There's actually lots of interesting things about the Japanese housing market: it's not a speculative investment (most houses lose value), much of the housing is designed to be disposable (lifespan 20-30 years), rents are quite affordable even in the biggest cities but commutes are long and size tends to be tiny by Western standards.
But I agree that prefabs aren't particularly interesting.
The long commute can be explained, IMO, in part by the transportation allowance, where employers are allowed to subsidize up to 1000USD/mo of commuting costs.
It makes “commute until you qualify” longer than it might otherwise be. And it doesn’t help that there has long been a tendency to overcentralize in Tokyo, which is very large and can take a while to commute around.
Pretty much here in Japan the houses ARE considered disposable -- at least if you go to buy a house or build a house you quickly realize that the big chunk of money is for the land and even though building your house will be expensive, it'll be worth nearly nothing when/if you go to sell it. (That's why I've hesitated to buy a house here...)
Keep in mind that one factor the rest of the world probably doesn’t have is earthquake codes. Japan has very stringent building regulations and they usually get updated after major events. The most recent revisions were in 1981 and 2000; a house is going to have poor resale value if it will kill you in the event of an earthquake.
Wood works well in earthquakes - when you design for it. Wood is flexible so shaking it won't damage anything structural and so repair is cosmetic. (the above is strongly an over simplification!) That is why Japan builds with wood a lot instead of brick/rock: after the earthquake you have a safe place to live while you repair it. Repairs might be so expensive that you rebuild, but at least you can a safe roof while building the new place. Not to mention if you were inside you don't die of building collapse.
> Wood works well in earthquakes - when you design for it.
I highly doubt that "designing for it" really beats inherently stronger building materials to specifically choose wood with its many, many other disadvantages over something else.
Actually it does. Wood is flexible in ways the most of your stronger materials are not. Iron works, but it is more expensive and doesn't really have any advantage until you are going tall (tall being about 6 floors, but consult an engineer for details)
There is a reason Japan traditionally used wood, it works well in general. The design for it parts of wood are not hard - I don't know Japanese history, but I'd guess they figured it out well B.C.
> Actually it does. Wood is flexible in ways the most of your stronger materials are not
You don't need to flex, and dissipate energy if you can simply withstand earthquake G forces through strength alone. And even if you do, steel is obviously better at energy dissipation.
Problem is things that don't flex also don't absorb the energy of earthquakes. Wood is more than strong enough and withstands earthquakes. Same for steel. Not true for brick, which is really a terrible building material, and almost always what people mean when they say we should build of something stronger than wood.
But these days there's a steel frame keeping the top storey from falling down into the lower storey, as will typically happen in an earthquake with older style homes.
But I agree that prefabs aren't particularly interesting.