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Vancouverites are downsizing their condos as nowhere else on the continent. Yaletown studio apartments can be readily sold with living areas under 500 square feet, and it is just a matter of time until the 400 square foot barrier is breached, especially for well-conceived apartments with lots of built-ins. These dimensions – need I remind Lower Mainlanders who don't get out much – are about the same as a Texas closet or a Saskatchewan mud room.

Last fall, Non-Partisan Association city councillor Kim Capri announced a plan to shrink housing even further, calling for temporary pads for the homeless the size of submarine bunks, or, as she so sweetly put it, cruise ship berths.

These incredible shrinking flats remind me of the old Genesis song, Get Them Out by Friday, a sci-fi speculation about the future of British real estate:

There has been a directive from Genetic Control:

That from now on, people will be shorter in height,

So they can fit twice as many in the same building site.

Learning to manage with smaller dwellings, Vancouverites must now look to the Brits, the Dutch, the Chinese, and most of all, the Japanese. These are cultures where people have lived at high population densities for a long time, and have developed the folkways and habits needed when rooming cheek by jowl.

To North American eyes, traditional Japanese neighbourhoods seem warrens of tiny, flimsy buildings. Streets barely wide enough to admit a car or phalanx of punkish teenagers are lined with buildings right up the roadway, one-, two- and only rarely, three-storeys high. Houses of the Meiji and older eras are made entirely of wood, with paper screen walls inside and the woven floor mats called tatami that give the Japanese – even today – their measuring stick for domestic space. Locals and expats speak of what it is like to “live in an eight mat house,” in the way we speak of bedrooms, or Europeans speak of the total number of rooms in a flat.

Vancouverites packed into Downtown South condos, or into Mount Pleasant houses cut into six Lilliputian suites might be interested in the social adaptations made by the Japanese to accommodate high density living. Some of the most interesting of these have to do with sex. Much as in Vancouver, astronomical housing prices mean that few Japanese can afford to live on their own prior to marriage.

Making space for those inevitable calls of love or lust, every Japanese town or city boasts scores of by-the-hour “sex hotels.” Surprisingly, only a small proportion of these hotel rooms are used by prostitutes – most are instead rented out by the young and yearning, or by middle-aged couples wanting for once to really let loose, without those snoopy Yamasakis next door listening in through the shoji screens.

With each block packed with houses made of wood and paper – in a damp, cool climate where the use of charcoal braziers is common – fires has been a constant threat for Japanese neighbourhoods. Even more than in the Americas or Europe, the history of their cities is of constant blaze and re-building.

Accordingly, the fire marshal is the one and only person who knows each dwelling in his neighbourhood. I learned this on my first visit to Japan – at end of a late 1970s round-the-world jaunt as an architecture student, arriving with just $110. I could not find Kyoto's cheap youth hostel, so I had no option but to rouse the fire marshal from sleep to point out its location, with domo-arigatos all round at 2:30 a.m. The western concept of “addresses” hardly exist in residential neighbourhoods like these, as houses are numbered not by location on a street, but in sequence of their construction.

Japanese addresses thus provide bragging rights, when one can claim, for instance, that one lives in the eighth-oldest house in Honmura, a beguiling if tiny island village in the Seto Sea, west of Osaka. Honmura's economy is sustained by a bizarre combination of a Mitsubishi metals rendering plant, and workers for a series of Tadao Ando-designed high end art museums (the Benesse Collection has Monets, Stellas, Pollocks and Naumans) that have hotels located inside each of them.

Even Honmura's village shops seem impossibly crowded, every square centimetre filled with brightly-coloured packaging. But like the neighbourhoods around them, the initial appearance of chaos around the till masks hyper-efficiency, and the patient saleslady find almost any product desired somewhere on her over-burdened shelves and floors.

From Honmura I took a ferry to Takamatsu, a newish city located on an adjacent island. The city is a tribute to Japan's late 1980s, early 90s building boom, and subsequent years of painful re-adjustment. To me, the city seemed a museum of glassy and glitzy Late Modern architecture, and of western-style apartment blocks (though at greater than Vancouver densities), all constructed within months of each other as the economic bubble blew out to its largest extension in 1992.

Vancouverites with worries about our beyond-all-reason housing prices will find much to sober them in Takamatsu and other Japanese cities. After a spectacular boom, Japan's housing prices dropped in 1993, then kept dropping – each and every year, without exception – for more than a decade. At the peak of the boom I heard architects and developers tell me the upward march in prices would never end, that a fantastic new era of mounting wealth and no-risk real estate had begun. Sound familiar?

On my previous trip to Japan in 1992 the bubble was just bursting. Nonetheless, we were told by a Tokyo real estate expert that one square mile of downtown Tokyo was then equal in value to every bit of land in all of Canada.

Booms end, but people push on, and yes, we can all live with less. Listen to the Japanese.