Chapter 9 — Buying from overseas

Document requirements vary by consulate and by judicial scrivener. Everything here should be confirmed for the specific transaction.

It is a solved problem

You can buy a house in Japan without setting foot in the country. People do it regularly. It is slower than being present, it involves paperwork that will feel excessive, and none of it is difficult.

What follows is the mechanism.

The thing you do not have

A Japanese purchase assumes something about a buyer that a non-resident does not have.

A registered seal (実印) and seal certificate (印鑑証明書). Japanese property transactions are executed with a registered personal seal, and its authenticity is proved by a certificate issued by your municipality. If you have never lived in Japan, you have neither.

There is an established substitute, and getting it is the single most important thing you will do in a remote purchase.

The affidavit (宣誓供述書)

In place of the seal certificate, you provide a notarised affidavit — a sworn statement confirming who you are and where you live, witnessed and certified by a notary.

This is not optional, and it must exist by settlement day. Without it, title cannot be registered in your name.

Where to have it notarised

Our advice is to use a notary in your own country. It is the shortest path, it is a routine service, and you can usually be seen within days.

Some countries maintain an embassy or consulate in Japan that offers notarisation, and it is technically possible to have the document notarised there instead. We would not rely on it. Waiting times can be long, appointments can be hard to obtain, and we have seen settlement dates put at risk by a consular booking that could not be brought forward.

Use a local notary. Reserve the consulate as a fallback.

Getting it right

Ask your agent for the draft immediately. The judicial scrivener prepares it in a particular format, and you cannot write your own. Once you have the draft, you fill in your details exactly as the format requires, and take it to the notary.

The reason for asking early is that the document has to be drafted in Japan, sent to you, notarised, and sent back. Every one of those steps takes days. Starting the week before settlement does not work.

Identity

You will be asked for a copy of your passport with your signature on it. That is all. You do not need a separate signature certificate from a consulate, and you should not spend time trying to obtain one.

Power of attorney (委任状)

Rather than certifying every document from abroad, most remote purchases use a power of attorney appointing someone in Japan to act on your behalf. Your representative can then sign the contract, attend settlement, receive the keys, and instruct the judicial scrivener.

The judicial scrivener drafts it, and will tell you what they need and when. Your agent selects the scrivener.

You do not need to become an expert in this. It is enough to know that the document exists, that it will be put in front of you, and that its scope will be written narrowly — this transaction, this property, these acts.

The sequence

This is where the order matters, and where the process is often described wrongly.

Offer accepted. Your representative submits the purchase application on your instructions.

Important Matters Explanation. Delivered by approved video call. You still need to be able to understand it.

Contract signed. By your representative under the power of attorney, or electronically where both sides are comfortable with it. Deposit transferred.

Then the documents. The scrivener drafts the affidavit and the power of attorney. They travel to you, you attend a notary, they travel back.

Funds transferred. Chapter 10. Start this early.

Settlement. Your representative attends. Title transfers. Keys are held for you or forwarded.

The affidavit is needed by settlement, not by contract. It is normally obtained during the gap between the two, or in parallel with the later stages of negotiation. You do not need it in hand before you can offer or sign, and waiting until you have one before making an offer will cost you properties.

Each document round trip is roughly two weeks. Most remote purchases involve one or two. This is the whole reason the timeline in Chapter 8 stretches from three weeks to three months.

Do you need a Japanese bank account?

Not to buy. Settlement funds are transferred internationally to the seller's account. That part is straightforward.

Afterwards is the real question, and the honest answer is that you probably will not have one.

Japanese banks require residency. Without a visa, opening an account is effectively impossible, and property ownership does not change that. Assume you will own a house in a country where you cannot hold money, because for most readers of this book that is exactly the position.

Two routes exist, and most owners use both.

Set up card payment wherever it is accepted. Electricity, gas, internet and in many municipalities property tax can be paid by card, and once a direct payment instruction is in place the bill settles itself. Apply for this first, for everything that will take it.

For the rest, appoint a management company. Some suppliers — water boards in particular — still will not accept a card issued outside Japan, and the notice arrives on paper at an empty house. A management company receives it, pays it, and invoices you. This is ordinary practice and it is what most non-resident owners do.

Chapter 11 covers the arrangement in more detail.

Buying without viewing

Some buyers complete without ever seeing the property. Whether this is reasonable depends entirely on what you are buying and what you have in place instead.

What reduces the risk. Video walkthroughs, unedited, including the parts nobody photographs — under the floor, the roof space, the boundary, the neighbours' walls. A building inspection by an independent surveyor. Photographs of every defect rather than every feature. Your representative physically standing in the building and telling you what it smells like.

What does not reduce the risk. Listing photographs. An agent's assurance that it is in good condition.

And you should know that the seller may refuse. Not every seller will sell to a buyer who has not seen the house. Some are uneasy about a purchaser they have never met; more often, they are worried that someone buying unseen will complain afterwards about a condition they could have observed. Given that most older properties are sold with the seller's liability contracted out entirely — Chapter 6 — you can see why they would rather the buyer had looked.

This is not obstruction. It is a seller protecting themselves from a dispute, and it is more common than you would expect.

We would say this plainly: buying unseen is defensible for a straightforward property with an inspection and honest video, and it is not defensible for an old house you intend to renovate. The gap between what a fifty-year-old Japanese house looks like on video and what it is like to stand in is large.

Note also that the oral Important Matters Explanation must still happen. Remote delivery is permitted; skipping it is not.

After completion

Title registration proceeds automatically. Your foreign address is recorded. If you later move, there is a procedure to update it, and neglecting this creates problems on resale.

Tax representative (納税管理人). For property tax, a non-resident owner is required under the Local Tax Act to appoint someone in Japan and file the appointment with the municipality. This is not a convenience — the notice is filed with the local tax office, and the municipality will expect a contactable person in Japan.

Note that the position differs by tax. For income tax the appointment is optional. For local taxes — property tax among them — it is not.

Somebody must have the keys. An empty house needs ventilating, mail collected, and a response when a neighbour calls about a leak. Chapter 11.

Next: Chapter 10 — Money. Moving it across borders, and whether you can borrow.