Transcript
Speaker: That's a ton, son. Cappin' off one week at time of base camp.
Speaker: Let's talk about Fuchu Urban for a second. Fuchu Urban sucked, bro. Fuchu Urban was the worst. Fuchu Urban was the hotel we stayed at our first night here. We actually had it for two nights. It starts off with a creepy guy downstairs. Creepy guy downstairs whose face was really oily. He had oiled, slick back hair. Quite large, unhappy looking guy. Yeah. Unhappy looking guys is my takeaway to cramped, dark hallway, dark room. Luckily we got a non -smoking room. That's how we started the trip. Pretty bad. I guess they had the upstairs on 10 thing, which is yeah good. It wasn't bad for us. I think if that's your first welcome to Japan, like if you've never been in Japan before ye and that's where you stand, you're going to think you're in. Yeah.
Speaker: Shacha. Separate the week from the obsolete. DJ Daigoto Sensei's back. We are back with the buying a house in Japan podcast. This is our one week since we moved into Tama base camp. I'm unfortunately leaving today to Hawaii and then California. Joey's holding down the fort. How are you here? till jerry August 2nd. Okay. Whoa, what a week, huh? Really flew by. Cappin' off one week at Tama Base Camp. We got a recording studio. We haven't been back in Tokyo, I feel like, for a while, right? but
Speaker: Impressions of Tokyo, impressions of Japan, things have changed in my mind a little bit. What about you? It doesn't feel like, not that I was expecting it to be like, oh, we somehow magically jump back into what it was like when I was at ICU as a university student here. And I don't even honestly remember too much what it was like, but this is clearly different experience than i then college times. Yeah, we're a little further away from Tokyo. Again, so we actually went into Tokyo from Tama maybe four times. I would say 33 times. It was a mission, but also comparatively to the average Japanese person. They do this all the time. We're in a city that's called like a bed city, which is like a commuter town. And every time we go on the train, it's like jam packed, sardine packed. And again, it doesn't help that we go at peak hours or at least we think, but man, Tucker's a lot more crowded than I remember it. Yeah. Bed -do -town is the new vocabulary of the day, commuter town.
Speaker: Tokyo is more crowded than I remember it. 100%, maybe X, five X more crowded. Or maybe, uh, but I'm really happy we did not buy in central Tokyo, especially not a one. We did not buy a. needed renovation property in Tokyo. And two, I'm glad we're not like central Tokyo, just because it's just too many people. Nakano was nice though. Higashi Nakano. Nakano was nice, but Tama was really nice too. Like we got birds chirping. We got a lot of space. We got a lot of sunlight. Like our house itself is like very large. And I think I would, if I was here living here long -term, I would optimize for space and this versus
Speaker: being deep in the city. Yeah. we Pro tip, Inagi Town drove through it. We went to Onsen last night. Inagi Town, which is like 15 minute, 10 minute car ride away. Really nice. Probably you need to up your budget a little bit, but nice little town, a lot of greenery. Yeah. I think we've also been driving around the car a lot. Car has been awesome. yeah Almost absolutely necessary for where we are here. and and It feels pretty good that if we ever need to go to Tokyo at this point, it's like very easy for us to drive to the station, find parking, go in. And I, compared to when we first got here, I was a little worried and I was like, Oh shit, are we too far away from the station? But I really liked the distance we are. And I would recommend it for people who want to be here long -term that you don't need to be in central Tokyo. And these suburbs are a really good option. Yeah.
Speaker: We're going to try that out today, right? We're going to try driving downtown a little bit. Yeah. I think it'd be fine. I was driving the forerunner into Manhattan. If you can find parking in Manhattan, I'm pretty sure we can find parking in Tokyo. Yeah. Let's see. I don't know. Joey's going to be dropping me off close to the sexy Skyliner from Narita. We're seeing how that goes. We don't have a toll card. That's something we need to think about the ETC, like every car has an ETC card, which is, I don't know, whatever yeah toll highway tracker thing. So we'll figure that out. We might have found the the Fumi equivalent here in Tokyo, someone that just helps us out with a random test. So maybe that's ah another task we can ask her to help us with getting the ETC card.
Speaker: Totally. Anyways, we had a big party. I know we recorded actually a lot of podcasts. So we're starting a like Akiyama preferred agent series where we're actually talking to folks and we invited everyone to this big party we threw and it was like so freaking awesome to see everyone in person. And I honestly just had a great time. We're like ripping tequila shots and really just connecting the dots with a lot of folks. It was really fun. It was a lot of fun. Kuma Cantina, great Mexicans fought in Nagano, if anybody's here in Tokyo. I wish, I wish I ate more of the food. I like was just doubted on talking. Me too.
