What a Japanese Home Inspection Actually Checks — and What It Misses

Every guide to buying property in Japan, including ours, tells you the same thing: get the house inspected before you commit. Very few explain what you actually receive for the money — and that gap is where overseas buyers get hurt.

A buyer who orders "an inspection" in Japan and assumes it works like a full structural survey at home can end up with a short report saying the visible parts of the house look normal, no idea what anything costs to fix, and no comeback against the seller when the bathroom floor gives way eighteen months later.

This guide sets out what the standard Japanese survey covers, what it deliberately leaves out, what to add, and how to arrange the whole thing from outside Japan.

At a glance

Question	Short answer
What is the standard inspection called?	建物状況調査 (also 既存住宅状況調査) — a building condition survey.
Who is allowed to carry it out?	A licensed architect (建築士) who has completed the national training for inspection technicians.
What does it look at?	The structural parts of the building and the parts that stop rain getting in.
Is anything opened up?	No. It is visual and measurement-based, without breaking into the structure.
Does it tell me what repairs cost?	No. Repair estimates come from a builder, separately.
How long does it take?	Usually two to three hours on site for a detached house, with the report about a week later.
What does it cost?	Commonly ¥50,000–¥100,000 for the standard survey on a detached house, plus options.
Can it be done while I am abroad?	Yes. You do not need to attend — but someone has to arrange access and read the report.

The two things people call an inspection in Japan

1. 建物状況調査 — the regulated survey

This is the one written into Japanese real estate law. Since 2018, an agent handling a second-hand home has had to ask the seller and the buyer whether they would like an inspector introduced, and to set out the results of any survey carried out in the previous year in the formal explanation of the property (重要事項説明) given before contract.

It has to be performed by an 既存住宅状況調査技術者: a licensed architect who has completed the training registered by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, working to a national method standard. That last point matters. It means the survey is consistent from one inspector to the next — and it also means the inspector will not simply go further than the standard because you asked nicely.

The scope is two things:

• The parts that hold the building up (構造耐力上主要な部分) — foundation, columns, beams, load-bearing walls, floor structure.
• The parts that keep rain out (雨水の浸入を防止する部分) — roof, external walls, openings.

The method is visual inspection and measurement, without destructive testing. The inspector looks, photographs, measures cracks and slopes, and records what can be seen from places a person can reach.

2. A fuller home inspection

Everything else is a commercial service on top: entering the crawl space under the floor, getting into the roof space, moisture readings, a termite investigation, a floor-level survey across the whole house, checking the boiler and the plumbing, and a written view on what the work is likely to cost.

None of that is unusual — it is simply not part of the regulated survey, and it is not included unless you ask for it by name and pay for it.

What the standard survey will not tell you

You might assume it covers	Reality
What the repairs will cost	Not included. The survey records condition; a builder prices the work.
How many years the house has left	Not included, and no honest inspector will give you a number.
Whether the building is legal	Not included. Unpermitted extensions and buildings that exceed the allowed floor area are a documents question, not a visual one.
Boiler, plumbing, wiring, air conditioning	Not in the structural scope. Ask for an equipment check separately.
Termites	Only so far as damage is visible. A proper termite investigation means going under the floor.
Asbestos	Not included. Suspected materials in older buildings need sampling and laboratory analysis.
The boundary and the land	Not included. Boundary markers and any dispute with a neighbour are a land survey and title matter.
Whether you should buy it	Not the inspector's job. They report condition; the decision is yours.

Why this matters more for an akiya than for a normal house

Two things come together in a way overseas buyers rarely see coming.

First, almost every akiya is sold as-is with the seller's liability excluded. Japanese law gives a buyer rights when what is delivered does not match the contract (契約不適合責任), but in a private sale those rights can be contracted away — and in practice they usually are, because the seller is an elderly owner or an heir who has never lived in the house and will not stand behind it. Where a professional dealer is the seller the law requires a minimum period of liability, but that is not the situation in most akiya sales.

So the moment you sign, the roof is yours, the rot is yours, and the termite colony is yours.

Second, you are usually buying without standing in the building. Photographs are taken to sell. They are taken in good light, from the corner of the room that still looks intact, and they do not smell of damp.

The inspection is the one step that puts an independent professional inside the house on your behalf before the money moves. Skipping it to save ¥80,000 on a ¥3,000,000 house is the worst trade in the entire process — see our guide to what renovating an akiya really costs for what turns up when nobody looked first.

The defects that actually decide a Japanese house

An inspector is looking for a short list of problems that change the number at the bottom of your budget.

