'I live with a ghost': Japan's haunted homes attract bargain hunters

Ryua says that she shares her Tokyo apartment with a ghost

From the moment Ryua first walked into her rental apartment in Tokyo she believed it to be haunted.

"When I visited the place for a viewing there was a man standing there, glaring at me," she says.

"Since the estate agent couldn't see him, I realised he must be a ghost."

While someone more squeamish would probably have quickly left the flat never to return, Ryua chose to go ahead and move in.

"I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I decided I wanted to become friends with this glaring male ghost," adds Ryua, who works as an aidoru, a young entertainer, and who doesn't wish to share her surname.

Four years later, and still in the same apartment, she says she continues to experience paranormal activity on a daily basis.

She says she hears endless footsteps and the ghost talking.

The previous occupant of Ryua's apartment, pictured here, sadly took their own life

Although Japan has increasingly marked Halloween, external in recent years, many Japanese people take ghosts seriously all year round.

The country has a word, "yuurei", which means a lingering, troubled spirit.

These are the ghosts of people who died in violent or tragic circumstances - those who were murdered, killed themselves, or simply were lonely and died alone.

If they died at home, then the belief is that their yuurei won't go away.

For house hunters who are not superstitious or squeamish it means there are big bargains to be found.

There is a whole category of dwellings called jiko bukken, which means "stigmatised" or "incident" properties.

Under guidelines issued by the government in 2021, Japanese estate agents must disclose suicide, murder, death by fire, and any death where the body was not discovered for an extended period of time.

For rental properties this information must be disclosed for three years, and it must be revealed indefinitely for any property offered for sale.

By contrast, in the UK there is no legal requirement, external to reveal that a person died in a property.

And in the US, it differs from state to state., external For example, in California you have to reveal if a person has died in the property in the past three years, while in Arizona and Oregon you do not.

Ryua was told that a man had killed himself in her apartment.

It meant that she gets an almost 30% discount on her rent on her tiny, 25 sq m bedsit in the fashionable ward of Setagaya.

She says she pays 45,000 yen ($285; £213) a month, instead of what should have been 62,000 yen.

While a house where there had been a murder or suicide would probably be harder to sell or rent out anywhere in the world, Tokyo estate agent Erik Oskamp says that Japanese people are particularly superstitious and averse to stigmatised properties.

"[Even] an apartment next to a cemetery will be difficult to rent out, especially if you can see the tombs from the kitchen," explains Oskamp.

"The worst thing is if a suicide has happened in the apartment.

Even if somebody has jumped from the roof, many renters will move out.

Other issues are a serious crime or a lonely death."

The latter issue, that of a person dying alone, would not generally affect the price of a property in, say, the UK or the US.

But in rural Kagoshima, in Japan's southwest, it enabled Diane Tincher to buy a large three-bedroom house for about half of what would have otherwise been the asking price.

The 79-year-old American has lived in Japan for nearly 40 years, working as a tour guide.

She says that the estate agent had been straight with her – there was a heavy discount as an elderly lady had died alone, thereby stigmatising the property.

Tincher paid 20m yen for the house, in a location where similar properties usually sell for up to 45m yen.

"I don't believe in ghosts.

But I know that the Japanese are very superstitious," she says.

"If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her every day... to live in such a splendid and affordable home."

Diane Tincher says she got a 50% reduction on her home in rural Japan

Researching the house, Tincher had found it on a website called Oshimaland, which lists jiko bukken properties, giving details of the events that occurred.

It was launched in 2005 covering Tokyo, before expanding across Japan and then internationally in 2011.

It is crowdsourced, meaning that members of the public add the homes and their details.

Teru Oshima, the founder of Oshimaland, says that in the past such properties were "not very attractive options" in Japan.