditions. The earthquake caused especially heavy damage on the inner-city housing of low-income people and the elderly. Housing recovery progress in the post-disaster period has also been unequal. This paper shows the growing socio-economic and spatial polarisation. The framework of Japan's housing policy is a two-tiered system. On the one hand, most people are encouraged to obtain their own houses by their own efforts on the market, whereas on the other, public housing as residual welfare housing is directly provided for those who are marginal to the market. The housing recovery policy followed this framework, and functioned to socio-spatially isolate low-income and/or elderly victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this paper is to provide a qualitative analysis of the transformations in the housing choices and living arrangements of older people in Japan. The underlying causes and issues of changing intergenerational linkages were explored in the context of the development of the Japanese welfare state. The fieldwork was conducted in Kitakyushu, Japan, through a series of interviews with older women. The informants were selected from three different welfare sectors - the state, the market, and the family - in order to make a clear distinction among people in terms of their socio-economic status, housing and living arrangements, and degree of family relations. The results of the analysis highlight older people's preference for more independent living with changing family patterns and ideology. It is, however, still constrained by the limited housing alternatives and underdeveloped social services. The paper also reveals the extent of poverty among single women in old age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The housing system in post-war Japan has consistently driven the growth of the owner-occupied housing sector, where many people have followed a conventional life-course in terms of ascending the housing ladder towards homeownership. Since the 1990s, however, a more insecure economy combined with the reorientation of housing and social policies has led to divergence in people's housing pathways. The conservative nature of public policy has largely been maintained, advantaging middle-class family households in accessing homeownership. However, in response to economic stagnation and within the context of pervasive neo-liberalism, the government has moved sharply towards accentuating the role of the market in providing housing and mortgages. Neo-liberal policies have become more pronounced while conservative institutions have firmly been ingrained in Japan's post-war society. Conventional middle-class families, protected by conservative policies in moving up the housing ladder, have maintained their relatively advantageous positions in the market economy. Neo-liberal policy has especially affected the housing conditions of specific groups who have been beyond the protection of conservative institutions, i.e. unmarried individuals, low-income households and those in unstable employment. The combination of conservative and neo-liberal approaches in policy practices has thus had strong diverging effects on people's housing opportunities. This paper explores the fragmentation of housing paths in Japan's insecure economy with particular reference to transformations in housing and social policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Japanese society, 'post-bubble' housing debates are being shaped by labour market restructuring, demographic change and policy shifts. In this context, this paper explores shifting trajectories of homeownership using three specific housing debates: 'the emergence of a gap society', 'increasing single-person households' and 'housing assets in later life'. By exploring these various debates, it attempts to highlight how housing, demography and social policy interact at different levels and in different areas to produce dynamic shifts away from the conventional post-war housing trajectory. Current trends have exhibited shifts away from: the linear upward housing trajectory; the family-centred housing model; the land-orientated housing system; and homeownership dominance per se. The concept of generation is used as a thread to tie the different debates together. Each housing issue is often more relevant to a particular generation, but relationships between generations within families and society add to the dynamism to the current shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]