Mr. Oshima has built one of Japan’s most popular real-estate websites by compiling an online map showing properties with histories of ghastly events. In Japan, that is valuable information: Landlords often give a discount to renters willing to take property that has a stigma.
Take a cramped three-story apartment building in northern Tokyo that has had more than its share of unhappy news, including a drunken brawl in 2006 that took the life of a construction worker who was hit with a beer bottle.
Mr. Oshima gives that building three fire icons, one for each unnatural death that took place on its premises. “The fire icon is partly inspired by the Michelin stars,” he said. “This one would be a three-star property.”
His website meticulously maps out such properties, making it both a landlord’s nightmare and the go-to online address for bargain hunters and superstitious Japanese who prefer to stay away from past troubles. While religion doesn’t play a major role in the everyday life of most Japanese, much of the nation’s folklore is rooted in the Shinto, Buddhist and even Christian traditions.
Fears about the dead are very much alive.
Japanese law obliges agents to inform prospective tenants of “important” matters involving the property and previous tenants, although it doesn’t spell out what these specifically include, said real-estate lawyer Nakao Seto. Court precedents suggest that concealing the sordid history of an apartment could expose landlords to liability. That is true in some U.S. jurisdictions as well.
In order to attract tenants, these properties are often offered up for rent or purchase at lower prices.
The government-affiliated Urban Renaissance Agency, which maintains around 750,000 housing units, offers 50% discounts on monthly rents for some properties where previous occupants were found dead. “They fill up pretty quickly once they’re listed,” said Kei Hayashida, a spokesman for UR.
Writer Fuminosuke Mori rented a stigmatized UR property when he was evicted from his old apartment and strapped for cash. In 2011, he moved into a one-room apartment in Yokohama that was available for just $240 a month, half the usual price. The previous occupant was a man in his 50s who killed himself in the apartment’s bathroom.
Mr. Mori said that while some friends began avoiding him after learning about his home’s history, he was living quite comfortably.
“My ex-wife thinks it’s creepy,” he said. He later chronicled his experience in a book titled “I’m Living in a Stigmatized Property!”
Mr. Oshima got into the haunted-house business from managing his family’s real-estate firm. He used to conduct background checks on properties he was interested in acquiring, compiling the information for internal use. While physical defects were easy to detect, gathering knowledge on past residents proved to be challenging.
“So I switched my approach, and focused on collecting day-to-day information for future reference,” said the 36-year-old. Police and newspaper reports, tip-offs from fellow agents and old-fashioned legwork were initially his main sources of information. He later started a website and threw it open to the public to contribute, Wikipedia-style.
What started as a side project has come to dominate Mr. Oshima’s time. While the website isn’t a moneymaker, he said advertising revenue covers operational costs and his staff’s salary. The site now has a total of 8,229 fire icons marked in the wider Tokyo area, and attracts several million page views a day.
Clicking on one of the fire icons, for example, shows a property in Tokyo’s Kabukicho night-life district, where the site says a person was stabbed to death on the ground floor in 2008. At a hotel near the main railway station in Kyoto, a man committed suicide by hydrogen-sulfide poisoning, the site says. In Naha, the capital of Japan’s southern Okinawa prefecture, two people were killed in a fire triggered by a gas explosion, it says.
Some in the realty business are concerned about the accuracy of sites like Mr. Oshima’s.
“If the information is correct, fine. But if it’s not true, it could be devastating to property values,” said Kiyoshi Hoshiai, a Tokyo landlord. Anonymous online users have also criticized what they consider the site’s bad taste.
Mr. Oshima is unfazed. He said information is mainly contributed by sources he considers trustworthy, and that his staff monitors what comes in, deleting any entries that seem dodgy. Viewers have also become quick to point out mistakes.
“My aim is to disclose any information that may prove useful for prospective tenants, regardless of whether property owners like it or not,” said Mr. Oshima.
His goal is to eventually map the whole world. While visits and contributions from users of his site’s English version are still sparse and concentrated in big cities like Los Angeles and London, he hopes the site will grow. New York currently has 72 fire icons. One, for example, marks a hotel overlooking Central Park where a body was found in a room on the 19th floor.
There is just one problem with his site. Mr. Oshima fears it may cast a pall over his own family’s real-estate holdings, even though he says they aren’t haunted.
“Seeing so many death scenes, I began to fear that my property may one day be stigmatized,” he said.
He is thinking of selling it and dedicating himself completely to the site.
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