Property tax in Japan for foreigners: what you will actually pay

Does being a foreigner change what you pay?

No. Japan's annual property tax is set out in the Local Tax Act, and Article 343 says the tax is charged on the owner of the fixed asset. That is the whole test. There is no clause about nationality, no clause about visa status, and no clause about whether you live in Japan. A tourist who buys a house in Hokkaido and a Japanese salaryman who buys the house next door are taxed by the same formula.

Nor is there a foreign-buyer surcharge anywhere in the Act. If you have read that Japan is considering restrictions on foreign land ownership, that debate is real, but as of July 2026 it has not changed how property tax is calculated.

What being a foreigner does change is the machinery: how the bill reaches you, who pays it if you are abroad, and what you have to file. That is the second half of this guide.

The three numbers that decide your bill

Nearly every English article says "property tax in Japan is 1.4% a year." That is the rate, and it is correct. It is also close to useless on its own, because the 1.4% is not applied to the price you paid. Three different numbers are in play, and confusing them is how people end up wildly over- or under-estimating.

1. The price you pay

The market price. It has no direct role in the annual tax calculation at all.

2. The assessed value

The kotei shisan zei hyoka gaku (固定資産税評価額), or assessed value for fixed asset tax purposes. This is the number the municipality puts in its tax ledger, and it is what the tax is built on.

For land, there is a published national guideline: at the 1994 revaluation, Japan set the assessed value of residential land at roughly 70% of the published land price. For buildings there is no equivalent ratio. A building is assessed by working out what it would cost to rebuild it today and then applying an age-based depreciation factor. That has no fixed relationship to what someone will pay you for it. A well-located 40-year-old wooden house can have an assessed building value close to zero while still selling for millions of yen.

Assessed values are revalued every three years. FY2024 was a base year, so the next revaluation lands in FY2027.

3. The taxable base

The kazei hyojun gaku (課税標準額), the figure the rate is actually multiplied by. For a house on its own plot this is usually far below the assessed value, for two reasons that stack on top of each other.

The first is the residential land reduction, covered in the next section. The second is a phase-in rule that is genuinely obscure in English: under the supplementary provisions of the Local Tax Act (Article 18 of the supplementary provisions, currently written for FY2024 to FY2026), the taxable base for building land is not allowed to jump to its full level in one year. Each year it may rise by at most 5% of the figure it is heading towards, until it catches up.

Read that carefully, because the 5% is where English summaries go wrong. Article 18(1) applies the 5% not to the raw assessed value but to the value after the residential land reduction has been applied — in the words of the Act, the price multiplied by "the rate specified in Article 349-3-2." So for the first 200 m² under your home, the annual step is 5% of (assessed value × 1/6), which is about 0.83% of the assessed value, not 5% of it. For the part above 200 m² it is 5% of (assessed value × 1/3). Only for commercial and other non-residential building land is the step a full 5% of the assessed value.

There is a floor as well as a ceiling: Article 18(3) will not let the base fall below 20% of that same reduced figure. In an area where land prices have been rising, the practical effect is that your real bill is materially lower than assessed value × reduction × 1.4% for several years, and it rises a little every year even though nothing about your property changed.

How to find the assessed value before you sign

This is the practical gap in almost every guide: they tell you the tax is charged on the assessed value, then leave you with no way to find out what it is. Here is how, in the order you should do it.

• ■Ask the agent for the seller's current tax bill — the nozei tsuchisho (納税通知書), the annual notice the municipality posts to the owner. It shows the assessed value, the taxable base and the amount actually charged for land and building separately. This is the single most useful document in the whole transaction and it costs nothing.
• ■Ask for the valuation certificate — the kotei shisan hyoka shomeisho (固定資産評価証明書). Issued by the municipality (by the metropolitan tax office in the 23 wards of Tokyo) for a small fee. Your judicial scrivener will need it anyway, because the registration tax is calculated from it.
• ■Ask for the koka shomeisho (公課証明書) if you want the taxable base as well as the assessed value. This is the version that includes the tax actually levied, so it already reflects the reductions and the phase-in.
• ■Read the Explanation of Important Matters — the juyo jiko setsumei (重要事項説明), the statutory briefing you must be given before you sign. Two different things are often blurred together in English here. The licence belongs to the company: a real estate agency (takken gyosha (宅地建物取引業者)) is licensed by a prefecture or by the national government. The briefing itself must be delivered by a qualified individual working there, a takken-shi (宅地建物取引士), who has to show you their registration card (Article 35(4) of the Real Estate Brokerage Act). Whether the current-year tax figures are attached varies; ask for them explicitly.

