Neighbourhood Vigilante

Does anyone remember "Vigilante"?

The area where the Salaryman HQ was established is a very safe area. Compared to other cities of similar size, Tokyo is a relatively safe place (but like anywhere, if you're set on looking for trouble I'm sure you'll find it) and our place in the suburbs of Tokyo is even safer. The community of houses are all new with very little around it and there's no traffic just passing through so any suspicious looking vehicles or people hanging around are sure to be noticed.

We had that one burglary in conjunction with the earthquake when all the predators and bottom feeder came out to play, but after that basically everyone signed up for private security companies (which I grudgingly agreed to as I didn't want to end up as the only unprotected house, ripe for the taking). Also, a lot of the women in the neighbourhood are housewives with small kids, so the area is quite lively on weekdays as well. The only time that I could image burglars striking would be the New Year's vacation when many houses stand empty as people leave Tokyo to be with their relatives, but that's only once a year and no burglaries were reported this time.

Despite this, our neighbourhood "council" decided to make the area even safer and initiate our own little neighbourhood vigilante squad to take turns patrolling the area. As exited I'm about joining a vigilante squad (Note to self; I need to make sure I arm myself with some menacing toy before patrolling) it feels like a completely meaningless and annoying endeavour to begin with, and the other day the chairman came around to check that the Salaryman family were up to do their part for the team. As I try to keep friendly with the neighbourhood I kept the Salaryman family's thoughts about this to myself and nodded and agreed that we'll do our part with pride. 

But as he told me the details of our duty I had trouble to not burst out laughing at the stupidity and futility of it all... Apparently, to not make thing inconvenient and make sure that everyone can participate, the "patrol" hours were set to once a day at noon, consisting of walking the maybe 50 meters of roads connecting our community to the main road and see if there's anything " suspicious" going on. Then followed by one "late" night shift once a week, but put at 5 pm to not make it too inconvenient and dark to see properly. Also, it will be cancelled on holidays as many people are away and can't be expected to perform their patrolling duties.

I wonder if any prospective burglars will show the same consideration when planning the next big heist of maybe a wide screen TV, blue ray players and some minor jewelry that a break in in our area can yield them? Will they consider that we're too convenient to not patrol during the actual hours when the burglars are roaming about?

But hey, I'll keep the peace, take toddler Sunshine with me out to patrol and spend 5 minutes walking around, tick off "nothing suspicious" one Sunday a year, but somehow do not feel one bit more secure than before the vigilante squad... If I'm going to do something completely meaningless, at least it's nicer to do it at convenient times.

Suburbian neighborhood complications...

I should get Mrs. Sunshine a claw glove for X-mas

After several months of staying vacant, it seems like a new family have moved into the house that has stood empty after the traffic accident that apparently killed the father of the previous family (see here for a recap). As the house is a few rows down from us, we haven't really given it much thought apart from when passing by the garden-turned-jungle so we're neither excited or annoyed by a new family moving in.

However, a few days ago, the new family apparently did their "walk around the neighborhood, say hello and hand out towels" routine. Mrs. Sunshine had been out playing with Toddler Sunshine and seen them a little from a distance as they were ringing the doorbells to the houses around us. She installed herself at home and expected the doorbell to ring and get a nice towel set within a few minutes, but as time passed and no one rung the doorbell she thought that they might just have done the greeting to the houses immediately next to it (not really wrong, but proper manner dictates that people 2-3 houses away also deserve a towel). But as she looked out the window she could see how they now had moved to houses further down ours, but for some reason skipped our house.

As she retold me the story when I came home in the evening, she was visibly annoyed by this breach of etiquette but was thinking that they might come by the next day, temporarily frightened by the foreign name on the nameplate by our house. But no one came around the next day either and the family has been seen scuttling around their new house, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Sunshine, seemingly finished with their rounds of greeting.

Mrs. Sunshine is generally a very pleasant and friendly person to deal with for people that don't know her, but a blatant breach of etiquette such as this ensures that the new family has ended up with a very negative balance to make up for. The politics of suburbia can be complicated and frightening indeed!

Hey, was this racist of me?

