This paper draws on the housing experiences of baby-boomers and baby-busters in Japan's home-owning society as an empirical case to demonstrate cohort effects on the production of new contours of social differentiation. While many baby-boomers, who were born in the last half of the 1940s, climbed up the housing ladder towards home ownership to accumulate housing assets during a period of vigorous economic development, baby-busters, who were born in the late 1950s and early 1960s when fertility rates dropped, were critically affected by the rise and fall of the bubble economy and experienced an unprecedented drop in the value of their residential properties.
