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: And we're live. This is the first podcast in a while, Joey, that I'm out in California. You're in Japan. Kind of miss you, buddy. How are you doing? Sunny California. Miss you too. You know what? I kind of wish the intro would, would play for us. When we record these, we don't hear the intro, but it amps up the speaker as well. Maybe we got to figure that out. Okay. Okay. Well, I think I can play the who shots a song that scooter added. I think it'll be good.
Speaker: But all right, how was actually, how's Bepu? I miss it. What you've been up to. Bepu's great. Shorts and t -shirt, weather's still hitting the onset every morning. My routine, I'm doing the Huberman. I was pretty bad with coffee. Like I would wake up and drink it first thing and listen to that Huberman podcast about caffeine. And now my morning routine here in Bepu is.
Speaker: Wake up I go for a little walk twenty minute walk get some sunlight directly my eyes spike my cortisol get rid of the adenosine I'll come back I'll make smoothie little protein in it I'll do some random stuff for whatever usually I'm just cleaning or like I don't know.
Speaker: whatever reading or something like that until, or I go to the gym. Basically this is just my time. I'm trying to push it two hours before I have coffee. So I'll do random stuff or I'll go to the gym. If I go to the gym, I eat afterwards, push the caffeine even further. So eat lunch first, push it further. That's what I did yesterday. I didn't go to the gym today though. It's great. I got a good routine going here in Beppu. Kind of nice, you know? Damn, jealous. Yeah. I was, I just listened to Joe Rogan podcast about, he drops humor and he's like, yeah, I do that.
Speaker: sunlight in the morning, but I do it in my cold plunge tank. And I was like, whoa, that is next level. So consider that as the next, next level up to that. Yeah. Well, speaking of cold plunge tank, there's a property nearby us that burned down recently. Oh boy. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. So I came back from the J rep summit. J rep summit had a great time. So flipped to Tokyo for three days, stayed two nights in Tokyo. I stayed in Shibuya where the conference was. I got a little tired of Shibuya after three days there. You know, it's kind of like, kind of like staying in Times Square. I feel like.
Speaker: But anyways, Summit was great. Ziv, Emil, Tracy, and Anton did a great job putting it together. Very interesting. I think one of the biggest things that stood out to me, excuse me, biggest thing that stood out to me right away was that most people there, there was a lot of people, maybe like 50, 60 people in the audience.
Speaker: Most of them were there for investment purposes. They wanted to know how to generate returns. I would say very few people interested in Acia. There were a few actually. And some of them were like way deep in the Acia game, but they might be so deep that again, they're coming at it from a very invest investors mindset. But yeah, great summit learned a lot. Yeah. That was one of my biggest takeaways that like people want to invest in this space.
Speaker: Were they primarily foreigners in Japan or Tokyo or were they locals or what was kind of the makeup of their 60 folks? Yeah, definitely at least 90 % foreigners. There were Japanese people there. I didn't get a chance to speak to many of them. I feel like a lot of the Japanese nationals left before the after party. The after party is where I really got to like kind of mingle and chat with other people.
Speaker: Yeah, that was, that was a lot of fun. I really liked the after party too, but yeah, unfortunately a lot of the Japanese nationals left before then. So I wasn't really sure, except for two people that I talked to. What were their names? Naomi, don't remember her last name and then someone named Keaton, both Japanese people and they're deep in the Akiya game. Like this, this dude Keaton said that he had flipped over.
Speaker: flipped or had some hand in flipping over a thousand Akiyas. He seemed a thousand. He seemed really knowledgeable, uses the same contractor that Anton does. Yeah. And so did this in Chiba. He only works in Chiba. And so did this woman, Naomi, they all were talking.
Speaker: Big game about this i don't remember his name i wrote it down about this contractor out in chiba and that's where it seemed like recently they've been focused on flipping ackes with chiba as well.
Speaker: That's not a bad idea. Honestly, Chiba is close to Tokyo. It's close to the airport. I think it's surf. I heard surf's okay there, but okay. That's, I mean, maybe we can do something like that in Bapu, but I imagine Chiba's probably a lot more effective and a lot more.
