Aloha,
John Campbell's remarks on Japan buying us all up, induces me to extend an anecdote or two from my home state. That is, Hawaii. As is well known, cash rich Japanese went on a bu(bble)ying spree in Hawaii in the mid-80s, during the last endaka. Homes that normally had been in the 0.5 to 1.5 million range (actually not very high in Hawaii) suddenly began selling for 10 or more million dollars.
One place, on lease land, not fee simple, went for over 30 million. The buying spree was mostly localized in the richest neighborhoods, although one Tokyo billionaire, who owns lots of commercial land in Tokyo, bought 120 medium priced homes (normally about 500 thousand each).
There is also a strip between downtown Honolulu and Waikiki which (I left there a year ago) was completely cleared, but not redeveloped. Known as the "Field of Dreams," this strip had been purchased by Japanese financiers before the bubble burst; but they didn't get anything built in time. In other words, most of those big buyers took a real licking.
Although the public debate was very heated, the impact seems to have been rather small, so long as you are not in the 10 million dollar home bracket. During that time, at least 5 of my economics students did studies on the impact in a variety of other Honolulu neighborhoods where Japanese did not buy. The conclusion was, each time, that the impact may have been no more than 5% of the housing price increases that were recorded for those years.
I was living in Europe when Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber published his book, the American Challenge. The Americans soon will own everything. History does repeat, often both times as farce.

Jim Marsh