(FORTUNE Magazine) – LIKE MODERN-DAY pioneers seeking a 40-acre homestead -- or a golf course near an airport -- thousands of Japanese are longing for the kind of wide-open spaces they cannot get at home. Last year they bought an estimated $14.8 billion of U.S. real estate -- making the total they own some $57.7 billion worth -- and they are likely to buy almost as much this year. The big hitters who invested in Rockefeller Center, the Maui Marriott, and a chunk of the Los Angeles skyline are being joined by ordinary Japanese. Your new landlord could be a doctor, a grocer, or a kimono maker. Says Soichiro Kawase of Haseko Corp., who syndicates U.S. properties for sale in Japan: ''We are buying a dream. Japanese love to buy American.'' They are getting plenty of help from the natives. U.S. brokers regularly jet into Narita airport laden with prospectuses. Donald Trump hawks Manhattan condos in upscale magazines -- in Japanese. Tokyo newspapers carry full-page ads featuring American houses, office buildings, and shopping centers. Junk mail touting U.S. real estate pours into Japanese homes. Tokyo branches of U.S. banks do a brisk business introducing Japanese buyers to American sellers. Japanese banks are getting in on the action. Yasuda Trust, among others, puts together syndicates of small-business owners to buy an American property -- a hotel, say, or a small office building. Yasuda throws a party for the investors in Tokyo, then sends them in a group to the U.S. to see their prize. Says Nakaji Kawata, a managing director of the bank: ''People enjoy the status of saying, 'I own a hotel in California.' It's fun.'' With American credit a bit squeezed by tightened regulation and the $325 billion savings and loan debacle, Japanese investment is perking up an otherwise sluggish market. Japanese real estate companies often have an easier time getting credit than do many U.S. developers -- even from American banks -- so joint ventures are increasing. About $13.4 billion in new construction was built with direct Japanese equity over the past two years, according to Jack Rodman of Kenneth Leventhal, a Los Angeles-based accounting firm that tracks Japanese investment. Last year roughly a quarter of new housing in California was financed by Japanese developers or banks, estimates Rodman. Haseko, a Japanese condominium developer, has invested $700 million in housing, offices, and shopping centers from Honolulu to Atlanta. The company in turn sold $60 million in syndicated U.S. property to Japanese investors last year through ''California Fairs'' held at luxury hotels in Tokyo. Mitsui Real Estate Development Co. is building homes in the Los Angeles suburb of Palos Verdes to sell for $500,000 to $1 million. They are about four times bigger than a similarly priced house in Japan. Sumitomo Realty & Development Co. has about 1,000 single-family homes under construction in California. The irony of building spacious houses for Americans when millions of Japanese are stuck in tiny apartments isn't lost on Japanese developers. They claim they would rather work in their own country but can't afford the land. Says Taro Ando, the gravelly voiced 80-year-old chairman of Sumitomo: ''Japanese land policy is to blame. It's a shame that salarymen can't buy a house like I could when I was young.'' Ando knows firsthand the anger of the eternally landless: Three years ago activists who blamed Sumitomo for soaring land prices attacked his home and briefly held his wife hostage. Says he: ''Solving the land problem is Japan's most important task today.'' The Japanese system of protecting farmland, imposing high capital gains taxes, and limiting the height of buildings has cut to a mere trickle the supply of new land coming to the market, while relentless economic growth has pumped up demand. Imagine the sprawl of Los Angeles combined with the density of Hong Kong, 29 million people packed into low-rise wooden houses creeping toward the horizon in a maze of streets too narrow to let a Cadillac pass, and you've got Tokyo. From 1985 to 1989 land prices rose 2 1/2 times. As of 1988, the total estimated market value of all the land in Japan, which is roughly the size of California, was about four times that of the real estate value of the entire United States. The Japanese are buying up America because their banks have helped them turn those inflated paper values into money they can spend -- or invest. Japan's major corporations are so loaded with cash these days that they have practically stopped borrowing. Desperate for business, banks have turned into - neighborhood loan pushers, lending individuals and small businesses up to 90% of the market value of their property. More and more Japanese are pouring that cash into the U.S. THE BILLIONAIRES born of the land boom come from a wild variety of backgrounds: pinball parlor wheeler-dealers to salarymen at insurance companies, backslapping hardware-store Rotarians to Harvard-educated financiers. From the looks of their cramped offices and modest homes, you'd never guess they owned some of America's most luxurious resorts and soaring skyscrapers. But it's their habit of frugality at home that's helped them buy major tracts of the good life overseas. A sampling of Japan's new real estate moguls:

THE OUTSIDER Billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto, president of Marugen Co., is a kimono maker's son from the provinces. He is a college dropout, many of his buildings are occupied by hostess bars, and he wears his suits a bit too nipped at the waist for the staid Tokyo real estate establishment. A bachelor who favors stylish gold cuff links, Kawamoto, 58, began buying retail and restaurant buildings on the Ginza, Tokyo's neon-lit nighttime playground, just as prices headed into orbit. Today a piece of land there as big as a page of this magazine goes for about $17,000, or $160 a square inch. His first building, ten floors of bars, cost $1.7 million 25 years ago. It's now valued at about $62 million. Kawamoto says he has never sold anything he's bought on the Ginza, typical for local landlords. Such property is rarely for sale, and when it is, you're unlikely to see an ad. It tends to trade privately, like stolen art. Across the water Kawamoto kicked up a politically charged backlash in Honolulu in 1988 when he took advantage of a depressed housing market to buy 179 upscale houses in just three months. Hawaiians swapped tales of the ''Kawamotomobile,'' a Rolls-Royce, cruising the streets like a shark. Asked about the episode, he seems offended: ''That's a bunch of baloney. I did not drive around in a Rolls pointing my finger at houses. I keep all three of my Rollses in Japan.'' Then he adds, ''I did those people the favor of buying their houses. They were grateful.'' He constantly gets offers from Americans who want to sell him art, ranches, movie studios, and mountains, but he waves them away. Instead, in Hawaii he is building housing for the elderly and a day camp for children, and in California what he describes as affordable housing -- single-family homes he hopes to rent for $750 to $1,100 a month. He's grown testy about criticism from Americans: ''They take the money and then all you hear is blah blah blah complaining. If they don't like our investment, they should go ahead and prohibit it!''

THE ESTABLISHMENT A few blocks northeast of the glitz of the Ginza are the sturdy office blocks of the Marunouchi business district, headquarters of Japan Inc. and light-years away from the world of Kawamoto. This is the fief of Mitsubishi Estate, Japan's richest and snobbiest real estate firm, part of the business group that includes Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Motors, and Mitsubishi Bank. Mitsubishi Estate has assets with a book value of $8 billion, worth probably ten times that on the market. It has owned just about all of the 18-square- block area facing the Imperial Palace since the last century -- and a share of Rockefeller Center since last November. Managing director Kiyoaki Hara points at a dumpy little office building outside his window: ''That's worth about as much as all of Rockefeller Center.'' Along with Mitsui Real Estate and Sumitomo Realty, Mitsubishi is part of a powerful circle of vertically integrated companies with financial, construction, and brokering power that no single U.S. firm can match. They see themselves as being far above the ordinary rabble of real estate. Sniffs Hara, who graduated from elite Hitotsubashi University: ''If you asked me to participate in a panel discussion with ((Kawamoto)), I'd refuse.'' So much greater the dismay of the Big Three, then, when U.S. newspapers compared the purchase of Rockefeller Center to Pearl Harbor. Conservative Mitsubishi -- a company often chided for an excess of caution, especially overseas -- was appalled. Hara, who remembers being mesmerized by New York City's wealth when he first visited the U.S. in the early 1960s, had wanted only a minority stake. He says the Rockefeller family pushed him to take a 51% share for $846 million. Even the Japanese press piled on, criticizing Mitsubishi for causing friction at a sensitive time. If Hara had the deal to do over? ''I wouldn't do it,'' he says with some bitterness. ''We were the ones talking about public perception, the American side was talking money money. We said we were concerned about how Americans would react. But the ((American)) investment bankers and lawyers were only thinking of getting high fees. They said, 'Leave it to us.' I never imagined we'd be treated so unfairly by the press.'' Hara's competitors have a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I sympathy for him. Junichiro Tanaka, president of Mitsui Real Estate, had turned down the chance to buy into Rockefeller Center partly because he thought it too expensive and partly because he feared a backlash. Mitsui had bought the adjoining Exxon building in 1986. Says he: ''Things had become more sensitive since then.'' Mitsubishi is focusing on Europe now, where the company recently joined a redevelopment project on Paternoster Square next to St. Paul's Cathedral in the City of London. Mitsui and Sumitomo are stepping up activities in Europe too.