• Water coming in. Stains on ceilings and at the top of walls, a roof that has slipped or split, gutters that stopped working years ago. A leak that has run for years has usually already rotted something structural.
• Termites. Japan has them nearly everywhere. They eat from the bottom up: sill plates, the base of columns, the frame under the bathroom. The damage is often invisible from inside the room and obvious from under the floor.
• Rot around wet rooms. Older Japanese bathrooms were built directly against the ground-floor structure. A long-running leak there is one of the most common reasons a house that "only needs cosmetic work" turns into a structural job.
• The house is out of level. Floors are measured for slope. A consistent lean across the building points at the foundation or at the ground beneath it, which is the one category of problem that is genuinely expensive to correct.
• Foundation condition. Many older houses sit on unreinforced concrete, or on stones. Cracks are read for pattern and width, not merely for presence.
• Earthquake standard. Not a defect as such, but the single biggest divider of value. More on the dates below.

1981 and 2000: the two dates that decide the price

Japan tightened its earthquake code twice in ways that still set the market:

• 1 June 1981 — the new earthquake standard (新耐震基準). Buildings whose permit was granted on or after this date were designed to a materially stronger standard. This is the line used by lenders, by insurers and by several tax reliefs.
• June 2000 — the wooden-house revision. For timber houses, the rules on foundation design, metal connectors and the balance of load-bearing walls were tightened again. A wooden house from 2000 onwards is a different proposition from one built in 1985.

Both dates refer to the building permit rather than the completion date, and the permit date is the one to check on the paperwork.

The insurance angle nobody mentions

Japan has a defect insurance product for second-hand sales: 既存住宅売買瑕疵保険. It covers repair costs if a defect later appears in the structure or in the parts that keep rain out, typically for one to five years depending on the product.

Two conditions matter to an akiya buyer:

1. The house has to pass an inspection to be insurable. Where the inspection finds problems, they have to be repaired and re-checked before cover can start.
2. As a rule the house has to meet the post-1981 earthquake standard. An older house qualifies only where it is shown to meet the standard, which usually means a seismic assessment and, often, retrofitting work.

So the inspection is not only how you avoid a bad purchase — it is also the gate to the only meaningful protection available after completion. For a house that clears it, that is worth having. For a cheap pre-1981 house, it is a realistic reason to expect no cover at all and to budget accordingly.

What it costs, and when to do it

As a guide to the current market, the regulated survey on a detached house commonly runs ¥50,000–¥100,000. Going under the floor and into the roof space is normally charged as an option, often in the region of ¥20,000–¥50,000 for the pair, and a distant property attracts the inspector's travel time. Condominium units are usually cheaper than houses, because the structure belongs to the building rather than to you.

Set against the purchase price, the renovation budget and the cost of being wrong, this is the least expensive part of the transaction.

On timing, there are two workable patterns in Japan:

• Before you make an offer. Cleanest, and the strongest position to negotiate from. It needs the seller's permission to enter, which an agent can usually arrange for a serious buyer.
• After the offer, before the contract. The common local practice. You make the application (申込み), the inspection happens in the window before signing, and you still have room to renegotiate or withdraw.

What does not work is inspecting after the contract is signed. At that point you own the problem.

One question worth asking the agent at the outset: has a building condition survey already been done? If the seller had one carried out within the past year, its results must be set out in the pre-contract explanation, and you may not need to repeat it.

Arranging it from overseas

You do not have to be in the country, but somebody has to do four things on the ground: agree access with the agent or the seller, be there when the inspector is, read a Japanese report, and turn it into a decision.

The way we run it for clients is:

1. You send us the listing and whatever building documents the agent holds.
2. We book an inspection technician near the property and agree a date for access with the agent.
3. The survey is carried out with the options you have chosen — under-floor and roof-space entry are the ones we recommend for anything older.
4. You get the report translated into plain English, with the findings ranked by what they mean for you: urgent, budget for it, live with it.
5. Where work is needed, we obtain builder quotes, so you are negotiating with a number rather than a worry.

Fees depend on the property and where it is, so we quote per case rather than publishing a flat price — send us the listing and we will come back with the cost and the earliest date.

If the report comes back bad

A bad report is not wasted money. It has three honest uses:

• Renegotiate. A documented defect with a builder's quote attached is the strongest argument for a price reduction that exists in a Japanese negotiation.
• Walk away. Nothing obliges you to proceed, and a house with a foundation problem is a house to leave to somebody else.
• Proceed with your eyes open. Plenty of buyers go ahead knowing the roof has three years left in it. That is a decision; discovering it afterwards is an accident.

How Japan YES helps

We are not a brokerage and we do not sell you the house. We coordinate the inspection, translate what comes back, obtain the repair quotes, and then look after the property side once you own it — acting as your tax representative (納税管理人) and your contact address in Japan, receiving and translating the post, and paying the bills on your behalf.

See our one-time services if you only need help with this step, or tell us what you are looking at and we will tell you what we would check first.