If an agent will not give you the assessed value before you commit, treat that as information about the agent.

The reductions that do most of the work

Two rates apply each year. Fixed asset tax (kotei shisan zei (固定資産税)) has a standard rate of 1.4% under Article 350 of the Local Tax Act. City planning tax (toshi keikaku zei (都市計画税)) is capped at 0.3% under Article 702-4. Article 702(1) lets a municipality charge it on land and buildings inside an urbanisation promotion area (shigaika kuiki (市街化区域)). Most urban addresses are inside one; a rural vacant house (akiya (空き家)) may not be. They arrive on the same bill.

Being outside that area is not a guarantee, and this is the sort of detail English guides flatten. The second sentence of Article 702(1) says that where not charging owners in the shigaika chosei kuiki (市街化調整区域), the urbanisation control area, would be so out of balance with charging owners inside the promotion area that special circumstances exist, the municipality may charge city planning tax there too, on the areas its own by-law names. And where a city planning area has no area classification at all, the by-law defines the charging area directly. So "outside the promotion area, therefore no city planning tax" is a strong default, not a rule. Ask the municipality.

The rate is the boring part. The reduction is where the money is. Under Article 349-3-2, land that is being used as the site of a home has its taxable base cut:

There is no permanent equivalent for the building. Apart from the time-limited new-build measure described at the end of this section, the building is taxed on its full assessed value. So on a bill for a house and its plot, the building can easily account for more of the tax than the land does, even where the land is worth several times the building.

There is also a floor. Article 351 says a municipality may not levy fixed asset tax where a single owner's taxable base in that municipality is under ¥300,000 for land or under ¥200,000 for buildings. For a cheap rural akiya this often means the annual fixed asset tax is nil. Four things about it.

• ■City planning tax goes too. The Act sets no separate threshold for it. Article 702-8(1) makes city planning tax assessed and collected following fixed asset tax, and municipalities publish the consequence in plain words — Nagoya City writes 「固定資産税について免税点未満の場合は、都市計画税も課税されません。」 ("where the fixed asset tax is below the threshold, city planning tax is not charged either"). A property under the threshold pays neither tax, not one of them.
• ■It is per owner, per municipality. Buying three cheap plots in the same town can push you over the line when any one of them alone would not have.
• ■The article carries a proviso that English guides drop. Where there is a financial or other special need, the municipality may charge below the threshold anyway, if its own by-law says so. Treat "under ¥300,000, therefore free" as a strong default, not a guarantee, and ask the municipality.
• ■The building figure rises in FY2027. Article 351 as amended by Act No. 2 of 2026, in force 1 April 2027, replaces "¥300,000 for land, ¥200,000 for buildings" with ¥300,000 for land or buildings (and raises the depreciable-asset figure from ¥1,500,000 to ¥1,800,000). The tax year it bites from is in the amending Act itself, not only in municipal leaflets: its supplementary Article 14(2) says the new Article 351 applies to fixed asset tax "for FY2027 and later years, and for years up to FY2026 the previous rules continue to apply." A cheap house assessed at, say, ¥250,000 is taxed this year and drops out of tax from FY2027. If you are buying an akiya, that is worth knowing before you budget.

A newly built home does get a reduction on the building. Under Article 15-6 of the supplementary provisions, a home newly built between 1 April 2022 and 31 March 2031 has half of the building's fixed asset tax knocked off for three years; for a fire-resistant or quasi-fire-resistant building of three or more storeys above ground, newly built between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2031, it runs for five years. The enforcement order limits it to a registered floor area of 40 m² to 240 m², and the halving covers only the first 120 m² of living space per dwelling. It applies to fixed asset tax only — city planning tax is charged in full throughout.

That 40 m² has its own Tokyo exception, and it is a different provision from the acquisition-tax one further down this page. Supplementary Article 12 of the Local Tax Act Enforcement Order, which defines the qualifying part of the building, sets the minimum at 40 m² but writes in 50 m² for a home inside a designated urban renaissance emergency development area within one of Tokyo's 23 special wards — for a unit in a block, only where the unit is not let out — and 30 m² for a rented unit in registered serviced housing for the elderly. The 40–240 m² range is also new: it applies to homes newly built on or after 1 April 2026, for FY2027 bills onward. A home built before that date is judged on the older range of 50 m² to 280 m², with 40 m² for a let-out unit.