THE RICH PROFESSOR Across town from the broad avenues of Marunouchi are the rabbit warrens of Minato Ward. The scent of grilled fish floats through jumbles of tiny wooden houses that seem in imminent danger of being swallowed by new high-rises, like mountain villages by dams. Here, Taikichiro Mori, 86, rules the domain where he was born and raised. He is not a hired manager like Hara or Tanaka. Mori himself owns $16 billion of some of Tokyo's finest real estate. A bespectacled former professor of economics, Mori calls himself ''the simple son of a rice merchant.'' Yet he has become enough of a legend to have had Americans knocking on his door last year to see whether he wanted to buy the Sears Tower in Chicago. Though richer several times over than, say, Donald Trump, Mori has no yachts, helicopters, or mansions. He lives in a small apartment, where his wife of 58 years enjoys growing potted plants on the veranda. In his modest office in Mori Building No. 37 (there are 80 scattered around Tokyo), the frail, kimonoed grandfather is the picture of patience and caution. He proved it in the way he assembled the land to build the $690 million Ark Hills office, hotel, and residential complex near the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. Mori took 20 years to cajole 450 householders into selling their tiny houses. In the U.S. property taxes would make it impossible to hold on to a set of unassembled properties that long. But in Tokyo taxes are 0.05% of market value. The complex is home to Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank. Instead of Sears Tower, the frugal former professor shopped for a smaller, better-priced deal. Last October he entered the depressed Houston real estate market, paying $300 million for the Four Oaks office complex. Mori's son, Minoru, 55, is said to be looking for more such bargains.

THE KIMONO SELLER In a little building in the shadow of Ark Hills, past the first-floor Volvo showroom and up the dingy elevator to the fifth floor, is the headquarters of Tokyo Masuiwaya, a kimono retailing outfit -- and owner of the Dana Point resort on the ocean in Orange County, California. In a linoleum-floored cubicle with two vinyl chairs and a sofa, under a Japanese painting of the seven lucky gods of prosperity and a wide-angle photograph of the lawns and terraces of Dana Point, founder and President Iwao Kariya, 63, tells his tale.

The son of a fisherman, Kariya grew up poor in Osaka. ''After the war, after the Americans firebombed the city, there was nothing,'' he remembers. ''I sold used kimonos in an open-air stall.'' From that start, he built one of Japan's largest retail chains purveying luxury kimonos. As the country grew richer, Kariya began selling jewelry, furs, and Western formal wear. He launched an Alain Delon-brand kimono and invited the French actor to his Japanese-style Kyoto villa to dazzle the ladies. He eventually started taking wealthy matrons on tours of Europe and America. ''Wouldn't it be nice, Mr. Kariya,'' suggested these ladies, ''if you had your own hotel?'' Last July he bought Dana Point for $95 million. ''If you think in yen,'' notes Toshiaki Sasaki, the company's expert in foreign real estate, ''it looks cheap.'' Owners of medium-size, domestically oriented businesses like Kariya's may be the fastest-growing group of Japanese investors in the U.S. market -- they bought $2.5 billion of property last year in their companies' names and billions more as individuals. Kariya says he plans to keep Dana Point forever, and preserve its American ambiance -- there are no Japanese staffers. Says he: ''I like America. I travel to Europe to bid on art'' -- he collects Renoirs and Monets -- ''but somehow I feel most comfortable in the U.S.''

THE BAKERSFIELD PIONEER Takashi Ichijima, 53, is a neighborhood realtor in a suburban Tokyo district shaded by cherry trees; he is also investing $60 million in what will eventually be a community for 9,000 Americans in farmland near Bakersfield, California. The landscaping, broad expanses of lawn, and golf course he has planned would be pipe dreams in Japan. Says he: ''I wish I could do this kind of project in Japan, but I can't. It's nearly impossible to find land for sale. Even if I could, for the same amount of money I could build only 17 or 18 homes, and not at a profit.'' Ichijima warmed up for the U.S. market by buying and selling condos in Hawaii, the usual first stop for Japanese. Now, like many other real estate investors large and small, he's shifting to development. Says he: ''We have to contribute something to the community, to build something. If Japanese just keep buying up existing property, friction will get worse.'' Will major Japanese investment in U.S. real estate go on increasing? The answer is yes, at least until Japan solves its own land problem. If the government wanted to do anything about it, the solution is simple enough: Raise taxes to force underused farmland onto the market, lower capital gains taxes to increase market liquidity, and allow taller buildings in order to use space more efficiently. The problem, apparently insurmountable, is getting politicians to go along. Until that day, get to know your new landlord. He may be able to recommend a really good sushi bar in downtown Atlanta.