Author breaks down economics of anime, tells us exactly what Sailor Moon’s house is worth

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How much are these classic anime families earning to afford their family households?

In today’s economy it’s getting tougher and tougher for young people to grab themselves a rung on the housing ladder, unless they make use of special discount offers or are willing to live in increasingly tiny, efficient constructions. Houses are just too expensive an investment for many young people, and not everyone has a rare collection of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to sell to fund one.

Light novel author SOW, who has written scenarios and light novels for properties including Square Enix’s Bravely Default, decided to investigate some of the familiar houses from childhood anime to see just how much they’d go for on today’s market, with some hilarious and eye-opening results.

▼ Let’s start with the longest-running anime of all time, Sazae-san.

“The value of the so-called “average house” changes with the times, like in the case of the Isono family. To afford a detached house capable of housing two families, located in the Setagaya ward in Tokyo…Even if you were factoring in the years since the property was built, you’d need about 150,000,000 yen (US$1,320,000) to purchase it in the modern market.”

While the anime for Sazae-san started in 1969, the manga it was based on started publication in the 1940s. No matter when their house was built it’s quite the purchase!

▼ Alright, how about the house favored by cat robot Doraemon?

“Moving on to the 70s, the “ordinary house” of that era was owned by the Nobi family. A two-storey single house in Nerima Ward, Tokyo, which is a more affordable 70 million yen (US$615,912). Still, that’s a monthly mortgage of 200,000 yen a month… Nobita’s dad must have a pretty good salary. Before someone interrupts to say “don’t they rent that house?”, rent for a house like this would probably be around 160,000 yen considering the base price of the house.”

▼ Usagi Tsukino of Sailor Moon is somewhat of an outlier.

“Of course no vintage anime lineup would be complete without Sailor Moon, so let’s look at the Tsukino household. They live in Azabu-Juban in Tokyo’s Minato ward, in a stylish modern detatched house! It even comes with a garden attached. You’d expect to pay 4.5 hundred million yen (US$3,965,805) for this beauty. How bourgeois!”

▼ Shin-chan lives in Saitama, which has some more affordable properties.

“By the way, since the Nohara household is in Kusakabe it probably costs 20 million yen (US$176,260) at most, judging by average house prices. Even so, Hiroshi Nohara has a car and a wife, and his wife can stay at home full-time to clean and look after his two children. Hiroshi was struggling to stay in the middle-class demographic when the show started, but now he’s practically become a member of the upper class!”

SOW wrote on numerous anime series, but in general noticed a disquieting trend about anime households in general in relation to modern society:

▼ The image is from cult hit The Tatami Galaxy, where the college-aged protagonist lives alone in an apartment

“The model for a normal household used to be very much like that of the Noharas, with a breadwinner father, a housewife mother and two children – but now less than five percent of households resemble that structure. Instead, the most common demographic is people living alone or in houses where unrelated people live together, so that has become the new “normal” for us.”

Seeing how we’re living in an age where not only is it common for people to spend truckloads of yen on weddings, but those weddings have as much chance as being to a fictional idol as to a hardworking housewife, it’s plain to see that society is moving at breakneck speed. Who knows what sort of family will be seen as normal in the future?

Source: Twitter/@SOW_Libra11 via Nijimen
Featured image: Twitter/@SOW_Libra11



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