The neighbour says snow is falling on them, or a tile flew over. The vacant-house owner's liability, and what to do that day

Damage to the neighbours brings collapse to mind, but what actually happens most in Toyama is three things well short of that.

The first is falling snow and the weight of snow. Snow piled on a roof comes down all at once on a warm day. When it does, it breaks eaves and gutters, and the neighbour's wall or carport. Nobody clears the snow from a vacant roof, so it is deeper and heavier than next door, and more of it comes down. And because the direction it falls is fixed by the roof's slope, a roof facing the neighbour drops it on the same spot every year. The weight itself is also a problem: after several winters without clearing, the eave timbers break and sag towards the neighbour. Year-round management is in A year-round calendar for managing a Toyama vacant house from afar, and how to read a house damaged by snow is in A collapsed roof or a house about to fall.

The second is roofing and gutters carried off by wind. Slipped tiles, lifting corrugated metal or sheeting on a lean-to roof, a gutter hanging loose, snow screens put up one autumn and left to rot. The winter monsoon winds and spring gales strip these off and send them flying — into the neighbour's window, a parked car, the road. Unlike falling snow this happens in any season and can hit a person, which is why we consider it the symptom to act on before falling snow. A photo of a single slipped tile is reason enough for emergency measures.

The third is a collapsing kura or barn, and dead garden trees. The kura and barn give way before the main house: their roofs are small and hold snow easily, nobody notices a leak, and the earthen walls soak up water and bulge. A kura that has started to lean often stands close to the boundary, so it falls onto the neighbour's wall or roof. Dead trees in a windbreak grove are the same; branches snapped by snow land on the neighbour's roof. How each type of kura fails is in What to do with a crumbling kura or barn, and garden trees are in Complaints about groves and garden trees.

What the three have in common is that the damage happens in winter and is noticed in spring. The neighbour's call comes in winter, right after the damage. Your reply and the emergency measures at that moment decide whether the same call comes next winter.

Fire works differently from falling snow or tiles. The basis is the Act on Liability for Fires (Act No. 40 of 1899), which has just one article: “Article 709 of the Civil Code does not apply to a fire, unless the person who caused it was grossly negligent.” In other words, the ordinary rule on compensation (Civil Code Article 709) does not apply to a fire started by accident, unless the person who started it was seriously careless. You can read the original text at e-Gov Japanese Law Search.

What it means is this. In Japan, where wooden houses stand close together, a fire spreads easily to the neighbours, and making the household where it started pay for the neighbours' losses too would ruin them. So for an accidental fire, there is no liability to compensate the neighbours unless there was gross negligence. If a fire from a vacant house spreads to the neighbour's house, as a rule the owner does not compensate the neighbour's loss. The reverse also holds: if a fire from the neighbour's house burns your family home, as a rule you cannot claim against the neighbour. This law is why fire insurance in Japan works as "each household insures its own house".

The exception is "gross negligence". Generally this means carelessly leaving a dangerous state in place when the slightest care would have prevented it. For a vacant house the issues are things like: leaving it unlocked so anyone could enter, leaving the power connected to ageing wiring, leaving dry grass, cardboard and other combustibles piled around it, or doing nothing after neighbours or the city pointed out the problem. Arson is a crime by a third party, and as a rule the owner is not liable for the arson itself. Commentaries do note, however, cases where leaving the house open to anyone for a long time was held to be gross negligence and liability was found. Individual cases are for a lawyer; here it is enough to remember two things, locks and combustibles.

There are fire-prevention rules too. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency's model Fire Prevention Ordinance has a clause on managing vacant houses: the owner or manager must do what's needed to prevent fire — for example, keeping people from entering freely and clearing away flammable items around the house. The Toyama City Fire Prevention Ordinance has a clause with the same purpose. Each municipality's ordinance is revised year to year, so check the current wording on its official website.

There are four things to do. Lock the front and back doors and board up broken windows. If the pipes have been drained, cancel the electricity contract, and the gas too. Clear dry grass, cardboard, old newspapers and wood scraps from around the house, and remove any kerosene or petrol. Tell the neighbourhood association the house is vacant and give them your contact details. All four can be arranged from outside the prefecture, and they matter not only for fire but for the insurance disclosure described later.

Compensating the neighbour and repairing your own house are separate matters as far as insurance goes. Once you have the policy document, check the following five points in order. Eligibility, premiums and the scope of cover differ by insurer and by contract. All we can give here is the order in which to check; the answers lie with your insurer.

• Is the policy still in your late parent's name? The contract generally passes to the heirs when the policyholder dies, but unless the name and contact details are changed, the renewal notice goes to the family home unseen and the policy lapses at expiry. Contact the insurer and ask for the change of name and for the contact address to be updated to your current one
• Have you told the insurer the house is unoccupied? Fire insurance treats occupied and unoccupied buildings differently, and an empty house may be underwritten as general property rather than as a dwelling. If an incident happens before you have declared it unoccupied, the claim may be refused. A vacant house costs more; the figure we use as a guide is ¥20,000–50,000 a year
• Is wind and snow damage covered, and is it excluded for a vacant house? Your own eaves and gutters broken by falling snow, or a roof stripped by wind, can sometimes be repaired under the fire policy's wind and snow damage cover. But some contracts exclude this cover, and cover for contents, once the house is vacant. Have the insurer go through the policy's list of cover with you
• Compensation to the neighbour comes from a personal liability rider, not the main fire policy. Paying the neighbour for a wall, a car or medical treatment is covered not by the fire policy itself but by a personal liability rider, or the liability cover of a mutual scheme. It sometimes comes attached to car insurance or a credit card. Whether an incident at a vacant house is covered depends on the contract, so state the facts plainly — snow from an unoccupied house broke the neighbour's wall — and ask
• If it has lapsed, ask whether you can take out a policy now. Whether an insurer will cover a vacant house differs from company to company, and some refuse. Ask two or more. If the answer is that you cannot get cover, or the premium is not worth it, that is a fact: the cost of keeping this house is high even in the insurer's eyes. The paths in that case are in a later section

