Apartment hunting (the prequel)
This marks the beginning of probably the most painful thing we’ll have to do in Japan. Technically, I started looking for apartments before even arriving, but the clock is ticking now (as we only have our current place to the end of the month). Tokyo is huge (2,191 km²) to say the least - you can fit 37 Manhattans (59 km²) in it which is really what it feels like sometimes. I’m not even sure we’ll be able to explore most of the districts in a year even if we tried.
From all of our past visits to Japan until now, we’ve explored around the following areas in Tokyo:
- - Shinjuku
- - Shibuya
- - Okubo
- - Yoyogi
- - Harajuku
- - Ebisu
- - Daikan-yama
- - Musashi-koyama (where we currently live)
- - Oimachi
- - Shimo-Kitazawa
- - Umegaoka
- - Kyodo
Essentially, our search and visits have been along two subway lines that (sort of) intersect both of our language schools: JR Yamanote Line and Odakyu Line:
This is probably very obvious, but because subways are so fast, once you can get onto the line you want, it’s pretty trivial if you are 2 vs. say 4 or 5 stops away from your destination. This enables us to expand our search pretty significantly which is nice but also very daunting. To add to the complexity of the process, there are a few additional considerations:
- 1. You basically have to use a realtor, especially if you don’t speak Japanese.
- 2. You have to find an English-speaking realtor, which has proven to be quite challenging.
- 3. (Good) realtors are location-specific, so if we are expanding our search to several regions, that does make life a lot harder
- 4. Landlords do not like renting to foreigners, especially ones that don’t speak Japanese, so that narrows our options significantly
- 5. Landlords additionally do not like renting to students, and especially to Japanese language students (someone told me it’s because they know you don’t speak Japanese)
I guess this is what foreigners describe as discrimination, but as I mentioned before, I try to put the most generous perspective on the situation. Every Japanese person I’ve met so far, even when I’ve done something wrong or declined service, has treated me with the utmost kindness and respect. It makes me feel bad thinking about how past foreigners must’ve been really bad tenants for landlords to discriminate against them. I wish we could somehow prove to them that despite not speaking Japanese, we would be good tenants, but it’s very understandable that the language barrier itself would already a major headache for people.
Anyways, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Here is a bit more light-hearted content to make us all feel a little better:
Not the best photo, but as we were visiting various neighborhoods, we walked by some people painting (or repainting) signage on a building, and it was very cool and pretty!
This was from one of the listings our realtor sent us. We joke about “Americans will use anything but the metric system”, but have you heard of measuring area in number of tatami mats? (There are no tatami mats in this apartment. This is purely a measurement device.)