Speaker: Closer to tokyo and people would be more interested, but we should definitely hit those guys up i'd be interested to learn more from them Yeah, even if just like, you know kind of expanding our networking to other people that are like quite far along On these types of projects as well just to like, you know learn from the best kind of thing everyone was super super helpful there anton gave me some advice on garbage or basically it
Speaker: Like there's nothing you can do kind of thing is like you need a license in Japan to remove like contractor garbage, like construction materials. You need a license. Yep. You need to pay somebody. Good to know. Glad that we actually have a network. I'd say, you know, our, our two weeks in Japan was pretty fruitful. I think we met a lot of people. We, we got V zero. I have a video tour, put in the show notes here. V zero is up, but.
Speaker: Yes. Moving on after you got back from, uh, got back to Beppu. Tell me the scene, man. Sad news. Right. All right. So yeah, after three days, J rep summit living in Shibuya came back. Actually I, for anybody else listening, I would highly recommend going to the J rep summit or tuning in online.
Speaker: I don't know when the next one is, maybe February, but I'm definitely going to go again. It was a great time. Okay. I missed out. You sounds like you had a lot of fun. You should come next time for sure. Take it. Well, a hundred percent. So came back from J rep summit. And I think I might've even just been like,
Speaker: Walking back, I got a taxi and I was like walking back home from the taxi. It's too expensive. Yeah. Each of my, I took a taxi from trains, bet boot train station to our place too. And it was like sun suns and so 3000 yen, which I think was probably like 20 bucks.
Speaker: probably a little pricey too. Taxis are expensive. Anyways, met one of the first ladies that helped us get the owns, the local onsen membership here. And, you know, I was coming back to the house and she was like, did you, she was like, did you hear about the fire? And like, I can't remember what she was saying. And I was like, what fire? Like, what do you mean? And apparently like.
Speaker: I don't know how many houses down, five houses down, six houses down, maybe not very far from our house. A house burned down the night before, but yeah, my last night in Tokyo. So just the night before I got back and yeah, three people were living in that house. All siblings, two brothers, one sister in the like 50 to 60 year old range and the two brothers died, which is yeah.
Speaker: Kind of wild to hear that that happened a few houses down from your own kind of thing. And again, I feel, I feel like we mentioned this before on this podcast, like the houses are so close together, like where we bought, that's one of that, like something we would have noticed had we come see the house in person. We didn't know that. And we bought the house anyways, but yeah, the houses are so close together here. Like had the wind gone in a different direction, someone was saying like a few more houses might've burned down as is what I hear.
Speaker: Yeah, I looked on Google maps. This house is like, we walk past it pretty much every day. It's like, what, maybe five houses down or like how many it's, it's gotta be at least five or six, three minute walk or like two minute walk from us. 30 seconds, 30 seconds. Yeah. And that's scary. And like thinking about our house and how it's all wooden beams and no installation, it makes sense that, you know, it could go up quite, I'm thankful our house in a bird now, man. It's so close.
Speaker: Yeah. So the, so I've been asking around about the cause of the fire. No one has an answer for me yet, but the reason I'm wanting to know the cause of the fire is that so, you know, my, your, the room you were staying in and the room I'm staying in talking, right? There's just one outlet and so many of these rooms just have one outlet.
Speaker: And we've got a lot of stuff plugged into them. So where that's going to cause excess heat is going to be the wires in the walls is where it's going to start heating up. You know, we don't, we do have a breaker that should prevent that, but you know, or, or, or these extension cords kind of thing, you know, they might not be rated for the amount of juice we're trying to pull through them. Like, you know, the more extension cords you get.
Speaker: Like at the end, there's going to be a lot of power flowing over wires that weren't meant to have that much power flowing over them. So I'm just wondering if it was an electrical fire. Cause their house was probably as old as ours, probably just one socket in each room. And maybe they had overloaded it. Damn. Just think about our house. It's like, if we were upstairs and there was a fire downstairs, we'd be like, what are we, did we jump out a window? You got to jump out the window.
