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. There's a shooting this shit.
Speaker: Shoot in the Shit episode, episode potentially three. Welcome to buying a house in Japan again. What's up, Joey? What's up, Taki? We are in Tokyo, specifically Ebisu, my friend Dimitri's place. Thank you, Dima, for listening to us, for hosting us. We really appreciate you. Yep. Joey, what's the past 24 hours look like? What have we been through here? We made it out of Istanbul. Had a little bit of a rough time. Taki's girlfriend had an even rougher time, but we all made it to our destinations.
Speaker: We're here now. We made it to Tokyo. I somehow managed to sleep on the flight. I got, I got close to, I woke up and it was an hour, 40 minutes to landing out of an 11 hour flight. I've never done that before. Dude, you're passed out. Like for, I passed you like three times to go to the bathroom. Like, yo, this, this guy fucking, I got to give a shout out to face cradle. It's the neck pillow I use not sponsored, but honestly, I will never travel without this neck pillow again. You strap it into the seat.
Speaker: And like you can, you can get a full lean forward. And like with the, the, the lean forward and the window lean, I was able to get this sleep. I lost the straps to it though. I forgot them on the plane. I got to reach out to them. I'm sure they're going to hook you up with one and say, definitely Istanbul airport was crazy. People are all pissed off. People were yelling, flights were delayed. Man, thank God we, we buffered in a lot of times. So if you're doing the same thing buffer in time, we took steps quite slowly.
Speaker: Yeah, flights delayed on the way in, flights delayed on the way out. I just feel like across the board, everything's delayed when you go through Istanbul. But when we landed in Tokyo, it was pretty smooth. So if you've never been to Tokyo, we landed the immigration process was a little long, not too bad, but.
Speaker: Getting into Tokyo proper was really easy. We just went down, got out, went downstairs. We took the KSA Nari to express, which is like 30, 20 bucks, brought us to central Tokyo. Weather's perfect. Time recording, October, really, really nice. My luggage broke, which sucked, but overall we had a good time getting in, I'd say. Yeah. A lot of our luggage is one way. I'm glad to finally, you know, get rid of all this heavy load.
Speaker: Yeah, so we're taking a recovery day today. We're actually going to pick up the car tomorrow from Tomo. We found out a couple of things. Most likely, if you're listening to this, you're going to rent a car, you're going to get insurance, you're going to get a thing called an ETC card. So if you're like driving on the highway, you need this.
Speaker: equivalent of a card that will charge you for tolls instead of stopping at each spot. So my friend Dima gave us that pro tip. We got the ETC card. I think the insurance is covered. We're ready for a seven hour drive tomorrow to Colbay.
Speaker: Let's do it seven hours based on me driving across the US. I think we're going to have to add three hours onto that for lunch and gas and random stops. So probably about 10 hour in the car day is my estimate. Damn. Okay. Whatever. It's good. We'll split the drive. Won't be too bad.
Speaker: We're actually, what are you doing right now, Joey? We're, we're looking at amazon .com, right? Yeah. So we got, yeah, we're trying to order a lot of stuff on Amazon benefits is that since we're splitting this house together, you know, we're just keeping track of all the house expenses. Just, you know, in one nice list on Amazon, it'll be nice to review our purchases that way and share the costs. And also, you know, delivery, I don't have Amazon prime here, but delivery looks like next day or two day shipping, which is pretty great. You can get everything and.
Speaker: everything you want on Amazon. Everybody knows that. So it's gonna be really great to furnish our apartment this way. Joey, what was the challenge with our postal code? I know you sent over a magazine the other day. Yeah, I was about to mention that. So we didn't know what our address was. Honestly, we only got the keys last week. So we're really just getting here in the nick of time. But yeah, we didn't know what our address was for our place. We had some address that was on the building inspection, but apparently,
Speaker: That's not our postal address. That's like a registration address with the city. And it was kind of weird because there was like two, in some places there was like duplicate numbers. Maybe that reflects like two, our houses stretches across two parcels of land. Anyways, it was kind of confusing. Use that address on Amazon and nothing was getting shipped there. I got these messages from the carrier like, oh, cannot complete address, you know, get in touch with this kind of thing. But I sent two horn magazines.
Speaker: Not true porn, soft core, no nipples. If people are familiar with Japanese konbini, you most likely know what I'm talking about. But those are our tests.
Speaker: Those are my tests, Amazon purchases to see if they would get delivered and neither of them got delivered. But we got, I asked our, someone working with our intermediary, Naomison, she works with Ziv for the postal address. And she was able to come through with that. So I sent another magazine today, just a couple, just an hour ago. So hopefully fingers crossed that gets delivered. And once that, once we get confirmation that's delivered, we're just going to go, you know, rack up. I don't know how much money on Amazon purchases, but you know, we have to furnish the whole house here.
Speaker: freaking Joey. We both have our Amazon accounts when we're I think in Montenegro and like I had normal populated stuff. What are you, what are you looking at? That's right. I mean, that's why, that's why I went with those magazines. Cause I, so I log in to amazon .co .jp for the first time and my recommendations were all these porn mags.
Speaker: I don't know. And now I haven't bought anything except these porn magazines on Amazon .com. So really my order history recommendations. It's total D gen right now. Nice, nice, nice, nice. So pro tip, Amazon delivers here. I think we're planning on hopefully getting stuff there. Again, we're arriving and we have nothing in this house. It could be
Speaker: Pretty bad. We don't have gas, I think, so we don't have hot water. We're planning to do hot spring only for the first couple of days, just until we get that set up. So I think we're planning on shipping a memory from a mattress, some of the basic stuffs, but we're working on a pretty robust Amazon wish list right now. It's looking good. Yeah. What do you think of putting a bed frame directly on top of Tatami? I think that works. I don't really know on Tatami, but for sure it'll work.
