Transcript
Speaker: If you do it yourself, you are going to set yourself up for one surprising headache after another that you're going to have fire drill after fire drill for about a six to nine month process as you think you're doing it the right way and you're not quite doing it the right way.
Speaker: Welcome to the buying a house in Japan podcast. Today we have a special guest. We have Kurt Bell with us for our first podcast of 2025. Welcome to the show, Kurt. How are you doing? Thank you so much. Happy new year. I'll give my damn minutes. Oh, gentlemen. I know we've rescheduled this a couple of times. but We tried to get you before you left to Japan, but where are you calling in from today?
Speaker: Literally, if the folks are seeing this on the the visual portion. I'm calling from the community park in Yada, a little town called Yada, which i apparently is the Valley of Tea in Shizoka City, Shizoka Prefecture, Central Japan. If I can look around the corner, you have a beautiful shot of Mount Fuji, just right over there.
Speaker: Dang. Okay. Kurt, we've been following you for, I feel like what feels like a year or so. I think you're, you're one of our biggest super contributors on AccuMart. So thank you for that. We've been following your journey, but do you mind giving us a quick intro on yourself and yeah what's your brief story and what got you to Japan today? today Sure, no problem. I'm Kurt Bell, a .k .a. Softee Papa on the interwebs. I'm a 60 -year -old guy. I've been married to a Japanese woman, Yumiko, for going on 37 years now together. And we just, both of us hit 60. We're both boomers, born in 1964, the last year of the boomers. So where' we both retired this year. And so we have come, thank you. So we have, this is our fifth transition between, I'm from California, Yumiko's from this very community right here where I'm standing.
Speaker: And in those all those years together, we have moved five times between California and Japan, where I guess we're restless souls. Going back and forth, trying it out for various lengths of time, two, five, 10 years at a time. And when we reached about two years ago, when we finally realized we had reached the point that we could stop working, and our daughter, who's now 24, and she stepped she literally split her childhood between japan in america her first thirteen years were here going up here in yada and then when she finished the junior high school we said let's make an american out of her we drug her back to america and then and she went through high school and finished college in america and so when she finished she was closing in on the end of her senior year in
Speaker: University in Coffee Fullerton in Los Angeles. She said, mommy dad, I think I've made up my mind. I'm going back to Japan. Japan is my home. And so my wife and I, we were facing down retirement. We said, hey, we'll come with you. So we all made this big plan. 2021 -24, to make things overly dramatic, it was the year of the dragon. And my wife and I born in 1964 are both dragons. Our daughter born in 2000 is also a dragon. So we said, let's make a dragon year out of it for all of us. Let's go.
Speaker: Upend everything will go to Japan and settle down. So now we just finished the process like literally last week. we're Actually, we're finishing the process. It's couldn't be better talking to the two of you because we're finishing with the purchase of our Akia, which we found by virtue of your services. So we're here. Our daughter is not settled in Tokyo. She's got started her career in public relations.
Speaker: My wife is right down there living in an apartment with me and we were buying a house and we just literally 15 minutes before this podcast started, we transferred the money from jim America to Japan to buy the house. Literally, before I was coming to see you guys, we were going to huddle around the curb or computer, pushing the button on the middle surface, looking, she was looking at her and bank account in Japan, money, come over, money, come over, and here we are. Now I'm talking to you. That's a good introduction.
Speaker: Yeah, that was one hell of introduction. We're thankful that we timed this at this timing. I got a ton of questions for you. I guess my first one, where did Softee Papa come from? I've seen that as your your tagline. And I think people are asking that too. Where did that originate from?
Speaker: Real simple. When I came over in 2003, Emily, our daughter was three years old at the time. I decided to become an an antique dealer and I started up an online antique shop and I softy Papa was my handle on eBay. And it's simply my daughter became a softy and I'm her Papa. And so it grew on YouTube, et cetera.
Speaker: but During all those times going back and forth between the states and Japan, did you always live in Shizuoka or did you live in different parts of Japan? So before my wife and I were married, my wife's family had a little bit of an issue with with the fact that I was in Japanese. So I lived in Chiba and then down in Osaka in Sakai. I also lived in Fukuroi here in Shizuoka Prefecture. They wouldn't even call me my my name, they called me America.
Speaker: When they finally realized that America wasn't going away, they they agreed to meet me. And then after they they realized that I was sticking around forever, I've been, this is Yada. You can see right behind me. this is wow ya Yada has been my home. I've been welcome here ever since. Beautiful, beautiful. And so when did you first come to Japan? There was five times. How did you get to Japan in the first place?
Speaker: So I got to Japan because by virtue of an accident in my senior year in high school, I got a summer job coordinating for Japanese high school students coming to America for a summer. And when they were all done, they invited me to come to Japan the following year after I graduated. I did, I basically wandered around Japan. This was 1985. I wandered all around with Japan with a backpack. You know, this is back in the days when Japan was like another planet, right? Cause there was no internet.
Speaker: you mean The foreigners were really a and a novelty thing, and I fell in love with the place, and it's just been a part of my life ever since. Amazing, yeah. It's interesting. You've seen Japan in so many different segments throughout the past, what, 20, 30 years or so, right? Exactly. Yes, I have.
Speaker: Okay. So let's go on to, I got a ton of questions here. Let's go onto the house search. So year of the dragon, sure your daughter is graduating. You guys have sat down and you're like, let's move back to Japan. Was it a pretty unanimous decision or were you pushing for it? How did that come to fruition?
Speaker: That's a real good question. and Guys, I'm i'm going to mobile right now just in because I want to get away from a jackhammer to start it up. I can't resist the opportunity to show this to you. This right flat right behind me, this is the original tea plant that first came. You know Shizoka is famous for tea, right? Oh, yeah. This is the first plant that came to Shizoka for tea. It just happens to be walking look past it.
