Getting an apartment in Japan

When I first came here in 1998, I moved into a small 2dk apartment, like most people. It cost 6 man yen every month. It was cramped. It was inconvenient (the train station was a 20 minute walk away through a graveyard). Did I mention it was cramped? These apartments are nicknamed 'rabbit hatch' over here.

Last month I told the wife I didn't want to live in one of these places again. I wanted space to stretch my legs, put my computer in the living room and spend time with the wife while writing or doing my own thing on the net. I suggested we rent a house until we had enough cash to buy a house. She said it was impossible, she didn't know anyone who did that and didn't think it could be done, especially in our limited price range.

I asked her to check the Internet and just see if something was available. It took her a few weeks to get around to doing a web search and she was surprised to get over several thousand hits on one site that listed real estate offers.

To narrow that down, we added "pet" and a few locations. That knocked the listings down to 700 and from that we searched for places that looked good and found several prime sites. We then contacted the listed real estate agent for that area and had a chat and booked a time to visit these places.

There are many estate agent places, and I mean many but only 4 major ones that I am aware of:
mini mini
apaman
century 21st
Avuru (they mean able)

There are thousands of independent estate agents and most are a hundred meters away from the other. A few days earlier we booked two agents and on the day we arrived in Ishibashi, we saw mini mini and decide to pop in on the off chance they had something. (Plus we had an hour to kill before meeting our weekly apartment manager--we were early and loaded down with suitcases.)

We explained our situation to the agent and he showed us some places, most were more than we wanted to pay. We asked for 3LDK but all he showed us were 3DK (side note: any LDK apartment that has the LDK listed under 13 is NOT a real LDK. Don't get fooled with the 9 or 10.5 LDK rooms, also if the kitchen is a counter kitchen, you just lost 5 jo of the LDK). He didn't seem to show us what we wanted but what he wanted to be rid of. Still, we took a look on Thursday (Wednesday we had an appointment with another agency. Many places are closed on Wednesday) and found two very nice places but I didn't want to live in Ishibashi--too city bound. My wife was in love with both places.

At the independent estate agents we were offered some other places as well as the ones we liked. On Wednesday we visited "Change" and looked at 8 houses in 6 hours. Again two appealed to us, one a mansion (apartment block) with a 9-jo LDK but with a connecting tatami room that had removable doors that opened the entire place up making it nice and wide, which is exactly what we wanted. The other place was a house with a massive kitchen area, LDK of 20 and with a tatami room that also had removable doors. It had a garden, covered car park, large rooms upstairs, a bedroom size 19-jo with an attic above accessed via a pull down ladder.

Though both places were awesome, they were just too far away. Yes, they contained the lifestlye I was after but transportation to and from work would be over 1,000 yen one way, plus we would need a car to go shopping. Those places were out. And the house option was a no go with the attic, I kept thinking of Jyuon

so that is seriously a no go. LOL.

In the next post I will discuss what happened on Friday and Saturday and the process you should expect when getting an apartment in Japan.