Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Buying a House in Japan podcast. My name's Take. And I'm Joey. And we're two friends who just quit our corporate jobs and bought a cheap house in rural Japan. The goal of this podcast is to document the highs and lows of the process while informing you of every step you need to take in order for you to do it yourself too. We're by no means experts and we're doing this for the first time, but we hope this gives you a realistic expectation if you embark on this journey yourself and we hope you enjoy the show.
Speaker: Hey all, I did it again. Messed up the audio quality. My bad. Uh, at least this time is a little bit better. And I promise you there are times of charm this episode after this, we are going to nail the audio quality down. So again, thanks. If you want to listen, I totally understand. If you want to pass, I promise we'll do better next time. Welcome to episode number six. We are officially 10 days in living in our new cheap abandoned house in Japan. Not new actually. Uh, we're looking in Beppu Oita.
Speaker: It's been a journey to say the least, Jerry. How are we doing? We're doing good. We're starting to assimilate into the neighborhood. Big thing happened this morning, Takei. Big, big thing. Well, so we haven't showered yet in our house. It's honestly super, super gross. So we've been kind of delaying taking showers and it's been feeling like we've been camping.
Speaker: So again, the city is really well known for its hot springs. So we've been going to hot springs every other day or so, but kind of just been getting lazy. There happens to be one local community owned center hot spring right next to us. It's been locked with a key. So we haven't been able to find out how to get in, but we've been seeing people come out.
Speaker: And I've been asked him and finally we, uh, we had made a break through, made a breakthrough. Um, we got access. So we finally have a place to, uh, shower more regularly. Actually it's, it's bigger than that too. Like one of the things we were looking for was some sort of phone send membership. Um, and this is like a, uh, it's like a private neighborhood.
Speaker: membership onsen, um, which is exactly what we wanted. You go to these other onsens and you're paying 1500 yen each time. Uh, you go almost like regardless of whether you're doing private or public onsen, but, um, we finally have a place. It's like a two minute walk from our house where we can get clean in the morning. It's 24 hours. We have a key power up. We've officially assimilated to the neighborhood. We make some friends. Um, you know, I think.
Speaker: I want to cover in this episode talking a little bit about how we're feeling after 10 days. I feel like we've learned a lot, but it's also been quite tough. The summary of that is these houses are cheap, but they're not easy to fix and get set up, or I don't know what we're doing, Joey, but do you agree with that sentiment? Yeah.
Speaker: We're not in over our head. I feel like we're, it's manageable. We have a plan. Um, but yeah, to put things in perspective, like our whole bottom floor is under construction. There's, there's a big hole in the floor. There's a big hole in the floor up on the upstairs now too. Um, you.
Speaker: need to have that, like if you're going to be an akiya hunter and go after these cheaper properties, like you need to be prepared to be kind of living a little bit camping for a while. Yeah. And at a comparison point, I think since our last podcast, we went down to Miyazaki, which is in the southern tip of this
Speaker: this kind of island to take a look at some properties. This stuff was like real far out there. No foreigners out there. We looked at one property in this, I think it's called Itilizaki Beach. It was a comparable price, about 40K. And holy crap, that was a nice property, Joey, right? It was really nice. Ready to move into like every, it was clean up, you know, it's not,
Speaker: How do I explain it? There's a YouTube video, but at a high level, it was a brand new construction. It had its own private access to a beach. Scratching our heads a little bit like, oh shit, we paid 40K for maybe a dump. I don't know. We were like, oh shoot, should we sell our place and buy this place instead? It was a good comparison point for sure.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, our place isn't a dump, but like you heard our first reactions or go and listen to that episode, our first reactions on the house. Like it was, it was, we were pretty, uh, pretty low point in, in this experience here. We were kind of shocked at how, uh, such bad condition the house is in. Obviously we've been putting a lot of work in and it's getting much more comfortable here, but.
Speaker: Yeah, just the comparison to see how far your money goes or if you, you know, you, you watch the market and you find something that is in good condition in your budget, you know, that's, it's going to be so much more of a comfortable experience. You can move in right. Like really the move in readiness is a big deal. Yeah. So I think thinking about just like after 10 days of living here and doing this, it's.
Speaker: kind of summarize Joey's first point of like, it feels like you have to be open to camping and kind of living a grungy life and kind of getting your hands dirty, I guess to say the least.
