It would be hard to mistake for a light switch. 

It's hard to harvest equity on these plays, unless you commit, long-term, towards very light leverage, as the only practical ways to benefit from the equity in your portfolio, if you plan to never sell it, only exchange it, for a lifetime, are to spend the cash flow, or cash out refi.

using a TREC 1-4 contract so hard to scam there.  

Now, I’m diving into the niche of land investing.When I was pursuing the BRRRR strategy, one of the aspects that made scaling seem feasible was the availability of hard or private money lenders.

High rates are here for at least the medium-term (1-2 years), so deals will have to pencil in this current environment.You may also want to consider hard money for your lending, as they can often fund your construction with far fewer restrictions than a HomeStyle loan.

I am on the same journey and as I have been battling over whether partnership or hard money makes sense for my own projects.

To sacrifice a good tenant, which is hard to come by these days in favor of higher rent, may not be the trade-off that you need or possibly want.

And using the hard money for the second one.

Mentally it's hard to buy into a dipping market, but I think that's where a lot of money is made longterm. 

My main concern with the Japanese market is that I really know nothing, and I find it a bit hard to find information about it, but I guess I also know "nothing" about property markets anywhere other than maybe Hong Kong. 800 square feet is not tiny by Hong Kong standards, you are absolutely correct, but just as you mentioned we have a live-in helper and are hoping to start having kids about 1.5 years later.