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Price Map
Basic Estate Agent Codes
Deposit & Key money
Wa and Yō
Apartment and Mansion
Wa and Yō
The One Room (Usagi Goya)
Lofts
All About Bathrooms
Japan has some interesting peculiarities when it comes to real estate. Rooms that perplex and delight. Maybe you’ve figured out where to search for your apartment but now you’ve got to know what to look for. Here’s my guide on what’s what.
Price Map
Here is a semi-translated map of the current rental rates in Tokyo for One-rooms, 1K apartments and mansions:
Basic Estate Agent Codes
帖 / Jō The unit of measurement in Japanese rooms, based on tatami mats that are 1.82m long × 92cm wide, roughly the size of a human being with a margin.
1,2,3,4… Number of separate bedrooms – “one room” (ワンルーム) style studios where you sleep in your kitchen are not listed as 1**
L,D,K Living, Dining, Kitchen. Often in Japanese real estate this can be all one room. As a rough guide, estate agents will list up to 3.5 Jō space as a kitchen (enough room for a stove and basin unit, a fridge, and for you to stand and cook. nothing else), 4 Jō – 6 Jō as a DK dining and kitchen space… (enough for a small table and 2 chairs – a table and 4 chairs), and 7 Jō plus as an LDK where you can presumably get a sofa in as well. There are some apartments where the L is a separate room from the DK, but predominantly the pattern is to classify a room big enough for a sofa and a small table as an LDK
UBThe Unit Bath. A bizarre invention where your bathroom looks like a space pod – seemingly formed out of a single piece of plastic and inserted into your apartment. Generally a sign of a low grade apartment, varying styles from toilet butted up next to bath, or my personal favorite – shower head over the toilet :S. See below for more details
BT別[Insert god rays and angel chorus] The holy grail of Japanese apartments – the separate bath and toilet. Sign of a good apartment – toilet and bathroom are in different places!! Learn this Kanji which means separate!
S Strange unusual letter that will confuse most Japanese people. Means varyingly: service room, storage room – 納戸 Nando, normal room but has no windows… (contained inside the middle of a structure perhaps)
SB Shoe box… weren’t expecting that were you!
MB Meter box.. (fusebox) now it’s just getting silly.
押 押し入れ Oshiire This is useful. It means a type of Japanese closet that has a shelf in the middle. Traditionally used for Futons but will fit your clothes on a squished up rail on the top part, or maybe your computer as a desk if you are inventive?
CL Western style full length closet
CF Cushioned flooring. Curious… This generally means the owner used to have tatami mats, but it wasn’t selling or it was too much maintenance so they put flooring over the top of it and made it kinda bouncy..!
玄 This is a random kanji, but in the context of apartments it means the area of the entrance where you take off your shoes and put them in the…. SB
木造 There are lots of codes for different building materials. If you see this kanji, it means the building is made out of wood, generally a sign of a low grade apartment or an old building. Not great for earthquakes, they will wobble a lot more, and in severe earthquakes will burn quickly in fires that inevitably break out. However in the case of the Big One, it’s questionable whether any structure is going to withstand it and in a way, at least if it’s a wooden structure you fall only one or two floors rather than 27 and er.. it’s lightweight?!
SR Shower room. Not that common
Shikikin & Reikin (Deposit & Key Money)
In very simple terms, shiki-kin (敷金) is deposit money that you can* get back, rei-kin (礼金) is gift money you give to the owner and don’t get back. Say what?! Gift money?. Yup, if you haven’t heard already, Japan is a country where you give up to 2 months rent as a present to the rich capitalist bastard who owns your home. Oh the injustice. What’s up with that? Well, back to a recurrent theme, Japan is a country built on a foundation of personal relationships of trust… However, over the course of the Edo and Meiji eras, Tokyo exploded in population size, meaning young students and unskilled workers flooded to Tokyo without any relatives there who could vouch for them or protect them. In order to win the trust of the owner who would usually only let their property to people they knew and trusted, or people who had closeby relatives who could be hounded for late rent money, out-of-town relatives started a custom of paying the landlord some gift money up front to ensure a smooth arrangement and make the landlord feel an obligation to look after the tenant. But this ain’t the Meiji era and I’m not a penniless carpenter from the boondocks! In modern times though, paying this exorbitant fee gives you absolutely nothing in return, and yet continues to be applied to almost all properties. Japanese Wikipedia suggests it is more common in the Kanto area due to this history, though other major cities like Osaka also use this system regularly. What do I do? Not much you can do really. All the more reason to choose your apartment really carefully, because it costs a lot to move. You can try asking your estate agent for no-reikin properties, but they are still less common in Tokyo and may limit your choice too much. So how much money do I need? Anything up to 6 months worth of rent: 2 month’s deposit, 2 month’s key money, 1 month’s agent fee, 1st month’s rent in advance Anything else? Yes…. usually the contract term is 2 years and you have to pay more key money at the end of it. Maybe not as much as before but a significant amount that you won’t get back. Also, you probably won’t get all your deposit back. Try your best by cleaning the apartment to a state of perfection before you leave.
