badmigraine
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Posts posted by badmigraine
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Haw haw haw haw haw Good one Mogs!
About the only thing I do 6 times a night is get up to pee.
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What you are asking for is very expensive and large for Tokyo.
I think the rent on a place like that would be about $12,000 per month.
I am not joking, as others will confirm. There's an expat at my former company who lives in a 3BR place in a newish building near the ANA Hotel (Akasaka), and I heard that his rent is 1,600,000 yen per month. That's over $13,000 at current exchange rates.
If you give up "modern" and "living room" and go down a bedroom or two, you can probably find a nice place for about $4000 - $9000 per month.
And don't forget these inescapable costs, in addition to your first month's rent:
Agency fees (you have to use an agent):
1 month's rent
Key money (nonrefundable gift to landlord):
2 month's rent
Security Deposit (expect to lose half of it)
2 month's rent
Guarantor (a Japanese national who agrees in a binding contract to pay your rent/damages if you don't):
free if you can persuade a friend, but if you can't, then you have to pay a percentage of your rent to a Guarantor Agency.
Fire/Flood Insurance (yep YOU, not landlord, pay this!):
For the place you describe, about $500 for 2 years.
Movers:
Depends if you do a lot of it yourself, but for the stuff to fill the space you describe, I would say about $1500.
BOTTOM LINE:
Your move-in cost, including all the above but assuming you got an old lady Japanese friend to sign up as your "guarantor", is...
$74,000
Keep in mind that this is all payable in CASH, UP FRONT.
How do you like them apples?
I once lived in a ratty 1BR apt. with kitchen and small spare room, in a "ritzy" area of Tokyo (Gaien-Mae), for about $1700 per month.
Friends from the US who visited remarked that the place resembled 3rd world housing. Bad sewer smells, poor drains, dirty greasy concrete with plasticky streaky yellowed wallpaper coating it, the range hood an oil\grease disaster with human hairs and dead roach skeletons stuck into it...moldy tiles, poor closet space, loud traffic noise and exhaust fumes in the spare room, bad ventilation (had to buy my own heater/air conditioner, for $1200--this is common), dingy brown indoor-outdoor carpet and old tatami mats in the bedroom. Right off the balcony was a giant utility pole transformer that hummed and buzzed and disrupted my cell phone signal, and probably my DNA too.
I was plenty comfy there, but really, it would not be for everyone. Especially in the quiet moments just before sleep sets in: "$1700...per month..for THIS?!"
Most of the other people in my law firm lived in places like the one you described except smaller, and the cheapest rent after mine was $5,000 per month.
Forget about it!!
You have to make certain concessions to live in Tokyo like a Japanese person, or else pay top dollar to live like ya did back home.
Still remember the night over beers when a guy I hadn't seen at the bar for months showed up tanned and happy, and said he'd been living in a 1-person airconditioned cabin on the beach in Thailand for about $90 per month.
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Gotta agree with Ocean on this one. The biggest financial mistake I have made in my life is renting for years and years in the same city, when I could have owned a place and had mortgage payments about the same as my rent...except they would be tax-deductible and also I could have painted the walls any color I wanted without asking the landlord's permission.
Rented in L.A. for 6 years. I should have just bought a one-BR condo then sold it when I moved.
I doubt it's that easy in Japan, so let's just say that this post is all about me and my issues.
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They're rather like foam breast implants with a roasted meat brain at the core.
Quite delicious, actually.
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Due to the lack of snowy mountains in Singapore, we assume that "boarding school" means a school where you have room & board.
Not a snowboarding school.
Right?
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Ocean, I recommended amputation but for his own selfish reasons Mogski decided that a new pair of boots might resolve the issue.
It could be that the boots merely aggravate a condition he acquired at work: kicking around useless prats who won't do their jobs!
Good thing I was on a different floor or I would have been one of the kicked.
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Skiing and boarding are not exactly health-promoting sports. They subject your musculo-skeletal system to many unnatural, sudden and repetitive stresses and torques.
The kind of skiing/boarding to which we tend to aspire as our ability improves is even less healthy.
Jumps, pipe tricks, incredibly steep descents, moguls, tree skiing, booze on the lift and stupid "watch me" tricks when legs and arms are tired and judgment is cloudy.
Fun as this may all be, from a medical point of view the cost of these activities may not justify the benefit.
The poster-child pros of today have injury lists a mile long. Blown ligaments, cartilage and bone damage...how do you think they will be doing at age 55, assuming they even get there? Nice to attend your kid's graduation in a wheelchair. "Dad was sponsored by Burton in the 90's!"
Great.
Does Burton give its riders a good retirement package with geriatric healthcare solutions for degenerative bone and joint problems?
Oh by the way Mogs I am going out to look at skateboards this afternoon! Inspired by those kids who were doing it in the park when we were chucking the frisbee on Saturday.
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For those seeking knee damage, I can recommend following Mogski down the mogul run on a snowboard at Naeba.
Worked like a charm for me!
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If you like extreme, then you might enjoy Japan's extremely high prices.
Most of us here are "extreme spenders".
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For me, the funniest thing about SkyP is the way the bill keeps coming to me every month like clockwork, even though there is hardly anything I feel like watching in all those 900 channels.
The World Cup soccer coverage was excellent, but there's little else to amuse.
And whatever happened to Samurai Jack on Cartoon Network? Used to be on all the time, now I think it's only once per week, late at night.
Think I'll go rent another vintage Bond DVD and zap some "Movie Butter" popcorn in the microwave.
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butter - failed cheese
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Freshman year in college I saw Subway and had a bad crush on Isabelle Adjani that made all the local girls seem like dowdy little nothings. I stalked her as far as the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, which led me to an archived issue of MacClean's (a Canadian mag) where I found an additional photo of her and was well satisfied.
