Erek Speed

Last time, I was sitting in my hotel contemplating my return to Japan. This time, I’m going to talk about the following week and my adventures finding an apartment.

The Monday after I arrived I visited a realtors office so he could find me a place to live. I didn’t much care about size but I wanted a place close to work and good arcades. I work in Shinjuku and there’s a really good arcade in Shibuya so he ended up showing me a place in Shibuya and a couple of places in Shinjuku.

They were all fine but one of the places in Shinjuku was a block from work and came furnished so I went with that place. I spent a few days chilling and bumming about around Shibuya and other places in Tokyo. It’s pretty nice to be in this city and not have any obligations but I would be glad to return to work. It’s good to have a purpose in life.

In Japan, apartments have quite high move in costs. Not only is there 1 month rent agency fee and 1-2 months deposit but there’s also 1-2 months of key money (??) which is essentially a bribe to sweeten the deal for the landlord. This plus first month’s rent and stuff like lock changing fee and cleaning fee made me worried for a bit that I wouldn’t be able to move in as soon as I needed. In the end, everything worked out and I was able to move in.

In that time, I also went to the Tokyo Game Show with Hidde and spent quite a bit of time sleeping. In the near future, I’ll have a post about the former but probably not about the latter.

I’ve been in Japan for a bit now, and as I’ve subtly alluded to, I’m not sleeping on the streets.  Previously, I’ve mentioned that some sort of apartment exists, but I’ve not really gone into more detail than that.   The purpose of this post is to shed some light onto the nature of my living conditions.  To that end, this post will probably be pretty short because the apartment is small and generally, apartments are not very interesting.  This post will be divided up into 4 short sections:  my room, the kitchen, the toilet, and the bathroom. (more…)

Another installment of my life in Japan.

Narita is a pretty simple airport so I didn’t have much trouble with it.  I changed about 100 dollars into yen, and then withdrew about 300 more from an ATM.  I did the cash exchange simply because you never know when an american bank will decide to not let you have money overseas.  I had let them know beforehand of course, but this was to be on the safe side. (more…)