I'm sure one of the was Ukrainian

The Salaryman base of operations lies in a pretty Japanese little enclave, almost completely ethnically cleansed of everything but the Japanese. I have rarely seen any Westerners at all in the neighborhood or in the vicinity of the station, passing by one or two, probably on their way to the station to go back home after doing some English home tutoring or so. But that's about it, otherwise it's all Japanese.

But last weekend, I took toddler Sunshine to a local playground, but not the closest one we have in connection with our gated community as all the kids in the neighborhood were hiding or just refusing to come out and play. I've been there with her quite a few times and there's always kids running around there, so I thought it would be more fun for her. For some reason, it was even more kids than usual there and a fair number of parents hovering over their little offspring just like me. 

I saw one kid who looked suspiciously half-Japanese/white but didn't really think that much about it, but after a half an hour or so I noticed two white ladies, probably in their 30's or so standing and chatting just outside the playground, obviously with their kids running wild inside. As foreigners are hard to come by in the neighborhood and I thought it could be nice to at least introduce myself and little Toddler Sunshine, I walked over to them and said something like "Hi, I haven't seen so many foreigners around here, I'm glad to see that it's not only me" with an attempt of a smile. I was met with blank stares, and then confused expressions as they realized that I was talking to them. A few seconds of silence followed, me still with the smile attached to my face and toddler Sunshine attached to my arm, then one of them said "No speak English". Slightly confused in turn, I switched to Japanese and repeated the greeting and added, "where are you from?". Then they seemed to catch on and replied back in Japanese "we're from the Ukraine".  A few seconds of awkward silence followed and I squeezed out, "oh, ok, nice to meet you, wave goodbye to the nice ladies now Toddler Sunshine" as I walked back to the playground with Toddler Sunshine. 

I had assumed that they maybe would be European or slightly worse but still acceptable; Australian or even, failing all else, American and thought it could be nice to know some people in the neighborhood coming from something of a similar cultural background as me who might also be interested in having their kids get to know other more international kids. But Ukrainian not able to speak English...? The only thing we probably had in common would be the "whiteness" (and for me, that's only 50% anyway) so my interest in socializing with them quickly dropped down to somewhere below 0 degrees C. 

I almost feel like my shift from friendly interest to complete disinterest in the realization that they were Ukrainian was slightly racist, but hey, in the suburban life sometimes you just have to do some things you are not always proud of to survive!       

Life, Death and Murder in the Chiba Suburbs

"...and when I'm finished, bring the yellow tape

To tape off the scene of the slaughter"

A while back we had a tragic incident in our neighborhood as the husband of one of our neighbors apparently passed away in a car accident, leaving the wife and young kids behind (granted, the source of the info was the infamous Mama Mafia so he might as well have run of to support the uprising in north Africa for all I know). As sad as it might sound we had no real connection to the family as the accident happened just at the time they were about to move in and we only met them once when they came around for greetings with towels (yes, so we had an ominous feeling from the start). So the house has remained empty for more than a year and we really didn't think about it much more than the occasional talk about whether someone new would move in or not.

Then the other day a cleaning crew was at their house and was sorting out the jungle that the garden had turned into making it likely that something is about to happen with the house. The conversation I had with Mrs. Sunshine went something like this:


Salaryman: I guess they'll sell the house, the wife probably need the money for herself and the kids now that the husband is gone?
Mrs. Sunshine: (matter of factly) Actually there was an insurance included in the contract, so if the breadwinner dies the insurance pays off the loan, so she should be ok.
Salaryman:(surprised) Huh? That's great actually, I didn't realize that but good to know that you and the baby don't have to struggle with that if anything would happen to me.
Mrs. Sunshine: (neutral) Yeah, I thought so too...

(a few seconds of ominous silence)

Salaryman: (jokingly, on the surface) So I guess I should be a bit careful, huh?
Mrs. Sunshine: (not letting anything show) Why?
Salaryman: Well, if you would murder me you could get a lot of money through that insurance!
Mrs. Sunshine: (immediately without a second of hesitation) Yeah, I totally know, but I just don't wanna go to jail?
Salaryman:(feeling constructive) Well you could murder me in a sneaky way, I would totally murder me if I were you! Why not some rare poison that the police is too dumb to figure out?

Mrs. Sunshine: (thoughtfully) That's true... I guess I could do it smart without getting caught...

(another few seconds of uncomfortable silence)

Salaryman: (nervously) Hey! I'm only joking here, you wouldn't murder me, right?!