Speaker: Kind of at first, I thought I wanted the futon on the tatami, but I kind of think that the room is just going to have a cleaner, more professional look with a bed frame. Yeah. So lean towards that.
Speaker: Let's see. I mean, the tatami smell smells is unique. So if you've never smelled tatami before, it has like a specific odor. It's a softer on the foot, which I do like. I think we go for it. We'll see. You know, we'll see. We'll figure it out. I mean, we could always just like, ultimately, like, so I think in discussion with Taki, we're going to break down two walls on the downstairs floor and that's going to open up a tatami room into a larger dining room. And so probably we'll redo that tatami room floor to just match the dining room floor.
Speaker: Yeah. Maybe we can do the upstairs bedroom, convert it from to time at the same time. I don't know for anyone listening. I think our goal right now is we're going to try to get this property up and running on Airbnb as soon as possible. We're both kind of a little bit limited on timeframe. So we're, hence why we're Amazon and everything. We're, we're going for a pretty expedited. I'm not a flip, but like get this up and running and on Airbnb ASAP. So we're going to be doing a couple of things. Floor plan will change. We're.
Speaker: The biggest change we need to make is we had like two squatty bodies in the toilet as far as toilets. They're really quite retro.
Speaker: So we're going to need to probably pay someone and get a nice, nice heated toilet seat, fancy Toto install in there, but a lot to be done. At least Amazon is going to be helpful here. We're going to be able to have hopefully sheets and they're not going to be clean sheets, but I mean, damn, so we don't have a washer dryer. Okay. So there's a lot of stuff we, we need, but at least we can, we can pre meditate and get some of it off the list now. Right. Joey.
Speaker: Yup. Um, we're not going to get confirmation of the Amazon delivery until Thursday. Okay. And we are now, we pushed up our date. It's Tuesday right now. We're going to hustle down there. Probably arrived Thursday night. I would say, right. Best case scenario. So tomorrow's yeah. Thursday night. We're going to be tired, but we will have by then. Theoretically driven almost entire length of Japan, which from Tokyo to Beppu is 14 hours, I think.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Just minus Tohoku and Hokkaido. Oh boy. A lot of driving. If you have any podcast recommendations, drop them. I don't know if anyone's going to listen to that, listen to this before then, but I got a lot of reggaeton playlists.
Speaker: All right, Joey. First impression. You haven't been here for 10, 10 years. How are you feeling about Tokyo? How are you feeling about Japan? There's definitely been some like flashes of nostalgia, almost like how you get it. Like a flash of deja vu, like for some reason when I was like filling my water cup from the tap and there was like that. Consomme punchy chips sitting there. I got like a flash of like hangovers. Like when I was in college for some reason, like almost like how deja vu hits you like that. This is like a nostalgia.
Speaker: Well, yo, the price of things. So cheap. We had a pretty bomb like ramen yesterday night for what, like a thousand yen, eight, 800 yen, 900 yen, which translates to like six, $7 tax and tip included. That's freaking insane.
Speaker: We went to Matsuya, which is like a Gyudon place. I couldn't believe it. Like I never really went to Matsuya for some reason when I was in university here or like any of those restaurants, but I know Taki loved it. And we went there last night for like a late night meal. Wow. 370 yen for their like standard Gyudon plus miso soup. Yeah. What's that? That's like $2.
Speaker: They must be. I don't know. I don't know. The meat quality tastes good, but I don't, I don't trust. How can anyone produce something for that? I mean, I trust a lot of the, like the food production in Japan, but like that, that's getting to where it's like, how can that, how is this possible?
Speaker: Yeah, I think, man, Tokyo's, Tokyo's a vibe. Like I'm personally a little bit done with cities. Like it's great. Everything. I had the best chakrasan in my life. I feel like this morning, so many things happening, so many young people around, but I'm really excited to go to this a little bit more rural area where we bought this house and a little bit slow life, excited for some good habits and healthy life. Hopefully.
Speaker: Yep. We're going to, one of the goals Tage mentioned and I'm excited about too is natto making, making our own natto. Fermented soybeans. Fermented soybeans. People hate it. People love it. Love hate relationship. It's a super food. My, my mom talks about it. She wants, I mean, she wants access to it in, in, in Nova Scotia. So if we can learn how to make it, my mom would love that.
Speaker: All right, well this is we are finally in Tokyo it's been six months in the making, we're a couple days from hopefully recording this directly in our new home, I would say if we get internet and stuff set up. Another pro tip, there's a great cell phone plan called you biggie, you bi gi, just download the app.
Speaker: I think it's like 10 gigs for $17 US of cell service. So if you're coming to Tokyo or anywhere in Japan, just download this. It was really seamless with an eSIM. Internet works great. But yeah, let's see if we got to set up. We got a lot to think about on this 14 hour drive down to Beppu.
Speaker: but overall feeling
Speaker: Whoo. Let's see how we, another fact toll roads here in Japan are expensive. I think we're expecting the cost of just told to probably be a couple hundred bucks, but we'll, we'll do a post -mortem there. I think it's going to cost us probably like three to $400, probably maybe $500 to drive that way. Really? Including gas and stuff. Oh, including gas. Yeah. Let's see. But all right. That's all from, from me, Joey. Anything else?
Speaker: No, let's, let's, let's, let's do it. Let's get these keys. We're going to run a couple of errands for us a day prep for the long mission. We're doing a washer drive. Maybe the last time we're washing our clothes for a week or so here in Tokyo, we got to figure that out. All right. Well, a lot to do Tuesday, October 3rd, 1241 PM calling in from Tokyo. Just a quick journal entry here, but yeah, over and out. Bye -bye. Bye -bye.