Four years later I was teaching English part-time at the Berlitz School in Oxford Circus. I met a German guy who worked as a makeup artist and specialized in wounds, mutilations and death for horror films. Somebody's got to do it.
One evening he was showing me a medical school picturebook of tropical skin diseases and mentioned that he once worked on a film with Isabelle Adjani. One night out of the blue Fassbinder turned up drunk and disrupted the set. Later that night, my friend went up to the director's hotel room to discuss the delay, and found him in "in flagrante delicto" in the bathtub, underneath the snakelike gyrations of the totally nude Ms. Adjani.
Movies. Who can tell where the real ends and the unreal begins?
I agree with what's been written here about the Kano sisters.
But there is something to be said about that look where the dress fits so tight the seams are about to split. Too many chocolate malts, a glorious dizziness of soft flesh flimsily strapped in and bobbling and protruding and parading around on impossibly high heels.
It's just not fair.
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Sorry Scoobs and thanks Ocean for getting to the query.As for me and Mogs being the same person, the reality of that would be too much to bear.
Good one though!
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You're right, Mogs! I better chomp some dairy products to soothe my innards.
Cheeseman, eat your heart out!
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Nice one Mogs! I've just popped in to answer the call of nature, but I didn't expect to see a full moon.
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Look, we'll be stuck in that car for several hours, so tonight make sure you don't eat any beans or Mexican food please!!
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Scooby, it begins to cool down right when I open my first beer around 6 p.m...
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The great thing about NHK fees is that whether or not you are legally bound to pay, there is no legal or other procedure by which NHK can force you to pay. Thus payment is in some sense "voluntary".
This is unlike other taxes which, if unpaid, could be levied against future income with penalty and interest and so forth.
My position is that taxation is theft. When you add up the national, state, municipal, sales, luxury, utility and other taxes that I must pay, over 50% of my income is gone.
I'm not going to pay any of this tax money if I don't absolutely have to.
Now, putting that principle of tax avoidance aside, let's look closer at this NHK tax. It's neither a progressive tax nor a pay-as-you-go tax. It is a flat fee charged not to each person, each TV owner, each TV watcher, or even each NHK watcher, but to people who have front doors that can be ding-donged.
The people who pay it have zero input into where the money goes, what it is used for, the NHK program lineup or business practices.
Do a little Net research and you'll see that NHK is like so many other government institutions, and this one with the Japanese flavor: alongside the productive workers are lots of vested office drone employees doing useless apple-polishing work and taking smoke breaks. It's like the old Soviet post office or something.
Sheesh.
If somebody asked me to pay out of civic pride, my civic pride would dictate picketing NHK and lobbying for reform, before mindlessly surrendering even more of my hard-earned cash without so much as a peep.
A final note: most of the NHK collectors who come round outside of regular business hours are students and fussbudget obatarian who work not for NHK but on commission.
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I've been a registered user for almost 2 years, and have always had cookies enabled and my IE browser security level set to "Medium"...but I have never seen the red folders! Neither at work nor at home!
They sound like a great idea!
I wonder what I am doing wrong...
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Mogs, I've never ever had red folders. What are they and how do they work?
I've always used the most current version of Explorer (currently 6.0).
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Every year for many years a certain group of snowboarders visits Taos, New Mexico, where the slopes and pow-pow are excellent, but where boarders are verboten.
As they do this every year, it's gotten harder and harder to pull it off. Three seasons ago one of this crew managed to dupe the patrollers by going up on a Voile split board...they thought he was a free-heeler.
Then when he got to the top, he ducked behind a bush, snapped the planks together and busted out on his board.
They weren't able to stop him until well past halfway down, and had to use the radios to do it.
The article I read about this says the patrollers were genuinely pissed off. The intrustion seemed to personally affront them as a kind of moral infraction. The boarder likened their righteous petty anger to that of the rent-a-cops and Sherrif's Deputies who busted your ass out of this or that parking lot when you'd gone there to make out with your love interest way back in high school.
Haw haw haw haw haw!!
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Interesting observation, NoFakie. I've got a latex fetish party coming up, and I'll look to Yoda for hints on how to apply CG to my costume.
"Drink not that triple shot of Malibu, or you will be blind to the golden shower of the Force!"
Has anyone ventured into buying houses or apartments in Japan?
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
That sounds great! We'll be over directly for a cup of joe at the cappucino corner! Get out the blender and we'll make some frozen cocktails!
I've got work tonight so I am dreaming the good dreams.
My girlfriend's from Okayama and when I was down there last month I had a look at some ads for apartments and it was even cheaper than what you describe in Osaka. Almost the kind of prices you'd expect in Walled Lake, Michigan. For nice newish places with parking too!
My gal said you don't usually pay key money in Okayama, and the security deposit is normally just 1 month's rent. That's a big improvement over Tokyo.
Still, let's put this into perspective. It looks like your move-in was about 1,000,000 yen. That's over $8,200 cash just to get into the place. That's a fair piece of change to dish out in cash money.
If it were like that where I come from, half the population would be homeless, or still living with Mom and Dad. $8,000 is a long way toward a downpayment on a small home or luxury car...
After almost 7 years and over $140,000 paid as rent, I am in the process of packing up and moving back to the US for a breather.
So I guess I am thinking about these things.
As a working-visa holder I couldn't have bought a place here, but in retrospect, a tent in the park might have been just the thing.
And if I could go back in time to those childhood days when they said "And what do YOU want to be when you grow up?", the answer would be "A LANDLORD IN JAPAN".