Mrs. Sunshine: (a bit too long pause before speaking) Of course not, I would never murder you, I love you (big smile)

From now on Toddler Sunshine will have a bit of everything I eat, just to be safe. The whiskey and chili oil might be a tad bit too early for her, but it's for the common good!

Word gets around...

Beware the Mafia!

I do realize that in this blog I seem to start things that I don't really follow up on properly... On my "at some point when I have time, energy and inspiration" list there is to do a follow up post on the "buying a house in Japan" series, as well as "making babies in Japan" and there's also a post on Japanese otaku and how they actual became useful during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster. But at this stage, the combined force of the summer heat and the stress and stuff going on with recently changing jobs, I have to admit that I am lacking in time, energy and inspiration....

It's a bit depressing to see the visitor numbers dipping a bit in the recent months (up until recently, I've always had a very slow but steady growth in monthly visitors, but hey, since I started the blog the first year with 10 visitors a day there's plenty of room to grow...) and a few "followers" also seem to be dropping off to bigger and better places, but that's something that comes with the territory of the slower pace of posting I guess.

Well, that wasn't really intended to be the main topic of today's post. Today's topic is actual a little follow up on life as a house owner here in Japan, although not chronologically correct at the stage where the story is now. But anyway, we bought our house in an area with a bunch of new built houses clustered together in a little community. The Salaryman family were among the first people who moved into one of the 45 something houses in the cluster. 

It quite quickly became obvious that most of the people who had bought houses in the area were somewhat similar to us in terms of age and family. Basically everyone in our neighborhood is ~30 something with one or two small kids (and others on the way, I think there are at least two women currently pregnant). That everyone is new also means that there still is no clear hierarchy among the housewives (as most are as the kids are small) and alliances are still being forged. 

However, something that we refer to as the "Mama Mafia" has emerged and is a cluster of around ~10 of the women in the area with kids in similar age. Previously, they used to have their gossip meetings just outside our house. Before Baby Sunshine was born, they were a little cold to Mrs. Sunshine, but as soon as the baby came into play, they seemed more eager to recruit her into the mafia. She has so far managed to avoid becoming a full time patched in member, but is something like an "associated member" of the Mafia at this point. 

The amount of gossip that goes around the Mafia is also quite astounding. A few weeks earlier Toddler Sunshine had a bit of a fever, not extremely high, but still high enough to warrant a visit to the doctor for some nice drugs and a few days of taking it easy in the house. As Mrs. Sunshine emerged from that and met with the Mafia when Toddler Sunshine was up and about again she found out that word on the street was that Toddler Sunshine had been infected with some form of really dangerous killer virus and had been between life and death for a week (even more surprising since Mrs. Sunshine barely had told anyone about the babies little cold). More recently we also heard how the area we live in is really dangerous and that a woman had been violently abducted from the local 7-eleven, but a quick scan of the news showed nothing of the kind (and such an event would be nationwide news).

Mrs. Sunshine is keeping to the strategy to stay on the good side of the Mafia but avoid getting too entangled in all the scheming and dirty business that is going on. Recently a non-mafia member mama approached her when the Mafia wasn't looking and was trying to make friends and half-whispered "I'm also a bit left out of the group, just like you" to which Mrs. Sunshine barely managed to repress expressing that she was as involved as she'd like to be... Compared to this, the politics in the office are mild mannered and fun...

Odds and Ends (to borrow a subtitle from Chris)

• Japan have a new prime minister and I can't really muster up any enthusiasm for it at all, Noda is his name apparently, but he'll probably be gone in a year anyway so no need to remember it...
• As a father, I am starting to worry a bit as Toddler Sunshine shows no interest at all in toddlers her own age, nor older girls that want to play with her, but older boys (well, for her "older" means age 2-5) seem drawn to her and she giggles like a little girl when they flock around her...
• I am getting quite annoyed with blogger as I for some reason have not been able to post comments for some reason this last week; I've been trying to comment on Bigger in Japan, Corinne's, Project Me and Saraf recently but kept getting refused to log in (and not being able to post "anonymously" with e-mail and website link either for some reason), this obviously happen AFTER I've written the comment and then after two or three tries of rewriting it I just give up... My apologies, but rest assured that there should be a few very insightful comment in there!  

