Two Months in Japan II: Apartment-Hunting?

Sorry about last post's abrupt end (though looking back on it I guess it was quite the cliff-hanger).

That afternoon I was meeting up with a German girl who I met at the hostel in Tokyo who is studying in Kyoto. She sent me a text message the night before saying she was coming into Osaka for the afternoon and asked if I wanted to meet up for coffee, so she came to meet me at the Apple Store (the computer company - they have computers with free internet) and we walked into America Mura (the American youth district - no actual Americans, just Japanese people with dreadlocks wearing t-shirts that say things like "Mother Africa" and trendy shops selling used American clothing from the early 90s). Amemura is great, lively any time of day.

So a couple of hours later I headed up to work, then after work headed north to Shiga prefecture. My friend Steve was able to get me in on a great "gig": one hour of English conversation at a community centre in Shiga for $100. REALLY necessary for a part-time worker like me to escape starvation. There was only one catch: it was at 9:30am on a Saturday morning. So I had to camp out in his apartment the night before.

The conversation thing was pretty good. There were four of us, American Steve, American Tim, Irish Therese and me, and about 17 Japanese people. The people in more rural areas like this are really appreciative to be able to speak English with locals. It all went fairly smoothly in my group since I'm now pretty used to making conversation with Japanese people after all the Voice classes I've had to lead. I really hope they invite me back to do this in future weekends (it's a regular event, at least once a month I think) because it's great money and pretty easy.

Therese demonstrated (and had them practice) some series of Irish dancing moves which earned her a fair amount of applause. She went north to go skiing afterwards, but Tim, Steve and I all went for revolving sushi.

Ok, I know you're wondering when I'm going to get back to finishing off last week's cliffhanger, so here goes:

I've decided I'm definitely moving (I've been more or less considering it since the day I arrived, but thought I'd wait it out a little bit). My house is a disgusting mess. I'm used to living in messy, "unsanitary" conditions, but this is just ridiculous. I can't cook a meal or touch the majority of things beyond my room without risking getting the plague. It's run down too, you can barely call it, as they say, "furnished", since of the appliances have probably been around since the 70s. Yes, the 70s, as in the decade before I was born. Thirdly, I'm being slightly shafted, as one of my roommates has a balcony-adjacent bedroom that is at least twice (probably three times) the side of mine, including numerous things such as a desk, two closets, a clothes rack, bookshelves. Mine barely has enough room for my futon (and no, as were promised to me, clothes racks - I'm hanging my shirts and suits on a piece of wood in my closet). Fourthly, my roommates have really gotten used to the atmosphere of living in the slums... they rarely wash dishes and have sometimes seem to forget the concept of where garbage is supposed to go. I think they might also have some fire safety issues, but that's another story.

Oh, and for all this I'm paying 58,000 yen per month. Someone in my neighbourhood told me they were paying 57,000 yen per month and showed me their apartment - it was only a bit smaller than ours but was all to herself.

Things are still not too bad, though, since I don't spend all that much time at home. It's kind of like staying in hostels while traveling - you just need somewhere to pass out after a long day of sightseeing and a long night of heavy drinking. But now that I've started becoming more frugal and would really like to start cooking and spending more time at home, I would really like somewhere safe and clean to do so.

But before I get to that, I'll tell you what I recently found out about my apartment last week (probably the thing that really got these new apartment plans in motion). I was complaining about it to a new person at work when my co-worker Janette (who has been here for a few years) said: "Oh, you live in Lions Mansion... you don't happen to live in that Nova apartment on the sixth floor, do you?"
"Why yes, I do," I replied, "Why?"
"Oh, God. Well... my friend was placed there a couple of years ago. He's a pretty dirty guy and the apartment was horrible disgusting back then..." And she basically described my apartment minus two years of absolutely no cleaning or hygiene. Hmm... No wonder I'm the fourth roommate in the past six months.

Will warned me about this ahead of time, though, saying that he and Chris are just really relaxed when it comes to being clean. So nothing against them at all, they're overall really great roommates and I'm a bit worried of what my new ones are going to be like.

That brings me onto the next matter: where I'm going to live. I can call Nova and tell them to just reassign me to a new apartment and I think it can all be done pretty easily. I like my area so I might request to stay here, unless I could get something even more convenient like Umeda.

Another idea is just to give Nova my month's notice and get my own apartment with a private landlord, though that's all a little complicated in Japan. On the plus side, a regular apartment would be much cheaper (Nova ups the rent by something like 33%). But on the negative side, there's the whole "dealing with a Japanese landlord" thing. And this is much worse than it sounds. For example, it's customary to pay something called "key money" in Japan. Key Money is a gift of something like 3-6 months worth of rent to your landlord when you move in. So that's something like $1800 easily the day you move in. And it's not like this is some kind of deposit or something credited towards your future rent payments, this is just a "gift" that you have to give you your landlord to thank them for letting you be a tenant in their apartment building. There are more complications, too, that's just the scariest part.

So one consideration I've been taking into mind about my new apartment's location is the gym. I need to join a gym and don't know where to sign up since I might possible be moving. Gyms in Japan have an annoying tendency to all operate on their own, meaning that if I signed up with one, even though it's a big chain company, I would still not be a member at their other locations around town. Someone told me today that books have been written saying that Japan is regarded as a great place for entrepreneurs because of all of these types of inefficiencies still lurking about. This could be an interesting topic if I end up doing a Monbukagakusho research thesis here, but that's another topic to be covered later.

I've been checking out gyms around town and was going to hold a "readers' poll" this post so that you could get involved and vote on which gym I should join (they're pretty much all the same price but have different advantages). But I want to wait until I find out more about where I'll be moving.

I have to go to bed.