Moving in Japan - Episode 1

With all the prospects of paying hefty key money (essentially a gift for the landlord), high deposits, and fees for all sorts of things, the hours of sitting in estate agents, filling out tons of paperwork, only to be let down at the last minute as the apartment suddenly gets snapped up by someone else, the hours of searching around for something that is not going to leave you broke for the next six months, but is barely big enough to accommodate your average XXL gaijin, the days of boxing, shifting and uprooting your life, and the delights of cleaning your old apartment from top to bottom and then being charged a month's rent as 'cleaning fees', welcome to the world of moving in Japan - it's not for the fainthearted. Here are some of my high(low)lights.

 

This will be my fifth move in ten years and the thought of it is as appealing as the last time I moved (around the time of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake). My first four years in Japan were spent living in the same apartment. I was living in Shimosa Nakayama (close to where I'm living now, incidentally – full loop), and I was living in what could be described as little more than a box with small, separate shower and toilet. For this, albeit being very close to the station, I was paying ¥70000 per month (about $750), and as I didn't really have much to compare it to at the time, I accepted that this was probably not a bad price to pay. 

My Austrian landlord had taken practically all of my money the first evening after I'd arrived – one and a half months rent up front, deposit, and insurance. He gave me the key and dropped me off. I'd just got here so I was too excited to care. The place was a lot smaller than I had been used to in the UK, but that was OK - I was in Japan! I wrote a diary for the first three months of my stay and most of what I wrote, reading back on it, was quite positive. My company gave me an advance on my wages to cover bills, eat and travel to work, and so I could keep up with rental payments, and so this helped me to get settled. In the small cluster of apartments in which I was living were a few other foreigners. I didn't really get to talk to them much, as they would come and go with quite high regularity.

After a while I got talking to one of the other residents that was living in one of the same sized apartments as me. It turned out I had been paying ¥10000 more a month than everyone else. So not only did I suddenly realise that the rent was extortionate for what I was getting, I was in fact being ripped off. I went to see the landlord about this and asked him to explain himself. He said that what I had heard was untrue, then showed me a few examples in his tenant book. Unfortunately, he showed me a few too many pages - “How about this, this and this?!” I said, pointing to apartments being rented at ¥60000. He admitted that he was overcharging me. I told him I wasn't going to pay him a month and a half rent to make up for the money he'd been taking off me, and with a slight grin he agreed. No “sorry” or contrition, just an air of, “Oh well, you caught me, but there's not much you can do about it.”

Looking back though, I really didn't have a leg to stand on, or at least I felt I didn't have anyone to turn to. Thinking about it I should've moved a lot sooner, but I ended up staying in his apartment for around 4 years, now that it was a bit cheaper – being close to the station and to work did help a lot too. Until a friend suggested we move in together, I'd never tried to look for another apartment. And so began the long, arduous trip into the world of moving in Japan.

Episode 2 coming soon.