The 1 January rule, and the money you hand the seller

Fixed asset tax for a given year is charged on whoever is the registered owner on 1 January of that year. There is no apportionment in the law. If you buy in March, the seller is still the taxpayer for the whole of that year, and the municipality will go on billing the seller.

In practice, Japanese sale contracts almost always include a clause in which the buyer reimburses the seller for the part of the year after completion. This money appears on your closing statement and it can be a six-figure yen amount. Two things worth understanding:

• ■It is not a tax. It is a private contract term. You are not paying the municipality, you are paying the seller. If the contract did not contain the clause, you would owe nothing.
• ■Ask which date the split starts from. Practice differs between regions, and the choice of start date moves real money. Get the calculation written out on the settlement sheet, and check it against the seller's actual tax notice rather than an estimate.

From the following January, the bill comes to you. Municipalities send it in spring and let you pay in four instalments or in one go; the exact months vary by municipality.

If you will not be living in Japan

This is where nationality finally becomes relevant, though what actually matters is whether you have an address in Japan.

Article 355 of the Local Tax Act says that a fixed asset taxpayer who has no address, residence or place of business in the municipality that levies the tax must appoint a nozei kanrinin (納税管理人) — a tax agent — and notify the mayor. The agent handles "all matters relating to payment": they receive the bill and they pay it. They are your postbox and your payer, not your adviser.

Article 355 paragraph 2 adds something rarely mentioned in English: you can apply to the mayor for a determination that appointing an agent is unnecessary, if there is no risk to collection of the tax. If you keep a Japanese bank account with a direct debit set up, this is worth asking about. Municipalities vary in how they handle it, so ask the specific municipality rather than assuming.

Who can be your agent? Article 355(1) gives two routes, and the second is the one that matters to an overseas owner. The first is simply to appoint someone with an address, residence or place of business inside the area the municipality's own by-law defines, and notify the mayor. The second, in the same sentence, is that you may apply to the mayor for approval to appoint someone outside that area, provided that person has the convenience of handling the matters — the Act's phrase is 「便宜を有するもの」. English guides give only the first route, which makes the rule look narrower than it is. In practice the agent is a friend, a property management company, a judicial scrivener or a tax accountant. The form is filed with the municipality where the property is, and each municipality has its own version. If you own property in three different cities, that is three filings.

A tax agent appointment matters in one further situation that has nothing to do with the annual bill. If you inherit Japanese property and then leave the country before the inheritance tax return is due, the filing deadline can move forward to the day you go — our guide to inheritance tax for foreigners sets out that provision, and the valuation basis it uses, which is not the assessed value this page is about.

Selling raises the same appointment again, and a further point that catches sellers who have already left: where the seller is a non-resident, the buyer can be required to withhold 10.21% of the price — the price, not the gain — and pay it to the state. Our guide to capital gains tax on a sale sets out that duty, the two conditions that switch it off, and why the five-year line between the two rates is measured on 1 January rather than on the day of the sale.

The one-off taxes when you buy

Annual tax is only part of the question. The taxes at purchase are larger and land in a single lump. In brief, with the rates in force in July 2026:

• ■Registration and licence tax (toroku menkyo zei (登録免許税)) — charged on the assessed value when the transfer is recorded at the Legal Affairs Bureau. Land transfers are at 1.5% instead of the standard 2.0% until 31 March 2029 (Special Taxation Measures Act Article 72), and that one does not depend on the building or on who lives there. A home you will live in yourself is at 0.3% instead of 2.0% on a transfer, and a first registration of a new home at 0.15% instead of 0.4%, both until 31 March 2027. The mortgage registration drops from 0.4% to 0.1% on the same conditions. All three housing reductions require an individual buyer who occupies the home, a certificate from the municipality, registration within a year of acquisition — and a registered floor area of 50 m² or more, with no upper limit.
• ■Real estate acquisition tax (fudosan shutoku zei (不動産取得税)) — a prefectural tax that arrives by post some months after you buy, which catches people out. 3% for land and homes, 4% for non-residential buildings, until 31 March 2027; the taxable base for land classified as building land is halved over the same period. A qualifying home gets a deduction from the building's base of up to ¥12,000,000, and a further credit against the land tax. The floor-area range here is 40 m² to 240 m² — 40, not 50, and with a ceiling. We can date that change from the statute rather than from a leaflet: ask the statutes database for the Local Tax Act Enforcement Order as it stood on 31 March 2026 and Article 37-16(i), the newly built home, read 五十平方メートル with a bracket dropping it to 四十平方メートル where the unit is let out, while Article 37-18(1), the pre-owned home, read a bare 五十平方メートル以上二百四十平方メートル以下 with no such bracket. Ask for 1 April 2026 and both read 四十平方メートル. It is recent enough that most English articles still say 50. One catch applies to everyone: it goes by the date you acquire, and an acquisition before 1 April 2026 stays on the old text. The mortgage tax deduction has a third floor-area rule, drawn differently again; we set that one out in a separate guide, checked on 4 August 2026. The Tokyo catch, however, does not apply to everyone — see below.
• ■Stamp duty (inshi zei (印紙税)) — a physical stamp on the contract. Under the reduced rates that run to 31 March 2027, a contract between ¥10,000,000 and ¥50,000,000 carries ¥10,000, and one between ¥50,000,000 and ¥100,000,000 carries ¥30,000. The duty is charged per original document. Contracts are normally drawn in duplicate and each side stamps its own original, so you pay the figure once; where only one original is made and the buyer keeps a photocopy, the two sides often split a single duty instead. Loan agreements are on a different, unreduced table.
• ■Consumption tax — 10%, but only on the building, and only when the seller is a business. Land is never subject to consumption tax. When you buy a second-hand home from a private individual, there is no consumption tax at all.

The central Tokyo 50 m² carve-back applies to new builds, not to pre-owned homes

The 40 m² figure comes with an exception for central Tokyo, and it is worth getting exactly right, because it is easy to state too broadly and the property it would wrongly catch — a compact second-hand flat in the 23 wards — is one of the most commonly bought things on this page.

The exception lives in supplementary Article 3 of Cabinet Order No. 83 of 31 March 2026. For acquisitions up to 31 March 2031 it keeps the minimum at 50 m² where the home is inside a designated urban renaissance emergency development area (tokutei toshi saisei kinkyu seibi chiiki (特定都市再生緊急整備地域)) that is itself inside one of Tokyo's 23 special wards, unless the unit is let out. But that supplementary article has four paragraphs, one for each provision it switches on, and the carve-back is not written into all four.

Paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 each run the acquisition-date rule and then add a substitution clause: read 40 m² as 50 m² for such a home. Paragraph 3 is one sentence long. It says the new Article 37-18 applies to acquisitions from the commencement date and that earlier acquisitions stay on the old rules, and it stops there. There is no substitution clause and no mention of Tokyo.

So a second-hand 45 m² flat in Minato ward is judged on 40 m² and keeps the acquisition-tax deduction, while an identical newly built 45 m² flat in the same designated area — bought to live in rather than to let — is judged on 50 m² and does not. If you are told otherwise, ask which paragraph it comes from. The prefectural tax office is the right place to confirm whether an address falls inside a designated area at all, which is the part no calculator can tell you.

Two different floor-area tests, and the gap between them

Notice what just happened. Acquisition tax wants 40 m² to 240 m². Registration tax wants 50 m² and above. They are set by two different orders — the Local Tax Act Enforcement Order for the first, the Special Taxation Measures Act Enforcement Order for the second — and they do not agree.

A 45 m² apartment therefore gets the acquisition-tax deduction and does not get the registration-tax reductions. On a ¥40,000,000 purchase with a ¥32,000,000 loan and a building assessed at ¥8,000,000, that difference is worth about ¥232,000: the building registration goes from ¥24,000 to ¥160,000 and the mortgage registration from ¥32,000 to ¥128,000. Small studios and compact city apartments sit exactly in this band. A 250 m² house has the mirror-image problem: the registration reductions still apply, because they have no upper limit, but the acquisition-tax deduction is gone.

The reductions are not automatic

Both acquisition-tax reliefs are drafted as conditional on you claiming them. Article 73-14(4) says the deduction applies "only where the acquirer of the home files, as the prefectural by-law provides, a declaration that these provisions should apply," and Article 73-24(5) says the same for the land credit. There is a safety valve — Articles 73-14(5) and 73-24(6) let the prefecture apply the relief anyway if it is satisfied the conditions are met, which is how most prefectures handle a straightforward owner-occupied purchase — but the relief you are counting on rests on that discretion unless you file. Ask the prefectural tax office which form it wants and by when, at completion, not when the bill arrives.