Speaker: Overall, I was thinking, I was talking to Jerry about this. I'm not sure if I would necessarily recommend what we're doing to friends. We do have, I think, a little niche of a skill set in that we've studied abroad in Japan. I'm Japanese. Everyone thinks I'm Japanese. Every time you meet someone, they look at me and expect me to speak Japanese, and Jerry's Japanese is better. But we can read. We understand the culture. So I'm definitely rethinking. I've told a lot of friends, like, hey, we bought a house for 40k. You should do it too.
Speaker: I would probably go back on that statement now and say, you know, you really, you really want to have to really love Japan, right? Joey, you're kind of talking about that. Yeah, for me, three, yeah, three things. I think one, you have to, uh, love Japan. Two, you have to be kind of ready to, to camp, um, for a little bit. Um, uh, in the house, what was the third one? I had a third one too.
Speaker: I don't know, you have to try to speak Japanese. I think, you know, I think everyone we've talked to has been very, we say Konnichiwa with a big smile to like all these elderly people and they love that. And I think we've said it enough times that we start building kind of rapport versus kind of, I think the American mentality of expecting people to speak English back to you, I think is, would not fly here.
Speaker: Yeah, you got to make an effort, I think, especially in kind of these like Inaka countryside places. Um, or like, I mean, I wouldn't really consider us in the Inaka, like that was a real city, but we're in a real Japanese neighborhood. Yeah. Um, so, I mean, we, we paid 40 K and an alternative to this is you can kind of pay her when I think this problem, how we bought a house that was turnkey, you know, like didn't have any issues. It was pretty well maintained. I think you.
Speaker: a lot of this hardship you want to go through. And hence, I guess why this place was so cheap and why there are such cheap places in that we physically have been doing hammer, nail, tearing walls, asking neighbors for help, looking for, going to the hardware store every day.
Speaker: I don't think many people are up for us, but, so I guess adding on to Joey's third point, if you are a big DIYer or you want that adventure, you have that time and energy and kind of desire to do it, I say, this is totally for you. And Joey, we've talked, we love what we're doing right now. I think it's quite fun. Every day we are making
Speaker: We like to say, we joke and we say power up. We've gotten power ups here, there on quality of life, I'd say every day. Yeah. And that, I mean, actually, that's the exciting part for me. Like that sort of like, we really started from a low point here and then every day, like the small things, like the small upgrades you do, like at first it was lighting and then like a chair, a chair was a big upgrade for us. Like how.
Speaker: How good those like small upgrades feel when you're doing this is really the exciting part for me And that's what I like about this And you can do it too like if you want to go the cheap Akia route There are these like great experiences that come from it like those like those every power up that you get after getting a chair or you know a coffee mug like those kind of things it feels really good and then that's kind of why we do it but
Speaker: If that's not for you, yeah money can get you out of this type of situation, you know, just up your budget Yeah, look at a place in Tokyo that that kind of stuff can can help you avoid these situations I'd say comparing to the US You know the cost of entry here is makes things a lot more palatable for us I know doing something like this in the US from a cost of goods cost of purchase cost of labor even and cost of just like living cost is all I'd say
Speaker: 30 % higher at minimum. So it is, I think this is a great testing ground to be like, hey, if this is something you're interested in, something you want to kind of like flip or DIY and figure out like hammer through walls and do all these things. This is actually a great opportunity. So, but if you're expecting just to pay 40K for something that's ready and you get it, you know, launching the community have things set up, I think you're, you're in for a route of making
Speaker: Definitely nothing is going to be set up for you. I mean, we didn't have power, we didn't have water, we didn't have gas. I'm literally still afraid to use our toilets, Joey. It's claustrophobic and it's a little scary. We haven't been in our shower slash bath room either. It's pretty gnarly in there. That's why we were really desperate to find other places to get clean.
Speaker: Yeah. In the cultural norms, I know we've said it a couple of times that even just like sorting our trash, we don't know how to throw things away in the US. You can just throw things in a garbage, black garbage in recycling. And it's never questioned here. It's like, it's scrutinized, right? I was really hoping to see the contractor bags at the hardware store. And no, there's no, there's nothing like those, those big black heavy duty contractor bags.
