Anton Wormann: From “No Foreigners” to Akiya and a Farm He Couldn't Save

This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version

A model from Sweden is buying abandoned houses (akiya) in Tokyo and fixing them up with his own hands. You may well have come across the videos. The channel is called ANTON IN JAPAN. Most of his videos are in English, and the channel had 727,000 subscribers as of October 31, 2026.

Who is he? What did he pay for those houses? Is he married? If you've been wondering, you're probably not alone.

So we went through his video descriptions and captions, along with reporting from Japan and abroad. Subscriber and view counts are figures we measured through the YouTube API.

We checked what the videos say through their captions. Quotes from the videos come from the auto-generated English captions, and we did not change the words.

Who Is Anton Wormann? His Background and Career

His name is written Anton Wormann. In Japanese, his company writes it アントン・ウォルマン, and some outlets write ウォールマン or ヴォルマン.

He is from Stockholm, Sweden. The introduction to his own column in the Japanese outlet OCEANS lists him as born in 1992. But the ages that outlets print don't agree, and we couldn't confirm it from his own words either.

He grew up in a house built in 1909 in suburban Stockholm. His parents fixed it up while they lived there, and he says he picked up DIY by watching his father, who flipped real estate.

He started modeling at 19. According to his column, he was an exclusive model for Gucci for two years from 2013, and he also lived in New York for two years.

His connection to Japan came through work, too. According to a May 2023 video, he spent two months in Japan as a model in 2015 and came back in 2017 on another two-month contract.

He moved to Japan at the end of 2018. He wrote as much himself in the description of a July 2021 video (“in the end of 2018”), and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's official site TOKYO UPDATES says the same. Some outlets say 2019, but here we go with his own words.

As of October 31, 2026, he is based in Tokyo, and his agency in Japan is Bon Image.

Why Did He Buy a House? The “No Foreigners” Apartment Hunt

Much of his house story is told in “Every Renovation I've Done in Japan,” a video from August 21, 2026. Over 58 minutes, he goes through seven years of properties, one by one. From here on, the house stories come from this video unless we say otherwise.

For his first nine months after moving to Japan, he lived in a share house. The trouble began when he started looking for a place of his own.

That's when he hit a wall. As he tells it: “No foreigners are allowed to rent a place.” He says he was also fed up with how high the initial fees were.

Business Insider Japan also reports that he kept getting turned down for rentals even though he had income and filed tax returns. To us, that experience seems connected to his real estate work today.

The turning point was a remark from a friend: “Why don't you just buy a place?” He started looking at properties and settled on his first apartment after seeing about seven to 10. Without that wall, none of what he does now might have happened.

Not Just One House in Sangenjaya: His Properties, in the Order He Got Them

You may remember him as the guy with the old house in Tokyo's Sangenjaya neighborhood. In fact, at least four properties come up around Sangenjaya alone.

The first is a secondhand condo of 39 square meters between Shibuya and Sangenjaya, which he bought in 2019. His OCEANS column puts the purchase at 14 million yen and the renovation at 1.5 million yen.

He didn't know how to dispose of the demolition waste from knocking out a wall, so he asked for help online, and he says it ended up costing about 160,000 yen. Looking back, he figures it would now be about a $500 job.

The second is a detached house he bought in 2020. Over the New Year holidays, when his father was visiting Japan, a local real estate agent showed them five run-down houses, and he couldn't get the first one out of his mind.

He got the keys about a week before COVID brought the city to a halt. He spent six months fixing it up while living on the second floor, and it became the home he shared with his partner.

This is the house now run as the vacation rental Sangenjaya Villa. OCEANS gave the purchase price as 20 million yen. He moved out about four years later, then took the house apart and rebuilt it.

When it was taken apart, he says, some of the posts turned out not to be attached to each other. The work took 13 months, and he says structural reinforcement alone used up 25 to 30% of the budget.

The third is Sangenjaya House, the best known of them all. The official site says it was built in 1936, so we'd guess that the articles calling it 86 years old are counting to 2022, the year he bought it.

While working next door, he says, he asked the owner, who happened to be passing by, “Can I buy it?” The answer: “Really? You want to buy this piece of crap?” He was able to buy it 15 months later.

On paper it was a 34-square-meter one-story house, and it could not be rebuilt. Reports differ on what he paid. According to documents reviewed by CNBC, it was about 8 million yen, excluding closing costs and fees. The Japanese housing site SUUMO Journal and OCEANS say about 10 million yen. We could not establish the reason for the gap.

Then came the termites. When he went back to the site after demolition, there were marks in the timber of the posts, and it was hollow inside. The older carpenter he hired made no headway even after a month, then ended up in the hospital.

A different carpenter's team replaced the posts and beams in two weeks and straightened the leaning house. That alone came to about 2 million yen. Concrete also went in under the floor, and in all, the work ran to about $60,000 and about a year. He says he still sees that carpenter once or twice a month, so we imagine that meeting meant a lot to him.

The fourth, Sangenjaya Museum, is not a house he bought. It is the house next door: the owner consulted the local government, a company that renovates abandoned houses fixed it up, and he rented it and finished the job.

