It used to have the most expensive real estate in the world but prices in Tokyo have plummeted, with millions of houses unable to be sold.

Chinese middle classes, mainly from Beijing and Shanghai, are coming in for the cheap takings and buying up apartments in central Tokyo.

But on the outskirts of Tokyo, in Yokosuka, houses lie abandoned all over the place.

Some look as if they have been deserted for years and others as if the inhabitants suddenly upped and left.

The Japanese call them ghost homes.

In the 1970s and 1980s people came to Yokosuka to buy affordable real estate and escape the boom time prices of central Tokyo.

Now 14 per cent of homes lie empty and across Japan a staggering eight million are unoccupied.