Buying a house in Japan Part 10 - The Immigration Lawyer...

(Again, to catch up on the ongoings, read the previous posts in this series here)

So, quite late in the evening during a regular weekday with just a couple of days to go until my permanent residence visa application had to be delivered, me and Mrs. Sunshine found ourselves in the middle of the most rundown and dirty area of the Ikebukuro red-light district to try and find the office of the immigration lawyer that we had made contact with the night before.

After some considerable search, we finally located the building, an apartment building that now seemed to no longer house private residences but offices of questionable (judging from the names they mostly seemed related to the sex industry in the area) firms housed in tiny one room apartments.

The lawyer turned out to be a quite friendly young guy who ushered us into the shabby apartment that served as his little law office, as we had explained our situation over the phone the previous day, he knew the basics of what we needed to have done and was quite positive that he could meet the deadline of compiling my permanent residence application within the two days that we had. Although friendly and seemingly competent enough, there was a certain "Ikebukuro Red-Light District Lawyer" vibe about him which was a bit reinforced by his seemingly erratic business hours (opening late in the afternoon and being available well into the night).

From the start, it became quite clear that he was more used to less straightforward permanent residence applications... Now, I'm not the expert on the visa process or anything, but when it comes to people applying for permanent residence who balance on the "~8 year before applying" criteria and do not have specialists job in the diplomatic or education sector, having a Japanese spouse is one of the more important factors. Considering the location of his office and the clientele that you could assume comes with it, I think it's fair to assume that he had handled a number of applications like this where marriages had been tied just to help in getting the visa... The conversation went something like this

Lawyer: Ok, so one of the first things that they're going to check is the passport and the stamps that you have and if any of you have made any trips together or so, how about you?

Salaryman: Yeah, sure, we took our honeymoon to Hawaii and have made a few other trips before that as well, take a look (handing over the passports)

Lawyer: (checking stamps and dates, nodding to himself as he finds that they correlate) ...nice...

Lawyer: (quite upbeat) Ok, next, you don't happen to have any pictures of you two together during the honeymoon or so that can give some more evidence?

Salaryman: (handing over a bunch of photos) We have a few here and we also had our wedding here in Tokyo with 70 or so guests, we have those pictures here as well (pointing at the wedding pictures with all of Mrs. Sunshine's serious looking Japanese relatives)

Lawyer: (with a sly grin) Nice, you really have all the bases covered, don't you (gives a wink)

Mrs. Sunshine: (slightly annoyed) Well, we are married actually, you know so I think it's quite normal.

Lawyer: (ignoring her and lowering his voice and almost whispers) One more very important thing, outside your apartment, do you have a nameplate with your family name on it?

Salaryman: (a bit surprised) No, actually not, we haven't gotten around to it and are gonna move quite soon anyway, why?

Lawyer: (looks around conspiratorially) You see... Sometimes they actually go to the apartment and try to check things out and if you don't have a nameplate, they might call the doorbell and want to check that things are in order... (looking very serious)

Salaryman: (laughing at the absurdity of the conversation) Well, ok, but they're more than welcome you know, we have nothing to hide!

Lawyer: (just looking very serious and concerned at both of us, silence for a few seconds)

Mrs. Sunshine: (to me) Look, whatever, I'll just make a sign and set it up tomorrow.

Lawyer: (gives a wink and a grin) Clever wife you have there.

After a few more back and forth of this type it finally seemed to dawn on him that there really wasn't any "catch" except the speed we needed the application compiled in. And by the end, he looked mildly relieved and looked at us and said "Huh? This actually looks a lot easier than most of the cases I handle, I'll knock off 20% of the price for you because of that".

As we left the office at around midnight, handing over half the money as advance payment I had the feeling that as soon as we had left the building, he was on the phone either with A) The Yakuza to use the money to pay off the money he owed them B) his favorite whorehouse asking them to saddle up since he got money in the bank or C) his gambling pals to make sure he would get in on the next mahjong game.

In the end he managed to get the application submitted on time and without any hitches I got the permanent residence visa approved, so although I would be hesitant to recommend him (unless you happen to be a Philippine girl in the Ikebukuro "service industry" overstaying your visa marrying the brother of the local club owner to get the visa), he took care of stuff quite smoothly for us.

