After more than two years of unbroken gains, Tokyo's used condominium market registered its first monthly price decline in August — a quiet but telling moment in the longer arc of Japan's return to a world of meaningful interest rates. The Bank of Japan's gradual tightening, amplified by the Financial Services Agency's growing concern over speculative lending, has begun to reach ordinary households in the form of costlier mortgages and cooling ambitions. What looks like a modest 0.2 percent dip is, in the larger human story, the sound of a market remembering that prices and gravity are old acq