what sort of trading is going on?, page-20

The article in the Australian has little to do with the commercial property market or BJT.

It comments on a small sector of the residential mortgage market - namely the mortgages extended by a state lender to some 'some hundreds of thousands of households'. I do not know the figure for outstanding mortgages but there are 53 million houses in Japan. So if the interest rate rises from 2% to 4% on those 'some hundreds of thousands of households' that is unpleasant for those concerned, but has little effect on the residential market let alone the commercial property market.

Up until 2007 default rates on residential mortgages had remained at between 0.1% and 0.2% for the previous ten years. Also there is not the crazy spiral of derivatives and swaps that magnified the collapse in the US.