It’s not who you are, it’s what you give

I realize that I've stopped the exciting buying a house series just when the tension was rising, please hold on a little longer, the upcoming episode with the lawyer is so great that I want to be able to do it full justice and write it properly.

Meanwhile, as we recently had a new family moving into the neighborhood who came around, introduced themselves and handed over a small gift. As you might have come to know from reading my blog or just knowing Japan in general, gifts are frequent and very important here in Japan . I also realized how closely me and Mrs. Sunshine associated the quality of the gifts with the people who gave them. As we moved into a new built little community and were one of the first people actually moving into our little house, quite a few families has come around and introduced themselves, each bringing a small gift.

When talking with Mrs. Sunshine recently about who lived in which house, we realized that we didn’t really remember faces and names that well, but very clearly remembered who had given us what and that was the hook for us to remember the family. "Oh, yeah, that was they who gave us those nice cookies, it was a good gift so they seemed really nice" or "wasn't it that family who gave us that really crappy towel set? They can’t have that much common sense" or the favorite, the family that gave us the exactly same thing that we ourselves gave out when we moved in "They seemed really nice and that they picked the same cake as us for gifts showed that they knew exactly what is suitable to give as a gift, they have excellent taste!".

Interestingly enough, it's seems like the old tradition of giving buckwheat noodles ("soba") have basically died out, so don't go around handing those out unless you're moving in to a geriatric ward.

Country life

As readers of my blog probably are well aware, since about a year earlier the Salaryman family relocated from central Tokyo to the suburbian outskirts of the city. The area is still just ~30min away from central Tokyo with the train, but sometimes I feel like we ended up in the real countryside.

Last year, on my way to and from the station, I usually passed by a number of pretty run-down homeless people, a large number of "Izakaya" style bars/restaurants, one or several low level Yakuza looking "Chinpira" ("small prawn" - small time gangsters) hanging around their turf and quite a few more or less seedy looking girl bars.

In the new Salaryman Family area we recently passed by the local elementary school who had drawn quite a crowd with today's event of "sweet potatoe picking contest" and a small restaurant located in what looked like a residential home called "Loghouse Country Diner".

Well, at least the Chinpira guys are just 30 minutes away if we take the train!

Buying a house in Japan Part 9 - Finding the lawyer

(Again, check out here to catch up on the ongoings so far)

As we now found ourselves with the issue of finishing up and submitting a "permanent residence" visa application to the immigration office within just a few days in order to secure the loan that we had filed for, things were a bit tense in the Salaryman household. Since neither of use had any experience in putting together such an application and the amount of documents are quite significant, it seemed like an almost impossible proposition for us to manage within just a few days, and to add to that, working days for me where I would had to spend most of the time toiling away in the office.

While my outlook was basically that of quite defeatism, Mrs. Sunshine had a burst of energy and located a lawyer working with things like this, relatively close to our previous apartment in Ikebukuro and as I came home after an exhausting day in the office, basically resigned to the fact that we would never get the application done and submitted and that we would have to give up the dream house we had seen the previous day, she had located a small one man law office.

(The conversation we had when I came home could've been taken from the movie Aliens, where I would play the part of Hudson and Sunshine that of Ripley:
Hudson: "That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?"
Ripley: "You better just start dealing with it, Hudson! Listen to me! Hudson, just deal with it, because we need you and I'm sick of your bullshit.")

So, as the phonecall was placed around 9PM and we explained the situation, to our surprise the lawyer said "Sure, we can do this, can you come over now immediately so I can start working, I'll be here all night?". As we headed out into the night with our documents towards the middle of the most sleazy area in Ikebukuro to have this midnight meeting with this lawyer, the real excitement started, but that's for the next post.

(Educational Piece: I think that most people put together their own applications for the "permanent residence" visa based on the instructions from the immigration office instead of paying an external person to handle this and assuming that time is available this is probably the best way to go. If you google around a bit I'm sure that you can find several homepages that give advice and instructions on how to do this)

Buying a house in Japan Part 8 - The LOAN!

(Go here to read up on the story so far)

Having found the perfect place for the Salaryman family and sitting down in the office of the real estate agent to start getting the purchase in motion, there was the slight issue of the loan we needed to take...

