This is the Yoshitaka Fukuhara Land & House Investigator Office in Okinawa City. When a family begins settling an estate, one problem tends to surface late: the building has no registration record at all.
How it comes to light
To settle an estate you first establish what the deceased owned. The usual starting points are the property tax statement sent by the municipality and the property ledger (nayosecho) available at the city office.
You then request a certificate of registered matters for each building at the Legal Affairs Bureau — and are told no registration record exists. Nothing is missing from your paperwork. The building was simply never registered.
This happens even when property tax has been paid faithfully for decades.
Why tax is charged on an unregistered building
Registration and property tax run on separate tracks.
Registration is handled by the Legal Affairs Bureau and only happens when the owner applies for it. Property tax is handled by the municipality, and buildings absent from the register are still taxable. The Local Tax Act requires each municipality to record, in a supplementary tax ledger for buildings, the owner, location and floor area of taxable buildings that do not appear in the register.
Municipalities therefore assess buildings by surveying what actually stands there. Paying tax is not evidence that a building is registered.
How to check
Look at the property tax statement. If the building has no building number, or is marked as unregistered, it probably has no registration record. The building number is assigned by the Legal Affairs Bureau at the moment of registration, so an unregistered building has none.
Requesting a certificate of registered matters will confirm it.
One month, not three years
Registration of inherited property became mandatory in Japan in April 2024. Article 76-2 of the Real Property Registration Act gives an heir three years from learning of the inheritance to apply.
The deadline that gets overlooked is much shorter. Article 47(1) requires anyone who acquires a building that has no registration of description to apply for that registration within one month of acquiring ownership. This is not limited to newly built houses: it applies equally to someone who inherits an unregistered building. What the rule covers is an ordinary building such as a detached house; a unit in a condominium block is treated separately. Article 36 sets the same one-month rule for unregistered land.
Under Article 164(1), failing to apply without justifiable grounds carries an administrative fine of up to 100,000 yen — the same ceiling as the inheritance registration duty.
When does that one month start for an heir? Under Civil Code Article 896 an heir succeeds to the deceased’s rights from the moment the inheritance opens, and under Article 909 a later division of the estate relates back to that same moment. The clock therefore starts, in principle, on the date of death.
By the time a family discovers that a building was never registered, the month has almost always passed. A missed deadline is not a reason to leave it alone — what matters is starting once you know.
Where the estate has not yet been divided, the relationship between all the heirs has to be settled first, and a disclaimer of inheritance or a will changes both who applies and which documents are needed.
Who handles what
In principle an application is made by the owner. Registration of description, however, requires site measurement and the drawings that go with it, so it is usually entrusted to a qualified professional.
Registration of description records where a building stands, how it is built and how large it is. It requires site measurement and drawings, so a land & house investigator handles it. For an unregistered building, this comes first.
Registration of rights comes afterwards: the ownership preservation registration and anything that follows, which put the owner in a position to assert the right against third parties. A judicial scrivener handles that.
Each registration is handled by the professional licensed for it, under their own responsibility. Our office shares a single point of contact with a judicial scrivener office, so when the rights side becomes necessary, the judicial scrivener explains and quotes for it directly, in the same place. You do not need to find a second firm partway through.
What the work involves
An application requires a building plan, floor plans for each level, and information proving that the applicant holds ownership (Real Property Registration Order, Appended Table item 12).
The statute itself says only “information proving ownership”. What counts is set out in a directive of the Director-General of the Civil Affairs Bureau: Article 87(1) of the Rules on Handling Real Property Registration Affairs lists the confirmation and inspection certificates under Articles 6 and 7 of the Building Standards Act, a certificate from the builder or from the owner of the land, documents relating to the purchase of a state-owned building, certification of property tax payment, and “any other information sufficient to prove the applicant’s acquisition of ownership”.
For a new building, the confirmation and inspection certificates and the contractor’s certificate of completion are standard. Older buildings often have none of these. That is where the rest of the list matters. Certification of property tax payment is the obvious candidate, though it rarely suffices on its own: the person who paid the tax is not always the owner, so it is weighed together with family register records, the deed of estate division, and whatever survives from the time of construction.
For an inherited building the proof comes in two layers: first, that the deceased acquired the building — usually by building it; second, that you succeeded to it by inheritance. With both in place the registration can be applied for in the heir’s own name, without first registering the deceased.
Which combination suffices depends on the age of the building and what documents remain. Each Legal Affairs Bureau also maintains its own field-investigation guidelines on the point, and the decision ultimately rests with the bureau. Please come to us before you have assembled everything. Cases that look hopeless often turn on a document the family did not think mattered.
The site survey itself is the same work as registering a newly built house: we measure the shape and floor area of each level.
When it becomes urgent
An unregistered building causes no trouble while the family simply lives in it. It becomes a problem the moment the property moves.
A sale requires registration before ownership can pass to the buyer. A mortgage requires it before a lien can be recorded. Demolition and rebuilding subsidies often require proof of ownership, and once a building has been demolished, registering it retroactively is considerably harder.
These situations arrive with a deadline attached, and measurement plus document gathering cannot be compressed into a few weeks.
Unregistered buildings are not unusual. The government treats them as part of the wider problem of property whose owner cannot be identified, and is working on both establishing the scale of it and deciding what to do.
Talk to us first
If you are wondering whether a family building is registered, bring the property tax statement and contact us through the enquiry form or by phone. We can start by checking whether a registration record exists. Consultation and estimates for the registration of description are free, and we can correspond in English.
Statutory basis: Real Property Registration Act Articles 36, 47(1), 76-2 and 164(1); Real Property Registration Order, Appended Table item 12; Local Tax Act Article 381(4) and (7); Civil Code Articles 896 and 909 — as in force at the end of July 2026. The texts are available at e-Gov. The examples of information proving ownership come from Article 87(1) of the Rules on Handling Real Property Registration Affairs (Civil Affairs Bureau directive No. 456 of 25 February 2005).