Society Prefecture-level housing surface per capita

I found this interesting chart showing the increase in housing surface per person (in tatami) by prefecture by decade from 1950 to 2000 (source). In 50 years the surface per person available in Japanese houses and apartments more than tripled, although in part due to the lower number of children per family and families of three generations under one roof becoming less frequent over time.




The authors of the study mention that tatami size varies by prefecture. 1 tatami is around 1.55 square meter in the Tokyo area, 1.66 in Nagoya area, 1.82 in Kyoto area. In average 1 tatami equals 1.65 square metre.

Obviously lodgings in Tokyo, Chiba and Osaka are smaller due to higher real estate prices, but the smallest of all are found, unexpectedly, in Okinawa .

In Tokyo the average surface per person passed from about 3 tatami (5 sq.m.) in 1950 to 10 tatami (16.5 sq.m.) in 2000.

The largest housings are found in Toyama prefecture, where the size per person passed from 5 tatami (8.2 sq.m.) to 15 tatami (25 sq.m.) over the same period. It's still incredibly little by Western standards. Even in Toyama in 2000, the surface per person is 5 times less than what I had growing up in the 1980s and 90s in Belgium.