The question here was “how do Japanese build wealth?” and someone suggested the stock market, so I replied that in the Japanese case, that might not actually be likely, because they had a big crash in the 80s which they have yet to recover from. No offense intended, but your comment doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion.
The point is that any asset class can crash, and it's very relevant.
People need to stop treating housing with the expectation that the value of a house should grow and grow and grow, because that's part of how we got to all this NIMBY bullshit.
They don't. Personal debt levels have been going up and savings diminishing in Japan, while wages have been stagnant for decades. Japanese middle class has been getting poorer and poorer consistently.
