House sharing in Japan

Continuing my recent real-estate kick…

One thing that surprised me when I first came to Japan as an exchange student was the extraordinarily low rate of apartment or house sharing among college students and other young, single people. Having just come from such an arrangement myself, I would have assumed that students in Japan would be similarly into sharing had I actually even stopped to think about it at any point. While I did meet a handful of Japanese students at Ritsumeikan who lived with friends, they were mostly (although not exclusively) in the group that had studied abroad, or were at least highly social with the foreign and international crowd.

But this is not to say that Japanese people never have roommates, only that it’s relatively rare. For example, after coming to Kyoto University last year, I met quite a lot of Japanese students living in share arrangements, which I believe to be directly related to Kyoto University’s higher rate of “bohemian” type culture, as well as the fact that unlike Ritsumeikan, Kyoto University actually has a few dormitories open to Japanese students (as opposed to the “International Houses” that many Japanese universities provide for exchange students, and shorter term foreign students), many of whom become accustomed to group living and decide to continue after moving out of the dorm.

How might one find a room to sublet, or a subletter to live in one’s spare room in Japan? It has been pointed out that “there is no culture for classifieds in Japan, which means an instant success for a “Japanese Craigslist” is next to impossible to achieve.” This is indeed true, but the sister-sites Roomshare.jp and Roomate.jp seem to be off to start, albeit in a specific arena.

While all sorts of arrangements exist, and the range of normality is probably not so drastically different from other countries I’d like to leave with one particularly unique “share mate” (as the term goes in Japanese) recruitment ad.

Hello.

I run a counseling business that I started. However, due to the poor economy I’ve had trouble getting clients. Well, that’s just how it is. However, now I am looking for someone who seriously wants to do a job in mental care.

Rent (with space for sleeping, internet, phone, everything needed for normal life) is free!

However, there are the following conditions.

  1. A woman with the appearance (mood of) of a counselor.
  2. A warm personality
  3. 20~35 years old.
  4. Someone who really wants to study ‘mental’ topics.

(It’s fine if you don’t have any other job.)

I have not posted this as a joke.

Anyone interested should please get in touch.

The poster does not say anything else about themselves, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a middle-aged guy with some sort of odd therapy fetish. It definitely seems like a setup for a movie though. Is this the start of a quirky romantic comedy, or a psycho-thriller?

BTW, thanks to Benjamin for pointing out this ad to me (and thanks to me for telling him about the site!)

38 thoughts on “House sharing in Japan”

  1. Thank *you* Roy!

    “Is this the start of a quirky romantic comedy, or a psycho-thriller?”

    I told you, neither. It’s the start of me *saving a whole lot of money on rent*! I definitely qualify for #3, probably fit #2, and am certainly not disinterested in “mental” topics. #1 is going to take a little bit of time, but since over the long term I’ll be saving several man a month, an investment may make sense.

    “everything needed for normal life) is free!”

    Does that mean that the things that are not normal are not free?

  2. When they say “mental” they of course really mean “mental health”, but that just isn’t funny.

  3. “A woman with the appearance (mood of) of a counselor.”

    Wig, China dress, what more do you need?

  4. Yeah, it always struck me as odd that having a 1 room place with an excuse for a kitchen was preferable to having a bigger place that you have to share with someone. In College, 2 different Japanese guys shared a house with me and some other folks. One of them took to it fine, the other not so well.

  5. I always figured it was because unless you lived by yourself, it was damn near impossible to have any privacy otherwise. Then again, I like the fact that you can have your own place in central Tokyo, albeit cramped, for as low as 60000 yen a month. Compare to New York, where the smallest place in Manhattan or inner Brooklyn/Queens would likely run $1200 a month, and forces people to share. Which, in my experience, sucks unless your schedules are REALLY synched to one another.

  6. Rabuho, that is pretty much my current thinking as well.

    Not to say that everyone in Japan has this daily routine, but my thought is that someone who spends all day shoulder to shoulder and face to face with colleagues, in a row of open desks, sandwiched between a commute with more of the same, would likely prefer a little more privacy at home (than say someone who drives their car to work and has a semiprivate office).

