Transcript
Speaker: Bye! All right. New intro today. New intro. Take is trying to change the intro song to the default road caster thing song that comes with the machine. I keep telling him to change it. He likes the default settings. I like the default fan trying to channel your DJ. What was your DJ name in college, Joey?
Speaker: What did I have? What was my name? Daigoro sensei. Forget that. How could you forget that? I use it as a username sometimes. Daigoro sensei. What is Daigoro? I forgot where it came from. Daigoro was the What is it? Not umeshu. Shochu. This, the cheap Shochu, if anyone's ever been to a Japanese liquor store, they have these, it it looks like those five, is it a five gallon water jug you get in America? It's clearly a plastic bottle. It's that big though. It's like maybe, a li maybe it's a four gallons. It's like pretty huge amount of alcohol and it's really bad tasting.
Speaker: Dormitory, we lived in at ICU campus, like a recurring joke to buy that for parties or whatever, and then serve it to people. Really bad tasting alcohol. So is that a really bad DJ or really good DJ? No, just, I don't know. It was more like an inside joke with the dormitory that daigoro was like, it's what's the word? Um, I don't know. It's not good. I don't have fond memories of it at all. Maybe but you it's like through. I don't know. We all laughed about it. So it's an inside joke. So Jeremy and I went to this dormitory called 2MD at this university called International Christian new University. It was like such a frat. It was a frat. I remember what part of the hazing process is they gave you like one of those giant ass sake cups that look like hats. What are those called?
Speaker: yeah You're right about the frat. I didn't even clearly know what a frat was at the time, but in retrospect, yeah, I agree. They would keep pouring digo dough into that like giant sake plate and make you drink from it. And everyone would question you upfront. I remember that. And I was like, what the fuck is happening here? Was that something that happened like in, like early in your first days? on like like initiations where I remember the plate for sure. It was like a big red enam or like fake lacquered. Yeah. Plate thing. Yeah. And you say, it I don't know what that is. It must be some sort of Japanese tradition to serve sake and one of those plate things. But yeah, we like ironically use that plate and put the daigoro in the plate. And then that's how you would drink the daigoro. And we did that at certain.
Speaker: Like rituals that the frat had, that plate would come out and there'd there'd be Daigoro as well. Good times. Welcome back to the buying a house in Japan podcast. Joey and I just bought a second house, I think, right? Yep. We sent the money. We did that together last night. Yeah, we sent the money. We have OFX. I think since our last chat, Joey, I jumped on the late night call with Yoshi where he. What happened? They verified who I was to the Shiho Shoshi. I just had to like hold up my passport and he like verified. Oh, this is your address. You are who you are. Yep. And then, so we got a second house, almost locked up. What is our second other thing we're about to buy, Joey?
Speaker: Oh, a Kuruma. Kuruma no Kagi is what my dad always says. My dad remembers, who's he my dad will listen to this episode sometime soon. My dad remembers, he he was in Japan for two years when I was in grade 11 and 12 there. And he remembers certain words and he likes to repeat them. But Kuruma no Kagi is a word that he remembers. Car keys. Kuruma is car. Kagi is keys. ah Yeah. We had a conversation last night about buying a car in Tokyo. Oh yeah. Kuruma Kagi.
Speaker: It's a good, it's a good word. Japanese lesson of the day. Thanks to Joey's dad, Ronald's documents. Appreciate you listening to us and whoever else from the Stockerman's family listened to our podcast. Yep. My brother and sister -in -law, they listened to. Really? Yeah. All right. Cool. And now my niece, I guess they, they turn it on in the room with my new baby niece. Yeah. I'm going to the UK soon. The whole family's going to be there, but yeah, now my niece has listened to at least one, one of our episodes. Done it. We've done it. Anyways. Yeah. We were getting a second car. So the first car we got down in Beppu, we bought from our friend. So it was maybe, I guess, Joey, Joey really handled that and.
Speaker: It was quite the process, right, Joyce? Yeah, in some ways it was tedious and in other ways it was less tedious than expected. But yeah, I would say that I definitely took some Japanese language skills as well. So for the average foreigner that maybe doesn't speak as much, I lived in Japan for six years, but for someone that doesn't speak very much Japanese, you're going to need some help is my understanding of the process, but it is possible. to own and register a car in Japan as a tourist. You just need to have an address associated with your name and you need to be able to prove, uh, that you own that address through a utility bill or something like that. So we're doing, so we're getting our, we're signing the documents. We're getting the keys, quote unquote, a week from today, June 14th, Joey and I are rocking up to Japan on June 25th. And we're going to go to the house on June 26th.
