Transcript
Speaker: We're driving down the road and the jungle gets taller and taller as we're driving. And eventually it crests over, like forms a full arc over the road, just like this mass of dense vegetation. And someone had hacked out like this kind of archway through the jungle. And we're like, okay, we're we're really getting deep into this forest jungle here. And we stop and the real estate agent, the seller side real estate agent puts on these big boots. And I'm like, okay, what does he know that we don't know?
Speaker: come back well but but but Welcome back. Welcome back. To the Buying a House in Japan podcast, the number one Akia podcast in the world. o Today, we are recording from Tosashimizu in Shikoku.
Speaker: Where is that, Joey? We're in Kochi Prefecture. If you look at Kochi Prefecture, if you look at chi co the island of Shikoku, it's like the middle island in Japan. On the southern shore, it does this like rainbow arc kind of shape, and we're at the left-south point of that rainbow arc.
Speaker: Out of all our friends, nobody has been here before. Except actually, no. Yeah, Mika. amika make me Mika has been here. She lives an hour away, though. That doesn't count.
Speaker: Yeah, she she happens to live around here. But i like we were talking on the drive here. We've been to Shikoku so many times recently, and like no one we know has been to Shikoku. So like we know, I guess, a lot more than our peers about Shikoku. Joey calls it the Deep South. of ja I mean, that was, Kaifu was kind of a strange town. Kaifu, yeah. So we recorded the last podcast, maybe like, think it was like a five, six hour drive close to Tokushima.
Speaker: So we have more or less just driven down the coast. And ah it's been a it's been a change. Kochi was a lot more impressive of a city than i think we had both expected. The last time we went to Kochi, we literally just got a hamburger i think as we were driving through, and we didn't actually go through Kochi proper.
Speaker: Unmemorable hamburger. i remember it. But anyways, we got to Kochi City, and it was just like bustling full of tourists. And we're just like, what the heck? Like Shibuya level. Like I've never seen that many tourists in this area. Like it it was like she like Kyoto, like Shibuya. And we're like, what is going on? This place is absolutely packed. We go we went to a ramen restaurant. It was a fish ramen.
Speaker: um How was that broth, by the way? Pretty good. Pretty light. But I think it was a good refreshing, i don't know, what was it, sea bream? Sea bream broth? Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, and then so we go to Starbucks after the ramen place, and, you know, there's lots of tourists everywhere, and then all of a sudden they disappear, like, empty.
Speaker: And later, i had some kind of like strange itch on my arm and I went to a pharmacy just to see if they could give me some sort of cream for the itch. And they asked me, oh, are you from the cruise? And ah it clicked that, okay, there's it's a cruise town. fue nohito Yeah, they asked me if I was fune noto actually you called it before they said that, but that was a confirmation. They were all wearing like name tags, like group 23 kind of thing. and like, what the heck? And it was just like insane how many people were flooding off, but that makes sense. Do you think this is like a cruise that starts in Tokyo, it goes to like... Must be. yeah and All these places. I think it's really good for Kochi.
Speaker: theyre like Definitely for the economy perspective, that entire street we were on was just like... Bustling. Bustling. And i don't know, yeah compared to Kaifu needs that. or then There needs to be more cruise stops on these coastal cities, I think, to inject economic kind of support.
Speaker: It felt, yeah, I mean, it felt good, especially after, like, kind of driving through, like, especially after Kaifu, which was unfortunately not doing very well economically, I would say. Okay, moving on. We then moved from Kochi down to an Airbnb where we met Ryo. Unfortunately, Ryo drove to the wrong direction. That was unfortunate for him. And he arrived, like, four hours later. After, like, spending the whole day driving and then we meet up with him in Kochi, have dint the Gyoza dinner. His wife was basically like...
Speaker: You got to go to this good gyoza place. It is the best gyoza in the world. And joey Joey. Trust me, she said. Trust me. Joey's ah joey's a fan of gyoza. Talk to us a little bit about gyoza worldwide, Joey.
Speaker: Gyoza worldwide is a movement, okay? It's gyoza worldwide is I had this idea that would be great to learn how to make Japanese dumplings gyoza from anywhere in the world. So I think I had this idea first when we were in Montenegro a long time ago. But I figure like dumplings are such a universal food. I feel like so many cultures around the world have have a different version of dumplings.