Speaker: It's got, it's even got a little monument right here for it. It's still alive. They kept it alive all these years. I don't know how they did it, but you can see they've got it marked off there. They got a barrier around it or right next to the prefectural museum. So they planted that there. I don't know the history beyond that, but so question was again. Yeah. What, how did you guys decide? Do you guys all sit around on a table and or was it your daughter being like, I'm going to go to Japan. You guys all followed that decision.
Speaker: Well, my wife and I had been mulling it over. It was largely a matter of deciding that we wanted to retire and realizing that the logistics of retirement worked out better, especially the finances, if we retired in Japan and stayed in the United States for a couple of reasons. Namely, I'll leave with the, I'll leave with the obvious one, Akia. I mean, if we came to Japan, we could get ourselves a home.
Speaker: paid for and done, which is a much harder prospect for people like us that have spent our lives wandering if we want to do that in Southern California. The second god big thing was, of course, health care, right? I mean, we're coming from a paradigm in the United States. The health care is good if you can afford it, right? And here in Japan, health care is good for everybody. That was another big one. i Also, we're getting to the old. you know We're no spring chickens anymore. The services that are available for older people here are pretty robust.
Speaker: namely in terms of public transportation, the ease of access to clinics, things like markets, et cetera. And then fourth, family. We have a much more bigger and extensive family connection here than we do in the States. And they need us more over here. there's the My wife's dad is getting is in his nineties now and can really benefit from having this nearby. So I would say it's logistics, practicality, houses, finance, healthcare, et cetera.
Speaker: I was going to say the weather is better too, but you came from Southern California. I'm in a snowy area right now. So weather, but maybe weather actually got colder for you. Yeah, it did. But you know what, for this Southern California boy, I find that the weather in Japan to be delightful. So I really enjoy the seasons. I enjoy looking at the face of Mount Fuji, which you can see easily from where I live here and how it changes through the season. So weather is definitely a factor for me.
Speaker: k So is this the first time that you and your wife purchased a property in Japan or in your previous trips in Japan, did you buy and sell or were you renting? when We were renting all the time in Japan because we never thought we would settle here for good. We did own a home in Southern California, which I wish I'd kept, but we did we sold that when we came to Japan in 2003. So this is our first home purchase in Japan.
Speaker: I'm curious why in Akiya versus a new build or was that in consideration? We know that Japanese people type tend to like newer builds and stuff like that. Was that part of the discussion or you guys were dead set? Let's get an Akiya from the get go.
Speaker: So actually, in fact, we fell under the dream, and it's a dream that a lot of people get a lot of on the internet of the traditional house, right? My wife grew up in what I would call a post -war clapboard contraption. Her dad describes it as a house that after the war, they they slapped together. He told me once that the bathtub cost more than the house.
Speaker: o because they bought the bathtub new the house they built from just bits and pieces of houses that they assembled from all over the place so it was so cold in the winter and and there were so many spiders and centipedes in the summer that i never thought my wife would want to live in anything like that again yet as she as motherhood came to an end or the active time of motherhood And we thought about coming back to Japan, the romance of that really began to appeal to her. Now I thought if if that wins her over someone that lived in one of these houses all of her life and grew up in it, then she's got me one over because I loved them from the beginning. So what happened, so we were considering the new build from the start because we wanted the romance of the old stuff.
Speaker: What also happened was we our experience confirmed the criticisms that so many people offer of those who go after the romance of the old komenka, is that it's going to be a headache once you get it. We found a beautiful machiya house here in Shimizu. Shimizu is the next town over from Shizoka. It's about 15 minutes away. We found a beautiful machiya traditional townhouse. If your listeners aren't familiar, think of them as the old style along the Ginza area of of a community.
Speaker: where you would have the residence and the business in one building, and they're all squished together, long and narrow, beautiful wooden beams, beautiful architecture, all the nice touches, and we were this close to buying it, thanks to you guys, right? We were almost, because it was Akiyamart, that's how we found it. I created this list, if you guys ask if you want to ask about it, I created this list, and I was on Akiyamart daily for for six months, in first part of 2024. Anyway,
Speaker: And I had the spreadsheet and and I would put in all the variables and the properties would float to the top. This machia floated to the top and we were this close to buying it until we did the house inspection. oh Then we had an architect come in and he did a proper house inspection. It wasn't that expensive. It was only about $500. And he revealed to us two major things. One, he revealed the whole house is tilted five degrees. but And you guys know we're in for a big earthquake.
Speaker: Right. Yep. And so, so the second thing he noted was, and we knew this was that the foundation, we knew that it was just the post on the rocks. Right. And my wife and I talked about it. So he said, well, we're old, you know, what do we got to lose? And then my wife said, yeah, whatever grandkids are staying on it. Right. So we got an estimate from the architect to redo everything. And it turned out it was much more expensive just to fix these problems than to even buy the place.
Speaker: So that broke us of our kominka dream, right? um for what And then I researched the re the building codes of Japan all the way back to the war, and I discovered what years the major building code changes occurred. And that led us with 1981. 1981, there was a big code that occurred to change in any household after 1981.
Speaker: was going to have the proper foundation along the bottom. So I went into Accu -Mart and I tuned the variables down and started looking for houses that were built within that range. I'm sorry, I'm being kind of automated, but hopefully that answers your question.
Speaker: No, awesome. And I think this is really appropriate timing. Joey and I have been talking as well of like, Jerry, what was the stat? like Yeah, I've been digging into the earthquake codes actually very recently too. So good timing. Yeah, definitely 1981. And then in 2000, they came out with the seismic grades as well. So the 1981 law is equivalent to the seismic grade one. And then they also have two for like schools and and stuff and three for hospitals, et cetera.
Speaker: But yeah, the stat that Taki was referring to that got me started down this path is I was wondering, like how dangerous is it to live in one of these pre -1981 homes? like What is the risk of it collapsing on me? And there were a lot of articles out there reference the Kumamoto earthquakes in 2016 when there were two magnitude seven earthquakes like within one hour from each other. So it was a a double magnitude seven earthquake, but 30 % of homes in that affected area collapsed.
