The right wing commentariat has heavily focused on foreigners buying up all the condos in Tokyo in the past several years, believing it to be the cause of the current property bubbles and cascading rise of living costs.

Last month, the government announced the results of a flawed[0] but informative survey of condo buyers. Turns out, barely 3% of condos were sold to foreigners.

Th right wing commentariat howled and didn’t believe the results, coming up with all sorts of conspiracy theories, they’re using a Japanese proxy, they’re buying through naturalised citizens, etc.

I wish I could find the article, it’s on Yahoo news and the comments are … enlightening.

0: flawed, because they ran a simple regex on owners’ names, those with non-Japanese names = foreigner.

Edit: found it

https://www.reddit.com/r/japanresidents/comments/1wh9uxj/for...

https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/97286038fd1ac0b4b2c3251d9d...