Speaker: and honestly it's like some kind of meaty filling with some veggies shoved in there and then ah like ah you know some sort of flour dough wrapper around it and I feel like meat veggies and flour you can find it pretty much any supermarket around the world so I had this idea that let me learn how to make it completely from scratch from you know supermarket stuff including the skins and that's my gyoza worldwide project I haven't I feel like i sporadically work on gyoza worldwide. Like maybe every six months I'll make gyoza from scratch. The hard part is that it's a lot of work making the skins.
Speaker: Sorry, not only making the skins. Making the filling too is like also, um you know, it takes a lot of work. And then on top of it, you have to fold all the dumplings and then cook them. So I feel like it's just like it's labor intensive.
Speaker: Do you take the... water out of the cabbage with the salt. Most definitely. You got it That's the key. Learn that from Talasi, your old, your friend from Hawaii. It works. You can do it. And I'm getting better at making the skins, but it is just labor intensive. That's why the project is at a proceeding at a snail's pace. I have been witness. We had a lot of gyoza in Montenegro. I remember the entire fridge was just gyoza. We ate gyoza for like four days, but it was good. the I would say the one trick that I learned also from your friend in Hawaii is shrimp. So I think she only eats shrimp gyoza, but I really do think the ah the pork giza sorry the pork and shrimp mixture is the best tasting mixture.
Speaker: you add some veggies and you know, cabbage and stuff in there too but meat wise, if you do the pork and shrimp, I think like, It just adds like a lot more umami interest and good flavor to the dumplings. I think excess ginger is my vote.
Speaker: Anyways, the whole reason we drove down to Kochi was to see this house in Toshishimizu, where we are recording now. Backstory of this, someone had reached out to us via email. It was her dad's home, seaside private beach, nook next to some pretty good surf, which we'll cover in a little bit. But House itself had been abandoned for about two years. Backstory, her dad was living in San Diego and like shipped his like entire home over to this area and rebuilt this house.
Speaker: The house was really interesting. Joey, first impressions of the Toosashimizu house. We had seen pictures before. We had seen pictures in like a little walkthrough video.
Speaker: Those photos and videos were taken about two years ago. And the first impressions are that the jungle has really like... It is an affing jungle. It reclaimed this this property.
Speaker: like Just from the road up, we there was like a hacked out, like this is the road, okay? and We're driving down the road and the jungle gets taller and taller as we're driving. but and Eventually, it crests over, like forms a full arc over the road, just like this mass of dense vegetation. And someone had hacked out like this kind of archway through the jungle. And we're like, okay, we're we're really getting deep into this forest jungle here. And um road was kind of muddy. The road was narrow. And we stop and the real estate agent, the seller side real estate agent puts on these big boots. And I'm like, what What does he know that we don't know? Very overgrown. Like it just goes to show you that like probably within a year, especially in like a warmer place like Kochi, like Japan that will reclaim these homes. Never underestimate the power of nature in Japan is what we've learned is just like.
Speaker: Every single one of our acuas, if we leave it unattended, plants will just take over. i Bugs will take over. i don't know. it's just like It's a different level than I feel like in the States for some reason.
Speaker: Yeah. Those are my first impressions. Some things like... I'm not sure if it was the vegetation, the very first gate, like one of the parts of the gate, one of the hinges had broken off. lot of very good gates on this property. Actually, I really liked the gates. I really liked the benches. We'll get into that in a second, but yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe the vegetation had just gotten so much that had it had broken one of the hinges on this gate. Yeah. To further paint the scene, we were we driven up and we were actually filming a video with one of our friends, Maego Mika, who's helping us direct. So she has been filming the background. Shout out to Maego Mika. Follow her channel.
Speaker: Her, Jesse, and Pancake are cool people. But anyways, as Joey mentioned, the real estate agent was in front. He put on these boots and he literally pulls out like these gardening scythe tools. yeah And we're just like, oh oh boy. And he goes through the gates and he just starts like hacking away at the weeds. Like he's done this before, obviously.
