I’m not sure that’s true. Most major cities have magnet schools these days…

They didn’t mention mass car ownership? Japan built most of its really crap postwar housing about a decade before car ownership became the norm. Out in the inaka here you can pretty much ride a wave of housing quality. Middle of town – mix of the best (recently rebuilt) and the worst (old shells and leftovers from the 50s), bit more out – decent apartments (80s and 90s) but crap houses and stores (built in the 1960s and 1970s), doinaka – houses look fine (mostly bubble era), but are starting to show age. Of course, down this way you don’t feel the lack of quality (insulation, etc.) like you do up north.

You actually forgot one of the essential points made in that episode though, which is the way in which primary/secondary education in the US is almost exclusively limited to your local school district, making the choice of living location far more critical than it is in Japan, and presumably many European countries. Japanese people I speak to about this difference (and it comes up a lot, which me being in the graduate school of education) find it kind of hard to comprehend that the only way for the vast majority of Americans to choose a school for their children is to move.

1) Before the 1930s housing was not the government’s concern at all
2) Incentives toward home ownership started in the 30s as part of the New Deal but didn’t really take off until the 50s
3) Suburbanism took off in the 50s for a number of reasons: – Geographic: America has a lot of good land to build houses – Technological/material: The technology was there to build sturdy cheap houses – Racism: white flight meant that massive of former city-dwellers flocked to suburbs for “better schools” (also blacks were initially excluded from America’s housing programs) – the fact that there is nobody to run from in countries like Japan takes away a major motivator to leave the city – Incentives: The low fixed interest rates and low down payments were subsidized by the govt and were the final icing on the cake to make housing seem worth it

In Japan we seem to be missing the available space, racism, and sturdy house factors, though ownership rates are actually kind of high at 60% (compared to 69% in the US). Also it looks like only part of home loan interest is tax deductible in Japan, whereas in the US I am pretty sure it’s 100% deductible.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/06/hear_paying_it_all_back.html
http://www.stat.go.jp/data/jyutaku/2003/panflet/4cyou3.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_ownership_rate
http://www.jhf.go.jp/jumap/atoz/houseloan/3_5.html
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/history/fac-bios/Jackson/faculty.html

[M]ost houses built now are perfectly capable of lasting 50 or 60 years at least. The problem is a) very few people want to buy a used house and b) houses aren’t properly maintained because of that.

My host family was interested in my tales of home repair/improvement. After all, it’s not aomething they’d undertake, and it was somewhat humorous to them that a woman would do such things.

If your house is worth more than the mortgage and you think you cant make mortgage payments, you should sell the house and move into a cheaper apt or something rather than get foreclosed on. And if thats not an option then youre ruined no matter what and you have to declare bankruptcy.

Generally I think the bonus payment system is kinda ludicrous because if there is no penalty for early repayment you can design your OWN bonus payment system by choosing to pay down your debt. As Ken mentioned stuff like that is just another way for real estate people to play 3-card monte with prices.