Finding a shoebox in Tokyo

All day last Saturday was spent driving around Tokyo with two real estate agents, inspecting a list of properties that roughly met some initial guidelines we had given the relocation company.  The choice was difficult to make without Jae here, but a full day of driving, stopping at an apartment, shoes off, wander around taking photos, shoes on, back into the car ... that was 100 times easier without a 3 year old hanging around.

With typical Japanese promptness, the first agent picked me up at 930am, and dropped me off at 12:40pm, apologising profusely for running 10 minutes late.  At this point I had 20 minutes until the second agent came to collect me and spent most of it feeling like I was going to throw up at the thought of not finding anything that would suit our needs.  We had looked at 6 or 7 places, and while I knew going in that compromises would have to be made, especially for size, there weren't really any of them that I thought we would be happy in.  They were all either too small (even with expectations of living tight), too old, too dark from being buried on the bottom floor in between 10 story buildings, oppressively expensive even for Tokyo, or just so inconvenient for me to ask Jae to live in with no real grocery stores or play areas for Nevan near by.  I was starting to think that I was going to be in serious trouble, either with Jae for taking a place that just wouldn't do, or with the company for having to extend our stay in temporary housing.

The second agent must have been sitting outside the apartment literally waiting for the clock to hit 1pm because she called me on the tick and off we went.  The first guy was nice but a bit like you'd find any other real estate agent in the world.  The second agent was actually just nice, and a had a funny mean streak making fun of real estate agents who need a GPS in order to find their way around Tokyo.  This girl was the driving equivalent of Rain Man, turning down 1 lane alleys so narrow she needed to do a 3 point turn to make the corner, cutting through wards to avoid traffic on the main routes that had led the first agent to being late getting me home, and every once in a while she would stop talking, start counting out something on her fingers and mumbling in Japanese before setting off again with the most polite driving I've ever seen.  I wouldn't have been able to find most of these places with a GPS and a sherpa guiding the way seeing as how there are no real addresses in Tokyo, just building names and block numbers, and street names are very rarely posted even in Japanese except for on the main boulevards.

She had way more interesting places to show me, and more that were actually in our price range.  As the cost of schools and regular expenses began to mount in our planning for Tokyo, as well as the housing depression in the US meaning I will have to keep paying the mortgage there as well, our price bracket had dropped several times.  The other agent had places all the way from our original price down to our new limit, but I actually went into the second round of apartments feeling like I could afford them.  After the morning session, I had narrowed down our original list of a half dozen areas to just two main wards, Setagaya-ku and Minato-ku.  Luckily, 6 of the 7 places she had queued up were in those two areas and we managed to see them all.

Setagaya-ku was the popular choice around the office.  My boss and one of the other managers on the team live in Setagaya or close by, its quiet and apparently really good for families, popular with expats who want to get out a little bit more into a Tokyo beyond the skyscrapers, and very representative of a normal Japanese ward.  It is mostly 2 and 3 story buildings, with very few buildings that are even 10 stories tall.  The streets are small, the train line central to town, and I thought it was excellently cute.  I saw one place that was a serious contender, taking a ton of pictures of every apartment even if I didn't like it, just to be polite to the agent.

Minato-ku is more what most people probably think of when they picture living in Japan.  50 story apartment buildings with the most modern fittings you can imagine, each complex with its own grocery store, gym, movie room, and pool.  It's also more expensive, not as endearing in a little back alley Tokyo kind of way, and more expensive.  The convenience factor for my commute is about the same between the two, but for Jae, Minato-ku is just more ideal as we wouldn't need a car, schools are pretty close by, and there is a little play area next door for Nevan.  We had looked at two apartments already, where I was dutifully taking pictures, when we walked into a corner unit on the 26th floor of Bloom Tower on Shibaura Island.  The apartment is small, the walls in the living room are a strange yellow-orange color, it's at the very top end of our price range, but good lord the view.  It looks out over Tokyo Harbor, with the entire Rainbow Bridge in view from the living room, master bedroom, and bathroom.  It's the kind of view that totally made me forget to look at practical things, or take pictures so Jae can see it.  So, yeah ... that's the one we applied for.