An apartment by any other name

Is it autumn already? I know I'm probably beginning to sound like a broken record with this, but I still can't figure out where all that time went. By all rights, it feels like it hasn't been long enough for it to be the end of September, but nevertheless, here I am, over a year into my time in Japan and a semi-seasoned expatriate. Even so, there are moments that give me pause: watching from afar the gigantic US Financial Meltdown of 2008 has been for me an oddly detached experience, reading and hearing about it near-endlessly in both languages as though it were happening to someone else even though I know it's bad news for lots of people acoss a huge swath of society back in my home country. But I am no economist, and anyway, I'm at least grateful that I have a roof over my head... which is what I'd like to talk about this week.

First of all, I live in an apartment. Or actually, it might be called a "heights". Or maybe a "mansion". I'm not really sure exactly, because Japanese realtors seem to classify the old standby of "apartment" with arcane terms that certainly do not mean the same thing as they do in English. A "mansion" is indeed an apartment, and not (as far as I can tell) anything particularly luxurious. This might be what we'd call an apartment you own instead of one you rent in the US, but I can never get a straight answer out of people, because they don't know either. （And they're too busy being blown away that the idea that a real mansion is a gigantic house on a large estate, something which simply could not exist with Japan's space issues. But that's a story for another time.)

Now, where was I? Ah, yes... somewhat less mystifying than the above is their size classification for apartments. It's a simple compound term that indicates the number of rooms and the particular amenities associated with the flat. For example, the term "3LDK" indicates a three-room apartment with living room, dining room, and kitchen in addition to the (taken as a given) toilet, bath, and sleeping area. The absolute smallest classification that I am aware of is a "1R", or one-room apartment: these put everything except the toilet and the bathtub in the same room as your bed. I'm slightly luckier than this: I have a 1K, which means that my kitchen and washing machine are outside of the bedroom. A larger space would be nice and all, but I'd have a hard time trying to justify it with the amount of possessions I have here, not to mention the increased rent costs. Living in Japan is not particularly cheap, after all. Apart from that, rooms themselves are classified as to whether they are Japanese (with woven-grass tatami mats) or "Western"-style, and (in both cases, oddly enough) measured according to the number of tatami mats that would fit into them. My place is all "Western"-style (the unfortunate norm, really) and entirely too small for my tastes, but somehow I get by.

Upon entering my apartment, the first thing one sees is the entryway, for taking off shoes. Traditional Japanese houses would have a substantial height difference between this and the floor proper , but this, like many modern Japanese houses, is just a tiled area prior to the (fake) wooden flooring that runs through the rest of the place. There's a handy cabinet for footwear directly to the side of this, and my shoes somehow manage to just barely fit.

My kitchen consists of some cabinets, a sink, a bit of shelf space, and a plug for a gas burner. The burner, (compact) fridge and microwave were not part of the included furnishings. I still manage to make decent use of the space, though, even if two burners would be ideal for cooking some things. Across from the kitchen, there's the bathroom, which (unlike larger Japanese dwellings) has a "unit bath", with toilet, sink and tub all in the same room. Next-door to this is the washing machine, which is tiny and underpowered to its American counterparts, but does its job well enough. As I've mentioned before, there is no such thing as a clothes dryer in Japan unless you've got the space and the money, of which I have neither.

The bedroom is separated from my kitchen space by a set of wooden sliding doors, which I worry about falling off unprovoked. They havent (yet), but I'm keeping my eye on them just in case. On one side of the room, I've got my desk / table (I use it for both purposes), a wooden bookshelf, and a plastic set of dresser drawers. Classy, I know. On the other side, I've got a relatively tiny closet (hence the aforementioned drawers), and an old brown imitation-leather sofa, that I still have no idea how I managed to get in to the apartment, and even foggier a notion of how on Earth I'll ever manage to get it out when it's time to go. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, I guess.

On the far wall, I've got two things of note: First, is the balcony. One thing I can say for Japanese apartments is that they certainly have their priorities straight when it comes to having something of an outdoor space. Even if it's used mostly for laundry and nothing else. i just wish they could change the view to something a little more stimulating than the roof of the building next door that needs replacement. The other thing on this wall is also quite important, and that's the air conditioner. Actually a combination heating / cooling unit, this is something that you turn on when you need it and turn off when you're comfortable. Its use seems closer to a gas-powered space heater or window-mounted air conditioner than the central air new houses in the US have been touting for quite a while now, but it makes sense from an energy-saving perspective... until you realize that the walls are really, really thin. For all the things that they manage to innovate on, you'd think someone in Japan, would have discovered thermal insulation...

Regardless of the relative quality of my living space here in Japan, I'm quite happy that I have a spot to call (or at least privately consider to be) my own. One day, after I return to the US, I'd like to be a homeowner, but I guess I have to work my way up one step at a time. Until then, I'll just have to use my one-room (plus kitchen) apartment to the fullest extent that my landlord allows.