ABSTRACT
In the post-war period Japan has experienced some of the most radical social and economic transformations of any modern society, from clambering out of the ruins of military defeat in 1945 to asserting itself as the world’s second largest economy by 1968. Housing and construction have been at the heart of the rebuilding and revitalization of the Japanese economy, a key policy in the state’s socio-economic agenda, as well as a stabilizing factor in social development during a period of rapid modernization. Housing market volatility has also been at the centre of Japan’s economic troubles over the last decades, and emphasis remains on housing and the housing market in strategies to restructure and regalvanize the Japanese economic machine.