Speaker: We're on the second floor might break your ankle or something, but better than break ankle crawl out of there. Better fire alarms. We got to get a fire extinguisher every room. I don't know. Like at least more, like we don't have one upstairs right now, I think so.
Speaker: that if
Speaker: Music this is like as bad maybe worse Anyways, I go to a new hardware store called good day yesterday last night and they're playing smooth jazz They're playing smooth jazz in the parking lot like smooth jazz inside the store. It was very calming
Speaker: Okay. How was the, how was the actual quality of the store before we go back to the top fire? I liked the quality of the store. I thought the quality of the wood. So I looked at the wood. I looked at a bunch of stuff. They had less lighting options than hero say, but I would probably go to good day, nine times out of 10.
Speaker: Damn it. Okay. It was a closer one to us, but anyone listening, check out all the hardware stores before committing to one. We just found one and we decided it was the one. So we just kept going back. And again, to Joey's point, it was like the same freaking looped.
Speaker: I don't even want to think about the music. It was pretty bad. All right, fire. Did anything else around the area get burned? It was just that house? No, there's like a tiny bit of what looks like superficial cosmetic damage on one of the houses beside it, but it kind of just looks like
Speaker: Maybe some plastic that they had out melted or just kind of like smoke soot or whatever, but I would say no, no, it looks like none of the other houses were damaged. I didn't see the fire, you know, the people, I wasn't here. I was in Tokyo, but I don't know. It makes me feel a little bit better. I think that the fire department probably did a good job.
Speaker: containing the fire, just the fact that the houses are so close together. And, you know, the people were saying the wind was going in the right direction away from the neighboring homes. But like, I kind of feel like they, if the fire department hadn't done a good job, they would have burned down too.
Speaker: God, I got it. I think we also do have fire insurance. I think off the top of my head, it wasn't too expensive. I think it was like a few hundred bucks for five or ten years. I think that's what Ziv had mentioned. I don't know what that covers, but might be a good opportunity to look up like, hey, if we do get into a situation like how much does insurance cover? But I do know it was pretty low premium over a five year period.
Speaker: the fifth
Speaker: and learned about the fire and checked it out. And they did say, you know, they want to be sensitive about this type of thing. And they said they think that we should wait a little bit longer before trying to contact the, I guess the surviving sister would be the owner now is what they figured, but they said they want to be a little sensitive and maybe wait a little bit before contacting anybody about the property. But I just feel that, you know, there's a lot of superstition in Japan around like,
Speaker: psychologically impacted properties. I don't know what the right term is, but you know, properties where someone might've died on the premises. Cursed properties. Cursed properties. Yeah. Or haunted properties. Halloween time. So we hadn't like, we have been interested in maybe picking something up close to G Soji Lux, the property that we bought here. This one is 30 seconds walk away. And I just feel that no one is.
Speaker: no Japanese person, you know, would really be interested in that type of property. But I, you know, I think it could be, you know, we sort of been brainstorming use cases, you know, even if we just use it as a parking lot or kind of like an event space, you know, it'd be nice to like maybe barbecue outside or have like a pizza or something there, right? Or like build a sauna or move our shed there. So, you know, I'm interested in that kind of thing. We need to be a little bit sensitive. You know, I'm sure a lot of these neighbors knew those people, right? So they don't want to
Speaker: How, how big is that lot? Or like, what is it? Is it just like burned to the ground, like straight up now, or is it cleared or what's kind of the current status? I'm wondering what's going on. I feel like if this was like in Canada or America, they would have bulldozed the remnants. Like there's kind of like some weird beams that are like swinging in the wind still. And I can, there's a partial wall still standing that I can see moving in the wind. And I'm thinking that's going to come down. You know, it's, it's cordoned off with like police tape, but I feel like.