Speaker: But the weeds are probably like, I would say at least chest high. Yeah, like he's got this machete on the end of a pole here. He's looking clean, though. He's like waxed hair, like dress shirt, but with these boots just like slicing down the weeds. Yeah, yeah. hats off to him. But this property is huge. So painting the picture more. It's on like this hillside forest, very close to the ocean, very, very secluded, very, very quiet area. I'd say like I was looking at the trees. They're like... hundred different types of green trees so it it is nature is here and it's really us first nature but he's hacking away he comes up upon the house and it it looks i think pretty but very unique the most unique akia we have personally seen to date in my opinion
Speaker: First you come up to his garage. So the dad of the person that's now trying to sell the house, Japanese American man came over from san Diego and he put a bunch of stuff in a shipping container and actually it was a very large shipping container. It looked like a double wide. I don't know if that exists or not. He might have had three actually. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get into it. But yeah, anyways, we'll get into what was in the shipping container because it's relevant to the house. But anyways, the first thing you come up, ah you go through this, the gate I was mentioning with the, it's like a very large gate, first of all.
Speaker: You go through that and you come up to this three car garage that is this old shipping container, but then converted into a garage. And there was a real like,
Speaker: a-frame roof on top and that's the first thing you see we didn't actually get to see the inside of the garage but like large garage fit for three cars so he had brought over pretty much his entire house from the u.s i think and and plopped it in japan but from there we go up like more stone steps this whole way we've got ah spider sticks so mean i don't know who had the stick rio at that time think you were the main spider stick man So like, you know because the spiders here especially in kind of like the foresty jungly areas can get quite big in the and they're actually their webs like are very strong and so you don't want to walk into those but so yeah, we're like kind of like spiders sticking our way up waving a stick in front of us ah Going through like grass is very tall. Lots of plants come over. i think it's interesting like what I found really interesting was that
Speaker: The vegetation has really taken over and I'm like, we were finding things later around the house buried under the vegetation. Like I'm sure there's a ton of things that we missed. Um, but you know, even finding the stepping stones going up to the house, it w it was kind of difficult through the vegetation.
Speaker: We get up there. And there's kind of some more sheds, this time in more of like a Japanese tea house style sheds. There's a lot of nice stone benches. We get up to the house and the the genkan, the entranceway, has these massive tree pillars of the house. Quite an impressive entranceway, I would say.
Speaker: The owner i had spent a lot, I think a lot of money or maybe a lot of energy on on making these unique things. So yeah, huge tree trunks. This house is not a Japanese house, would say. Picture that, like, this is kind of my, aunt like, I've never met the dad here who built this house. But my sort of understanding is that Japanese American man, and he wanted a very American house. He wanted his, like, sort of what he was used to in San Diego. So, again, back to the shipping container. He shipped over like his stove, his dishwasher, his washer dryer, um
Speaker: light door the doors light fixtures, the outlets in the walls, furniture, fireplace. So like there's very American sort of it looks like a very American home when you're on the inside. And you've got all those, you know, you have the three prong outlet. Japan normally has like two. There's just two prongs on that middle ground plug.
Speaker: If he brings something over, it won't fit in the walls here. He had those three-pronged outlets. So my understanding of this house is like he – or what this man wanted out of the house was to have his San Diego kind of house here plus – He had built onto this house. So there was like the American half and then there was the Japanese half. So there were tatami rooms on the other side, but it goes even further than that. He had a whole sort of tea ceremony. It wasn't just one room. It was a tea ceremony, like multiple rooms built around tea ceremony.
Speaker: And they were all tatami. He had some sort of things I didn't fully understand, but there was, in one of the outer tea ceremony rooms, there was some special, like, faucets near the floor. I'm not sure exactly what that's for, and, like, a burner. And he also had the irori, irori, having a hard time saying that now, irori. which is like the that little stove. You pull up a small center tatami mat, and there's like a little charcoal burner in the middle of the floor. I'm not exactly what it's used for. it Maybe tea ceremony stuff. didn't really want to show us that. He like pulled it up. i was like, all right, cool, man. He did want to show it. Yeah, he did. We weren't asking for it. It's cool.
Speaker: But the, yeah, so I think the owner had bought this house first and then added on these annexes with his Western kind of style. So it's very clear, like as you walk past, I think the...
Speaker: kitchen all of a sudden becomes a Japanese house with the tea ceremony room with the kind of hidden rooms. And I think with that, you also see the aging difference of the two sections. The Japanese side was very, very in need of some some love, I'd say. Like a lot of floors were sunk in. there It just felt a little bit mustier there.