Speaker: We, I think really, we were yapping. We, for Joey and I, we were like, no matter what, after ah we closed that 10 PM, we are going straight home. We got all these meetings the next day and come the end of the party, Joey. We, that was so easy to convince us to go to the next bar. Yeah. We went to two more bars afterwards. We went to three more bars or we got, we went to the columbini. We got seven 11. We got yelled out by some dude went to that pool bar. And then we went to that one bar where we played Uno. And we're like two or three AM just wandering the streets. We're like, all right, we got to take a cab back. Um, that guy that we were on like a very large main road outside of Columbia and someone, uh, yelled at us for being noisy at about 10 PM. Yeah. That guy's fighting uphill battle. I would yell. I would yell at us. We were being a little obnoxious, but overall, I think the party was really fun. We will do it again. People were like, what are you guys celebrating? We're like, I don't know. We just having a good time. Like or we're.
Speaker: What a, a lot to celebrate though. I told people the Guru Meghanae story a little bit that we ran a club when we were at ICU, which was like a food critique club. And we got some money from the school to run it. And we had no real expenses. We didn't really do too much. We just, it was just all our friends. We just hung out really. And then we had this money left over at the end of the year and we just blew it on a big food dinner. So I just killed people. Same thing. Yeah. That was, is that a fake club? but There were no real events. I just remember we did that one kebab. Like kebab fair selling thing. or I think we ah we did like maybe two paperwork. a Yeah, we did the kebab thing. that's why we That's what we were celebrating. oh That's how we raised the money. Yeah, we were chopping all the cabbage and yelling at people to buy kebabs. And we spent I think 100 % of it on a fugu. All you can eat, all you can drink, fugu is like blowfish dinner. And I remember just like, oh man. This is the type of businesses we run. yeah Zero profit, all fun. Hopefully not.
Speaker: Yeah, it was the the party was fun though. And I think that kind of made the atmosphere more fun too, that we were there to have fun. Totally. What else? what's happened Oh, we just actually got a whole bunch of cookies at the local department store. We took our own advice, which I know we didn't, we haven't been always taking all the advice we say, but we bought a whole bunch of cookies. We wrote little notes. We gave people, like wrote on the notes wrote our line ID so people could contact us and went by each neighbor and introduce herself. I think went pretty well, right? Definitely. I think the neighbors were very appreciative. We took our own advice this time. That's like I said, we don't always do it, but yeah, people ask us how do the neighbors feel when you move in and how does society, the largest society feel about foreigners buying property here. If you do buy a property here, this is one thing that can smooth everything over with the neighbors by the little cookie box gift things. They sell at the station pre -wrapped, put a little note on it with your contact information saying, Hey, moving into the neighborhood. Nice to meet you. Give it to the neighbors around you. Easy.
Speaker: If you were to redo this week, Joey, what would you do differently? We had a lot of business meetings. I would spread those out more. I'm only here for a week. i know Not an option. we grinding i I didn't get enough sleep this week is what I feel like. I feel like maybe I sleep more than you or I'm not sure what. it's got to work just kind of this is a power ah yeah This is a business week. this is It was difficult. Other than that,
Speaker: We tried our best with the cardboard. There's really no escaping the amount of cardboard you'll get when you buy one of these homes and start buying stuff for your house. That's just a massive. pile of cardboard. If we didn't have the meetings though, like we made a lot less progress on the house than we thought we did. but We bought this place expecting to get it to maybe closer to V1. I'd say we got it to version 0 .3 or something. I was going to say 0 .32. We didn't finish our bed frames. Yeah, we kept being like, all right, we're going to make the bed frames tomorrow, but we just kept kept on doing work.