Speaker: It's still going to continue crumbling and I'm wondering when they are going to bulldoze it. Maybe like the surviving sister expected to pay for that. Maybe she doesn't have the money. I'm not quite sure what's going on, but a lot of structure is left up that I think should be taken down.
Speaker: Hmm. Okay. Well, prayers to the family and the survivors and it's a pretty, pretty terrible thing. Like thankfully that was not our property or it didn't spread, but good reminder, Joey, like we got a fire extinguishers, see what we can do to fireproof. But I hear, you know, I don't think Japanese, Japanese, at least the community around us is going to buy that property and
Speaker: I'm not too superstitious and I mean if there's an opportunity even it just uses a parking lot we have really we don't have very much space outside of our house that it wouldn't mind you know a little extra spot but also I don't know what the proper timeline is I know you talked to a real estate agent or something what do they
Speaker: What did they advise? Well, I mean, I, I spoke to the real estate agent like the day or day after kind of thing. So I would, you know, I really don't, I mean, yes, definitely too soon, but I guess another thing I'm trying to do is just kind of put myself in situations every day where I have to.
Speaker: have a difficult conversation in Japan or like a complicated conversation in Japanese. So that's, I just passed by Fudo -san and I was like, you know what, let me just jump in this real estate office and just like, see if I can communicate this to somebody. So that, that was part of the reason why I just, I did it so early as well. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure like, you know, we should just, if it comes down to it and we buy the property, like I think if we just put up like a small little memorial or something like that, you know, in memory of, of these people, you know, I think that that would be a nice thing for the neighborhood.
Speaker: Yeah, let's see how things go. Keep me up to date, Joey. Yeah, I want to be sensitive and give time, but at the same time, if that lot is actually open and we have an opportunity, I say.
Speaker: Not a bad idea, even if we just use this parking. Cause one of the struggles we're actually facing right now, which we'll move into talking about is contractors having people over even. And with that, we only have one parking spot. So we've been kind of having to like find random parking spots in this tight neighborhood. So it would be helpful, but exciting news. We have selected a contractor. Last episode we had talked about contractor a, which is like the single one man army.
Speaker: guy, and then contractor B, which was the larger company, excited to share that the quote for contractor A came in around, is it 3 million yen? Is that what we? Yeah, just 3 million and a little change on top. So that's about $20 ,000. So I think that's an amazingly low price. We were expecting closer to the 6 million, but for 3 million, AKA $20 ,000 with the current exchange rate to do
Speaker: Pretty much our entire bottom floor, our ceilings, our walls, and redo two toilets, redo our shower. I think that's a freaking steal. How are you feeling about that quote?
Speaker: Yeah. Feeling, feeling good. I all agreed. Like it came in at about 30 % of what we expected the person to come back at. And we even kind of budgeted for them going even higher, but yeah. So some things that I guess we tacked on more when we spoke to the second contractors now, just based on that conversation over text with Fumi. So she wrote back to contractor A.
Speaker: the other day because we needed to add a few things on like the redo the kitchen a little bit. I forget what else, like the staircase, maybe I can't remember, but just like a few things that we had added for contractor B that we didn't realize yet for contractor A and now we're, so, so we're going to get a revised quote and he's coming back on Sunday to talk about the house and so I can chat with him, which is good that he's coming Sunday cause I'm going to a Halloween party tonight and I did not want to meet him at 10 AM after the Halloween party.
Speaker: We're coming back to the Halloween party part, but contractor B actually didn't get back to us yet. It's been, I guess over a week now. They, again, we're a little bit bigger, a little bit less stoked. They wanted to do more of kind of like the prefab type stuff. So we kind of already had made our mind, Joey, right? That we were going to go with contract today, regardless almost, almost of what we got with contractor B. But it's good to see that, you know, contractor A moves fast, at least on the quote.
Speaker: Oh yeah. I think, yeah. So they did mention that their quotes take, so contractor B did mention that their quotes take a long time. I think he said two to three weeks. I think this maybe you were in a different room or something at the time, but yeah, he did say that, that ours, he's like, we take a while to come up with quotes. And then someone asks how long? And I think he said two to three weeks. So.