Speaker: But it also had a lot of style, which I think is very unique. And I haven't seen it. I haven't seen a tea ceremony room like that in any of the acciots we've purchased or gone in. This man had like a very specific idea when he built this house. Unique taste. Unique taste. I think is good. You know, it's not it's not the boring 1980s, you know, whatever house we' we're typically seeing. So it was an honor to actually to take a look at this and have Kay let us, the owner's daughter, let us go in. But...
Speaker: you know House-wise, I think it's maybe around 2,000 square feet, maybe 1,800 square feet. So very, very big house. not so Half the house is Japanese rooms, half the house is like Western rooms, like high ceilings, big bedroom, not not the common Japanese house, like the as Joey mentioned.
Speaker: Thanksgiving turkey oven, which is very, very uncommon for... her The exact... The landlord... The New York landlord special is the exact same ah stove and oven unit that I had in my first apartment in East Village.
Speaker: Big... I think the best part, though, was the bathroom. The... Was that in the master bedroom? like Yeah. The Hinoki tub. The Japanese... Is that Cypress Hinoki? Some kind of Japanese wood tub with, like, copper...
Speaker: finishings on it and like a bunch of rocks in the you know a stone tile it was really nice the bathroom was the master bedroom like ohudo room was really nice now some of the downsides it definitely needs some renovation it's not ready for someone to just buy it and live in it yeah um one of the alarming not alarming things but like we were walking around in the The real estate agent just started like smacking the wall. We're like, what is this guy doing? Supposedly, I think there's either like a weasel weasel nest.
Speaker: it He said they don't nest, though. Okay, like a weasel maybe. What was he doing then? he' was just like Maybe they do nest. Who knows? He was just like knocking the walls. and like What are you doing, dude? He's like, there might be weasels here. but we There might be a weasel in the roof.
Speaker: yeah so Some of those stains could be from weasel droppings or or things like that. but um the roof had been yeah so There was some you know moisture damage on the ceilings in several rooms, but he did say the roof was redone. The ceilings were very high, again, kind of American household, so I couldn't go touch them but um to see if it was still wet. but According to the real estate agent, the roof was redone recently.
Speaker: So I think overall, Joey, what would you give the condition of the interior and what would need to be done to bring it up? Okay. Tough question.
Speaker: personally i think i would rate the interior quite low i think that a lot of gutting needs to be done so a lot of the american half of the house had carpets rip out the carpets i think like a deep clean everywhere for sure like you know dead flies on the floor actually dead we'll get into the crabs dead crabs cool crabs on the floor well yeah but actually there's a lot to talk about crab wise there are millions of crabs around this house we'll talk about that in a second but yeah sort of varmints had and critters had come into the house and and you know i guess couldn't get back out and so they've died there you want a number from zero to ten i'm i'm going low i'm going four four okay yeah condition of the inside of the house of four I think it's higher.
Speaker: Like, we saw it in like a true, had it been touched for two years state. I think it could have been much, much worse. Let's hear your rating. I would say the condition of the Japanese side, five. The Western side, six point five.
Speaker: Condition of the Western side. Yeah. I think like you just rip up, so it's carpeted on the Western side, rip up the carpets, hire someone to like do real deep cleaning. That's what I was thinking too. Change some, change some of the appliances out. Like,
Speaker: The bones, I think, of this house are going to be better. So he brought like a carpenter or a house builder from San Diego. It was like a Japanese, another Japanese American man who I guess is building homes in San Diego. He brought that guy. You know, he sent the shipping, three shipping containers over. He brought this Japanese-American builder over with him.
Speaker: So i is it built to an American standard? Like, I guess it i think so must be. think so. Like, it's American doors. They use the American crown moldings. Like, everything looks quite American.
Speaker: So I would say this is built to last longer, maybe, than japanese build style, but you know, we we had actually talked to Mika, like who's the right person for this kind of project. I think someone who's a us DIYer could do really well here because it's like, it's basically working on an American house, but also having a Japanese side of the house too. So I'd said it with you a couple times, like had this been our first house and instead of Beppu?
Speaker: I think we would have had a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. you you i I agree. I agree. um Now that we're jaded two years later, little bit too big of a project for us we've gotten TBC has gotten us soft, I think. We are we're soft, soft Akiya boys. Hey, they we did J-Lux, our first Beppu house. That was a pretty adventure. How much money do you think this would need to take to get to like a comfortable to sleep in?
Speaker: I would do like, I think what I would do if let's just say i bought this house, I would focus on the American side first, which is the kitchen, uh, living room and main master bedroom.
