Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Buying a House in Japan podcast. My name's Take. And I'm Joey. And we're two friends who just quit our corporate jobs and bought a cheap house in rural Japan. The goal of this podcast is to document the highs and lows of the process while informing you of every step you need to take in order for you to do it yourself too. We're by no means experts and we're doing this for the first time, but we hope this gives you a realistic expectation if you embark on this journey yourself and we hope you enjoy the show.
Speaker: Hey all, before listening to this podcast realized I totally messed up on the microphone settings. So this is really annoying echo, super unpleasant to listen to. Uh, so if this deters you at all, feel free to skip this episode. Uh, I think we will hopefully get better recording quality as we figure this out. Again, all learning process, our first podcast. So thanks for listening to it. If you do. Um, but yeah, coming to you live and SOGI Lux is recording studio.
Speaker: Joey, how are we doing today? What's up, Tage? Jeez, we have come quite a far way since our last recording, haven't we? Yeah, I would say that the mood has improved, you know.
Speaker: I feel like we left our last episode on a little bit of a negative footing. I would say that we're feeling much better about the place now. We are currently sitting in a plant filled room with great lighting. We have a soft carpet, a couple of chairs, sipping on sparkling water. Drinks only mini fridge.
Speaker: everyone should have one in their house. Yep. We're definitely on top of the mountain now. We were definitely on a quite a low and then we put a lot of effort, I think these past couple of days to polish up this diamond and rough. It's still definitely rough by many means. There's I think critical flaws here there. The room I'm in, I'm afraid every time I walk around, I might fall through the floorings quite soft and squishy. Joey, how's your room?
Speaker: My room's doing all right. We had some issues. We got really scared about Donny, little mites that live in Satami early on. I don't think I've been bit, maybe mosquito bites we got, but I think we successfully killed the Donny. The room's feeling great. It's crazy. It feels like dog years in some sense. It's been like three days since our last recording, but every day, like every day we wake up and like, we're going to have a chill day, but
Speaker: We had to go back to back to back. Like we've been to every department store and like recycle goods store here. I mean, we had to, like we were living pretty rough for a bit. I mean, we're still, I'm still afraid to use our, our bathroom. We've been scoping out other showers and other, other places to use the restroom. That's, that's the current state. But other than that, we have at least this room, this recording studio as a safe place now. Yeah, it's definitely a safe zone. Feeling pretty good.
Speaker: And hey, congratulations on the bed, Taka. I think we mentioned last episode that we found out how to use Amazon. With that, we went pretty hard, ordered everything off Amazon. So got a low bed frame, got sheets. Today's the first day I'm sleeping with clean sheets, not on the floor.
Speaker: Got a desk in the room, got a yoga mat. Tip for Amazon Japan, put a little sign outside. Just use chat TBT to translate it that says just like leave the packages here. Cause we found that when we were away or like not answering the door for whatever reason, they would take the packages with them. They wouldn't just like throw it at the front door. Like I've been used to. So put a little sign out.
Speaker: Yeah. They were like really, we missed a couple of packages. It went on a whole and we're like, Oh man, that was a mission critical package. Joey would be like scoping out of his window and he saw the delivery person and we'd chase him down. So I think we finally have not only one figure it out or confusing address.
Speaker: But two, we've successfully gotten, I think we have a system to get Amazon deliveries here. Everything on Amazon is pretty comparable to the US as far as selection. I think it's cheaper, it's faster, and this is kind of the way. We have a big hole in the floor.
Speaker: Okay, let's talk about that, Joey. So what happened? What did we do? We started breaking down some walls. So a lot of Japanese homes, like the house I lived in when I was in high school in this house, very similar. It's all like compartmentalized rooms everywhere. And the downstairs, we have grand plans to really make it like an open, open area. So the kitchen, kind of living room, hallway, all open up into each other. So we've been breaking down some of those interior walls.
Speaker: Yeah. Again, current state, upstairs we've cleaned it, downstairs feels like a basement, I like to say. Every time right before we're sleeping, we're like, ah shit, we got to brush our teeth down in the basement. It's pretty gross and dusty and we're, we're shoes, but it's a work in progress. And I think busting down those walls really was, was quite cool to see our, our plan vision kind of come to reality of like what it would look like as an open floor plan.