Speaker: Oh, okay. Well, good thing about Contractor A, we kind of put a, he's putting a little bit of time pressure on us. He has another client and we're kind of got into like a who signs the contract first war. So we're actually going to be starting construction. I think as soon as November, the basic idea is we're going to do the bottom floor in November and the upper floor in December, I'll be coming back to Beppu end of November with my girlfriend and we're going to be moving some furniture. It's her birthday tomorrow. So happy birthday Gaga. Shout out if you're listening to this.
Speaker: And yeah, so contractor A, he gave us from a contract perspective, gave us an itemized list. He was actually pretty detailed line by line of like how much things are going to cost, which is quite refreshing. I think I don't get that typically here in the States when I work with contractors. So the good plus. But yeah, Joey's going to meet him tomorrow. We're going to add on a couple of things I expect. Joey, what do you think?
Speaker: What do you think our secondary contractor bid will end up at? I'm betting around the 4 .5 million yet.
Speaker: Hmm. They did. Do you remember a contractor be at one point? He like, I don't know if it was like, what's the right word? Like patronizing, but they're like the bot, the boss guy. Do you remember? I feel like he asked you, he was like, how much are you ready to pay? Yeah. He was like, have you guys even thought about how much like you you're going to spend on, on these renovations or something like that? I was like.
Speaker: I don't know. He kind of made it like, like he was. Yeah. Whoa, buddy. We're not showing you our card. Like, of course not. We're going to be like, I remember you answered it well, but whatever, whatever we need to do to do it correctly or something. Yeah, that was a good answer.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there'll be a little higher than contact A, probably not too crazy. But yeah, around the four or 5 million maybe. I got a question for you though, Taki, what's your advice? So when Sato -san comes, so in November, I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of FaceTime with him while he's here. And the thing I can't, you know, I really want this, so the concrete box bathroom, you know, after seeing a bunch of Airbnbs, I really want
Speaker: Like a home where I feel really comfortable, you know, taking a shower and enjoy taking a shower in there. So I kind of, you know, have specific things. So for example, like how, or I guess like.
Speaker: How do you make sure it's done properly? Like what is a good. Pinterest man, I think between pictures. Yeah. Just get like, if you, if you have time, just like do a quick scan. He could even just draw it, you know, just draw it and then follow it up with Pinterest, like finishes and be like, this is how I want it to look. Okay. I mean, you send that to him and then like at let's say midway through or at the end, you're like.
Speaker: Let's put the two photos. It's kind of like your haircut strategy. You know, like, this is what I want my hair to look like. And you have photos and it's a pretty good, you know, I want that. No, no curb shower, right? I want the floor slightly slanted to the, to the gutter. And then like, like you're saying, we need some sort of glass partition thing, but I just don't want the curb. You know, I really want the no curb shower. So like, how do I like get this across most effectively?
Speaker: I could tell me how that goes. I think he was pretty stoked about that. The concrete box thing. I remember you talked to him, but yeah, I think the more effectively you can communicate that on Sunday, the better. Okay. If you just be like, Hey, this is what I want. Pinterest. This is exactly, but yeah, when he comes back on Saturdays, I think it's going to be a good to walk through everything we're going to be doing. I'm sure he's going to have, I'm sure we're going to add on like 20%, 30 % more work.
Speaker: Yeah. Speaking of concrete box, went to a really nice cafe. It's a cafe hotel here in Bepu yesterday, Hajimari Bepu. Wow. It's all kind of concrete in there. Even the toilet, I think the toilet bathroom is like pretty rough concrete on the walls. Maybe like.
Speaker: what your knee, how is, is he's going to look like, I mean, maybe, maybe you're going to smooth yours a little bit more than this, but like, even the point I'm trying to say is, I guess like even pretty rough concrete looks pretty good. Oh, actually speaking of, yeah. So they're, they're tearing that down in my Hawaii condo right now as we speak and.