Speaker: that were pre 1981 built. So it is a real risk. And Kurt, I guess about the Cominca, I romanticized too about buying a Machia or Cominca. I think just the wood beams and the way it's constructed is so, so unique. I'm curious, like from a price point, what was the initial price and what was the quoted price to fix stuff? If you don't mind sharing, I don't mind sharing. So the the price for the house, it was an astonishing 4 .8 million.
Speaker: and Now, this was, I say astonishing given the location. So youon I'm a project, my IT project manager by trade. I know you guys are IT background and you're in the IT and project management world. You get three things to get time, quality time, quality, or a budget, right? but yeah Choose two, right? Choose two. Right, right. So for us, we were choosing, using Akiyomart, I had developed a map of the Shizoka area where I could reasonably realize we could within our budget, because our budget our budget was 10 million, 10 million yen. That's what our purchase budget was.
Speaker: And then we had a renovation budget on top of that. So I had this map that I was looking for houses, kominka style houses within 30 minutes of dad's house under 10 million yen. And i you if you think too, what I discovered was I can get the kominka, I can get the garden, et cetera, and I can get it under 10 million, but I can't get it within 30 minutes.
Speaker: So here we had a house through this machia house that was 15 minutes from dad's house and a big enough eight period lot long period lot that would be demolished there was an extra building in the back we demolished it in the back we get the garden and it was five million yen but you know five million yen so i it seemed on the surface that we were getting all three right which you know just to see right so they actually offered if we would take the goods they um actually offered to knock another million off so that would have brought it to 3 .8 million right And we're coming over to Japan with no furniture, and it was really nice furniture. It's not one of these dumps that just got like a hoarder's house. This was well -maintained, beautiful gansu all over the place, really nice. It was a tatami maker's workshop.
Speaker: So anyway, so then to get to the point, so it was 4 .8 million, dropped down to 3 .8 million. My wife and I were who are rubbing our hands together going, this is the quickest ability of us lots of money in the budget to to do the to knock the house in the back and do the renovations. The cost to do the earthquake retrofit was 6 million. wow okay then we got the budget we Then we got an estimate, we had a destruction construction company come in and to demolish the house in the back. That was 5 million.
Speaker: yeah ah okay So now we're above now we're ah but we're now we're approaching 15 million yen, right? Wow. For listeners kind of doing the conversions, about 3 .8 million yen is close to what? $25 ,000. And then your total budget was what? Closer to 60 ,000 US? Does that sound roughly right? Right. For the purchase, not for the renovation, right?
Speaker: Okay. Got it. Wow. Yeah. It's really such an interesting, that there's a dying population that can do the retrofitting on these Macias too. So i'm I'm curious if that price is going to keep going up to do work on them, but something we, I think all of us romanticized buying one, renovating it, making it a nice, like your con or Airbnb or or modern spot, but maybe your second property, right? Is that still in the cards, you think?
Speaker: Maybe not. I can definitely say that the experience disabused both of us of the dream. And what we realized, yeah and the first thing, when we found the house that we we were buying we're buying right now, and I'd love to tell you guys about it if you're curious, but when we found the house, the first thing I did when we went over and looked at it was I looked at the foundation because it had trained me. The experience with the Matia house, with the old style house, it had trained me, okay, these are the things that are going to get us, right? And I knew it was built in 1983, so I knew it was up to the 81 standards. I can't tell you the peace of mind that I had with that. And then as I'm touring through the house, I'm no longer looking for things like classic wood beam architecture. I'm looking at things like, do the walls look like they're sound? Do the windows look like they need to be replaced? You know, what's the state of the kitchen, et cetera?
Speaker: So the whole experience of doing the Kolminka search kind of woke me up to the thing that a lot of the cynics had been saying all along. And I realized, yeah, the cynics have got a point, actually. I guess I really need to take that into consideration. And in the end, we think we didn't get to the Kolminka. However, to answer your question, could that be in the cards? If you ask my wife, if she would say, heck no. If you ask me...
Speaker: If you asked me, I'd say, why not? Because part of my reputation as softy papa is that I do adventures in the deep mountains here in the Japan Southern Alps. And I know a lot of villages out there that are empty. And I remember one incident that a farmer I met at a beautiful home, and I was talking to him and in my broken Japanese and telling him how much I thought the helm and the farm was was beautiful. And he said, would you like to buy it? And I said, how much? And he said, what about a basket of summer vegetables? Whoa, really?
Speaker: Yeah. So, Hey, so who knows? Maybe I'll have a summer basket of summer vegetables. ready have One basket. Okay. yeah The return of softy Papa. Before we, we talk about your new property. I want to take a deep dive on your desert journey here. So I was following along what prompted Yumiko to move over first to Japan. And I know you spent some time venturing out and in California, right?
Speaker: Right. Right. So that is a little of a story on its own. So we had, like I said, we have made the move five times and we always have a strategy when we do this. We send over one of us first, whichever, whichever country we're switching to, we send over the native to that country over first to soften the ground. Right. I noticed that with with gear your wife and when one of the dogs went first.