Speaker: We started busting down walls. We've got drywall. We've got random bits of studs or whatever stuff from the walls we busted down. Construction materials now that we need to get rid of and it's just sitting outside. We're not quite sure how to get rid of it yet. We're working on that. Right after this podcast, we are going to do the dreaded cleanup, Jerry. I say we do an hour of just cardboard. If you're listening to this, you know the deal with Amazon. We overbordered on Amazon. We got 10 ,000
Speaker: pounds of cardboard, it seems like, in our living room that we need to figure out. In Japan, you need to break it down and tie it up, I think. But we actually have cleaners coming in on Tuesday. We're paying about US $500 for them just to clean the upstairs. And we're going to try to finagle our way into them taking away our trash. So we're going to try to make it look like organized and nice. So it's easy for them to clean up.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah easier for that like maybe we can get it like 80 % of the way for them and then they'll be like alright Well, I'll do the last 20 % for you kind of thing. Yeah, so back to just like reckon whether I recommend this I would say I don't recommend this for most of my friends and I'm pretty
Speaker: I believe that most people can do it, but you got to really look deep within yourself. I say to be like, I want to do this versus like, Hey, Steve, I've never been to Japan. I'm just going to figure out as I go.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that if the cheap Akiyas excites you, you better be ready for some camping and you better be ready for like a lot more sort of like, you gotta really want to be here and love Japan and figure it out in the Japanese way. I feel like you need to have that sort of mentality to go the cheap Akiya route. You can definitely live here in Japan comfortably if you just throw more money at the problem too though.
Speaker: But there's also, as we get over this hump, and I'm already kind of seeing the other side of it, Joey, we have a gem. This is really a diamond and rough. Three of our rooms have ocean view. Our neighbors are awesome. It's such a quiet neighborhood. Walkability is great. Once we're done with this, I think it's going to be banging, to say the least.
Speaker: Yeah, it'll be very comfortable to come back here for whatever, you know, however it works out in our life, three months at a time, even a week, two weeks. Even the opportunity of like expanding or making this a business is definitely there. You know, we look at our neighbors and it's a little bit morbid, but like everyone's like 80. I think I heard a stat recently that one in 10 people in Japan are above the age of 80, which is like, I don't know what that is in the US, but that seems quite high. I mean, just looking around our neighborhood, we're probably average in age of
Speaker: 60, 70? What would you say, Joey? 70 and up for sure. 60 is young for this neighborhood, I feel like. Yeah. Old people love chatting with us here. I've been jokingly saying like, we're the future of this neighborhood. They've been like looking at my Japanese face. I mean, I think they want me to run for mayor, Joey. That's my sense of it.
Speaker: But yeah, I think over the next, if this works out for us, there's gonna be tons of opportunity, I think.
Speaker: We kind of talked to some of the neighbors and mentioned like how much we got this place for. They're like, whoa, that's kind of expensive. And here we are like, oh, yeah, that's 20 times cheaper than anything in California or the US. Yeah, they all kind of thought it was expensive, which, Liat, you had mentioned this earlier today that you were thinking like, oh, that's good news. If other people are thinking of selling here, kind of their expectations are low for the value of their homes.
Speaker: And I'm honestly rethinking the Airbnb perspective. I looked up initially, and there are Airbnbs, but not in this specific neighborhood. I think given how close we are to our neighbors, we're like three feet wall separation to our closest neighbor. I'm a little bit worried about disrupting the neighborhood. It seems like it's a pretty peaceful place right now.
Speaker: That's kind of top of mind for me, but we'll keep you up to date. I feel like I do still recommend it, but again, only to people that like have been to Japan before, at least like have at least been to Japan once before. And hopefully for like an extended period of time, like maybe Didier brought here or like taught English or something like that. Someone who like kind of gets it a little bit more, um, you know, understands the Japanese culture a little bit better.
Speaker: I agree with you. I think not to be, I see there's also quite a few foreigners here, which just to kind of reassure you, I think no matter what town you are and no matter how remote,
Speaker: There's going to be a foreigner, you know, we were down in Miyazaki and the guy pointed out like the Australian do tasks and stuff like that. So just know you're not totally going to be isolated, but expect to be mostly surrounded by Japanese locals and be prepared that you need to be in the mentality to assimilate and again, not be that nail that sticks out, which yep.
Speaker: So, all right. Well, that's all from us. I think I'm feeling great. Our top floor is looking great. Mine is a couple of soft spots in my room. I'm afraid I'm going to kick a hole through the wall. We are headed to Fukuoka today to meet Ziv, who is our intermediary. We're quite excited. We're going to grab a drink with him, talk a little bit about our, some of our real estate ideas maybe, but never been to Fukuoka.
Speaker: Excited to see what true city life is like even though I do enjoy the bamboo small vibe city All right over now