Speaker: Yeah. And in that process of busting down the walls, there was like a really soft spot in the floor. And now we've got a big hole there. We have a giant hole, but it looks a lot better. Yeah. We just don't know. Trash is a big problem here. So we don't know where to get rid of like the drywall equivalent. I think they call it seco bold or something like that.
Speaker: And we've learned that we can't just go to dump and dump it. Trash will not take it. So we'll talk about it soon, but we have a fixer who we've hired who's on the job to figure out where we can put it. But man, it looks good. I think this is going to be such a cool spot when we're done with it. Can't wait. It's starting to feel, I mean, I'm envious of your bed.
Speaker: I know my room is really good when I get that bed in there too, but I'm leaning back in my chair right now. I'm just looking at the bed with the nice mood lighting. I got some incense, nice incense going now. Got some plants. Holy crap. We're.
Speaker: We made it. Yeah. So I'd like to announce we've kind of hired our first person to help us here. We've realized that our Japanese language skills are not good. And we just like don't have a phone number. And honestly, we got connected through a friend of a friend to someone who's down to help us hourly. So we kind of negotiated a little bit and she's going to be helping us kind of be our fixer Jerry, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't like, I don't know if this is advice we can give to other people, but like, if you can do it, like, yeah, this is a local person that lives in Beppu. She speaks Japanese fluently and like stuff like dealing with contractors, like, you know, getting rid of like construction material trash and how to navigate the dump. Like there's a ton of things I mean, Takei.
Speaker: would have a hard time with like, I'm sure we could eventually do it. But just, you know, we'd rather pay someone for their time and energy that speaks a language on the ground that can like help us, you know, schedule cleaning services, all that kind of stuff. So that's the move we made. Yeah, we went from it.
Speaker: First impressions of the house, kind of scoping out what we needed to do. We did some planning. We just kind of sat down and we're like, okay, we need someone. I would recommend if you are in a similar position to us, just start looking for that person before you even get here. Someone on the ground to kind of help us do everything, you know? I know it's going to an additional cost, but I feel really good that this will help us. Eventually, you know, she might be our property manager even, but we're taking it one step at a time.
Speaker: Yeah. And I'm sure like, like we're still leaning on Ziv as well. Like Ziv definitely provides some of these services as well. Or I guess we're hoping to get a lot sort of more services out of our, our fixer person. But again, I'm sure that Ziv provides a lot of these services as well.
Speaker: Yeah, and ultimately, I think one of our goals is to make this a mean paku or Airbnb. And one of the strict guidelines there is you need to have someone, I think within like 30 minutes of the property. And I think, you know, we have someone local to Beppu and the town we're in is pretty super important. So happy that we've
Speaker: We've got that Joey. We, and it's good to know that as we are working on this, we have someone else that's kind of like doing the stuff that doing some stuff in the background to help us kind of streamline getting to being super efficient.
Speaker: And just the fact that she's here too, you know, like really helps if we need someone to come like open up a door and I don't know, let air through the house or, or whatever needs to be done, you know. Yeah. So we actually, yeah, we met her through a friend's friend and it's interesting. We, we had some, we went over for a pizza party, really good pizza here in Beppu, actually pizza alto. We, I don't know if you're ever in here, ever here, try it out, but interesting topic. One of.
Speaker: As we mentioned, our bathroom and shower is pretty brutal that we do not want to take a shower here. Luckily, we're really close to a local onsen, like a local hot spring source. We just can't figure how to get in and I think you need to be a local member.
Speaker: We're joking around like there's, we need to get our master bather membership. There's a thing here in Beppu where you're a master bather and you get, there's like levels of belts and things like that. Surprise. Apparently no pun intended, you know, surprisingly. But we are trying to be master bathers I think now. Right, Joey? I definitely want to be a master bather. The local, we might've mentioned it on the last episode, but yeah, the local hot spring, really cool.
Speaker: It's bare, as bare bones as you can get, but it's real onsen water. Looks cool. Only, you know, only kind of senior citizens going in there, but that's going to be our local spot. Yeah. It's been really fun the past couple of days. We've been going to, I'd say different restaurants every day. We've been going to different onsens every day. Every day has been kind of a new experience day. Start out with just like the onsens of the hot springs, Joey, like list them off. What's your, what's your top ranking onsen you've been to so far in the past week or so?