Speaker: but Overall, and I'll have fun doing that kind of stuff. The next few weeks are going to be much more slower paced for me. I think I'll just tackle cleaning one room at a time, buying more stuff, putting the beds together. So a little bit more like what our experience at the Betboo property was like. Yeah, I wasn't initially so excited to go to Costco and IKEA, but we just like didn't have time. And ideally we would have time and go furnish it, but I think it's more effective just to order everything off Amazon. Although we did cook one. That was a great meal that you cooked twice. Thousand layer nabe. Yeah. Just one cookbook nami fire, fire recipe. The like the French word. I don't know. Actually I should know how to speak French. like I call it milf nabe. Yeah, the milfoy thousand layer nabe. That was great. It came together really easily. Super good that we're cooking and we have space to cook in. This is the biggest house I've ever owned by far. biggest problem We have so much space here. Me as well. I only own Beppu in this. I don't know. We only hang out in one corner though. It's because we have a lack of furniture. But yeah, I think if I were to do it again, I think we would just order more on Amazon and be more realistic. Like we're not going to have time to go to the
Speaker: hardware store every day and do these things. Yeah. I will put the list together. If anybody else is curious about what we bought, I've been adding every thing we buy to an Amazon wish list. I'll maybe we can put that in the show, link to it in the show notes or something. We'll put it together. Yeah. I'm also from my Airbnbs in Hawaii. I've been putting that together. So it's good. A lot of that experience from our, you know, Airbnbs or Beppu even have come and made this process a lot easier. If you're listening, hopefully some of the things we're saying got a biggest tip, get Amazon locked and loaded. Yep. Um, you will have difficulty. Like, I feel like we've talked about the, there's some pitfalls with doing Amazon, but just like it will work. Just keep trying. yeah There's going to be like random payment air stuff. You're going to see people won't want to leave packages unattended. Like the whole, there's going to be issues, but you can do it.
Speaker: We almost landed, I'd say, like a perfect landing. I think a couple things were our car insurance. We didn't get our car insurance until just a couple days ago. Had we had our car insurance day one when we landed, whoa, we would have been able to do more stuff. yeah And then two, if we had our we hit our credit card limit on Amazon and let it figure out how to pay those whole thing. but We could have ordered more Amazon stuff. And lastly, I think we could have hired some helper. If we hired like a some dude for some hourly rate to just like help us open boxes, throw stuff away, like that would really have helped a lot. Yeah. Maybe we try to figure out the task rabbit game here. Yeah. If someone's building our bed while we're doing these meetings, that's like the perfect combo, right? If someone's in here like making progress, but
Speaker: Yeah, we're literally staring at a mountain of cardboard that Joey, you are going to figure this out. Thanks. I'm not too worried about it. like i Through trial and error, I figured out the Beppu garbage game. I'm sure I'll figure it out here. Another thing is we have some structural issues, I think, with our garage. There's a lot of cracks. There's a couple of concerns here and there. But again, for the price point we got in the proximity to Tokyo, the amount of space, anyone looking to move to Tokyo, I think this is a really good option. There's a couple houses around us for sale, actually, I think.
Speaker: But yeah, give us a holler if you're looking to move to the suburbs of Tokyo. I would I don't want to live in central Tokyo unless it's a nice spot or like it's a nice turnkey spot. night Yeah, I even need body if it was like. We use the car a lot to pick people up, to move things, to go places. I do think. I'm not as against central Tokyo as Takei is. I fully understand what he's talking about. It's very crowded. You're going to be dealing with crowds every single day of your time there. I don't know. I still think the city's exciting.
Speaker: Yeah, but after the bar that we took a cab back because we missed the last train, it was about a hundred US dollars, a little bit more than that. But that's if you split it between two people and it's like you do that once in a while, I feel like that's a really. I don't know, we you still get the best of city life if you really want to, but it's just less frequent. And I don't know, I'm getting, I'm in my mid, we're both in our mid thirties at this point. I'm cool not being like deep in there. Yeah. No, time, time was great to to get away and have space. But man, I'm really realizing Japanese work culture is tough. Like the cultural.
Speaker: Yeah, we got a little insight just to a little bit of how a little bit more about hey how agents get paid in in Japan and Tokyo. And yeah, it's not a lot of money. Yeah. So Segue, we spent a lot of time this week talking a lot of agents, trying to figure out like, how do we help people buy these cheaper Akiyas and also incentivize agents. We finally actually come up with something called Akiyama direct, maybe we'll do a full separate podcast on it, but high level like this week, I think we have finally unlocked. How do we help people buy?
Speaker: I agree with that. And I think we slightly feel like we cracked the code. We'll see how it goes. Theoretically in a way that agents are getting paid fairly, a little bit of an asterisk there just based on how the internal workings of a brokerage in Japan works. But we're trying our best to make sure that agents get paid fairly for the work they're doing. And at the same time, encouraging them to step out a little bit of the comfort zone and help foreigners buy. Yeah, I think we're also up leveling technology. I think we take it for granted a lot of the software use at some of our tech companies, Calendly scheduling stuff, organization stuff. So we're bringing a lot of that tech.
