Apartment hunting in Japan - Part 1

Adventures in Japanese house hunting. 11-24-07

Wear slip-on shoes. That is the first and the most important piece of advice I can give you. I bent down to untie, pull off, and walk about in my grey socks, only to shove my feet back in, retie my very comfortable for walking, but pain-in-the-ass for quick release, British shoes more than 18 times this Thanksgiving. I wish I had thought that through. Wear slip-on shoes to go house hunting in Japan. Please.

I am looking for an apartment in Tokyo. I knew not to wear shoes in Japanese homes; what I learned was you don’t wear shoes even when it’s an empty home.

I met the Real Estate agent at my fiancée’s office. He had 12 listings in his bag of tricks. After talking with me, he cut that down to 9. K. L. is a new Tokyo based broadcast news correspondent. I’m her husband-to-be whose job is to find us a place to live and navigate my way through Japan with only 4 words of the language committed to memory. Thankfully, the Real Estate agent spoke English. He had spent 3 years in New York as a student. I told him we want a modern, 2 bedroom apartment, no more than 30 minutes away from K.L.’s office, and for somewhere around $4,000 a month. Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in and our weak dollar isn’t helping matters. It takes somewhere around 101 yen to equal one greenback. To put that into perspective, a plastic bottle of Coca-Cola will run you 150 yen (just move the decimal point over two places in your mind… that Coke costs just under $1.50). Our rent in Washington D.C. was $2,000 a month. We’ll probably get a third less space in Japan for at least twice the amount of money. Of the 9 properties the Real Estate agent wanted me to look at only one was listed at 400,000 yen a month.

We arrived at the first apartment. It’s in the ex-pat neighborhood of Hiroo. I am transported out of Tokyo to a land of Anglo faces. I see brown, blonde, and red hair instead of the ever-present black. For the first time since I got here, I actually saw black people! K.L. excitedly told me the day before that she had seen a black man. If you ever wondered what it feels like to be the minority, move your white, black, or brown American ass to Japan. You will be alone in a crowd. Back to the apartment, it is nice but not wired for hi-speed internet. Mark it off the list. Without hi-speed I can’t watch college football on my Slingbox Tivo combo that lives in Atlanta, Georgia. I must have hi-speed. Oh yeah, and K.L. wouldn’t be able to watch Grey’s Anatomy. Chicks.

At this point, the male Real Estate agent turned me over to his young female compatriot. I must say this smacks of the male chauvinism that is seemingly rampant in Asia. The check is always brought to me even though she usually pays. At the airport, the immigration officers talked to me about the mistake on our application even though she is the one with a job here. The taxi cab driver at the airport only talked to me during our ride. Believe me, K. L. notices. I hear alllll about it. My theory is that the hand off to the young woman happened because the male Real Estate agent felt like he needed to be there at the beginning to show me how important I am but he then left me because I do not have a job here. The Japanese are very class conscience. When they first meet you, they start handing out business cards. I already have a stack and I’ve only been here a week. They use them to gauge how much they should defer to you based on how high your position is. Not that I minded. Discriminate against me by forcing me to spend time with a pretty girl anytime.

So Agent #2 and I headed to the next apartment. You learn some things are universal. When you go around a town with a Real Estate agent the car will be immaculate. It looked like it had just come off the production line. Anyway, we drove to the apartment in the sky but we didn’t get there by going in a straight line. My beautiful distraction pulled her clean car into the exit of the next apartment. Instead of backing out and driving the next 100 meters down the road to the entry, she just pulled onto the sidewalk. A litany of “sumimasen, sumimasen, sumimasen” greeted my ears as she pushed pedestrians aside (not that they could hear her on the other side of the metal and glass). Sumimasen is one of the Japanese words I actually know… it means “excuse me”. As an ugly American I use it often, and I was about to, after walking into the next apartment. This one bedroom sits on the 28^th floor and is a mere 480,000 yen. Our queen sized bed wouldn’t fit in the bedroom. But man oh man did it have a view. Mt. Fuji and the Tokyo tower dot the metropolitan landscape. So I did what any big fat American would do. I asked, “Do you have anything larger?”

It just so happens that on the 24^th floor there is a two bedroom with the same wall length windows and 77.75 square meters, which is 836 square feet (the Real Estate company makes the conversion for us backwards Americans) of space. To own this gem, you only have to pay 580,000 yen. Yes, that is close to $5,500 a month. If you have a car, tack on another 63,000 yen a month. They want you to pay 4 months rent as a deposit. Then there is the “key fee”. In Tokyo, you not only pay for the apartment, you pay for the key itself. At the Park Axis Aoyama that will add another 2 months rent upfront… and this you will -not- get back. So before you step into your new rental apartment, you have dropped $32,235.72. Oh, and did I mention that you have to buy your own refrigerator? I only looked at one apartment with a fridge. A run of the mill icebox will run you 60,000 to 800,000 yen. The kitchen comes equipped with a Viking gas stove top, but no oven. The Japanese just don’t seem to bake anything. I don’t even know if we bought an oven if we could have it installed. We read a blog from an American who lives in Japan and they wrote about ringing up a $1,000 water bill shortly after getting here. It is a whole new world.