Basically we sat down and needed to fill out about hundreds of pages of forms to declare our intent to buy the house. Also, we needed to, within a few days, make a cash down payment of about a million Japanese yen (roughly $10,000 USD) which would not be returned in case we changed our minds our wanted to cancel the purchase. "Fair enough" we thought since our intent would withdraw the house from the market and make sure that it wouldn't be snatched up form under our noses.

Now, the only issue we faced was to secure the finances we needed to actually buy the house (generally, you need to cough up between $300,000-500,000 USD for a decent new house in the Tokyo area). Since we, the Salaryman family lacked the means to buy the house with cash, taking a loan was the only feasible option, and this is where all the hilarity started...

I had done some basic research on loans and stuff before we ventured out on this whole house buying adventure and was aware that most Japanese banks require the person to have "permanent residence" visa status and that a few banks might grant a loan even if that's not the case. I also knew that a number of other more exotic options existed that had no Japanese visa demands, like taking a loan from a non-Japanese bank etc. It should also be added that I didn't have permanent residence status at this stage, but was not particularly concerned about getting that with ~10 years in Japan, stable job, Japanese mother and Japanese wife.

Sitting down with the sales representative, we explained our situation and asked about his advice for getting a loan secured, something which he was more than happy to do since the money would end up in his company (likely with a nice commission for him as well for making the sale). After a few calls and a few solid "no, not unless he has permanent residence status" and some "we would need to look into this more in detail" that might take more time than we had to get the purchase done by the time we wanted, one of the largests banks here in Japan; the Mizuho bank stated that "we can grant the loan assuming that this person has filed an application for permanent residence".

With Mrs. Sunshine coming from a family with quite a few of the male members working in the banking sector and considering the stability of Mizuho, we decided that that would be the best option for us to go. The only problem was that we needed to get the visa submission in within a few days (yep, hadn't done anything really to prepare...)...

Coming up next: Visa applications, shady lawyers and massage parlors

Buying a house in Japan Part 7 - The Decision!

I know that I'm not keeping up this great series very regular, so just go here to get the recap and your bearings on where we are in our house buying endeavours!

After several months of scanning the Internet and going to check out houses, we finally managed to find a house that looked basically perfect. One of our biggest requirements, and also hurdle, was our wish to have a decent sized living room where we could fit in a nice big corner sofa and also have some room for the baby to play in. Most of the houses we saw were of decent size in terms of sqm, but usually had a quite small living room (~15-20sqm or so perhaps).

Before we went to see the place we had quite high hopes since we had seen the layout, knew the location, price and all of it seemed to meet our initial requirements, so the deal breaker would be if the distance to the train station would be misleading in the papers or that the designer had been drunk when choosing the color schemes etc. in the house.

As we met up with the in-laws, who joined in for support, and discussed our strategy, we decided to use English as much as possible when expressing our opinions on stuff to not give away too much to the sales rep (who we correctly assumed wouldn't be able to understand English). This was probably good in theory, but practically completely unnecessary since even a deaf sales rep would be able to read our reactions as we enthusiastically checked out the place and found it to be basically perfect and what we had been looking for since several months back and almost given up on.

After seeing the house and sat down with the rep, we quite quickly made it clear that we wanted the house (note to self; next time buying a house, trying to negotiate price before saying "it's great, we want it!" might give a stronger position for negotiations). For obvious reasons, the rep was more than happy to sell us the house, but also needed to get things put in motion for the huge loan that we needed to take, as well as a down payment of 1 million Yen (~$10K USD) in cash within a few days... The down payment we could scavenge up without too much effort.

Coming up next; the LOAN

Buying a house in Japan Part 6 - The Sales Reps

As the Salaryman-Sunshine family (baby Sunshine still comfortably internalized inside Mrs. Sunshine) continued the hunt for a suitable base of operations, a quite large number of weekends were spent visiting and checking out a quite large number of houses and met a host of different reps with different approaches to the job.

The basic flow is the same as in most places I would guess; most of the houses we checked out were recommended by one of the local real estate agents in the area and a rep would take us out to the property, show us how things looked, answer any questions and with varying degrees of effort put into it, try to sell us the house. In some instances when we were looking into houses that were planned or under construction, we talked directly with the sales department of the building company (who usually has a separate subsidiary doing the sales).