Speaker: As a quick recap, this house is pretty far away from Tokyo so and we, but we have a garage. So we're trying to get this car ideally within the next 19 days, Joey. I think it's, possible I think it's possible. Hey, when I bought the forerunner in Hawaii, that was same day. I think it's possible to do it in 19 days. So we were partnering with, uh, old friend of ours also from ICU, not part of second men's dorm, but DJ though, he's definitely seen DJ. di go to and say or something Maybe I wasn't DJing back then. It was, I was rapping. I got a sense of my rap, my, my MC name. here so wasn't deep Just to set the record straight. I wasn't.
Speaker: his mc c not d i i go to and say Yeah, he was a year after me. So he probably came to some parties at the, at two MD, but yeah, our friend Ken races cars in Japan and knows a lot about the buying process. I think he said he's bought and sold 10 or 11 cars in Tokyo. So. We're going to get his help to help us purchase his car. And hopefully if it's smooth enough and he enjoys that work, we might try to offer this as a service or basically help Ken set up this business. And then we funnel him customers that are looking to buy a car and supplement the house that they purchased in Japan. Yep. So we're trying to help people and maybe you who's listening right now buy a house in Japan, but I guess usually most of the times, or I guess.
Speaker: Often we're looking at houses or people are looking at houses like pretty far away that absolutely need a car. Ideally we can walk to train stations, but I'd say a lot of these cheaper Akiyas that are in good condition and good deals usually aren't too close to a train station. So we're trying to think a little bit further ahead here of, can we help you guys also buy a car as well? We're putting ourselves as the pilot on this one. So we've talked to Ken and we're like, Ken, we're trying to buy a car in 19 days, can we do it? He gave us a couple quick tips. Originally, Joey and I were like, maybe we just go to a car dealership. Ken was like, no, absolutely not. Go to mccarrie .com. McCarrie is like Amazon. How would you say Facebook marketplace of Japan?
Speaker: Craigslist, there's Mercari in the States. Like a lot of people I know in New York use Mercari to find furniture, but I, if I had to guess, I think the English website is better than the Japanese website, even since it's a Japanese. If anyone's listening out there, there is room for someone to build basically the, like a better car. like the Accia Mart for cars. I think like we're like we were looking on Mercari for, first of all, you can't filter by the age of the car and you can't even filter by where the car is physically located. You have to click on every listing. Google translated into English and then so hopefully the seller has listed the age of the car, which I feel like 90 % of the time they haven't done.
Speaker: And sometimes you're not even sure where the car's located. It's, it's ah such a strange process, but Ken was very adamant. This is the best way to get a good quality car for cheap in Japan is to use Mercari. JP. So that's what we're going to do. Echoing to what Joey said, terrible UI on the website. Really frustrating, but I have to agree with Ken sentiment. Like the cars are fricking cheap on there. Like. We were telling Ken, like, Hey, we want a budget of under maybe like 5k, 4k USD for a car. And the purpose is to be able to haul furniture, like drive people, but generally a bigger car. He was like, ah, you easy. You can get something for like 2000 or 3000. That was, I was a little surprised. No, just I'm happily, I don't know what the word is. Maybe I'm not surprised. Cause I was looking at a lot of dealerships in Beppu and you can buy brand new, like 2025.
Speaker: K truck for $5 ,000. So this this is a brand new never before been driven $5 ,000 to buy a 10, 10 year old used car for $2 ,000. Like not crazy. Yeah. Before going into the car, we actually have cars we have shortlisted at this point. We talked to Ken a little bit about the registration process. It sounded quite simple, but we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to be buying the car with our company. So I think we're going to be registering the address to the company. Also, we probably need a seal of some sort. He's going to help us figure out that paperwork, which is why we're like trying to figure out, like work out a ah ah process or an agreement with him. But he sounded quite confident. I think we could do this, Joey. Yeah. i So when I bought the car in Beppu, I remember we discussed a little bit whether we should register it with, we had and maybe not quite incorporated the business at that time, or we had just got it incorporated.
Speaker: I remember the person that was helping me, Nippon Bridge, shout out to Ziv's sister company, NTI and Nippon Bridge, Nippon Trading International Bridge was helping me. I remember they mentioned that it might be more complicated to register the car under the company, but I'm i'm not a hundred percent sure here. And I don't even remember the reasoning if a yeah reason was even given, but. potentially the same complication or slightly more complicated, but I can't imagine it's that hard. And I trust Ken can figure it out. It sounds like just like gathering the right paperwork and to my understanding, he goes he gets the car similar to how you would in the US and he goes to the DMV and he said the whole process at the DMV equivalent, I forgot the Japanese translation of what it's called, takes about three to four hours.