Speaker: i would do like I would rip out the carpets, I would put new flooring, like just to get it to livable, like almost like a V0, maybe this isn't its final form, but I wanna be able to use this house sooner than later.
Speaker: i would put in some sort of flooring, you know maybe something cheap. wallpaper on the walls like i would kind of do that the lips the the tbc kk20 style lipstick on a pig renovation just to get it livable first and i think that can be done quite cheap yeah i would i would just wall off the japanese side and just like focus on the western side i think you could get ten thousand dollars is my prediction on on getting the interior livable pretty and i think if you put another 30 to 50 000 you can make it pretty banging yeah is' my opinion Okay, i let's let's talk about the outside and... All right, Tomb Raider.
Speaker: Private beach, everybody. We haven't even mentioned the most specialist part in my mind. We'll get to it. We'll save the the best for last, but this house does have a private beach. Okay, joey Joey was acting like Tomb Raider the entire time.
Speaker: Is it Tomb Raider? Lara Croft is main character? At first was saying Indiana Jones, and then I thought it was funnier in my head saying Tomb Raider, so I switched to Tomb Raider. Jerry's running around with a stick being like, I found a pizza oven. They're like, oh, check out what I found. Everybody else was inside, and wanted to go explore the outside because I thought the outside had a lot of cool stuff, and I liked that I was seeing stuff under the brush. It felt like there was a lot to be discovered out there.
Speaker: So while everybody else was inside, I started walking around the outside of the house and walking around the side. What did I discover first? First, a ton of stone benches, which I think are really cool. And they're numbered too. You're counting them down. Yeah. So I found like eight, seven, six, five. I didn't find the other ones. So they're out there. I found a pizza oven buried in the brush, which is really cool.
Speaker: I found two koi ponds and there might be more. And they they had like, you know, sort of a pump and a fountain and all that kind of stuff. So they must have been very nice at one point.
Speaker: Walking around the other way around the house, we came across behind the tea ceremony rooms of the house. There was like, it you know, it kind of looks like a bus stop, I would say. But again, done in that tea ceremony style. It's just like a bench, like kind of like a lean to, I think, style. structure with a bench in it which was really nice and you kind of the sunakabe walls what else do we see back there just to give also like a bird's eye view the house itself is like a big squarish type shape with imagine it like diagonally split western side and east western style and asian style japanese style and then the actual outside i think that the plot must be pretty huge must be like
Speaker: four to five thousand square feet. Yeah, it feels feels quite big. Huge, huge lot. And it's just, it definitely is now heavily overgrown, but you could see the remnants of like what was there. And I think if you literally just had someone mow down all those weeds, it would be like,
Speaker: Such a big peaceful kind of garden. Let's talk about the crabs. There's crabs everywhere. So these crabs, so they're little crabs. they're They're small. They're about the size of the width of your thumb, maybe. Maybe a little bit bigger, width of your middle finger. They, it seems like they live in holes because I could see some like holes dug in the dirt and crabs down in them. These maybe are like land. We're close to the ocean. We'll get to the private beach in a bit. We are very close to the ocean. But I think these are land crabs because they were they were living in holes in the rocks. So anyways, there's like a rock wall going around. You know, but it's a large plot of land. There's many rock walls. But on one rock wall in the back of the house, there's lots of little crevices for crabs to...
Speaker: live and as we're walking back there all of a sudden you just see all these little orange faces like duck in back into their little hidey holes in the the walls and that wasn't just the only place we saw the crabs they were literally in lots of different kind of little hidey holes in the dirt in the mud in the rocks in the jungle they're cool I know you don't play video games, but it seems like this, in in when you play, let's say, Pokemon or something, this is like when you go to like the the ocean region and you start seeing different types of Pokemon. and I really felt like we were in the ocean, Akiya kind of territory and that we saw a lot of ocean-type things, including these crabs. But yeah, there were literally, like I would say, 200 to 500 crabs, not exaggerating, like on these back walls and like all over the property. and It's cool to see. I mean, I hope there were a couple that entered the house. We saw a couple dead crabs in the house.
