Before dinner last Wednesday, my wife and I took a short bike ride around the block looking in the windows of the apartment shops, as we have been for the last number of months. Ang's 3 year non-renewable job contract is about to expire this July, and along with it, our lease on the apartment which also belongs to the school. We've steadily been noticing a continuing drop in the number of 'nice' apartments in the last number of months. First of all, April is the end of the financial year and also moving season for almost all Japanese people. Another reason for the drop has been attributed to the Japanese love for June brides, so there are a number of young couples out there just like us snapping up all the best apartments.
Anyway, Wednesday night I decided we'd done enough waiting, so when the agent stepped out of the door to usher us into the store I put up very little resistance and followed him right in. By Friday we were being ushered around a small number of apartments to see how we liked them. We quickly realised that the price we were after was going to be impossible if we were to actually enjoy the next year at all in any semblance of comfort. Sadly our price bracket had to jump up another $150 a month. By Friday night we had registered our interest in one little place a little bit further away from the station than we are now, quite nice but it didn't have the separate kitchen we were hunting for. It was also quickly named Brainfry due to the fact that if you look up out of the living room window you get a beautiful view of an enormous neighbouring mobile phone tower. The only bonus of this is that the tower sits atop the local telephone switching station, our ADSL connection would be getting a mighty boost, fantastic. The fact that we will begin to glow in the dark in a few weeks time was put to the back of our minds.
On Saturday we continued our search at the next apartment shop in the line, and quickly found out that each store actually shares the same listings. This shop still managed to show us around a number of different apartments, one of which we were particularly interested in, due to the fact that it was only about 50 metres from our current apartment, and had everything we were after. The price was a little higher than we had wanted, but we were willing to absorb it for convenience's sake. We were later to find out that this property was owned by a branch of the local government, in charge of Japanese Agriculture of all things, and they happen to have a 'No Foreigners' policy written down in their books that there was no way around. It didn't matter who our employer was or our references, it didn't get around the fact that we were dirty foreigners. One of the worst things about that is that any Japanese person I tell about it, says that it is "too bad", but their facial expressions give away the fact that they aren't really too surprised about it. Damn government sponsored racism, 'please come to our country nice foreigner, but don't even think about staying here'.
Anyway, Sunday was also spent checking out properties, and we even visited a third and fourth shop. The third shop had a cool young agent that we really would have wanted to get a property through, and he also seemed so disappointed when we had already seen almost every property he could have shown us. Hopefully we can take a couple of friends to him shortly to cheer him up.
By Monday we were down to two properties. One that was the perfect design inside, next to a train line but not near the station (13 minutes walk) or any shops, and also on the 1st floor, which equals colder in winter. And one that was slightly closer to the stations (9 minutes walk), 2nd floor, potential for super fast internet, super close to good shops, restaurants and a big park, but had no separate kitchen, and would fry our brains. We had no choice but to go for the fried brains. We're hoping not to regret our decision in the next number of months, but hey, that's life. Mmmmmmmm Braiiiinnnnssssss...
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