Speaker: He also mentioned, we, when we were looking at Mercari and actually ah just jumping straight into it looking at Mercari, he was, I were like, Ken, we don't know how much the shipping costs. If this is in Southern Japan or foreign Hokkaido, like how do we get it? He says typically it costs like 500 bucks or something to get the car to Tokyo. just good That's pretty good. My friend, my roommate, good friend in New York. I remember he shipped a car. I went with him. You went, wait wait, to Kentucky? Yeah. I went with him to Long Island to pick it up at whatever that your other roommate's house and the bumper was messed up. and Yeah, when they backed it off, they messed up the bumper. Oh, you went with them. Anyways, $10 ,000 to ship it from Kentucky to just outside New York and Long Island. Okay. Just know you could take a look at Mercari. Location is not necessarily an inhibitor, but
Speaker: You will need someone in Japan to do this, I believe. I was like, Ken, I don't think we want to do this. Like I don't want to talk to someone like negotiate or whatever, buy the car, coordinate. I think we'll leave that to Ken, right? ah Yeah, actually slightly find that process fun, but I would rather given the time crunch for us and also just to figure out if we can offer this service to other clients. I think that so we're going with Ken and see if he can pull it off. Yeah, so we looked at a couple vans initially. So we were looking at one K trucks or K vans. In short, they're like lower powered cars in Japan. One thing Ken kept saying to us, us kept saying to us, it was like, if you don't care about safety, get one of these cars. you remember i'm saying
Speaker: Yeah. And I remember Max said that too. Remember we were at dinner with Yuji and Max and I remember Max was like, we were talking about Rayco's car or something. And if you get into accident on the highway, he was like, it's it's game over. He said something like that too. A lot of people seem to think these K they're really cute, the K vans, K trucks, but it just seems overwhelming. People do not trust them internally. If you were in an accident, it sounds like, um, could be serious. So we shortlisted and sent a couple of K cars to Ken got that feedback. We also let him know we're going to be like trying to move furniture and stuff. And he was just like, one, he sent back and said, Hey, these, the cars we sent him are all like $3 ,000, $4 ,000. And he was like, Hey, these are all good cars, but they're all, they all, they're all priced too high. I was like, what really?
Speaker: He said you can usually probably get 50 % off these by getting a higher mileage one and still have like resolvable or no issues. He did call out the Japanese customer typically overtakes care of his car. I forgot the word he used. Yeah, you did say that. Which is great. Yeah. Japan has this like thing where you have to get your car checked every two years. So I guess there's a really high threshold. You won't see like a true beater. I was worried about buying a lemon and Ken was like, very unlikely. I think most of these cars again are taken care of too well. Yeah.
Speaker: I think maybe like the one issue is we got too excited about these some of these modded out cars. And then I think that's where you'd run into issues. If you buy something, someone had done a lot of custom word that work that worked themselves on, you might run into problems, obviously. So yeah, we looked at just for, if you guys want to see, I'll link the car is actually in in the Spotify description, but we are looking at and what is it called diet Suzuki? Every van it's a cute K truck where the seats fold down through all this perfect. But he said, no, we are now switching and swerving. Joey, what kind of car are we getting right now? We're going mini van, right? Good question. It's a mini van. I see that more excitedly, dude. It's a mini van.
Speaker: I'm trying to find the listening. Oh yeah, here it is. Esteema. Aeris. What is this? I don't even know what to make. this this It looks like a Toyota Sienna. I think very, let's see. It looks like a Toyota Sienna. This is like a true soccer dad car. Hold that pulled up. Hold up. one owner esimma to it is toyota this so i was like is this your toy i don't even know recognize the symbol but you stream remind but it is it is toyota yeah it looks like the cnn i agree Sienna so we're buying it or we're gonna try to buy it for two thousand nine hundred dollars It looks like it's two thousand two thousand ten hundred and fifteen Kilometer thousand kilometers Okay, it's the Previa so the the Toyota Previa also known as the Toyota Esteema in Japan so ours is the Esteema which is the JDM and version, but it's the Previa in the US. Good. We also have a little screen in the back for the kids. I was saying we should put our AccuMart commercial on there or something. Just playing all the time. Repeat with me Uber drivers. All right. Previa, let's go.