Speaker: That's right, that's right. And when we came back to America in 2014, I came over first to America to do the exact same thing. So we send the native over first to quell to quell the environment, right? And they're basically what they're doing is they're establishing a beachhead, right? They're finding a job, finding a place to live, getting in the furniture in place, getting out. In my case, when i when I went over first 14 months ahead of my family in 2014,
Speaker: I was starting up the process for my wife, green card. I was consulting with attorneys to get all that process. Also, when I went over in 2014, I was starting my IT career after 10 year break and I was a little bit worried. I wasn't going to have what it takes. So I didn't want to bring the whole family over just in case I failed. And then we're all stuck in America. Right. So I came over first to get a year under my belt to make sure that they were going to keep me around before I brought them over. So we just did the same thing. We sent Imiko over first. She retired from her position. She was a senior administrator for a Japanese restaurant chain called Yukaku. they're yaki nuing in the and enormous
Speaker: Yeah, in the North American headquarters. Anyway, so she quit her job, and then she came came over, found this apartment, bought us a car, and started reaching out and connected with the realtor. So I would do Aki Amart over on the Japan, on the American side, and I would say, hey, look at this property. And then she found a realtor over here to connect with, and that realtor would then show us those properties. and So that's why she went first. And as far as the desert was kind of, as long as it was gonna live, we were living in Huntington Beach, California,
Speaker: Southern California, which is kind of an expensive place. And I thought, as long as I'm alone, my wife and daughter are are gone, why don't know the dogs and I just get a little Airbnb tiny house in the middle of the Azaburiga desert and hope, cause I work remote and just pull out of there until it's time, my time to go. Wow. I know we could talk a lot about your desert venture here. I followed a lot of like from fires or whatever, but give me a one or two highlights from the desert isolation when you're out there.
Speaker: Well, the desert isolation, I would say it wasn't as much of anything revelatory of anything new because during the 14 months that I was alone for six months while my wife and daughter came to Japan. And when I went to America, I was alone for 14 months, preparing this oil for them to come over. And while I was alone for that time, and I had done the same thing. I was living in in the l LA area.
Speaker: But every weekend I would go out into the deep Mojave Desert and go solo adventuring by myself. And that's when I wrote the book, Going Alone. That's why I say it. It's not a book for everybody. It's a book for people that are interested in the madness that comes with the deep desert solitude, you know? And so when when I had the six months alone after the family left, it was like a gentle return to that. But because I had already done the 14 months of craziness, it was nothing new.
Speaker: Okay. Interesting. And so how did you bring your dogs over? Like, what what was that process? We do have a couple of folks who are looking at relocating. I know moving animals to Japan is maybe not the easiest or what was that process like? Yes. I'm happy to talk about this, but let me ask you for first.
Speaker: How's the audio? Am I sounding pretty good? I think I've got a good spot. You're you're sounding good. Great. Okay. So let's talk dogs. Okay. Now, probably the the most important thing in this whole process for me was to make sure that we didn't wind up in a situation where for some reason or another, our dogs wound up in quarantine, either in Japan or America, or the timing worked out in such a way that the whole family is on one side of the Pacific and one of the dogs or both of them are on the other side. Right. I wanted to make sure.
Speaker: I'm an old guy and I'm very sentimental and i I wanted the impact on the dogs to be minimal. So when we first started this process, I started looking into the rules and procedures to bring dogs over to Japan.
Speaker: The main thing Japan is concerned about is rabies being an island nation. They don't want rabies in the country. And I realized that if you can facilitate, if you can thread the needle of ensuring that rabies vaccinations and certifications are good, you're 90 % of the way there. okay and And lots of people, if you go on the internet and talk, and I got a lot of flack for this, they will tell you, you can do this yourself. You don't need help to do this.
Speaker: I decided to not do it myself because I didn't want to make a mistake. So I chose the easy way out, which is to find a professional pet shipper that was experienced in bringing dogs from the United States to Japan to guide me through the process. And I've received a lot of flack from that because it's very expensive and a lot of people say it's unnecessary. But for me, the piece of buying that I gained it was well worth it. Still, I can speak to the process because I documented the process and it's it's all still in my head. And basically, if you're willing to do it,
Speaker: It's all about first finding the proper type of vet. And I'm talking specifically about from the United States. So for your viewers that are coming from Canada or elsewhere, it's the same concept, but you'll have to apply your own terminology or et cetera to wherever you live. So speaking from the US context, you need to find a US Department of USDA certified vet. Their technology has to be hooked up sent to this to the Department of Agriculture that they can do electronic transmissions back and forth and documentation.
Speaker: that's going to become really important at the end when you get down to the last week before departure. So a lot of people, when they start off, they don't know that, right? So they start off with the wrong kind of vet, and if you have the wrong kind of vet, the vet thinks they're doing the right thing. They're giving the vaccine, rabies vaccination, not the vaccination, they're signing the ah documents, but they're not doing it the right way. For example, the rabies vaccination documents need to be written in blue ink. A lot of vets from the American... Blue ink?
Speaker: and mean not written not not black blue cant be black cant be black professional pet shippers. Do they, if you just want to go with the easy mode option, do they handle all this or are you describing something that even if you go with the professionals, you still have to do all this yourself? Kind of. It's like getting married and you get a wedding planner versus doing it yourself and you're still the one that gets married.
Speaker: right yes but but But you're still the one that has to say I do, but whether or not you want all the headache of planning for it and choosing cake cakee and you get it. So to kind of make a long story short, I'm going to just set the stage. If you do it yourself, you are going to set yourself up for one surprising headache after another, that you're going to have fire drill after fire drill for about a six to nine month process as you think you're doing it the right way and you're not quite doing it the right way.
Speaker: you'll get there. If your reasonable amount of due diligence, you'll get there. But the cost and stress and pain along the way, I think is not worth the cost of simply hiring a professional to help you get there. No. I mean, it sounds like buying a house in Japan too. I was just going to say, like you can do it yourself, but I'd be like our first house is they've helped us. And I do believe going at the professional with many things in Japan is the right way. May I, is it okay if I plug the bed shipper that we use? Yeah, sure. Absolutely.
Speaker: Okay. Starwood Pet Shippers. She's written the name Starwood Pet Shippers, the contact there. Ryan, she's the head of head the head person that we worked with she and she was our contact. Ryan, Daryl, Josh, and I think it's Tatsuya on the ah Japan side. They were our team. I mean, can just imagine that guys, we had a team. We had guys at the airport, both l LAX and Narita.