  7. There are a million “cultural” factors behind this – what kind of circus would it be if 4 people sharing a place were trying to wash and hang out their laundry each and every day? Most people who share in “the West” grab a quick shower in the morning (and out of 4, there is always one who doesn’t get up until 1:30) – I don’t even want to imagine the logistics of bathtime in a similar Japanese situation.

  8. Off topic – (In relation to another discussion that we had – Miley Cyrus is what, 16? Her bikini pics are plastered all over MSN this morning in a totally unionic way like she is JLo or something.”Tween sensation Miley Cyrus blasts critics of her bikini body” – that is blasting critics of how “good” her bikini body is, not critics of her showing her bikini body).

  9. Murakami’s Norwegian Wood describes what college dorm life was like back in the 60s, and I believe a somewhat similar system remains in some of the universities, without all the regimentation. Students live in small rooms alone (can’t remember if the Wood character had a room to himself) and must bathe at sento and do their laundry at laundromats.

    Also, I remember from my Ritsumeikan days that one typical-looking dorm for Asian foreign students was privately run and had coin-operated shower and laundry facilities on-site. I actually came somewhat close to living there myself. The quirkiest rule I remember is that Mahjong was specifically banned.

    These solutions are probably the more typical Japanese alternative to roommate situations. Oh, that and the geshuku, in which a Japanese family will cordon off a part of their house as an apartment to rent to students at an affordable price.

  10. From what I can tell, proper geshuku has virtually disappeared, to the point where people sometimes use the word to refer to a normal rental by a student away from home! Incidentally, the traditional geshuku is the type of arrangement that first brought about reikin, where the young person was actually living in part of the house of another person, who was expected to take some amount of care of them.

    There are actually a number of those old fashioned private dorms still operating in Kyoto, now used by a mixture of poor students and the simply poor. The only university I’m aware of that still owns dorms is Kyodai although there must be some others.

  11. For a good look at the old dorm-style student lifestyle – Matsumoto Reiji’s “Otoko Oidon” manga.

  12. OK, don’t know that manga (know the author of course) but will check it out. It’s nice to have visuals instead of just descriptions when trying understand some vanished culture.

  13. And David Zoppetti’s autobiographical novel “Ichigensan” about his life as a student at Doshisha has a description of his geshuku arrangement. From what I can remember it was more or less informal – the owner posted info on a board at the university and he answered the ad and had to be interviewed by her to be let in.

  14. Otoko Oidon is great on a number of levels – the vanished dorm culture, the complex of a backwardass Kyushu kid going to the big city just as Japan was hitting a mass college “fashion” stride, and the thematic parallels with Matsumoto’s space operas (the characters even appear on one of the 999 planets). I also highly recommend まんが道 (I think that is supposed to be read Manga Michi, never seen it furiganaed) by Fujiko Fujio A (the one who didn’t create Doraemon) which is all about the pair of Fujiko Fujios getting hooked on manga right after the way and eventually moving to the big city – a lot of inside dope about filmgoing, the publishing industry, and lots of great color concerning how it was to live broke in Tokyo in a boarding house in the early 50s. If you want to go WAY back, Mori Ogai’s Vita Sexualis which details a dorm experience in the mid Meiji Period.

  15. “The quirkiest rule I remember is that Mahjong was specifically banned.”

    See, its in details like these that you start to see the differences between good universities and the truly great ones. Neighboring Kyoto University’s most well known dorm, Yoshida Ryo, has a room *devoted* to Mahjong. 😛

  16. They also have a video game room and a manga library. But the dorm Adam is referring to is a private establishment not affiliated with any university, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison.

  17. “The only university I’m aware of that still owns dorms”

    My university does – two for guys and one for gals. I was recommended NOT to move in when I started at the uni, as they were small and cramped (twin shares, incidentally).

  18. In a big dorm a mahjong room would be great if it was away from the rooms. In a small place…. think clicking tiles, dramtic tsumos, and billowing clouds of cigarette smoke at 4 in the morning.

  19. >Murakami’s Norwegian Wood describes what college dorm life was like back in the 60s, and I believe a somewhat similar system remains in some of the universities, without all the regimentation. Students live in small rooms alone (can’t remember if the Wood character had a room to himself) and must bathe at sento and do their laundry at laundromats.

