Why Are Westerners So Drawn to Japan's Akiya and Kominka?

The West Closed Its Cities with Stone Walls.
Japan Opened Its Towns with Wood and Paper.

Introduction — It's Not Just About the Price

In recent years, a growing number of Westerners have been purchasing akiya (vacant houses) and kominka (traditional Japanese old houses) across Japan.

"You can buy a house in rural Japan for just a few tens of thousands of dollars" — this headline has been picked up by media around the world, sparking an unprecedented wave of foreign interest in Japanese real estate. Yet when these buyers actually visit Japan, walk through an old townscape, and step inside a kominka that has stood for over a century, what strikes them most is rarely the price.

"Why does simply being in this space bring me such a deep sense of peace?"

To understand the source of this feeling, we need to look far beyond aesthetics or novelty. We need to trace the fundamentally different paths that Western and Japanese cities took through history — paths shaped by two very different relationships with death itself: the Conflict-Death Worldview and the Disaster-Death Worldview.

Western Cities — The Closed World of the Walled City

If you have ever visited an old European city, you have likely seen the remnants of massive city walls. Paris, Vienna, Prague, Xi'an — these cities all share one defining feature: the entire town was once enclosed within walls.

The history of continental Europe and China is a history of invasion across land borders, of conquest by foreign armies, and of the destruction and massacre that followed. When a city fell to an enemy, its inhabitants faced slaughter and its buildings were razed to the ground. In a world where the risk of death by conflict was ever-present, survival demanded that entire cities be enclosed behind walls, with gates that could be sealed shut against the enemy.

This urban form is known as the fortified city or walled city (城郭都市 / jōkaku toshi in Japanese).

The underlying philosophy of the walled city is stark in its simplicity: inside the walls lies safety, civilization, and order; outside lies danger, barbarism, and chaos. This binary division between "inside" and "outside" is deeply embedded in the Western urban consciousness. Although the physical walls have long since disappeared from modern Western cities, their memory lives on in gated communities, suburban enclaves, and the persistent urban design instinct to separate and contain.

Japanese Cities — The Open World of the Castle Town

Japan's traditional cities — known as jōkamachi (castle towns) — occupy an extraordinarily unique position in the global history of urban design.

As an island nation surrounded by sea on all sides, Japan faced a far lower risk of large-scale foreign invasion. The greatest threat to Japanese lives was not human enemies crossing borders, but the relentless forces of nature: earthquakes, typhoons, great fires, and tsunamis. In other words, the form of death that Japanese people confronted for centuries was not death by conflict, but death by natural disaster.

This difference produced a fundamentally different kind of city.

In a Japanese castle town, the castle itself and the surrounding samurai residences (buke yashiki) were protected by moats (hori) and stone ramparts (ishigaki). But the districts where ordinary people lived and worked — the merchant and commoner quarters known as chōninchi — were never enclosed by walls. The town was completely open to the outside world.

Why?

The reason is deeply rational. In Japan, stone walls crumble in earthquakes, get swept away by typhoons, and are useless against the great fires that periodically consumed entire neighborhoods. When the enemy is nature itself, walls cannot protect you. And so the Japanese developed a different philosophy: "When it breaks, we simply rebuild."

This thinking is closely connected to mujōkan — the Buddhist sense of impermanence. Everything changes. Everything passes. Rather than building to resist destruction, the Japanese built with the understanding that destruction is inevitable, and that beauty lies in the capacity to be reborn after each collapse. This philosophy is woven into the very fabric of Japanese wooden architecture.

250 Years of Peace That Created a "City of Healing"

What made Japan's castle towns truly unique in world history was the Edo Period (1603–1868).

For roughly 250 years — an era sometimes called the Pax Tokugawa — Japan experienced virtually no major wars. During this extraordinary stretch of peace, castle towns shed their military function and evolved into purely commercial, cultural, and residential cities. Along the castle moats, beautiful wooden townhouses (machiya) lined the streets. Artisan workshops and merchant storehouses (kura) stood side by side. Temple gardens wove pockets of tranquil greenery into the urban fabric.

While European walled cities struggled against the pressures of modernization within their confining walls — forced to either demolish the walls or accept overcrowding — Japan's castle towns, unbounded by walls, grew organically over the centuries, blending seamlessly with the surrounding natural landscape.

Today, this history survives as living layers in castle towns across Japan. The castle remains at the center. Former samurai estates have become government buildings and public parks. Old merchant quarters live on as shopping streets and neighborhoods dotted with kominka. Without walls to interrupt the flow, history and modernity merge in a gentle gradient — a kind of urban tapestry that is extraordinarily rare anywhere else in the world.

Wood and Paper — A Luxury That Stone Cultures Never Knew

The moment a Westerner steps inside a kominka, what often strikes them with the greatest force is the relationship between the space and the natural world.

Traditional Western architecture is built from stone and brick. Its fundamental purpose is to shut out the threats of the outside world — cold, wind, enemies. Walls are thick. Windows are small. Inside and outside are firmly separated.

Japanese kominka, by contrast, are built from wood and paper — specifically, shōji (translucent paper sliding screens) and fusuma (opaque paper sliding partitions). Their fundamental purpose is not to shut out nature, but to invite it in.

This architecture, where the boundary between inside and outside dissolves, represents the polar opposite of the Western stone tradition that draws hard lines between interior and exterior. For people raised in a culture of stone, a Japanese kominka is not simply an "old house." It is a living encounter with the road not taken — an alternative architectural possibility that their own civilization chose not to pursue. That is why the experience feels not just novel, but profoundly moving.

And viewed through a modern lens, this architecture — built from natural materials, designed in harmony with the environment, engineered for natural ventilation — stands as a pioneering example of sustainable building, centuries before the word was coined.

People Who Lived Behind Stone Walls Have Found Healing in Open Wooden Spaces

Let us bring the threads together.

Western cities were born from the fear of death by conflict. And so they closed themselves behind stone walls, drew hard boundaries between inside and outside, and prioritized fortification and defense above all else.

Japanese castle towns were born from a philosophy of accepting death by disaster. And so they stayed open, refused to wall themselves off from nature, and chose wood and paper — materials that could break and be reborn — over the permanence of stone.

When these two civilizations meet, what Westerners feel in a Japanese kominka or castle town is not mere "exotic charm." It is something far deeper. It is a reunion with something their own civilization spent centuries leaving behind — a way of living that dissolves the boundary with nature, that does not fear impermanence, that embraces change, and that finds beauty not in resistance but in renewal.

En Beau lo Co., Ltd. is a real estate concierge and property management company based in Osaka, Japan, offering pre-purchase consulting and ongoing support for international clients interested in Japanese real estate.

Glossary of Japanese Terms