thank you for making this! @exculcator thank you for the explanation

Nice.

For those of you who might be wondering why the author has called houses from the 1950s to 1980s "old", in Japan, the tax laws are structured to encourage you to demolish single household residential buildings when they are between 25 and 30 years old and build new ones in their place (in a similar manner to how cars are encouraged to be retired between 5 and 6 years old); it's essentially a giant subsidy for the construction industry. My house here in Japan is 30 years old, when I bought it 5 years ago, I had to explain to the real estate agent that actually I was buying it *for the house* and not just the lot of land. The official valuation of the house (not including the land) was only 1/10th of what I actually paid for it.