One note on order. Contact the insurer before clearing up and before repairing. Without photos of the damage, both the insurance claim and the conversation with the neighbour lose their basis. Photograph, contact the insurer, then emergency measures. This is the same order we recommend in recovering from flood and heavy-rain damage.

If insurance covers both the compensation and the repair, keeping and repairing the house becomes realistic. If neither applies, repair costs and compensation are out of your own pocket, and the sum repeats every winter. The cost of keeping a vacant house is roughly ¥150,000–400,000 a year, but that figure does not include repairing broken eaves or compensating the neighbour.

The aim of emergency measures is not repair but removing whatever will fall next, or turning it so it cannot fall, before it does. As a builder with a construction permit we carry out the following work ourselves.

Here too is what cannot be done, and what we would ask you not to do. Getting through winter under a blue tarpaulin: a tarp cannot bear the weight of snow, it freezes and grows heavy, and the Hokuriku wind lifts it onto the neighbour's house or the power lines. It works for a summer leak, but not as a winter emergency measure. Climbing onto the roof yourself. Asking the neighbours to clear the roof snow: good manners is to ask them only to look and let you know, never to do the work. Felling and uprooting trees: we are not a landscaping firm and do not take on tree work. And there is one thing emergency measures do not solve. Next year, the same house will still be standing in the same place.

Just the order of magnitude of the costs. Work that only stops a leak starts at a few hundred thousand yen. Re-roofing (tiles, snow measures) has cost ¥2–4.5 million in our own projects. Hiring a contractor to clear roof snow is ¥30,000–80,000 a time. Demolishing to an empty lot costs ¥30,000–50,000 per tsubo for a wooden house in Toyama, from about ¥1.5–2 million for 40 tsubo (about 132 m²) of floor area, and commonly over ¥3 million once a kura and windbreak grove are included (demolition cost guide). Emergency measures come in below these figures, but repeated every year they catch up with the cost of proper work.

If you have decided to sell to us, you need not do emergency measures first. We buy the house as it stands and do the work after taking it over. Money spent on emergency measures cannot always be added to the price, so send photos first and we will tell you in advance where the line falls: not needed if you sell, needed if you keep.

Going to the city or the neighbourhood association is a legitimate step for a neighbour. If the owner is far away, not replying, and the snow keeps falling, there is nowhere else to turn. The one thing not to do is to reproach them for going to the city. The moment you blame them, a conversation about repair costs becomes one about liability.

Some cities also have a scheme that lets the residents' association act. Takaoka has the Takaoka community vacant-house hazard prevention support scheme, under which the residents' association of a district with a poorly kept vacant house can get support for measures to prevent danger. The thing to note is that this is not a scheme for the association to intervene on its own; it is based on authorisation from the owner or heirs. If the neighbourhood chairman contacts you to say they would like your consent to deal with the dangerous part using the city's scheme, that is an offer to reduce the danger at no cost or effort to you as owner, and there is little reason to refuse. The scheme's content and conditions change each fiscal year, so check Takaoka City's official page. For windbreak groves, the support available in Tonami and Nanto is on the windbreak grove page.

When the city acts directly, it follows the stages of the Act on Special Measures for Promoting Countermeasures against Vacant Houses (the Vacant Houses Act): request, advice and guidance, recommendation, order, enforced demolition. After a recommendation the lot loses the residential-land relief on its property tax from the next fiscal year; breaching an order carries a fine of up to ¥500,000; and if you still do nothing, the city demolishes in your place and bills you. How to tell the stage and the time left when a letter arrives is covered separately in A notice from the city about your vacant house.

This section has one point. The neighbour, the residents' association and the city are all mechanisms that act in the owner's place when the owner does not act; if the owner acts first, they are not needed. An owner who has replied, taken photos and arranged emergency measures can safely assume the city will almost never issue an order.

Emergency measures and insurance will get you through this winter. But the liability under Article 717 continues next year and the year after, for as long as you own the building. Hiring someone to look after it does not change who the owner is. There are three ways to end the liability for good, and only one of them moves the liability itself to someone else.

If you plan to move back, that's option 1; if you won't move back but don't want to let go, option 2; if you won't move back, option 3. Send us photos and the location, and we'll lay out all three on the same scale — the money involved, next to the responsibility that remains. If you sell, the inheritance registration must be completed by handover (compulsory since April 2024), and we can introduce a partner judicial scrivener. The ¥30 million special deduction for an inherited vacant house applies to transfers up to the end of December 2027, and it can apply to our direct purchase too if the conditions are met (the ¥30 million deduction).

One word on order. Reply to the neighbour and arrange emergency measures before deciding whether to sell. The snow until handover remains your responsibility. Send photos at the start of November and we can aim to hand over before serious snow reaches the plains.