Here's the everyday picture a weekend of hot springs won't give you: getting around, the weather, what housing looks like, and a few things worth checking before you buy. Most people meet Oita over a weekend in Beppu or Yufuin and leave charmed by the baths. Living in Oita is a different question, and a fair one to ask before you buy. This is the day-to-day view from someone who does it: how you get around, what the weather does, what the housing actually looks like, and the

The prefecture's regions, what the houses are like, how you get there, and how the akiya bank process works if you are buying from abroad. Nagasaki does not look like the prefectures most foreign buyers picture when they think about Japanese property. It is mostly coastline, peninsula, and island. If you are weighing a vacant house in Nagasaki, that geography drives the rest of it: what you pay, how you reach the place, and what living there is like day to day. Here is what t

What Kyushu's smallest prefecture offers akiya buyers, from Fukuoka commuter towns to porcelain villages and hot spring resorts Saga occupies the narrow neck of northwest Kyushu, with the Genkai Sea to the north and the Ariake Sea to the south. Fukuoka sits to its northeast, Nagasaki to its southwest. It is the least populous prefecture in Kyushu, home to about 780,000 people, and one of the most agricultural: close to 39 percent of its land is farmland. That mix is the whole

Fukuoka city, Kitakyushu, and the farm towns south of them all run vacant-house programs under the same name. They are not the same thing. Here is what changes for akiya and affordable houses in Fukuoka as you move from the city down into the countryside. The last post mapped the region and the listing landscape. This one goes a level down, into how the programs actually work, because "Fukuoka akiya bank" does not describe one system. Each municipality runs its own, and a cit

Fukuoka is the largest market in Kyushu, which means two searches in one prefecture. In and around the city, akiya are scarce and priced up. In the rural belt, the affordable houses actually sit. This is the first prefecture post in the Kyushu series. It covers where akiya and affordable houses in Fukuoka are found, which city programs you can navigate without Japanese, which are Japanese-only, roughly where prices sit, and what conditions apply before you buy. Fukuoka prefec