Speaker: doing all of the interface with the customs division. These are guys that can go through into the customs area. That's all they do all day long. And they know those guys on a first name basis, right? And everything went perfectly. They kept us on track. Now it's expensive, really expensive. So that's the dr downside. So be be prepared budget for it. Okay, what's our wood enterprises start with pet shippers.
Speaker: pet shippers yep All right. heard the The question here, rough ballpark. If I have a dog, I want to move to Japan. One is kind of easy mode. it Is it a $10 ,000 kind of fee you think? or The ours is a little more complex because we had two dogs, you know, I needed to divide everything by two and we added an an additional complexity. The complexity was that after my wife, I got two dogs.
Speaker: Rudy and Ollie. Ollie is my wife's dog. Rudy is my dog. Ollie suffered serious depression after my wife. And so about two months in of this dog just being so depressed, we elected to send him over first, which are basically then they then doubled part of the fees, right? Because that means That means you gotta have two D -days, right? Two operational events where you've got people on both, right? So it didn't exactly double it, but it nearly doubled it. So to all together to get the dogs from one side to the other all in, $14 ,000.
Speaker: Okay. Got it. Appreciate the transparency. I know other people are going to think the same thing, especially after you've mentioned it. in Everything moving to Japan is not as easy as it seems. There's a lot of steps. And I feel very similar, you know, when we were buying our house or just opening a bank account, like it's set up for failure over and over. Letting the professionals handle, I think is kind of the way to go. If you have the one more thing? Starwood, the thing that made me choose them, so I'm a due diligence kind of guy, like I said, I'm a project manager. I'm all about contingencies and options. When I started looking at pet shippers, I came up with a spreadsheet and a list of various pet shippers to choose from, and I got the quotes from them. And I couldn't figure out why Starwood was so much more expensive than everybody else. Then I realized it.
Speaker: because Starwood was the only one that was showing me the true total cost. Everyone else was hiding the the cost that would come up incidentally along the way. I chose them because they gave me the rock bottom price from the beginning, and they weren't even, they weren't even going to shade on the others. They weren't like saying, here's the cost that we're giving, and the others aren't giving the whole cost. They said, here's the cost. And then when I looked into it, I realized, oh, you guys are giving me the real deal. That's why I chose them.
Speaker: Sorry, just to be clear, was the price you gave us, was that for the two dogs or had you already divided it in half? Thank you for the clarifying. That was total for two dogs. So I would say if you just have one dog you want to ship, if you use Starwood and you're going to go from America to Japan, expect to work out somewhere around five grand total per dog.
Speaker: And how are the dogs doing? How is the transition there? Japan, do they notice a difference between the US and Japan? I noticed that they both went from going wolf to Wanwan within a short period at of time. So the trip over was devastating, as you can imagine. I've got photographs of putting them in the crates and handing them over to the pet shipper.
Speaker: And I mean, gosh, I want to tear up. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, knowing that they were going to spend half a day en route in a scary place in a crate, right? But after the reunion on the other side, both dogs are fine. They're 100%. And Ollie, the black dog, my wife's dog, he's happier than he's ever been in his whole life to be with his mom again.
Speaker: Okay. All right. So you successfully moved the dogs over and moved the entire family over. Let's talk about the house search on the ground. Tell us about, how did you find this place you've landed? I was really eager to talk about this with you because in a way this speaks to how your service, Akiyomart can be used in a way as an entry point into the local market. As you guys know, cause you guys have bought homes and you're familiar, obviously you're familiar with the Japan real estate market.
Speaker: um the The real estate market here is very insular, especially in a particular community. It's a very insular community. The realtors typically all know one another. A lot of the properties, and you've probably heard this maybe even from Ziv and you guys know it yourself, a lot of properties don't even surface onto the real estate network. They get transaction around the community, right? That's what happened to us. So the process began with Akiamar. That was me.
Speaker: In every spare moment that I have, I had come up with my search criteria on Aquimart, and I would zoom in on Suzoka area, yeah and I was looking, as you guys probably know on your website, I was looking for those new little dots to appear, right? In yeah in the in the area that, oh, there's one right there, and I zoom in on it and have a look at that. And by the way, I don't know which of you did it, but when you set up that feature, when you hover over the property on the right, how it pops up, the lights up on the thing, brilliant guys. Was that you, Joseph? i I did it, but it was Takei's idea.
Speaker: All right, com combo. I was going to send you guys an email and I didn't, but that was brilliant. Cause you saved me so much time. hunting So back to the stories, I would find the properties and then on your Anaki mark, it didn't has a link to the actual real estate listing, right? So then I would go to the actual real estate listing, send that link. Cause that's Japanese and send it to my wife. She's Japanese. She would then reach out to the realtor. Now what happened was the very first place that we looked at.
Speaker: We really hit it off with the realtor. He's a really great guy. In fact, he was so great. You guys are going to be amazed at this. We told him about a community that we wanted to live in a property that wasn't even on the market that we were hoping to buy.
Speaker: and but we couldn't find the owner. He went to that village five times on his own and just five times circulated around the community, getting to know people in the very Japanese way until he was able to find the owner, contact the owner, find out if they wanted to sell it. It turns out the owner lives in Tokyo. They're planning to retire. They're going to come back and take it. When he did that, we knew he was our guy.
Speaker: right all right and he's And he doesn't know this yet, but he's going to get a really nice bonus when we're all done with our car purchase. He's a great guy. Anyway, I've given you the two of the three steps. The first step was start with Akiya Mart. Find the properties that you want. If you're lucky enough that you've got a Japan liaison on the ground here, like you've got like my wife, send the information to them. They'll contact the real fear. They'll get us showing. So what that's what happens. We saw three houses that I had found on Akiya Mart and looked at them. We were this close to buying the Machia house.
