[MMM]

Sgt. Beavis...

One thing you need to know is that the resale value of homes in Japan is more like the resale value of cars than it is like homes in US.

In the US 5/6 home purchases are for used home.

In Japan it is about the opposite. 5/6 home purchases are for new homes.

So if everyone is moving into new homes, what happens to the old ones? They are destroyed.

500,000 for an 1800 sq ft. house is pretty overpriced for Hadano, but you said it was built in the 1980s, so that makes sense. Everything was overpriced back then, until the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s. Hadano used to be a big tobacco town, but that dried up (along with property values) in the mid-80s as well.

I'll be very frank and say I have a feeling your in-laws are using Koreans as a convenient scapegoat for what-ended-up as a not-that-great property investment.