Speaker: This car is in Hachioji city, which is helpful. This is about 20, 30 minutes away from our Tama ah house or Tokyo base camp house. So this was convenient. So we're going to shoot the shot here. Hopefully by the time when you, we record this next episode, we'll have some updates, but $3 ,000 for a car. This is, I would definitely pay this much in the U S a hundred percent for this condition car right now. Yeah. The other reason, uh, so yeah, we got a lot of safety warnings about the K van. We wanted the K van is cute. We is slight concerns about the size of our garage, but I think it's going to be fine with a larger vehicle as well. But just taking those things on the highway, potentially it's just going to be a kind of a rough ride for a few hours. If you want to take it on the highway, the other great thing about getting like a regular mini van is yeah, we can do day trips wherever we could even take this, drive it down to beppu as well. So this is like a real mini van.
Speaker: that you won't have issues on the highway. We're going to be able to haul furniture with it and kind of anything we need to do, which is in line with the whole Tokyo base camp idea, which is we got the place that's outside the cool parts of the city. It's a little bit far, but we have outdoor space where we could put construction stuff. So I've got a garage. Yeah. Or a sauna outside. We got the garage. We got the car that can move real luggage. Like. I do think we're it's all in that line of it's not cool, but it's the it's the right decision for setting up some sort of base camp in Tokyo. Yeah, our metrics were like, the car's got to start every single time. It's got to be low maintenance. It's got to be able to move stuff. So who knew, Joey, I didn't think I'd be buying a minivan, but
Speaker: This is middle age right now. We bought it. We bought a house in the outskirts of Tokyo. We have a white mini van. It's definitely not a cool car, but neither is the car in bet the Honda light. We got a Honda life down there is about cool. I think it's still cool that we have a car and we have a house in Tokyo some someday. We're getting the gym, Nino. Yeah. ah Take a look. If you have the luxury of time and space, take a look at Mercari. There's some freaking sick cars there. Yep. Other than that, how much is insurance costs about a thousand? Yeah. On the, for the Honda life, we got insured for about a thousand a year. Yeah. Okay. Let's see if Ken can also do that again. We're trying to make like an A to Z car purchasing process. We'll probably pay him a premium just to, Hey Ken, this is the car we want handle it. Kind of project manage it for us. Cause we just got too many balls. We're juggling at this point, but we do this car will be really helpful.
Speaker: Yeah. And that's like the service we're eventually hoping to provide to just someone that handles it for you and tells you, Hey, I need these documents, whatever you send it to them. And then, I dunno, you got a car when you get to Japan. Yep. Cool, man. I hope this fits in our garage. There's a legitimate concern. our I think we have a 0 .9 meters of length to spare. I don't know what that is in inches. point nine meters 90 centimeters. ninety and so We have 90 centimeters from the end of our garage to the where our car is, so we're going to have to park it pretty tight every time, Jerry. probably I hope there's a reverse camera in this. Do you think there is?
Speaker: It does look like the neighbors kind of there. So neighbors have a very similar garage. I don't know if it's the exact same. It looks like they have a very similar van and there's just pokes out a little bit into the sidewalk. It seems like it's probably fine. That street's a dead end anyways. All right. Follow us for this journey of us buying a car. I think this should be straightforward. We just need to get paperwork from folks. We then need a transfer. We might have Ken buy it. It sounds like the big thing we're missing is a phone number. And this is a reoccurring issue, Jerry. We should definitely get a phone number at this time. we Yeah, we need to actually, we'll discuss later off call yeah with Amazon. So again, we're going to try to do the same thing, send a test to Amazon package. So the house, we yeah, just a little bit of complication without having a Japanese phone. It is possible. We are trying to go through a business.
Speaker: account, slight other complication there, but yeah check out yeah, go ahead. T minus what? T minus seven days till we get the property. T minus 18 days or 19 days till we're in Japan, ideally with a car rocking up to our house with internet. Actually, Yoshi said he's getting the internet installed. That first Costco haul going to be great. This is our life now. Minivan, Costco outskirts rural Japan. Let's go. Yeah, we made it middle age. And then one last plug. on might Let's do this. hey we We're throwing a party June 30th in Tokyo. If you are listening to this and you're in Tokyo, give us a holler. We might have a couple extra spots. We're just trying to have fun with folks we've been working with. And we appreciate you listening to this podcast. And if you're in Tokyo, shoot us a message. If we have room, we would love to invite you.
Speaker: Yup. Check out the Akimar website. You can browse great properties there. And also if anyone's interested in purchasing one of these properties, we handle, we do some one -on -one consulting and afterwards we can pass you off to someone, the right agent that can help you buy the house. Yep. We're getting closer, Jerry. We're getting closer to solving this puzzle, I feel. It's coming. All right. Cool. We'll catch you next week. See ya.