Apartment and Mansion
There are two concepts in Japanese real estate that may differ from your home country. As a general rule,
Apartment means : Cheap(er), low grade, wooden structure, old, low ceiling height, dark – frosted windows, cockroaches, low or no monthly maintenance fee, 1 2 or 3 story building, metallic cheap kitchen often without a stove – just a gas pipe for you to fit a detachable unit to, thin walls, unit baths
Mansion means : non-wooden structure, high rise or taller building, expensive monthly maintenance (¥6000+), caretaker employed around 2 days a week, thick walls, western and or Japanese rooms, better light, separate bath and toilet
Conclusion? Yes mansions are better than apartments and probably where you will want to live long term. Having said that, plenty of foreigners choose apartments on the basis of price, location or availability, and having lived in one myself for a year, I can report it is doable with minimum discomfort. Don’t mistake the apartment style for a more authentic Japanese experience though – almost all Japanese people, women especially, dislike this style of housing, thinking it dirty and unsafe, and would rather live in a more inconvenient location than in this style apartment unless they have no other choice.
Wa and Yō
Learn this kanji!
和洋
WaYō
JapaneseWestern
The One Room (Usagi Goya)
This is a Japanese experiment in hygiene. Eat, sleep, work, entertain, in a space barely bigger than the Tokyo Tower elevator. Cook your food, turn around, you’re in your bedroom… I’ve seen some great photography projects of these usagi-goyas. They have a kind of cult appeal. At least in my mind. A great place to collect thousands of manga comics and lose your mind.
Lofts
These peculiarly Japanese style apartments, though less common, offer you a way out of the one-room hell. Use the downstairs for eating, working, entertaining, and retire at night to a little nook up above. Like in this picture, some of the nooks even have air conditioning. Not for the claustrophobic!
Separate Bath and Toilet, UB and No Bath or Toilet?!
As already mentioned, separate bath and toilet and the Unit Bath Space Pod are markers for the quality of the apartment, and the cost of the rent. There is one more culture shock apartment type – those listed without a bath or a toilet!!! This often fools foreign apartment seekers because the headline price is always stupidly low. As low as ¥45,000 in central Shibuya. Unfortunately, no joy… this is scary ghetto apartment land! Well maybe not. But I certainly have never met a foreigner who moved into this type of accommodation (contact me if you have!). The principal seems to be a very small apartment-style room (hopefully Japanese so you can at least put your bed away during the day) and then a communally shared bathroom and toilet. There is no mention of management so who knows who cleans these areas. 
Alternatively you may find one of the increasingly rare buildings with no bathroom at all. These places rely on a local Sentō public bath to service the renters. This is some hard core Japanese culture experience! And, a great idea for a blog – “blog without a bathroom!”… haha. Anyway, on closer inspection we can see the setup – pretty grim and in all honesty, estate agents might be hesitant to let you live in one, worrying about whether you could deal with the culture, may also have de-facto male-only restrictions.
FYI, these Japanese style toilets are not limited to communal-style apartments. I’ve had a couple of shocks being shown around regular apartments with estate agents and finding such a squat toilet… very weird in your own home!!
Note: the no-bath apartment is not the same as a guest-house / gaijin house. They are not advertised in English, are much smaller, very poorly built and cockroach friendly wooden structures. In all honesty, you’re unlikely to come close to living in one, but it’s good to be aware of what the super-cheap headline price is concealing.
Conclusion
Learn the estate agent lingo so you can find an appropriate apartment and enjoy the cultural experience of peculiar housing