One more distinction worth having. The acquisition-tax deduction for a newly built home does not require you to live in it: Article 73-14(1) simply talks about the construction or purchase of a new, never-occupied home. Owner-occupation is required for a pre-owned home, under Article 73-14(3). The registration-tax reductions require it in every case. So a new-build bought to rent out keeps the ¥12,000,000 deduction and loses the 0.15% and 0.1% registration rates.

The counter-intuitive result: a foreign buyer purchasing an ordinary owner-occupied family home often pays nothing at all in acquisition tax, because the deduction and the land credit can wipe it out entirely. Whether they do depends on your own figures. Open the calculator and it starts on a worked example — a ¥40,000,000 pre-owned house of 100 m² on 150 m² of land, bought with a ¥32,000,000 loan, with the assessed values estimated at ¥16,800,000 for the land and ¥9,600,000 for the building. That produces ¥0 of acquisition tax on both land and building, and ¥1,728,800 of total one-off costs, of which ¥1,386,000 is the broker's commission. The tax is not the expensive part. The agent is.

Those assessed values are the calculator's own estimate from the price, not real ones; tick "I have the real assessed values" and the figures will move. That is the point of the tool.

This guide does not cover income tax on rental income, capital gains tax on a later sale, inheritance tax, or the withholding obligations that apply when a non-resident is on either side of a deal. Those are separate subjects with their own traps, and we would rather leave them out than summarise them badly.

Four ways the bill goes up later

You demolish the house

The 1/6 reduction attaches to land that is the site of a home. Take the home away and the land stops being jutaku yochi (住宅用地), residential land, and becomes what the Act calls shogyochi to (商業地等), commercial and other building land. This is the single biggest reason Japan is full of derelict houses that nobody pulls down.

English guides usually say the tax "goes up six times." That number comes from comparing 1/6 with the whole value, and the phase-in rule from earlier in this guide gets in the way of it twice. First, the taxable base for commercial and other building land does not climb to 100% of the assessed value: Article 18(2) of the supplementary provisions stops it at 60% of the assessed value (and Article 18(5) pulls a base above 70% back down to 70%). Going from 1/6, which is 16.7%, to 60% is a rise of about 3.6 times, not six — and for city planning tax, from 1/3 to the same 60%, about 1.8 times rather than three. Second, it does not arrive in one year. The base climbs in annual steps of at most 5% of the assessed value, so the bill keeps rising for years after the demolition crew has gone.

Put the two taxes together and you can see where the plot ends up. Take a plot of 200 m² or less inside an urbanisation promotion area, and call the assessed value 100. With a home on it you pay 1.4% × 1/6 plus 0.3% × 1/3, which is 0.233 + 0.100 = 0.333 per year. With the home gone, and once the phase-in has finished its climb, you pay 1.4% × 60% plus 0.3% × 60%, which is 0.84 + 0.18 = 1.02. That is a little over three times the combined bill, not six.

None of which makes demolition cheap. Roughly trebling a bill you will pay every year for as long as you own the land is a serious decision, and it is why so many empty houses are left standing. But if you have been quoted "six times" as a reason not to demolish, the real figure is smaller and slower, and it is worth getting the actual number rather than the rule of thumb.

If you are buying an akiya intending to clear the site, ask the municipality for the post-demolition figure before you buy, not after. They can tell you what the land alone would be assessed and taxed at.

Your empty house gets a formal recommendation

Article 349-3-2 excludes from the reduction any land under a property that has received a recommendation under the Act on Special Measures concerning Vacant Houses — either as a tokutei akiya to (特定空家等) (a vacant house in a dangerous or seriously unsanitary state) or as a kanri fuzen akiya to (管理不全空家等) (one heading that way through neglect). The house is still standing, and the reduction is gone anyway. If you buy a rural property and leave it untouched for years, this is a real risk and not a theoretical one.

The three-yearly revaluation

Assessed values are reset every three years, with the next reset in FY2027. If land prices in your area have risen, your assessed value rises with them, and the phase-in then walks your taxable base up towards the new figure over the following years.

You stop being reachable

A bill that is never delivered is still a bill. Late charges accrue from the due date. Keep the tax agent notification current, and update it if your agent moves or you sell.

