Kyoto, Osaka, Nara or Tokyo

In short

• The 2026 official land-price benchmark puts Tokyo's 23 wards near 856,000 yen per square metre of residential land, Osaka City near 301,000, Kyoto City near 248,000, and publishes no city average for Nara at all.

• Those are benchmark values for bare land, published yearly as a trading reference, not transaction averages.

• The national taxes on buying and holding are identical in all four cities; what differs is local practice and, above all, lodging rules.

• Lodging rules are not city-level facts in Tokyo: they change ward by ward, and one central ward confines home-sharing to weekends across its whole territory.

• Osaka took the last new applications for its special-zone lodging scheme on 29 May 2026; Kyoto's seasonal limits are the strictest of the four; Nara has its own quieter ordinance.

• The honest way to choose is not a ranking. It is running the same checklist this series built, against the one city your actual plan needs.

Which city to buy in is the question we are asked most and the one this series answers last, because every article before it is the answer's raw material.

What a city costs, what it lets a building do, and what its politics are doing to those rules: those three are checkable. Everything else is taste, and taste is yours.

What the official price map says

Japan publishes one price map worth trusting: the annual official land-price benchmark, set for thousands of standard points as of 1 January and published in March. Two properties of it matter before any number does. It values bare land, imagining away the building, and it is a legal reference for trading, not an average of what deals closed at.

On the 2026 map, residential land in Tokyo's 23 wards averages about 856,000 yen per square metre, up 9.0 per cent in a year. Every one of the 23 wards has risen for a fifth consecutive year. Osaka City averages about 301,000, up 6.5. Kyoto City averages about 248,000, up 3.6, with the five central wards near 327,000 and the outer six near 195,000. For Nara City the authorities publish a rate of change but no city-wide average price: up 1.3 per cent. Pair it with residential land across Nara Prefecture, down for an eighteenth straight year. The city climbs while its prefecture sinks, which is a sentence about where demand in Nara actually sits.

Read as a gradient rather than as prices, the map puts Tokyo's residential benchmark at roughly three and a half times Kyoto's and nearly three times Osaka's. All four trend arrows point up, at very different angles.

What the map cannot say is what your street costs. For that, this series has already given you the tools: the assessed-value documents and ward-level rent statistics from earlier articles, all of them keyed to an address rather than a city.

Same taxes, different lodging politics

Every tax this series has covered, stamp duty, registration tax, acquisition tax, the annual pair, runs on national law and does not care which of the four cities you choose. Two local differences are worth naming: city planning tax is levied by some municipalities and not others, and Tokyo's wards enjoy a metropolitan relief that halves it on small residential land, renewed yearly.

Lodging is where the cities genuinely diverge, and the divergence is structural.

Tokyo has no city-wide rule at all. Each ward writes its own, and they range from mild to severe. One central ward confines notified home-sharing to weekends, Saturday noon to Monday noon, across its entire territory. Another bans weekday operation only within its residential-only zones. A Tokyo lodging plan is a ward-level question, and two addresses a street apart can live under different regimes.

Osaka ran its special-zone lodging scheme, the one route with no day cap outside a hotel licence, and took its final new applications on 29 May 2026. Existing certifications continue, and the ordinary notification and licence routes remain open, with the licence-side rules themselves under revision. Kyoto never had the special-zone scheme and holds the strictest position of the four: the roughly sixty-day winter window in residential-only zones from the feasibility article, plus a resident-host exemption. The city has called a late-August meeting on further tightening; as this series went to press it had not met, and nothing new was in force. Nara City, quietly, has its own ordinance too: seasonal restrictions in its residential and historic zones, and a year-round weekday one near schools. Its exemptions run broad; a host living in, or managing from close by, escapes most of it.

None of this touches a buyer who wants a home, a rental, or a monthly-let. It decides the fate of lodging plans, and it is the fastest-moving law in this series, which is why the checklist below sends you to the ordinance, not to this paragraph.

What the gradient buys, structurally

Strip the taste out and each city's position is a structure, not a verdict.

Tokyo is the deep market: the highest benchmark, rules that vary by ward, and the price of entry to match. Osaka sits at roughly a third of Tokyo's benchmark with the legacy of the special-zone era in its lodging stock and a licence regime in revision. Kyoto is where this series' machiya articles live: the tightest lodging rules of the four, and a benchmark under a third of Tokyo's. Nara is the outlier: a city rising while its prefecture falls, machiya streets of its own, no official average on the price map, and a lodging ordinance gentler than Kyoto's.

moogo is based in Kyoto and buys and sells nationwide, all four cities included. What is currently for sale is on moogo's homes for sale.

What the structure cannot do is rank the cities for you, because the ranking flips with the plan. A family home ignores every lodging paragraph above. A lodging plan makes them decisive. A monthly-rental plan from the rent-first article can test two of these cities for the price of one season each.

Choosing without a crystal ball

The method this series recommends is the one it has already taught, run city-specifically.

Pull the zone for the specific address, because use rights are zonal, not municipal. Ask for the tax statement, because assessed values, not benchmarks, set your bills. If lodging is any part of the plan, read the ordinance of that municipality, and in Tokyo of that ward, as of that month. And weight the politics: of the four, Kyoto's lodging rules are the most actively contested, which cuts against lodging certainty and says nothing at all against a home.

Then let the plan pick the city, and the street pick the house. The series' checklists do not care which city they run in, which is the point of having built them.

Questions buyers ask

Which city is the best investment? This series does not rank cities, and the official map is a benchmark, not a forecast. What is checkable is structure: price gradients, rule regimes and their direction of travel, all cited above with sources and dates.

Are the buying costs different between the four? The national taxes are identical. City planning tax applies in all four cities but not in every municipality around them, and Tokyo's wards halve it on small residential land under a yearly metropolitan measure. The arithmetic from the costs article transfers unchanged.

Is Osaka lodging finished? No. The special-zone route took its final new applications on 29 May 2026. Existing certifications run on, and the ordinary notification and hotel-licence routes remain open, with the licence rules under revision. What ended is the one route that had no day cap short of a hotel licence.

Why does Nara get so little attention? Its prefecture's long decline hides its city's rise, and no official city-average price exists to headline. The change rates tell the story the average cannot.

Can moogo help outside Kyoto? Buying and selling, yes, nationwide, from Kyoto. Short stays, monthly rentals and management stay Kyoto and, for stays, Nara, which is the operational half this series keeps separate from the buying half.

Four cities, one method: benchmark for the gradient, documents for the address, ordinance for the plan. Run it against the city your life or your plan actually points at, and the question answers itself in your terms rather than in a ranking's. To run it with us, tell moogo what you are weighing.

Written against published law and official sources as of 25 August 2026; rules change. 081株式会社 is a licensed real estate broker, not a tax or legal practice. This is general information, not advice on your situation, and case-specific decisions rest with the competent authority and your own professional.