Speaker: But then when we got the information about the cost to do the retrofit and the all the earthquake, food we we were on the fence. Here's what happened. By then, that would took about three months, four months for that to happen to get to that process. By then, a whole real estate network in this community knew about the foreign guy in America and his Japanese wife looking for a house and they knew what we were after. And furthermore, kids, they knew that we had been kind of turned off by the Kolminka dream. And so can you imagine, yeah you've got this whole community of real estate agents
Speaker: that are communicating with each other. They know that we're on the radar. They know what we want. They know what our budget is. And what happened was this house, it's just over here, popped up on the market. Now this area that we're in right here is called Yara. My wife calls it kind of like the Roppongi Hills of Shizoka. This is the art museum right up here. The university is right over here. It's a really exclusive area to live. We never thought we would be able to live here, never.
Speaker: And this is just happens to be where my wife's family lives. They've been here since like the Edo period. So Roppongi Hills and Shazoka grew up around them, right? And they were farmers here. They had all this land. So what happened was, we never we gave it we never thought we would live in this community. This house,
Speaker: Five minutes from walk from dad's place, popped up on the market in this neighborhood. But that network that I told you about, they knew about us. They reached out to our man and said, hey, there's this house that just popped up. Don't you have that foreign guy and his wife that are looking? This seems to meet all their criteria built in 1983. It's in their budget, yada, yada, yada. Our guy called us up. He said, you want to come over and look at it now?
Speaker: we came over we looked at it we literally walked from dad's house five minutes up to the house oh my gosh this is exactly it we went back we went back to our apartment we sat there in our apartment and we thought we'll think about it overnight and we looked at each other and we said we've been doing our due diligence for over a year we know what we want We're not waiting any longer. We sent the realtor an email. We got how you do with the form. You get that document, you fill it out. We took a photo of it. We sent it to him. The the owner responded back within an hour with accepted our offer. We get full price offer within an hour of that. Another offer came through above full price and the selling realtor said, sorry, it's sold. Yep. That's our story. Year of the dragon.
Speaker: you're the dragon yeah
Speaker: Congratulations. That's awesome. Thank you. Very cool that you got it too. At asking price, second offer came in and they said, Nope, someone got in just ahead of you. Literally. If we had waited, if we had decided to sleep on it, it would have been over. That's true. um That's all the preparation you guys have done. All the preparation research lets you guys make that quick decision. So that's great. Why have you guys to thank as well? Because.
Speaker: you It was Akiamar that gave us the ability to do the due diligence in my native English because in your site's ability to translate, I was able to know more about it. Before Akiamar, I was still, I was researching, but I would have to go to the Japanese sites, which are very haphazard, right?
Speaker: And it and it would it would add a lot of time to every search and I couldn't nail things down. I knew because of your website, what was available and what to expect. And that this house in this area at that price was a bullseye and not to be waited on. It really does help you. I feel like me and Taki, we've looked at so many properties now. We've got a feel for what what's there and you know, when something special comes up.
Speaker: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And thank you guys for that. I mean, it really is an amazing service. And just to let you know, I mean, even though i we're done with our houses, I plan to keep the service just because it's so much fun. You know, right on right I enjoy, I enjoy popping in there and looking at and seeing it become a habit, a part of my, a part of my routine. Thank you for being a power user. We've been talking about getting people to curate maybe collections and lists. We have categories we might be reaching out to you soon, maybe to make a softy Papa curated list for our homepage.
Speaker: You know, I don't know if you guys are aware, but I have, back in my YouTube days, I had ah ah a channel and a brand called Abandoned Japan. And I used to go out into the all over Shizoka, basically, this is before the Akia craze. And I would find these places and I would just make videos about them. So I do have an abandoned Japan playlist on my channel. I was thinking that maybe I should use Akia Mart.
Speaker: the map to target some of these places and respectfully from a distance, just walk past them, take a couple of photos and talk about them and make videos. And then I can just as a compliment to what you guys do and say, here's a video of a particular house that I found an auction mark.
Speaker: Okay. That might be a good collaboration. You're a man on the ground now. And I think you're retired, so hopefully you have some time to go searching for these. But the trick of course, I'm just going to say this is is a disclaimer. The trick of course is to do it in a respectful manner. My, always my concern is to make sure that I never want to be that corner that's poking around a neighborhood, making the locals feel uncomfortable. And it's a tricky thing. It was a tricky thing to do a decade ago, and it's an even more challenging thing to do now.
Speaker: Yup. I think that's so important that you highlight then, you know, coming back and forth to Japan, you're well versed in the Japanese culture of being respectful and being private with neighbors, but I have more questions about the house. I'm really interested in it. So give me the specs there. When was it built? How big is it? What did you end up closing at the price wise on it? Sure. So it's a 1983 build or bedroom. There is no Washington, no Japanese room. It's all Western style room. It's 15 minutes or less than that to two train stations. It's right next to the river.
Speaker: but it's not in danger of flood. The river is flood controlled. It's a beautiful bamboo forest about it. And it's surrounded, it's got farmland. It's got rice fields on two sides. It's got a bamboo forest on the third side, and then one house on the other side. And here's the interesting thing. The bamboo forest side of the house is extensive. There's like, like that that piece of land is like big enough for like two additional houses. And it's owned by the prefecture.
Speaker: Oh, and so we've already talked to our realtor and he thinks that he can negotiate with the prefecture to sell the land to us. The reason it hasn't been developed is that it's all along the river. There's no road access to it. There's just a little dirt road to it. That's why it hasn't been gobbled up in all the land building that's happened in the 30 years. Because you basically it's useless land.
Speaker: So we think we might be able to buy it or and this your viewers might find this interesting. A lot of the Japanese prefectures we discovered will either sell you the land or they'll lease it to you long -term 10 or 20 year leases.