I must admit that I had an image of real estate sales reps as being quite pushy and aggressive in their sales methods (by Japanese standards) but to our surprise this was not the case. We encountered three basic types of reps:

Rep Type A: Didn't really care much and seemed more annoyed than anything that he/she had to leave his comfy little office and actually guide some potential customers to the property he/she was trying to sell. Typical exchanges would be us saying "well, this living room is a bit on the small side" and getting a "yep, it's pretty small isn't" in reply without any effort in putting any spin to it.

Rep Type B: The slightly slimy besserwisser type sales rep. To their credit, this type did actually try to sell the property in question but had the annoying habit of trying to sell in and empasize features that were pretty obvious; "look, you can actually put a medium-sized refrigirator here, how about that, huh?" "this room has heated flooring, have you ever heard of such a thing? It heats the floor and keeps your feet warm at winter". We encountered a few of these and usually ended up being more annoyed by the sales tactics than put off by the property...

Rep Type C: Well, this would be the more reasonable and low-key type of rep that we eventually ended up buying our house from. This were the type that let us check stuff out on our own mostly and answered our questions, focusing on the good things but not trying to spin things into the surreal.

In the end we got a really good rep and I was surprised to see that we got a very good after-service after purchasing the house (small stuff fixed quickly and without any fuss). However, we did end up buying through a housing company so it might be different when buying a used property through a real estate agent.

Buying a house in Japan Part 5 - The Hunt is on!

(Ok, I know I promised the reps in this installment, but I think that I'd better discuss the actual hunt first, so wait 'til the next time please!)

As we were now basically had narrowded down our preferences and done some initial scouting, we were now ready to more seriously start to hunt down the Salaryman-cave that we both wanted.

Basically the search went through two separate ways; one was our own hunting via Internet to see if we could find a house that A) Was the size we needed B) Located in the area we wanted (i.e. train stations) C) Within our price range. There's no lack of search sites avaliable (yahoo.co.jp and athome.co.jp are two respectable ones) and most of them allowed for quite sensitive search criteria; which was good. The bad was that not much came up... In parallel with our own efforts, the Father-in-Law had also made it his mission to help us in our hunt, travelling around to local smaller real estate agents to see if anything new that hadn't made it to the Internet yet had shown up.

For a few months, this was quite depressive since basically very few attractive places showed up and those that did oftentimes looked much better on paper than in real life or had some catch included that wasn't clearly stated (e.g. construction was delayed so wouldn't be available until later than we had planned etc.).

There was a time when we had basically all but given up and resigned to the fact that we would have to make some considerable concessions in our search criteria (the above A, B and C...) to have any chance of finding a place that would be worthy to serve as the permanent base of operations for years to come. Then through a stroke of luck, through the efforts of the FIL we managed to get our filthy hands on some information that had not yet gone up on the Internet, but that is story for the final installments in this great series!

Buying a house in Japan Part 4 - The Layout and the Tatami-room

Ok, I do admit that I'm not keeping this series as regularly updated as maybe I should, but I can't really be bothered with doing a recap every time I update so if you're wondering where we are in this exciting sequence of events click the "buying a house in Japan" label and read up.

Me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman were basically in agreement in what type of floor plan and space we wanted for our new little house; basically a large living room with kitchen, three bedrooms and one guestroom downstairs. The only place where we ran into some discussion were as to whether it was necessary that the downstairs guestroom would be a Japanese style room with tatami room or a regular western style room. Since I felt no particular need for a room to drink green tea in, sitting in a kimono contemplating my next move in the game of Go, I initially put up some minor resistance against the idea of a tatami room. The rationale for my resistance was based on the minimalistic approach of Japanese rooms and the difficulties in setting up matching bookshelves, drawers and other furniture.

My resistance proved quite futile, not due to overwhelming opposition, but mainly due to the fact that it proved quite impossible to find a house with the layout we wanted without a Japanese room and that we had already abandoned the idea of having a house built according to our specs...

In the end, I'm quite ok with the Tatami-room, we have no lack of storage space and it actually does smell pretty nice and also serves as a easy-access non-cluttered storage facility for Baby Sunshine.

Coming up next: The Sales Reps...

Buying a House in Japan Part 3 - Building from scratch or buying finished

Ok, so just to quickly recap the events here for those who are too lazy to go back and check the earlier posts in this series.