Speaker: Yep. Like I saw them on the road too, as we were driving to other places around the town later. I think that's just like kind of land crab. I don't know. We can look it up, see what kind of crabs they are. As we mentioned, the owner of this property was had a very unique vision for both the interior, but also the exterior. There are like, Some really cool gates. There's some really cool structures. There's also some like creepy faces on on one of the totems. But I think he definitely put a lot of heart and soul into designing this place to how he wanted to be. And it seemed like this was his escape and like kind of isolation zone. He was a big fisherman and um came here for kind of that solitude. But Joey, before we move on to the private beach, how would you what would you rate the at outside of the house?
Speaker: I mean, it's so like the adventure levels high. I felt like a Tomb Raider walking around out there with my spider stick and discovering like there was like a ah concrete pillar that I found. Like think of like a and not Roman concrete pillar, but like a large concrete pillar that had been knocked down and then i don't know a bunch of jungle plants had grown over it. like That felt like Tomb Raider to me. like I've seen that exact scene in Tomb Raider PS1.
Speaker: But how would I rate it? Give me a number. The adventure was high. ah The adventure sort of experience today was high outside. It was a lot of land. There's a lot of stuff going on out there from pizza ovens to koi ponds to...
Speaker: Japanese bus My Neighbor Totoro bus stop looking thing to staircases to terraced bamboo forest stuff that I didn't even explore.
Speaker: i think the outside is very cool. Eight. Eight. I would agree with you. I think the potential is incredibly high on the outside. We saw it in, again, the worst state. Two years of just weeds growing everywhere. So...
Speaker: I would also give it an eight. If you, if I were the new owner of this house, I would just pay someone like thousand, couple thousand bucks to just go in there and and and clear it out and just make it nice.
Speaker: I really feel like with a little bit of elbow grease and maybe just outsourcing to folks, you could get this house into a seven or eight without too much trouble is my feeling. Again, we saw it untouched for two years, but Feelings on the house overall.
Speaker: Again, I had mentioned this before. Had we bought this house instead of our Beppu house for the first Aki, I think this would have been an effing adventure and we would have so much fun because there's just so much space and like...
Speaker: You can do anything you want here. You won't be able to live in it right away. I think that that is probably the biggest hurdle for me and you. If we were to look at this property in our own current lives to do it, like you would have to rent a hotel. Luckily, there's a really cool campsite here. you could Actually, we're sitting in the cool campsite. We're glamping at the moment. Glamping Snow Peak campsite just like a couple minutes away. Yeah. They have an onsen here. they They bring you the barbecue set and not everything you need to set up. So we're really glamping. We got AC in our in our rooms here glamping. So like you could live here and renovate.
Speaker: Okay. So the highlight of the property... And I think our favorite aspect of it is it comes with a private beach. Yeah. Very cool. And like, this will tie into like who I think would fit in well with this property. Like I think kids would love this property. I think everything from the crabs to the space to like all the tomb Raider-y like. So much room for adventure. Adventures. So then back to where we parked the cars, where were the, um,
Speaker: the real estate agent put on his boots, there's a fork in the road. And if you go the other way, you know, again, you're right at the driveway, basically at the driveway, it was a one minute walk up the driveway to the house. And then if you go one minute on the fork,
Speaker: you get to this private beach, which is, I would say, pebbly. It's not like a white sand beach. It's pebbly, and then there's some large boulders in the surf.
Speaker: ah There was no surf. it was It was very calm. It's like this bay. And I think outside the far end of the bay, there was kind of like a surf break anyways, so I don't think you're going to get big waves here.
Speaker: Water was super, super calm, super turquoise, maybe a little milky, but it was very clean water. And we jumped in there. The water was so warm. It's end of October here right now at the time of recording. And the water was very, very warm compared to a Tommy, which we were just at.
Speaker: The water here was way clearer, way warmer, way more turquoise. I feel like the routine would be, let's say we did buy this Akia and we'd just be working on it. Then like end of the day, just jump in the water every day and have a beer. I feel like that would be like a really good, good routine. And I have a funny memory of like we were recording, like check out this house for the final conclusion of our video. And we see like Leo in the background, like just like stepping on these rocks, like prancing around, like skipping around. What are you doing? The rocks are sharp. Yeah. They weren't that sharp.
Speaker: But yeah, this property is such a good fit for someone who wants a project, who wants isolation, and doesn't mind being away from the common kind of like cities.
Speaker: It's about two hours away from Kochi City, I think, maybe closer to Shimanto. Yeah. Yeah, can't sugarcoat it. You're buying a project in my mind. But I think as far as adventure goes, this is probably the most interesting Akiya we've ever come across.