Speaker: And so we think we're going to try to either buy it or lease it. So what we'll be having the end is we'll have a house with rice fields on one side, one neighbor on the other side, and an enormous urban garden facing the river on the other side, five minutes walk from dad's house, 15 minutes from the train, of course, just for 10 minutes away, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: Sounds romantic. I'm looking at the Yada area on the map right now. It looks beautiful. Is it the Yoshida River? I see the University. That's the Yoshida River. Exactly, exactly. And the Art Museum. Have you ever been to the Shikiji Sauna? It's like the mecca of saunas, Japanese people describe it as. It's like 20 minutes from your house. I actually went here with one of our real estate agent friends last summer. It was pretty nice, Shikiji Sauna.
Speaker: I know there is one. I haven't been there and in um over 10 years. I don't remember the name, but my wife's taken me to one nearby. Maybe that's the one. it's Very nice. Could be all right our real estate agent friend. He was like, we were driving from somewhere else and she's, we'll go back to Tokyo. He was like, Oh, we're going by this sauna place. We got to go. Oh, really? How nice.
Speaker: And garrett how much was the property all like after was it and within your budget? Did you go over budget? Our budget, like I said before, was 10 million yen. So the offer price was the ask price was 9 .8 million, which is I think like around 62, 63 ,000, something like that. And you'll correct me if you've got a calculator and.
Speaker: This place has a little bit of furniture in it, not a lot. And we don't have anything because we didn't bring anything from America. And the owners who accepted the offer, they said, hey, we'll knock a million yen off if you take the furniture. So that brought it down to 8 .8 million. So we settled on 8 .8. We did two weeks ago, we did the deposit. And this is something that you might find interesting. Maybe you guys already know this, our real group helped us with this. We gave 50 mon in, so 500 ,000 yen as a deposit. The seller said that they would be fine with, you know, 50 ,000. And our buyer, our agent was like, no, you don't want to do that. Here's the reason.
Speaker: it's just 50 ,000 yen, which is like $350. He says, imagine that the seller's cousin suddenly appears on the scene and says, hey, I wanted to buy this house all along, right? And they say, oh yeah, but somebody already agreed to somebody. And if we back out now, we'll have to give them their deposit back and the same amount as a forfeiture, right? As a penalty. And they say, well, it's just $350.
Speaker: He said, but if you give them a ah big deposit, like Goju Manen, which is like $3 ,500, then if they try to back out, then they have to give you the $3 ,500 back and come up with another $3 ,500 as penalty. But the the flip side is that if we back out, we lose our deposit. Yep. Yep.
Speaker: Interesting. Yeah, we we haven't had that with any of our customers, but we've we've heard that as a strategy and kind of put more skin in the game so that neither party can back out, right? So guys, I got to tell you what the stress was. I literally have been so stressed out since we gave that deposit because okay of the remittance. Okay. So and hopefully I've answered your question about how much it costs, the discount we got, the down payment and our strategy with that.
Speaker: So then we're so then I'm left with this situation. Okay, so I've got here's the thing. So I'm an old guy. I'm retired and we're paying for this out of one of my IRA, right. So I have the IRA set aside that ah your mark that money is going to to buy the house.
Speaker: I had, so once we were done and I wanted to wait until after January, so I was fully employed for most of 2024. So I didn't want to execute, pull the money out of the IRA in 2024 because that would be piled on top of a full years of the income and taxable at that full rate, right? yeah I wanted to wait until we crossed over to 2025 when I'm not working anymore.
Speaker: and that that money will be intact at a lower rate. Does that make sense? yeah Right. So I didn't have the money. We had to be at home, we had pulled the trigger on the house, but all the money was sitting in my IR, which is like three steps away from our Japanese bank. Cause it's not in my American bank. It's in the, it's in the brokerage house. Right? So I go, Oh my gosh. Okay. And we gave them 50 ,000, them 50 ,000 on end.
Speaker: And now i've got three I got days to get the money out of the brokerage, into our bank account, converted to yen and transferred over to Japan. ye So I waited. So New Year's Eve was hell for me because I knew that the next day, ah actually New Year's Eve was like a Saturday. So I had to wait until the Monday to do the transaction. So that went, no problem. So I got the money. I'm sorry guys, if I'm giving you more information than that. none No, no, this is awesome. So as soon as it was New Year's Day and I had to make sure it was New Year's Day in America, right?
Speaker: Because if I could eat New Year's Day here, then I would have executed the transaction on December 31st and it but still would have been 2024. So no drinking no drinking for me on New Year's Eve. So as soon as I knew it was New Year's in America, all the way to Hawaii, I then executed the transaction, pulled all of the money out of the brokerage,
Speaker: And once I saw it was there, I then transmitted it into my bank account. Now the thing is, since it was a big amount of money, it took like five days. So the money disappeared from my brokerage, and there didn't show up in my bank account. And I'm like, where the hell is that language? Where is it? Right? Or is it right? And it showed up two days later, but it showed up as pending.
Speaker: Then it took another three days for it to show his green. That was last night. It showed up finally green available. So my wife and I had this day and the timing couldn't have been better after breakfast. This morning we sat down together side by side like the two dating teenage couples on the iPhone and we did we moved it from the bank account into wise and guys, this might be interesting to your users because why only recently up their limit. So you can now transfer over a million yen. And I had practiced that because we had bought a car. So then we we brought the money over from the bank into wise. Yeah, there we go. Okay. It's in wise now. Then, and and then it executed the conversion, which celebration, it was at one 58 point, whatever, zero, zero. Great, great timing. Yep.
Speaker: I was like, this couldn't be better. Now it's in the end. And then we sat there and then we executed it to send it to our bank in Japan. And my wife's on her phone looking at her bank account. We're sitting there to get a sip of our coffee and I'm going, I'm meeting, talking to Joseph in 20 minutes. I'm chipped as I was walking out the door. She says, it's here. And then that's why I'm so giddy right now.
