In Japan, Timeshares Are Back, and Cooler Than Ever

New York Times

21-03-2025

In the foothills of Mount Asama, one of Japan's most active volcanoes, jagged lava formations dot the landscape — remnants of a 1783 eruption that swallowed villages and permanently scarred the land. A nearby park pocked with dark volcanic rock is called Onioshidashien, or Expelling Demons.
Nearby, a crop of angular polyhedrons appeared last year, joining the lava deposits in this forested region about 90 miles northwest of central Tokyo. But these new objects arrived with skylights and saunas.
The Mount Asama area, which one local tourism site calls 'one of the best spots in Japan to witness the threat of nature,' may seem an unlikely place for a showcase of modern design. But these geometric vacation homes mark the return of a trend that went out of fashion in Japan's post-1980s economic decline: timeshares.
Built on platforms, the 14 Moss prefabricated cabins, designed by the architect Kotaro Anzai for the timeshare startup Sanu, have floor-to-ceiling windows to bring in views of the surrounding forest of Japanese maple, elm, magnolia and Mizunara oak. At 516 square feet, each cabin can accommodate four guests. Amenities include pellet stoves, wine cellars and, in some cases, private saunas and electric-vehicle chargers. Apart from their unusual geometric design, the cabins' main attraction may be their furniture, which is made entirely from Japanese wood: cypress, cedar and larch for the structures, cedar for the deck and window frames, and chestnut for the beds.
A short drive away, Sanu's cluster of slightly larger, A-frame-style cabins also feature cedar and other Japanese woods. Inspired by honeycombs, the Bee bungalows have sleeping nooks with two semidouble beds framed by semicircular, slatted interior walls. There's plenty of light from large windows under the 13-foot ceilings, and some decks have wooden barrel saunas for warming up during the long winters.
With their quirky shapes, lavish appointments and alluring settings, this new generation of timeshares is attracting remote workers, co-owners and investors ranging from middle-class families to global celebrities. They offer a fractional ownership system that is new to Japan — part of the redrawing of a tourism and leisure industry that has been shaken up by the rise of hybrid work and a surge of inbound visitors over the past few years.
'Owning a cottage can be very expensive in Japan, but we can overcome that through sharing,' said Gen Fukushima, 38, the chief executive of Sanu, which began operations in 2021 with the Bee cabins. 'We want to give people the chance to live and work remotely in a natural environment.'
Sanu offers two basic services: Subscribers can pay a monthly fee of 55,000 yen (about $370) for up to seven nights at more than 30 sites across Japan. They can also buy shares of the properties for 12 nights a year starting at around 4 million yen ($27,000), including the right to sell unused nights back to the company.
'There's a growing trend to enjoy the stay itself, like staying put in a specific area and experiencing local life, or incorporating remote work in an environment surrounded by nature,' said Arata Kawamoto, 41, an engineer working in Tokyo who became a Sanu co-owner. 'This year I plan to invite my family and friends to enjoy fishing and stargazing.'
Timeshares were a more popular concept in Japan's high-growth heyday and, more recently, before the yen lost about a third of its peak value. The country's timeshare market developed in the 1990s and early 2000s, centered on high-rise beachfront properties in Hawaii run by major hotel chains, as well as some domestic 'resort clubs' that offered a similar experience (but usually without a kitchen). The yen's recent drop has hit hard for the roughly 100,000 Japanese who own timeshares in Hawaii, with many struggling to sell their units because of increasingly expensive fees in dollars.
Despite all this, Yasushi Asami, an urban engineering professor at the University of Tokyo, said Japanese consumers are once again warming to properties that offer flexibility as the app-based sharing economy gains traction in Japan. 'In terms of the real estate market, it used to be popular to purchase resort condominiums or villas, but recently, there are risks to owning them,' Mr. Asami said. 'So I think timeshare and accommodation types are becoming more popular.'
Membership resort hotels, led by brands such as Tokyo's Prince Hotels, are expanding their offerings. The Orlando-based Hilton Grand Vacations, which operates nearly 200 timeshare resorts around the world, is opening a complex with 63 one-bedroom units in Kyoto, its third in Japan.
At the other end of the spectrum are smaller-scale properties with heritage or high style. Some entrepreneurs are making use of Japan's millions of abandoned houses, or akiya, by turning them into shared accommodation. Kessaku, a startup founded in 2024, wants to protect heritage houses at risk of ruin or demolition by preserving them as timeshares. Starting from $15, investors can acquire fractional ownership and use of these homes; with enough shares, they can earn free nights or rent out the property to others.
Kessaku currently has two properties: a 100-year-old merchant's residence in Yakage, Okayama Prefecture, with traditional tatami mats, shoji screens and fusuma sliding doors; and a 19th-century mae-nagare-style farmhouse in Nanto, Toyama Prefecture.
'I'm very interested in architecture and heritage preservation, and love the style and craftsmanship of traditional Japanese houses, so it's sad to see the loss of so many them across the country,' said the investor Nettah Yoeli-Rimmer, 40, a lecturer in Spanish literature and culture at the University of Antwerp who plans to use his Kessaku shares to recoup his investment through rentals. 'The Yakage property appealed because of its location — relatively easy to access by train, but off the beaten path.'
Then there's the high end. Back in the Mount Asama region, a Tokyo-based startup called Not a Hotel has opened luxury accommodations such as Irori, a 2,684-square-foot structure that sleeps eight and evokes the clean lines of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its architect, Tessey Suma, centered the glass-walled house on its irori hearth, a dining space in traditional farmhouses. Wings lead off to bedrooms, a sauna overlooking a terrace and garden, and a bath fed by hot springs.
Irori is in a gated subdivision with nine other Not a Hotel properties, including Base L, a black A-frame-style structure designed by Yosuke Aizawa of White Mountaineering that can sleep eight, has 1,700 square feet, a hot spring bath, a sauna and a private garden. These homes are designed to fill a void: There aren't enough stylish properties in Japan with a legacy of high design to meet the needs of international visitors, said David Marx, a company spokesman.
Near a turntable in the Base lounge are vinyl records by artists like Bill Evans, Nina Simone and Takuya Kuroda, a jazz trumpeter. Two others who would fit right in are the singer Pharrell Williams and the record producer Nigo, both Louis Vuitton designers and now investors and advisers to Not a Hotel.
The company's designers include the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, which conceived a mountaintop lodge in the ski resort of Rusutsu, accessible only via ski lift or helicopter. And Nigo, who doubles as a designer, is building a cliff-side house overlooking Tokyo Bay that will feature hotel-style guest pods and, on the roof, a 14-foot stainless steel astronaut sculpture by the American artist Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS.
Buoyed by the cheap yen and surging inbound tourism, Not a Hotel says it has amassed contracts valued at 37.6 billion yen ($253 million) from nearly 750 co-owners since its establishment in 2020. The company's founder and C.E.O., Shinji Hamauzu, said the fractional ownership model allows clients to buy only as much as they need — one twelfth of a property allows 30 nights.
'Many affluent people today are able to work from wherever, and they like to travel around rather than commit to a single place every year,' Mr. Hamauzu said. 'Every time we expand our properties, we give owners new places to go.'