Back to the apartment in the sky, I’m told that utilities are not included, but there is a gym and a bar. They are right next to each other so the temptation to sip instead of sweat would always be there. But it is the treadmill of the Gods. You stare off over all of Tokyo for miles in every direction. The treadmill is surrounded by glass and sits atop the 30^th floor. It is simply breathtaking. Gym memberships cost a few hundred to join and at least a hundred dollars to use every month. So the super expensive apartment is a good one, but it may not be “the one”.

At our next apartment, I found yet another expense. Renters have to buy their own light fixtures for new apartments! I hadn’t noticed they were missing in the other apartments since it was such a sunny day. This time we went through a model apartment that was filled with furniture and the agent reminded me the dining table will not come with the apartment. Then she looked up and said, “And of course, neither will the light fixtures.” My mouth fell open. Hidden costs abound. When I moved to Los Angeles, this Georgia boy was amazed that apartments there don’t come with refrigerators or window screens. There’s even more to buy in Tokyo. I’m sure I still don’t know the half of it.

We ran through the next five apartments to end my Thanksgiving Day. Some were big and some were small. Some were brand new and a few were old-er. I have never seen so much closet space. If nothing else, the Japanese know how to use the space available. Next to every door is a closet for shoes and jackets. In every bedroom there are built-in drawers, shelves, and racks. There are a few built-in desks and bookshelves. But nary an oven big enough for a turkey could I find. There is almost always a very small broiler. “To cook your fish,” I’m told. There is usually a microwave / small oven big enough to fit a chicken. In some of the apartments, there are combo washers - dryers. You have to buy your own clothes washing machine in others. And then there are the dishwashers. I would say they are a third the size of their American counterparts. We both looked at the one in our corporate housing and asked, “What’s that?” We just couldn’t believe it would be so small. Same goes for the fridge. All of the ones I have seen are at the most half as large as fridges found in the States. The top section holds food, a middle freezer section is where you can find ice, and then there is another smaller refrigeration space for more food.

At the 7^th apartment I couldn’t help but say, “Wow”. It looks like the perfect space. There is a large bedroom, a decent kitchen (sans fridge of course), a nice bathroom with a washer/dryer, a decent sized second bedroom, and then a great open space. Windows abound and since it’s on the 19^th floor the views are wonderful. The rent is a bit steep at 520,000 yen, but the place is 100 square meters. They want 2 months deposit and no key money. And the neighborhood is teeming with restaurants, supermarkets, and interesting stores. The problem? Half of that great view will be going away. Right across the street, construction crews have just broken ground for a 30 story apartment building. Construction will take about 2 years to complete… or exactly the amount of time we will live in Japan. Construction. K.L. hates it. She lived next to construction in Chicago and couldn’t stand the noise, the pollution, or the trouble.

So we find our last choice of the day. The price? 480,000 yen, only one month deposit, and no key money. Also no refrigerator, light fixtures, or curtains. It is the closest to work; only 5 minutes walk from door to door. And again, the views are spectacular. We have Tokyo Tower off to the right, 2 temples off to the left, and another to the right. You feel like you are in Japan when you look out at that view. But it is smaller… coming in at only 83 square meters (893 square feet) and there is nothing to do in the neighborhood. Our Real Estate agent tells me there is an identical floor plan one on the 17^th floor. Instead of the dark wood we are standing on the one on the 17^th floor is a very light birch. It costs an extra 10,000 yen to live in the light. “I would rather keep the money” I say. “It’s worth the extra money,” K.L. says after she sees them both. And to tell the truth, the lighter wood does make the smaller space seem bigger.

The next week is full of these types of trips. I think I saw two dozen different apartments when it was all said and done. The most interesting, though not the most livable, was a five bedroom. Each room was tiny and there were three different sets of stairs to climb before you gained access to the bedroom. There was a fourth staircase that leads you up to your two, I repeat, two patios. Before you get excited, the views from said-patios are the backyards of your neighbors, meaning close balconies and clotheslines. That’s it. Nothing spectacular. You do get two bathrooms for the trouble of always having to run up and down stairs every time you do, want, or need anything not in that small room.

So just like the last twenty-three times I have left an apartment, I crammed my feet into those very comfortable walking shoes againThe agent and I climbed into the sparkling Nissan and drive away. Nothing is perfect. Everything is a compromise, but we could live in at least 8 of them. I’ll have a few more meetings with the real estate agent over the next couple of weeks and try to pull my weight in this relationship. I mean, if the Japanese continue to defer to me then I had better do something to deserve it. Oh yeah, I’m male. I don’t have to do anything else. Man, ain’t life grand.

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