How to land

I just realized I should maybe list what I needed in order to acquire the plots, just as reference.

Once I decided I wanted the plots, I filled in a simple application. Not that I needed to, because people were not exactly lining up for it. But I guess it is a standard thing, to inform the selling agent that I was interested and he should hold the land. In my case the seller and the agent were the same. Their real estate agent had acquired the land from some bank several years back, who in turn had got it from some public auction.

I needed to fill in the price I am willing to pay, how much down-payment I will pay, date of making contract (if the seller would agree with my price) and date for ownership registrations, money transfer etc to be completed. The price I offered was a bit less than 65% of the asking price.

My agent told me that it would probably not go through because the seller, being in the business, probably knew what price is realistic to set and I was offering way below that, which is ridiculous. Plus he personally knew the guy, and told me that he usually doesn't set prices that are negotiable.

I told him that asking is free, so let's just do it anyway and see what happens. He helped me with the dates as I didn't know how long things usually take.

In the application, there were also lots of fields related to loan and financing, which we could skip luckily as it didn't apply to this case.
After half a week, I got a call back from my agent that the seller had agreed to my price, and that we should sign the contract 1,5 weeks later. He would prepare the contract within this week, and I had a couple of things too that I wanted him to make sure and add to the contract, so we agreed to have a dry run that weekend, a week before contract signing, with only me and him.

During the practice run, he went through the contract in detail, reading everything down to the fine print and explaining it to me in layman Japanese. He also showed me that he had added my worry points about "cultural bury ground", "protected wood", "waste dump field" etc. He also had attached the official documents for any of these queries which he had found through the land registers.

For the real contract signing, I needed to being my hanko (for signing on various documents), my hanko registration paper (to prove that this in fact is my hanko), the down-payment, a document showing I had enough money in my bank to pay the whole thing, my residence information (for transfer of ownership later) and official stamp with 1000 yen value (in Japan all contracts, paperwork and receipt over a certain amount must be stamped with paper stamp to make them official. The value of stamp depends on type of contract/paper and the money it represents. In our case, land sale for a certain price equals a stamp of 1000 yen.) which I bought from the post office.

Apart from the price of land itself, other costs apply. The biggest is the handling fee to my agent (Which I think he really earned) equal to 3% of the price+60000+tax. The second biggest is ownership transfer fee. There were a couple minor other fees and taxes too but in comparison they were low.

On the big day, I met with the seller finally. And we sat and went through the contracts, and then signed, stamped (The seller had brought his own 1000 yen paper stamp.) two sets of contracts and put our hanko (hanko on the paper stamp, hanko under signature, and hanko on the back where the contract paper is binded), he took one and I took one contract.

Apart from contracts, we also got lots of attachments (I think 10 in all) which were mentioned in the main contract. Those are maps, official papers, history/registration certificates, measurements, papers for my worry points above, "document of important matters" etc. I am still reading them.

In a couple of weeks from now, we will meet at my bank and complete the transaction. They give me the ownership and I give them the money.