A large amount of garbage left behind & raw fish hung at the entrance… “Landlord” victim reveals the scene of “shudder-inducing harassment

A five-minute walk from the station, in a quiet residential area, was an odd sight. Pipes assembled around a house. Torn plastic sheets were tangled around the building, and trash littered the surrounding area. This is the site of a “malicious land grab” in Tokyo’s Nerima Ward.

Around last summer, men in black jerseys started coming and harassing me. I don’t understand why I am being harassed like this.

A., 75, a resident of the area, said, “I don’t understand why I am being harassed like this.

Currently, “harassment by land speculation” is rampant, especially in central Tokyo. The average price of a condominium in the Tokyo metropolitan area has reached a record high of 143.6 million yen, and in the 23 wards of Tokyo, the price has soared to over 200 million yen.

Some real estate agents are focusing on the purchase of “sokochi,” land with leasehold or surface rights attached to it. This is because large tracts of land can be purchased from landowners, the tenants are evicted, and the land can be resold as condominium land, generating a large profit. Because of this, there has been severe harassment, which is hard to imagine in the era of Reiwa, when compliance was strictly enforced,” said a reporter from the business department of a national newspaper.

The land in Nerima Ward mentioned at the beginning of this article was also the target of a land grab for the purpose of resale. In April 2007, a mid-sized Osaka real estate company N began purchasing a 900 m2 plot of land that included Ms. A’s house from the landowner, who evicted the residents of six of the eight houses on the property and demolished the buildings.

“They put pipes around the houses up to roof height and covered them with blue and white plastic sheeting to reduce sunlight. Men claiming to be employees of Company N parked several cars, including a black van with Naniwa license plates, in the vacant lot next door and kept an eye on us. When we went shopping, they followed us on bicycles, and my son was even followed to his workplace.

A. called 110 and said, “It’s a crime of assault.

When Ms. A tried to clean up the trash, the men said to her, “These are important things, don’t throw them away! Don’t throw it away! Don’t throw it away!

Violence!

On one occasion, the men suddenly started making a fuss when Mr. A was sweeping the front of his house and his broom happened to hit one of the men in the leg. The men called 110, saying they were guilty of assault. They called the police.

They took a picture of me being put in the police car for questioning, enlarged the picture, and put it on the fence they had erected on the street in front of our house. At that time, I contacted the authorities and had them remove it because it was a public road, but the picture is still posted on the vacant lot next door,” said Mr. A.

The harassment escalated.

During the hot summer months, they brought sofas, tables, and floodlights into the vacant lot behind our house and started barbecuing. They played music loudly and made a lot of noise all night long. The noise from the generator was also too loud to sleep. In the winter, they would decorate the pipes around the house with electric lights, saying, ‘We’re going to make Christmas decorations. They kept lighting up the house at night, making it hard to get a good night’s sleep.

Mr. A has lived in this location for nearly 60 years, and has a lease agreement with the previous landowner until 2036, but he has no intention of moving, even though N Corp. has offered him a specific eviction fee.

The harassment also occurred at a building in a prime location in Minato Ward, which N Corp. purchased last July. They evicted all the building’s tenants by hanging raw fish and meat at the building’s entrance. The building was resold to another real estate agent in March of this year.

When we asked N Corp. about this kind of land-grabbing, they simply replied, “We don’t have any specific answers for you.

Kazutoshi Taneda, a lawyer with the Lawyers Against Black Landlords and Landlords, points out, “Malicious land sharks are notorious for their land grabbing activities.

Malicious land sharks harass people at the very edge, where the police and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism, which has jurisdiction over the Building Lots and Buildings Transaction Business Law, cannot act. Since the police do not crack down, the residents are forced to leave. In order to prevent the same damage from happening again, it is necessary to revise the law and tighten regulations on land grabbing.

As land and condominium prices soar, the number of victims of malicious land grabbing continues to increase.

From the May 12 and 19, 2023 issue of FRIDAY