Wakabayashi Park House is also listed among the official rentals, but he says the buyer was his real estate senpai (mentor), who entrusted him with the renovation.

How Much Do the Rentals Bring In? The Numbers Outlets Have Reported

Money figures are best read with their dates attached. He runs his vacation rentals under the name Japandi Houses, and as of October 31, 2026, the official site lists six.

In October 2024, CNBC reported Sangenjaya House's rental revenue at about $11,000 a month. This figure, too, comes from documents reviewed by CNBC.

In July 2026, Business Insider Japan reported that about 8 million yen in renovation costs had been recouped in about half a year. The gross yield was over 100%. But in the same article, he says that once his own unpaid labor is priced at an hourly rate, the real yield is 40 to 50%. That figure comes from working at least 1,000 hours a year, so it doesn't look easy to copy.

The Nakano House Was Sold; the Chiba Farmhouse Was His “Biggest Failure”

He took on the Nakano house in 2024. In his own words, he bought it for about 20 million yen and spent 8 million to 10 million yen on the renovation. OCEANS has slightly different figures: 17 million yen to buy and 7 million yen to renovate.

The hard part wasn't the structure but the leaks. He redid the entire roof and put concrete under the floor as well.

In an August 2026 video, he revealed that he had sold this house. It was the first detached house he had worked on that he sold, and he said “it hurt a little bit.”

Then there's the one he calls “my biggest failure so far”: a farmhouse in Kujukuri, Chiba Prefecture. According to Newsweek, he bought the 11-room, 250-square-meter house in summer 2024 for about $15,000.

The house was 120 to 130 years old, and just clearing it out took three or four weeks. He fixed the leaks, but without enough money or time, he put his Tokyo work first and the project stalled.

After that he used it as storage for another house's renovation, and that's where it was burglarized. Thieves took his tools and, he says, even the roof over the entrance.

In the end, he sold it to a local real estate company developing the land next door. The house was torn down, leaving an empty lot, and he admits he made a small profit. Even so, he said it “felt like a defeat.”

We suspect what stays with him is less the profit than not being able to save the house. His own conclusion from the story is not to jump at the cheapest option and to “start small.”

What Did the Waterfall House Cost? Japandi Waterfall House

While work on that farmhouse was at a standstill, the same agent got in touch. This time it was a house near the Awamata-no-Taki waterfall in Otaki, Chiba Prefecture. He calls it “a 4 million yen house.”

His first video on it, from July 8, 2025, is among his most-watched long videos, at about 276,000 views as of October 31, 2026.

Work began in earnest in July 2025, and for a year he made the trip from Tokyo one to three times a week, about 80 minutes each way. The hardest part, he says, was hauling materials up and down the hill to the house.

As of August 2026, the electrical work had slipped from June to August, then September, then October. His take: “It is the countryside. It's a different pace.”

In a video dated October 30, 2026, he reported that he had welcomed his first guests. A typhoon meant he couldn't accept the bookings for a long holiday, and it seems the first guests came from a request after that.

Why Did He Start Making Videos in English? The First Response

His videos started in Japanese. アントンチャンネル (Anton Channel), a Japanese-language channel, opened in February 2021 and had 125,000 subscribers as of October 31, 2026. Its last upload was on July 12, 2024.

In May 2021, he also put out a workout video with fellow Swedish-born Murasame Tatsumasa (article in Japanese).

The English-language ANTON IN JAPAN opened on March 23, 2023. He says he felt empty after finishing Sangenjaya House, and that he started the channel to show his friends and family.

Then, he says, his first two videos got around 50 million views in just a few weeks. The response was big enough that he thought, “I guess I'm not making content in Japanese anymore.” We imagine even he didn't see that coming.

The Short “Japan has a huge problem..” from April 2023 is his most-viewed video on YouTube, at about 42.31 million views as of October 31, 2026. As of the same date, the channel had 689 videos and about 202.78 million total views.

Is He Married? The Engagement He Talked About

You may be wondering about marriage. The latest we could confirm from his own words is a Q&A video dated January 2, 2026. Answering a misconception from viewers, he said he was engaged.

Through October 30, 2026, 154 more videos were published after that one, and we checked the captions of 21 of them. In that range, we could not confirm anything about a wedding. That may be a bit of a letdown.

His Company, His Book, and His Ties to Yanmar

His company is ANTON LLC, established in June 2023 according to his company profile. In an August 2026 video, he said he has also started a real estate brokerage.

His book, Free Houses in Japan, came out on November 9, 2023. Amazon's listing shows an English-language book of 308 pages. The title says “free houses,” but none of the houses so far were free.

In December 2025, he became Yanmar Compact Equipment's first global brand ambassador. According to the Japanese-language release, their early collaboration was his use of a mini excavator in an 800 mm-wide passage in Nakano.

After that, he got a heavy-equipment license with the company's support. His channel also has Yanmar videos tagged “#PR.”

At the end of the August 2026 video, he counted up the houses he has been involved with and said “12, 13 houses.” More than half of them, he says, are work from the past two years, and he would like to do another house in the countryside.

We can't help wondering what kind of house he'll fix next.