Basically, the Salaryman household had at this stage decided to A) Purchase a free-standing house and not an apartment/mansion and B) To look outside main metropolitan Tokyo for this.

The next critical question that appeared was how to approach this, basically the three choices of 1. Buying a used house (to possibly renovating depending on the state of it), 2. Buying a lot of land and then having the house built, or, 3. Purchasing an already (or almost) finished new house to move in our meager belongings to.

At the onset, we did not rule out any of the options, but after viewing quite a few used houses and not finding anything we really liked, we mostly set our focus on the latter two options. The obvious appeal of buying a lot of land and then contracting the building of the house to a company carried with it the very attractive options of being able to fully customize the layout and everything related to the house (for me, crawlspace and a Gary Heidnik style torture dungeon were pretty high up on the wish-list to give it a bit more of an unique flavour).

For a little while we basically pursued this path (or somewhere in-between, where some customization was possible) but after realizing that this would first of all take considerable time (several months since the house did, for obvious reasons, not physically exist when we would start) and also endless meetings where materials used etc. would need to be discussed, priced and decided upon together with the architects and the construction company. Not to mention that the culmulative knowledge of house-building and proper materials for such between me and Mrs. Salaryman basically is close to the freezing point... Also,the fact that Mrs. Sunshine's brother was simultaneously pursuing this house-building path and that his project had been dragging on for over a year just further discouraged us.

In the end, we decided to go for purchasing a finished house for immediate moving in, and to depend on more knowledgable family and friends that the house would be solidly built with no cheap stuff.

Ok, so far I don't think this has been very entertaining, but now the scene has been set for some of the more interesting challenges we were facing when moving forward with this!

Buying a House in Japan Part 2 - It's all about location

To slowly continue this series, as you might remember, we left off where the Salaryman family had decided to set their sights on purchasing a house and not a apartment (here).

Then the next set of choice came up; where to start looking for said house. Considering that I work in central Tokyo, we obviously needed somewhere reasonably accessible through commute. The options were to search in central Tokyo or in the surrounding prefectures (Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa prefectures primarily) which can provide reasonable access although a significant commute to and from work.

After some initial scouting we came to the following conclusion; Buying a house in metropolitan Tokyo would have the benefit of a short commute and also being a pretty safe investment since the land prices in central Tokyo very likely will not take a huge dive. However, that said, they also are extremely expensive and with land being as valuable as it is, houses are focused on being built narrow and high instead of broad and wide... So basically a house with two bathrooms, three rooms +living/dining room end up being three stories high and very narrow. Also, if you're lucky you could get a parking space and garden suitable for one bicycle and one potted plant. But if you get that you should be grateful, considering that the land is basically gold.

In contrast, looking outside Tokyo, for half the price of that in central Tokyo we could get a house roughly twice the area, with a garden and parking space for two larger size trucks, with the downside of an increased commuting time of about an hour single way...

As readers of my blogs have noticed, after the move I started up the "Commuter terrorists" series of posts, so I think it is pretty obvious which path we decided to pursue...

Buying a House in Japan Part 1 - House or "mansion"?

So, now finally I'm getting around to start this new hit educational series on house buying in Japan. In case you have any specific questions that you would like me to dig into on this subject, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail on it and I will see what I can do.

As me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman had tied the not and considered moving out from the relatively small rental apartment in Ikebukuro we were staying at before. When considering our options, we decided that we did not want to rent anymore but invest in buying.

The first question that came up was what to target; a free standing house or a "mansion"? In Japan, what goes as a "mansion" is what is commonly known outside of Japan as an "apartment" and can be just one room and is nothing fancy. The origins as to why the Japanese borrowed that word into the language and decided to apply it, not to a spacious house with a ballroom and tons of bedrooms, but to a regular apartment is lost to me (does anyone happen to know?). There are also "apartments" in Japan and the general difference between a "mansion" and "apartment" in Japan is that the latter usually are older, have thinner walls and is generally quite crappy by Western standards.

There are conveniences you get with a mansion that you don't get with your own house, quite a few places offer dry cleaning services, have rental rooms for visiting family, better security and if something breaks down having it fixed is usually taken care of by the janitor. But we decided that we wanted to have the privacy and freedom of having our completely own place including the plot of land. So that's the direction we headed off to when we started looking for a house!

Coming up next: The search - where to buy and where to not buy...