Speaker: Top ring. I don't remember the name. What was the name of the one today? Oh, so you will post something. No sad. Oh, you know, if you are interested, just message us, but it wasn't. Describe it. Yeah, it was really great. I look like we rolled up to like a farm type house, like up. So we drove up into the Hills and then pulled over kind of at this farm type area and paid 600 yen. I paid extra a hundred to get one of the little towels. And then you go on this little hike.
Speaker: back in the back of the farm through the woods bamboo forest cedar forest really beautiful a river with waterfalls coming down through the hike and then you get to this little clearing and there's a change room and six different baths there and it was pretty 10 out of 10 10 out of 10 yeah the gals are great the view was great you know waterfall
Speaker: Bamboo four is kind of outdoor on send vibe. It's co -ed, which was cool too. It looks like you're supposed to wear a bathing suit when you go there. There was one other old guy that was there with us and he was wearing a bathing suit. So I think that's the move because it is co -ed. It was 300 yen. This is a recurring thing here. You know, it feels like we're spending money left and right, but when we're checking our credit card bills and like.
Speaker: Really tallying up how much we spend. Wow. I was talking to Joey. I think we're saving money. Just general cost of living here of food and just like general things you do. We're not spending that much per day. I'd say we're eating out of the day. We're eating out of the restaurant. I think I mentioned last episode. One of the big things here is I would like to be able to walk to places to eat. We've scoped up some incredible spots so far for
Speaker: So we have a good Tonkatsu place, which is a poor cutlet. We have a good Udon spot right down the street, good ramen place. We're still looking around for a Yaki Todi spot, but overwhelmingly, people have been so friendly here. I really love being here, I think, so far. And what a big contrast to where we were last episode, right?
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, even the last episode, like we, I think we had just spent our first night or we about spend our first night and something like that. Yeah. That was like, I think the day after, uh, it's only been a couple of days, but through our, every day's been honestly a fucking hustle though. Let's be real. Yeah. We're working hard to go back and forth to the hardware store, different stores like that. It's been good though.
Speaker: And that we worked out today, we got a gym membership. So that was pretty, the gym, pretty incredible. Pretty, pretty clean, very tidy, empty. Has showers too. That's like another thing. Big plus. Huge plus. Cause we're not going into our haunted bathroom. That's for sure.
Speaker: Yep. So we're still living the, not using kitchen, not using bathroom shower part of the house, but we do again have a dope recording living room studio right now. Joey, congratulations. Yeah. And two pretty good bedrooms. And we got a desk for the home. We got two desks today too. We went to the department store and we like found a perfect couch, perfect table. And we're like, let's buy this. But found out there's like a 10, 12 day delivery on it.
Speaker: Given our time constraint, we just went to a recycled or like used furniture shop and kind of thrifted pretty suitable tables though. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. We're headed tomorrow to Miyazaki. So down south even further to check out another real estate property set up by Ziv. It's in a spot called Kushima, which is very, very Southern tip of Kyushu. We're really looking at it from a cert perspective. I think honestly,
Speaker: Right now, looking at the scope of this project, it's a little bit too much to chew for us from both bandwidth and monetary perspective, but we're here, so we want to check it out. It's definitely a spot we are interested in in the near future to hopefully purchase or get investors to help purchase, and I think a couple people have shown interest.
Speaker: So we're, we're driving down four hour drive tomorrow. Waking up early. Yeah. We found out you cannot drink a single beer here in Japan. We are at this yakitori shop and we drink a beer and these locals were chatting with us and like, Hey, are you guys driving?
Speaker: What was the experience like, Joey? Yeah, a real local used to respond. I guess, like, I just assumed that it's like America, you know, kind of have one beer, you know, and feel like a big guy, maybe a few more than that and drive home.
Speaker: Definitely not something you should be doing, but you know, most people do it anyways. Yeah. Apparently here. So the blood alcohol content, I don't know what the unit square, but it was like 0 .08 in America and in Japan is 0 .03. So what's that a third? If you're like a person where it's like one beer, that's like a third of a beer. So yeah, pretty much zero tolerance here. Yakuman and, uh,
Speaker: Fine. It sounds like $8 ,000, but you probably get your license taken away too or at least lose your driving privileges. So yeah, much more strict. I wasn't even thinking about it. You know, I just kind of assumed the same as America.
