People don't seem to realize that something being a solid investment and it being widely accessible are contradictory terms and that ideal regulation would work towards a balance of these, not over-optimization of either.
That doesn't mean that the land it is built on has 0 value, but it vastly changes the financial dynamics of home-owning, and would also remove the nonsense linked to home = wealth.
With the reasonable assumption that the build quality of home in Japan is no worse than in the rest of the "Western world", it really puts the whole real estate financial racket into perspective.
For the poor souls that have decades of interest left to pay on a loan it's a different story, but somehow, someone has to lose something for most people to have decent housing costs.
Nah, that would be the case even if housing prices were indefinitely flat, because the bank will give you a loan against an asset with a stable value (house) but not be willing to loan you money at the same interest rate so you can gamble in the stock market.
As long as the bank will loan you money against a house for a lower interest rate than your expected returns from the stock market, it will make sense to borrow the money to buy a house instead of taking your own money out of the stock market, for anyone willing to take the risk of the stocks going down.