Speaker: concrete's going to look pretty like how rough was it? Was it like it had visible holes in it or like I thought about taking a picture. Yeah. I would say visible holes, rough surface finish. It kind of looks like there was there, there had maybe been a wall in front of it before plaster or something like that. And they literally just took the plaster off.
Speaker: Okay. I think that's exactly it. I might go there today. Take some photos just to get backstory. Joey's been on a mission to find like that perfect kind of like hipster coffee shop. I'd say in bet, but we haven't found it. We've gotten to a couple of spots and been like.
Speaker: And the first spot we went to was like a big disappointment, I would say. Guess what? What? The, maybe we don't mention the name of the big disappointment, but this Hajimari Beppu is across the street from big disappointment. And guess what coffee they use? Oh, that's the only downside. That's the only downside. Did the coffee not taste good?
Speaker: Actually it, I thought it, so I explained to the, I want, so I learned a new word, light roast is asa -iri in Japanese. So I was asking for like a light roast coffee there and they said, oh no, light roasted, like we could water a dam for you. And I was like, ah, no need to, I was like, no, I'll just take it as is. I don't know if they watered it down, but it tasted better than the first, than, than the first time we got it from the, the place that shall not be named.
Speaker: Damn. Okay. I mean, that was a huge disappointment. I think that was the first coffee we had in Beppu and we're like, hopes were high. It was like a coffee roaster. And we're like, Oh, I didn't even drink it. And like, yeah, you didn't drink it. That's true. Yeah. Yep. Yep. All right, man. Well, fine to wrap things up. I want to know about this Halloween party you're going to. What's, what's the schedule today?
Speaker: Oh yeah. So, you know, just trying to find a Halloween party for Halloween. I don't know. I've spent 10, 10 years in New York. So maybe it's just, you know, you got, you got it. You got a party from town of time is maybe just kind of where my head is. Do you have a costume? Yeah. So I got a costume in favor, but if anybody's seen the movie, how high with a red man, method man.
Speaker: where they get into Harvard. Anyways, they go to Halloween party at Harvard and they dress up as two nuns with sunglasses on. I thought that was pretty cool look. So I got like a nun costume off Amazon and I got some sunglasses and I'm just going to wear like a bunch of jewelry on top of the costumes. So yeah, we'll see. All right. I'm Googling, right? Okay. So you're basically going to go and it's a nun and like most people like note, this is a younger party, younger demographic, right?
Speaker: Yeah. So this is a, this is like, well, it's hard to say. So it's this event company run by students out of APU here in Beppu. So yeah, probably a lot of college students going through, but I think they've sold over 200 tickets. And I feel like if the event space can hold 200 people, it's probably a big event space. It's in Oita city, which is bigger than Beppu too. So just, it, it sort of feels to me that this might be like a maybe 300, 400 people party, which is like pretty impressive to throw for college students.
Speaker: All right, buddy, have fun. So you're, you're, what time is it right there over there? Like one, two. It's almost 1 PM. Yep.
Speaker: Okay, man. Let me know how it goes. You're going to be what? So in Japan, there's like a last train. So last train is probably what, like 10, 11. I was asking around. So a lot of people, I was kind of like asking people and like the guy that about the tickets from, I'm like, okay, like, what's the situation? How's everybody going to get home with the last train? And he was kind of like, Oh, you just wait until the first train in the morning. And I was like, Oh, that's what we used to do in Tokyo. I was like, I don't want to do that.
Speaker: I'm probably just going to shell out the probably maybe 50, 60 bucks to get a taxi home when the party's over. I'm, I'm not waiting for first train. I'm just paying for the taxi or to, or to split it with someone. Yeah. Maybe if anything, if someone else wants to go to bet boost split it with them, but like, yeah, I'm not waiting until first train.
Speaker: All right. At like a gusto. No way. No, no way. All right, man. Well, Hey, Godspeed. Let me know how the Halloween party is. And a lot of good updates, excited to see. We'll be back next week, hopefully with the next steps on our contractor. We're making really fast progress and things are moving.
Speaker: that's weird