Speaker: Yeah. So pro tip, do not drink a single beer here in drive. We learned that you could get a DUI more or less for that, which is good learning. We learned that this way and had another one beer in versus, you know, we were thinking about driving over to nearby city to maybe grab some drinks, but hell no, we are training busing or walking there now.
Speaker: Infrastructure is great here. So, you know, that's a good number. Three reason of why to buy in Japan continued. I agree with you. Infrastructure is great. We see that like every day, infrastructure is true. Number three reason. Yeah. There's like so much shitty stuff. Infrastructure wise, you're seeing in a lot of countries that this is top top two, three in the world for sure.
Speaker: All right. For actual home improvement wise, there's a lot of things we still need to do, Joey. I know we're, most people probably aren't going to listen to this and we're probably going to be the biggest listeners looking back. What, what next? What's the big.
Speaker: I want another fridge so you can just have the drinks only fridge. Right now we're putting food in the fridge. I just want to see the drinks only. Yeah, we need to get access downstairs. We need to throw away trash. We need to redo. For me, I need to redo the floors every day. Stepping on sketchy floors just is kind of scary. Yeah, we got to get the floors redone up here.
Speaker: We will report back on general pricing. You know, me and Joey actually were talking about this. We bought this house for 42K. I think we're put, we kind of budgeted close to 20K in renovations. I think it's going to go over that and thinking back to when we were identifying the property.
Speaker: cheap houses Japan, Michael said, you know, upping your budget will go a long way. We are going to try to look at a couple places in the area for close to like 60K. If that was the case, that might've been the move. But we've learned a lot and I think our location's great. We've really found a gem.
Speaker: Yeah. What if we, what if we bought something for 60K that already had floors redone and you know, had a bathroom, which is the work where you need to get done here. So yeah. All right. Well, Joey, let's end up with a top.
Speaker: top three learnings between the two of us over the past couple of days. I think we mentioned a couple here of any, any come to mind for you or something that surprised you about this process or it feels cheap. It feels like we were talking about this on a walk a little earlier, like feels like.
Speaker: We haven't spent as much as we thought we would up until this point, although we haven't, you know, talked to any contractors or anything like that yet. It's just been furniture and food, but like feels cheaper than expected. You know, if you've got us dollars, everything's basically 33 % off and I also feel like the cost of living in general is lower. So like probably even more than 33 % off. Yeah. I would come in and man, Beppu is like fucking beautiful. I mean, we've been driving around, it's been a, I
Speaker: great diversity of nature and kind of views. We have ocean view from three of our rooms right now. I think that really surprised me. I thought we were going to be more in a dense city. So that was a pleasant surprise of our spot, but I think so scenic here. Very, very, very beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker: The last one, I guess, is we were at a yakitori restaurant, and we were talking Japanese a little bit -ish to some really friendly locals and telling them, hey, we bought an akiya or abandoned house. And they were very supportive. I think that was really cool. I think everyone in Japan knows there's this problem in seeing people like us coming in and trying to speak Japanese and going to these local restaurants and telling them.
Speaker: It was a good feeling. We're not gentrifying this place. It doesn't feel like we're gentrifying. In Hawaii, when I buy something, it comes with a double -edged sword. Here, it seems like they were stoked. They were pumped for us. I think they're excited to see a younger generation come in and do this, which is a good feeling. It's like a win -win situation in a lot of senses.
Speaker: Cool. I mean, how are you feeling out of 10? One in 10? About this purchase actually. Oh, I'm feeling good. I feel like I want to spend a lot of time here. Okay. I got about a week left here and Joey's got two more months. We have a fixer now that's going to be helping us navigate this construction and renovation process. Again, I don't know if anyone's listening to this, but I think we're going to look back on this and be
Speaker: It's going to be really interesting to see how much progress we made, even from the last episode. So I'm feeling a 10 out of 10 on this purchase. Yeah, let's see you after it's done. And hopefully once we get this rented out, but all right, October 11th, thank you for listening and coming to you from the recording studio.