    It’s called a rooming house, and they’re still pretty common in Japan, especially for students and itinerant labourers, factory workers and construction workers.

  20. I had the privilege of living in a “ryo” in Hokkaido at a rural university
    for a year. 10,000 a month. majong allowed, and played until 6am.
    a cesspit of filth and squalor, not a fermentation of intellect, more like
    man-children playing Tekken and knowing all the moves, and eating
    cup noodles. once there was a drinking party and someone put his
    member into a fishes’ mouth.

    In Tokyo the only housing shares you will get is with an eigo bandit or a
    psycho woman who wants to destroy you. “Come live with me and practice English”
    can you imagine anything worse ?

    Houses aren’T big enough to share here unless you get a proper town house which I did in Tokyo for a year, and it took about 600 months of reikin and shikikin which explains why the original housemates are still there.

  21. It seems that many owners in Japan are less likely to rent a regular apartment to a 2 or more unrelated people, so this probably also contributes to the relatively low number of room sharers. Not to mention the standard leases I’ve seen have specifically authorized who may live there and don’t allow subletting.

  22. stevicus: True, but I think to a certain extent it’s a chicken and egg problem. The real estate places near university campuses, for example, list a many of their decent sized properties as explicitly “share OK.” And if you rent through an agency you probably never meet or deal with the landlord, so you can always have one person sign a contract and collect rent from all the other tenants.

    Djavve: A FISH?!? Jesus fucking Christ!

    KokuRyu: I can’t recall, what’s the term in Japanese? Curzon actually lived in a place like that for a while when we were exchange students, so hopefully he’ll add something about it later.

  23. Usually they write シェア可, at least around here. But yeah, if you’re living with actual relatives I don’t think you’re even expected to mention it.

  24. Djavve – was this a live fish in a tank, or a dead one on the table (new perversion: stick it in an ikidzukuri fish and let it flap around….Yuck). Of for those that find home-prepared fugu not thrilling enough, try it with a piranha….

  25. At a dorm party I was at a dude lit his hair on fire trying to light a smoke off a gas burner. Hilarious AND family friendly.

  26. It was a dead fish actually and he could actually fit it into
    its paltry mouth. I was forced to drink a pint of cheap sake
    from one of those child-sized bottles, and since then,
    over 10 years ago, I have never been able to drink
    sake or shochu ever again.

    trouble is you wouldn’t want to share a house with a Japanese man
    as they are generally not able to clear up their own trash
    as mum always did it for them – I knew one guy who when his
    girlfriend was coming round would just pick up everything
    and stick in in the bath.

    Gaijin houses are generaly horrible, fire-risk lethal, with the sound
    of shagging to lull you to sleep. You end up sharing a room with about
    three hundred cockroaches too.

    I’d rather share a house with strangers than put my penis into a fish though,
    if that is what people are wondering.

  27. Oh, OK. I was going to make a stereotypical and perhaps racist comment and ask if your friend was asian 🙂

  28. “I had the privilege of living in a “ryo” in Hokkaido at a rural university
    for a year. 10,000 a month. majong allowed, and played until 6am.
    a cesspit of filth and squalor, not a fermentation of intellect, more like
    man-children playing Tekken and knowing all the moves, and eating
    cup noodles. once there was a drinking party and someone put his
    member into a fishes’ mouth.”

    Yoshida Ryo is 2,000 a month. Other than that, it sounds the same as your place.

    When you say “not a fermentation of intellect” are you sure you don’t mean that it _was_ one? Intellects are fermented at Yoshida Ryo nightly.

  29. no intellectual ferment unless you want to know how
    to do all the special moves on Tekken.
    And yes he was a Japanese, the fish guy.
    they like “abaretari hadaka ni nattari…”

    wow 2000 yen a month, it’s amazing…

    I’d do it again in flash if I wasn’t a succesful TV
    commentator with suprisingly bad Japanese (can
    we have a thread about how bad Spector is please?)

  30. Dave Spector should just start a band named Electric Geisha and throw it in Aum’s collective faces. Although I guess after the death sentence for their leader it might not sting very much.

  31. but he is still alive ! When he is finally put to death, then it is time to close in the net on Spectre himself.

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