Speaker: kind of efficiency, I'd say to some of these agents, which I think will really move the needle. Yeah. having thinks say Anyone with ah experience in Japan is going to know that you've probably heard of some modern companies still using a fax machine machine or floppy disks or something, or you've looked at a Japanese website and been whole blast from the past a little bit. We're trying to change that as well. and coax these agents towards using talking into things like Calendly and Google Hangouts and other ways of like a modern CRM to organize their leads. That's the direction we're trying to go. Yeah. So I think again, theoretically, I think we've unlocked how to help people buy without
Speaker: So from the consumer side or client side, we're bringing a lot of this tech that will make it feel better. I'd say more efficient. And then on the agent side, we're also bringing that tech, but also trying to find a way to incentivize them. How do you make it easier or maybe more lucrative for them to to work with people that are lower lower budget, right? Yep. ah You'll start seeing, I'll start trying to work on some stuff on the website to make the Accumark direct process a little bit clearer. Stay tuned on the website there and you'll start seeing more about it. Yeah. A little bit of a segue. It's really interesting. there's Right now in Tokyo, it's like election season for mayor or something. We always walk by these billboards and it's like, there are some really, we think we have wild candidates in the US for president, which
Speaker: Everyone's shrugging a little bit here about that, but Tokyo's kind of, it's crazy. They have an AI mayor. So there's these big boards, right? And they have a whole bunch of like flyers for candidates that are running. Joey, what are some of the, who are some of the candidates running from our perception? Like a surprising number of troll candidates. It seems 25 % of these are troll candidates, which is interesting. This is for mayor of Tokyo. Um, again, Japan is not. federated into states like Canada and the United States are so it's a lot more like kind of one country one government for the whole country kind of thing I don't know what the right way to describe that is but so maybe the Tokyo mayor is a little bit more powerful than say the New York City mayor absolutely but yes surprising number of troll candidates here
Speaker: First off, the AI mayor is really funny. There's a picture of like a cyborg robot kind of thing. I have no idea what the platform is. Who gets to ask the AI the questions um policy? Probably kills it on responses though. You have very super responses I would expect. But that's funny. Another one is Dr. Nakamats. Apparently he's 96 now. If anybody recognizes that name, there's an episode of Bizarre Food. I've probably watched every single episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. I watch a lot of Discovery Channel, like in my and high school college days, maybe.
Speaker: I've probably seen every episode of ah but bizarre foods is dr. Nakamatsu is running for tokyo mare as well he invented the floppy disk and he's a eccentric character one notable thing i remember from the episode of bizarre foods is he has a swimming pool in his house. And he has a waterproof notebook and a waterproof pencil. And what he'll do is he'll swim under the water until he, so the quote is in the episode, he goes as close to the death as possible. And then that's when he gets his best ideas and he'll write them on the notebook. Wow. so And his house looks like a castle as well. Dude's like 96. That's Dr. Nakamatsu. Okay. Biden, knew we got Biden, but got nothing on Dr. Nakamatsu.
Speaker: My wildcard candidate, there's a Joker candidate, like a Batman Joker candidate. And there's this one NHK specifically walking Phoenix makeup stuff. You can take a look on YouTube. Each one of these cans have to have the ability for a public TV platform. So there's like an interview kind of thing. Look up NHK Joker, can it Tokyo? It's this dude who just on the table, like yelling and like moving around. He's dressed up like the Joker and just like doing crazy things. And what's really funny is there's a sign language interpreter in the back who just doesn't know what's going on. She's like shaking her head. So I didn't know what that was at first, but take a look. So a lot of troll candidates, right? There's also, I forget who is, I haven't seen the poster, but there's like a pro pornography candidate or something too. I haven't seen the posters, but heard about it. Yeah. Anyways. So.
Speaker: It's not just the US that's in election shambles at this point. It's the entire world, hopefully, at least Japan too. I wonder who actually is like the leading candidate there. Yeah, I wonder. Everyone knows the Joker candidates and like all these other ones. The troll gang. No one knows the real ones. I do you feel though like Japanese sentiment is low right now with the yen being so low. People talk about inflation and it's it's sad, but it it is really palpable in the atmosphere. Like being on those trains, it's a little bit sad. I think everyone's on their phone. Like everyone, I don't see, doesn't feel happy, dark, but.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a different, I have a lot of experience on the New York City subway as well. Definitely, completely different experience. Yeah, definitely. New York City subway compared to Tokyo subway. New York City is a lot more chaos, but maybe... Not maybe the general mood is a lot higher Japan, zero chaos, but very, uh, people are like robots here. Like they're salary men walking in and they get like jammed in. Everyone's looking at their phone and be a Japanese citizen and grinding like this really takes a lot of like per perseverance.
