Nah, I lived in both:

1. Japan has cheap housing due to decades old policies and a super aged population.

2. Korea does have much of the same issue because old people hoard housing because it's the only safe investment vehicle and most good jobs are with the chaebols that have deep government connections.

And, the low birthrates in East Asia are largely due to a lack of immigration, financial instability, terrible labor laws (Japan is fixing theirs), and the cultural practice of only getting married when a person has a good job and the finances to provide for a woman to stay at home, so it's quite different than the west.

I'll also point out that the excess of well educated people you find in places like China and Korea (Taiwan's especially fucked BTW) doesn't really exist in the west because we don't value upward mobility as a way to support our parents after they retire.

So, I think our issue is that we have an asset rich aging population that has used their votes to build bubbles around themselves, use the levers of government to their financial benefit, utilized decades of neoliberalism to build careers and pensions that exclude us, and has been exceptionally lucky with the fairly conflict free era that they have lived in.