Would you sleep in a haunted house for Rs 31,000? Japan’s strange job

A two-storey house in Yokohama, Japan, has been empty for at least five years. It isn’t falling apart — it could easily be renovated into a comfortable home — but nobody wants to live there because of what happened inside it. It belongs to a category Japan calls ‘jiko bukken,’ or stigmatized properties: homes where a suicide, murder, fatal fire, or a ‘lonely death’ (an elderly person dying alone and going undiscovered) has occurred.

To help owners of homes like this, a property management company called Kachimode has built a business around a single, unusual service: paying someone 88,000 yen (about Rs 31,000, or $542) per property to spend the entire night — 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. — inside the house, armed with video cameras, audio recorders, thermography equipment, electromagnetic wave detectors and sensors tracking temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and noise. The point is to produce hard evidence, in the form of a report, that the property is free of ghosts or poltergeist activity.

Kachimode’s president, Kazutoshi Kodama, told DW that the fear driving this business is cultural, not superstitious in a casual sense. ‘Death equates to impurity and misfortune,’ he said, explaining that many Japanese people won’t even set foot inside a stigmatized property. Kodama also works with a university professor who specializes in monitoring supernatural phenomena, and said the sensors have occasionally caught glitches — a camera stopping on its own, a microphone cutting out — though nearly all of it turns out to be a one-time, unreproducible event. A smaller set of properties show unexplained activity that persists, and those remain genuinely hard to rent or sell.

The money at stake is significant. Japanese law requires that a property’s stigmatized history be disclosed to any buyer or tenant, and there are websites dedicated purely to listing which homes carry the label. That transparency pushes rents down by around 30% in major cities and by as much as 50% in smaller towns; Kodama said one property he knows of stayed vacant for over 1,000 days despite repeated attempts to fill it.

This all sits inside a much larger housing problem. A government survey from late 2024 found Japan has nine million vacant homes — 13.8% of all residential properties — a figure driven by population decline, inheritance disputes and an ageing population, with the death-stigma factor adding further friction. Joey Stockerman, co-founder of a similar firm called Akiya Mart, recounted a case where an investor bought a stigmatized property in a Tokyo suburb for under $5,000, about 5% of its actual value, and it still took two years to rent out. Akiya Mart’s own solution leans spiritual rather than technical: a package in which a Shinto priest performs a cleansing ritual on the home before it’s remarketed.

Kodama, for his part, believes the ghost-investigation business only has room to grow as Japan’s vacant-home count climbs. ‘Properties where we do find mysterious phenomena are the ones that are typically shunned,’ he said. ‘They are difficult to let or sell. But there are still ways to manage even these properties… I think this sector has potential because there are people in need.’

[Wikimedia Commons/by Syuzo Tsushima]