Speaker: then Yeah, perseverance for sure. And it's just like lack of other options I think is maybe the main driving force here. Yeah. So looking from the outside perspective, it's tough. I sympathize ah with the Japanese nationals and hopefully there's something here. I think also everyone knows the depopulation. People see these akiyas, people are frustrated that the yen is weak. It's every person we've actually interviewed recently. I think we asked what's your feeling and it it seems like everyone's everyone knows what's happening, but they don't have a solution or nor are they willing to actually make the change for the solution. So yeah, we're here to change that Joey, right? A little bit. I do think we, we definitely breathe a little bit of life into this neighborhood where I think like neighbors like us.
Speaker: And i I do think the neighbors like us everywhere I go, and sorry, everywhere we've bought a ah house so far, we are, we're trying to do right by the neighbors as well. I'm still trying to figure out my own personal thoughts on answering my own question of like in the grander scheme of things. How would I feel if Japan were my home country and this were happening? So I need to think on that a little bit longer, but. Yeah. What we do is we try to really screen out people who we think are good fits also. So like just our process, we do a consultation. So anyone you talk to, any listing on Akiyomart, talk with us first. And I think that's one of the things we try to figure out. Like would we want this person in or as is this a good person to move? And if there isn't, we definitely reject people too. People that have never been to Japan and just want something cheap. Those are.
Speaker: Not the people that we refer to our agents. Yep So that's something we control and at least we're giving up the option to like if Japan is willing to take more people They're gonna need what we're building, right? And excuse me. We're also giving the the gi my preferred Excuse me, I'm drinking a ton, son. We're giving the preferred agent the option to reject candidates as well. They don't feel comfortable working with this person for whatever reason. We've let them know several times. we Yeah. You know, talk about that more too also in a little bit, but we are doing like cohorts. So we have a finite number of agents. We have a finite number of bandwidth and we want to make sure that we provide a good experience. But also we do want to give agents the interview process a little bit of be like, Hey, we want to make sure I work with this person versus like I'm stuck working with this, this client.
Speaker: Funny story before I forget this morning, Joey, when I woke up like really early, six Sam and we don't have blinds or any like privacy windows in our bedroom. So I've been like, Joey's room's a little worse. Everyone in the street can really see in, but today I woke up and like literally popped up, popped my head up and I saw our neighbor. He was looking just like out in his garden and I like make direct eye contact him and my hair's all messed up. And I was like, and smile said, Hey, and he like was shook. He like didn't say anything. And I just went back down on the bed. yeah
Speaker: Hey, in English, he said. i like The window was close. I just like waved my hand and I was just like, oh, and that was awkward. But he he didn't react or wave back to me, but I don't know why that came up. but but Actually, interesting. they So we have we're very close to the neighbors in Beppu and a lot of windows we can so you can see in from street level. What like the plan is to tint them or what were you thinking is the best option? At least tint them like our house. Luckily, we also get a ton of really good light and a lot of sun comes in. I think Tinting windows is beneficial from an installation perspective, but also privacy perspective. So there's a different, like similar like cartons you can't see through, but I like the ones that are slightly reflective where it's a mirror. So during the day they can't see in it, but night they will, we'll figure it out. We want to get a lot of our windows tinted, but at minimum, if it blocks the sun, that's already a plus.
Speaker: You can also get heavy tint on the car windows, including the front windshield in Japan, which is I think illegal in most, but over a certain tint illegal in most places in Canada and the US. I will pay some amount of money to underlight our car. If we can get the blue underlight, like we have this mom white minivan blue or green. What would you pick color wise? Dark purple. yeah Purple's pretty good. yeah Also illegal. I believe in the US and Canada, the underglow, but in Japan you can do it. Okay. Let's do it under Tokyo drift with the mom van, but. All right, man. I think, uh, really happy with how we bought this place. Every person that's come over has been like, wow, this place is amazing. I don't know if they're just saying that, but I feel so much better that we bought this place. It seems good. Joey is going to be living here for the month, so you'll keep us posted, but successful trip. I feel like, again, this house isn't perfect. There's some things wrong, but really glad we fired the gun on this and
Speaker: We learned a lot. We definitely learned about the transaction process and we're looking at our next spot soon, Joey, right? Looking at Osaka. Yeah. I think we mentioned it in a few other podcasts, but some good, a lot of positives about Osaka right now. yeah On to the next, but good luck. You're going to be here for a month fixing this place up while I'm in California. What's got it. Thanks. Thanks for your help on. I'm looking at these dumb boat, the boxes, bro. You're, that's you. All right. All right. End of the podcast. Bye -bye. See you guys later.
Speaker: I'm a base camp.
