Housing Purchase by Single Women in Tokyo Yoshilehl YUI* Recently some single women purchase their houses and the number of houses owned by single women are increasing in Tokyo. And their housing demands caused to publish the housing information magazine for women. This magazine contains a lot of housing information and the experience reports, which shows the ownership by working single women. In order to analyze the gendering urban space, the author aims to clarify why single women tend to purchase their houses in Tokyo. The author uses the experience reports of housing Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, 1-1-1 Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8524, Japan

ownership by single women in Tokyo metropolitan regions. These reports contain their economic conditions, their working conditions and their life. We can understand the housing demands of single women from these reports, because these sources are collected for marketing research. Furthermore the author tries to clarify its background and housing problems for women in metropolitan region. According to these reports, over the half of informants who bought their house were in their thirties. This means that the magazine editor presents the information for thirties, because they can own thier houses and they eager to move out rent houses. And most of them live in inner and its adjacent areas, because they want to live in a convenient and safe location near stations. Single women continue to work after they own their houses and hope to avoid housing problems in their old age. And they can save housing cost by purchasing house, because housing loan becomes cheaper than rent recently, which was caused by low rate of interest rent policy. On the other hand, rent continues to increase in Tokyo in spite of small houses. Furthermore, some of single women plan to rent out if they marriage in future. That means that they purchased house by a speculative business. Many developers increased housing supply for single women, because they can use land in the commercial zone, which are popular with single women. And many banks tend to accommodate single women with a housing loan, because many single women have much saving. As mentioned above, the phenomenon is caused by the increase of working women in Tokyo metropolitan area. But all women who purchase their house are not so rich. They want to own their house because they are not satisfied with expensive rent in Tokyo and the costly and cumbersome charges of broker's procedure. And many single women want to enrich their life by ownership of house. Furthermore there is no supply of public housing for single women in Japan. Because of lack of housing policy for them, single woman must reduce their housing problem in future by themselves. Key words : single women, housing, gender, urban geography, Tokyo