Speaker: Wow. but what again Congratulations. year Year of the snake is off to a strong start for you here. There you go. All right, Kurt, to wrap it up, what is your number one piece of advice for someone who is looking to purchase an Akia in Japan? Or retire in Japan. Yeah. One of each actually. Buy Akia and retire. Two -part question. I think I can answer both of those questions with Two words, due diligence. Right. First, let's tackle the retirement part first. Retiring in Japan is a wholesale life paradigm change. If you weren't born and raised in this country, or you haven't had a lot of time already living in this country, I'm not one of those guys that's booing from the armchair saying, Oh, that dream sucks. You can't possibly do it. It's not like you think I've never been one of those guys, but
Speaker: Those guys do have a point. We do, as human beings, tend to view things with a limited rose -colored colored glasses when we view them from a distance, either that distancetan de and distance in place or in time. Even for those of us that have spent a long time living in Japan, ah like myself, I had to ask myself, why is it that I didn't stay there permanently in the first place? Because I did not want to live here when I left in 2014. That's the whole of the story. And I had to ask myself, have I overcome those issues? Or at least have I gotten to a point that I'm reconciled to whatever those issues were that I can live with them if I go back to Japan? For those that have never had the chance to live in Japan, and the due diligence to figure out if it really is a place that you can live really needs to be
Speaker: tackleled up front And that's a long and complicated process if if you've never lived here yourself or or if you don't have connections that will help to enable that. So take your time to think about it. For myself, having already spent 15 years of my life living here, that meant about two years of careful consideration as I close in on the end of my career about where I wanted to live.
Speaker: And even then, I wasn't completely sure that I had made the right decision. So and that's that. As for a house, it's the same thing. There's a lot of vision and a lot of dream. And a lot of us come from places where homeownership is one size fits all. rather you In Southern California, for the most part, you're looking at either an apartment, condominium,
Speaker: or a track home. In Japan, yeah there's an allure of a lot of variety and a lot of things that we're not even aware of. Again, using the the paradigm of, if you'll reuse that word, but it is the right word, the paradigm of the United States and Southern California. We have a particular culture there and In Japan, you can look at the various various different types of housing scenarios, but a lot of people don't see past, and I'm one of them, don't see past the allure of the initial gloss of the vision, and then the deeper context of the community and culture. By coming back now here to Yara, I'm realizing that if we had picked that kominka that we were after,
Speaker: One of the things that we unique when I were going to have to challenge face down is the fact that we don't belong there. That's not our community. That's not where we have our connections and move. Like I said here, every third house is my wife's cousins and family. And that's a bare burden and a weight on its own. but So to wrap it up, consider it for both the house and the culture. Is the culture someplace that you want to live? Are you really in um in a place in life where that's going to work for you? And with the house, have you really explored all that's involved in taking up either that particular type of property or living in that type of community and facing down the responsibilities that are incumbent in all of it.
Speaker: that's Boom. Wow. That was probably some of the best insights we've, uh, you know, what to consider. We definitely agree with you doing that due diligence. Joey and I could use some more of that. I feel like we've been shooting from the hip on some places. We might've made some mistakes, but hurt to completely wrap it up. I hear you're also an author, right? Do you have a book coming about? ah Can you talk to us a little bit about that as ah an out outro here?
Speaker: I can. i Can I just add one addendum to something I just said that just came to mind? Seeing a place and in in in a house for yourself versus seeing it on the internet makes a world of difference. I can't tell you how many times both my daughter and my wife did the groundwork here.
Speaker: I would send them a link, and then they would go to that place, and they would say, Kurt, it looks great, but there's these things that you didn't see, that you couldn't see, right? And that's not the fault of any online service. That's not certainly not the fault of Akyamark. It just means that when you're on the ground doing the three -dimensional exploration you know, eyes, ears, sounds, seeing the neighborhood, that reveals things that you can't necessarily see. So let me just add that, pile that on top of the due diligence. If you get, buying a place site unseen might offer its own level of challenge. Absolutely.
Speaker: Back to the point about the question. Thank you for asking. That's right. Yes, my favorite book is that I've written, if I can have some, is Going Alone, which we mentioned about the desert, which was my barbaric yelp after 14 months of going alone into the deep Mojave desert and facing down the emptiness of the world. and And it was the thing that I wrote in my mid fifties as I was facing down the end of midlife and the onset of old age. And maybe it was my version of the midlife crisis that I resolved by writing the book.
Speaker: But anyway, if you want to take a look at that and you're interested to see the madness of a particular man that did like, that's what I would recommend. However. If you're interested in something that's maybe a little more practical, I have a book called Retiring in Japan. I wrote this book with the help of artificial intelligence. I'm an IT guy. I go for the tool of where they are, right? And I wrote it with the help of IT. I even attributed the authorship to an agent called Sofibaba IT because I want to make sure people know for sure that that that it's a collaborative work. But I must say, it's a better book than I could have written myself.
Speaker: Anyway, when I started when I set up on the road to to retire and come to Japan, I realized that you meet when I were embarking on a journey that might be of interest to others, and that there would be a lot that would happen along the way that if I would just take those and documented that might be of interest to others, and that's exactly what I did.
Speaker: and this book basically is chapter by chapter coverage of how we handled the visa process for me, ah the process of buying a home, the process of getting settled, the process of making decisions about what to take, what not to take, the very important process of bringing dogs overseas, I've got all the details in there, and of course the process of getting settled and becoming a part of the community.
Speaker: It's available on Amazon. If you want to go to my YouTube channel, all my recent videos is linked on below within my YouTube store and it's for my Patreon supporters. It's available for free on my Patreon.
Speaker: Amazing. We will link that. We want both of those signed when we see you in person next in Shizuoka. Other than that, Kurt, thank you so much for being on. This has been such an amazing story. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of value from this. So see you in real life at that Sana place that we're coming to Japan in February. So hopefully we'll swing by Shizuoka.
Speaker: I would love that. You guys hop on by. We got all these houses out here. We'll hop in there. Three of us will go take a look at a few. How about we do that? Hell yeah. Awesome, Kurt. Well, thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Take care. Bye -bye.