Speaker: And again, it's in a warm area of Japan, which I personally like. Private beach. cute crabs running around the land, a lot of interesting stuff buried in the bush.
Speaker: I think a handy couple or maybe like a couple friends together could do have a really fun time buying this property and renovating it.
Speaker: As for property price, we're still figuring that out with the seller. Honestly, we think it's currently priced too high for what it is and we will talk to the seller. And give her our opinion because I don't think a Japanese buyer will will buy this.
Speaker: We also surfed afterwards, like 15-minute drive down the road. Finally. Yeah, we had a really good session. Waves were a little big for me, but I went to the far end of the beach, which was a little more sheltered, and had a great session.
Speaker: Yeah, we've been driving around with boards for the past week or so, and finally we've we've brought whipped out the surfboards about 10 minutes away from the house. There's a surf break called Okihama, and it's a beach break, but beautiful. Like, really good vibes. The people were really nice there. The views were great. The waves, beach break, again, I'm not the biggest fan of beach breaks, but quite big.
Speaker: I think it seems like it picked up some of the swell. Some bombs out there. Yeah, it's like, this is a really good place, really good vacation home, I'd say. It will need a lot of, you'll need to have someone on the ground taking care of the property. But I actually don't think that would be that hard here, given like how many people we saw in that surf lot.
Speaker: Yeah. There must be some surfers that are like down to. Surf community seems cool. Yeah. The food has been amazing. We've had a lot of katsu, which is like bonito, and they have this style where they smoke it. Bluefin, I think. Is a bluefin to it? Yeah. So the food's been really good. The weather's been good. i think this is a much better area, in our opinion, than kaifu in yeah total. Yes.
Speaker: The house itself, again, i think such a good project house for someone who wants a vacation home. It will really take the right person. You will need to get your hands dirty. It will require, i would have at least 30 to 50 K in renovation capital ready.
Speaker: Our agent, Joe has already seen it, so he can help with the transaction. Other than that, we are going to be posting a YouTube video on this produced by Maego Mika. We'll probably really release this podcast around that time. But any final thoughts, Joey, on the Tosa Shimizu house?
Speaker: I think the energy here, like the vibes are good here, I think is like... one like just compared to the other surf spot kaifu we were at before, there's more people more young people here. People seem friendlier. you know and it It even rained for a bit today, but still like spirits were high throughout the day. i think it was... um A good energy place. Water's warm. Water's warm. Water's clear. Water's a great color.
Speaker: Jerry wore a 3-2 wetsuit today and was was overheating. I was overheating. I was splashing my face. had to like dunk under the water for a bit. I just think that, yeah, the vibes are good in this area. Just know, I think...
Speaker: It is more isolated than other places in Japan. It is a project, but private beach is so, so hard to get anywhere else in the world.
Speaker: And I think the feeling of you, let's say you do buy this property, the feeling of you, every day I think you could see tangible improvements in the property. Like if you just went at like, okay, we're not hiring anyone, I think like... just spending a day chopping down the weeds, you'd really see that progress, which I think we, it's hard to, it's hard to see that and in projects. I feel like in the U S or I don't know, you you just don't have the opportunity at this price point to, to make a difference in a property. So,
Speaker: um All right, so we will post this video. We will also put a Akiyamara link. We are going working on it. The photos will probably be a little bit outdated, but please reference our video.
Speaker: Other than that, Joey, Utsukara, you were Tomb Raider today. Glad we didn't get bit by any snakes. That's what I learned. So again, on the Aisatsu, that's what you say when you get out of the water after surfing.
Speaker: I was saying konbamo to people because it was kind of 5 p.m. when we got out of the water, and they said otsukare to me. So just know. Again, that reminds me of bukatsu, though, when I was in high school. Like when you're done the bukatsu, you're done the activity, it's otsukare. So just know that, people.
Speaker: You get out of the surf, it's otsukare. Joey Sensei, a.k.a. Aisatsu King. Otsukare-sama desu. Otsukare-sama desu.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Buying a House in Japan. If you find the show helpful or at least entertaining, give us a five-star rating. Takes five seconds and really goes a long way. If you or someone you know is looking for a Japanese home, check out Akiyamart.com, our English-friendly site that lets you browse over half a million listings. That's A-K-I-Y-A-M-A-R-T.com to find your dream home in Japan.
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Speaker: Thank you so much for listening.