What is changing

5 October 2026: nationality joins the registration file

This one is confirmed from the statute, not from press reports. The Real Property Registration Rules are amended by Ministry of Justice Ordinance No. 23 of 31 March 2026, which comes into force on 5 October 2026 and carries no transitional provision. We read both versions of the text in the government's statutes database — the version in force on 4 October 2026 and the version in force on 5 October 2026 — and compared them. Three things change, and the second matters far more to a reader of this page than the first.

One: nationality is added to the file. Article 158-38 lists what goes into the "search information management file" that the Minister of Justice keeps on every natural person recorded as an owner. Today it is name, phonetic reading of the name, address, date of birth, email address, and the details needed to identify the register entries. From 5 October it gains a new item six, kokuseki to (国籍等) — nationality, or, for someone from a place Japan does not treat as a state, the "region" referred to in Article 2(v)(b) of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act. Article 1 of that Act's Enforcement Order names those regions: Taiwan, and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. That is why the provision reads "nationality etc." rather than "nationality".

Two: buyers living abroad are brought inside the requirement. This is the change that will affect readers of this guide most, and we have not seen it explained in English anywhere. Article 158-39 is the rule that makes the applicant supply the search information when a transfer of ownership is registered. In the current text the duty applies only 「…が国内に住所を有するときは」 — where the person becoming the registered owner has an address in Japan. In the 5 October text that clause is deleted outright. From that date the search information, nationality included, is declared for every natural person becoming a registered owner, whether or not they live in Japan. A non-resident foreign buyer, who is entirely outside the present requirement, will be inside it.

Three: you have to evidence it. Article 158-39(2) currently requires official documents proving the phonetic reading and the date of birth. From 5 October it requires proof of nationality as well, and it adds a clause for the obvious problem that a foreign national may have nothing a Japanese public officer has issued: where no such document exists, information standing in its place may be supplied. There is a proviso removing the requirement where the application information itself lets the registrar confirm the nationality. Note also that the shortcut in paragraph 3 — an electronic certificate standing in for the documents in an online application — is narrowed so that it covers the phonetic reading and the date of birth but not nationality.

What we can say about publicity is limited to what the rules provide for. This information goes into a file kept by the Minister of Justice under Article 158-38, retained permanently, separate from the register entry itself, and we found no provision in the Rules for it to appear on a certificate of registered matters or to be inspected by the public. That is not the same as a guarantee of confidentiality, and we are not going to dress it up as one.

One detail of the existing rule is worth keeping in view, because it already singles out foreign owners: the phonetic reading in Article 158-38(ii) is, for a person who does not hold Japanese nationality, the romanised form of their name.

None of this changes what you pay. It changes what you declare. If you are registering a purchase on or after 5 October 2026, ask your judicial scrivener now what they will want from you to evidence nationality, because for a buyer abroad there may be no Japanese document to produce.

Separately, there is an active political debate in Japan about restricting foreign acquisition of land. It has not changed the tax rules described above. We review this quarterly.

What to ask your agent

Take this list to the licensed agent handling the sale. None of these questions asks for advice; all of them ask for a document or a number that already exists.

• ■May I see the seller's fixed asset tax notice for this year, showing land and building separately?
• ■What is the assessed value of the land, and of the building?
• ■What is the taxable base after the residential land reduction?
• ■Is city planning tax charged on this property — either because it is inside an urbanisation promotion area, or because the municipality's by-law extends the tax to it?
• ■How much of the annual tax will I be asked to reimburse at completion, and from which date is the split calculated?
• ■Is the land registered as building land, and is the whole plot treated as the site of the home?
• ■What is the registered floor area on the register — not the brochure figure — and the date of completion of the building?
• ■Which acquisition-tax and registration-tax reductions do you expect to apply here, and what do I have to file with the prefecture to claim them?
• ■Can the Explanation of Important Matters be given by video call, and can the document be sent electronically? In what language will it be given, and will you accept an interpreter I bring?
• ■If I register on or after 5 October 2026, what will you and the judicial scrivener need from me to evidence my nationality?
• ■Which judicial scrivener will handle the registration, and what is their quoted fee?
• ■If the seller is a company, is consumption tax included in the advertised price?

The property register itself: what a certificate proves, and the two filing deadlines →

Renting rather than owning: the deposit rules the Civil Code added in 2020, and what a move-out charge may cover →

Buying with a loan: the charge the Civil Code creates over the property, and the registration that records it →

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