An increasing number of Tokyo houses are uninhabited, due to nothing so prosaic as demographics. An aging population means some homeowners die or otherwise move out, unreplaced by successor generations.
The results suggest settings for horror stories to come.
[S]ome eight million dwellings are now unoccupied, according to a government count. Nearly half of them have been forsaken completely – neither for sale nor for rent, they simply sit there, in varying states of disrepair....
“There are empty houses everywhere, places where nobody’s lived for 20 years, and more are cropping up all the time,” said Haneda, 77, complaining that thieves had broken into her neighbor’s house twice and that a typhoon had damaged the roof of the one next to it.
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