Convenience Culture

Having reached the decision to sell the Kameoka house, we embarked on a quest to find a real estate agent is isn't lazy, greedy, indifferent, a crook or a complete moron. yes, we have set  the bar very high for this one. I don't like real estate agents. I have yet to meet one that has justified their exorbitant commission. I had thought that the advent of the internet would swiftly bring about the demise of these parasites. Real estate companies now have no real advantage over a private seller. The internet is a powerful advertising tool and it has broken the monopoly of the printed  magazines and shopfront advertisements of the agents. Unless you need someone to hold your hand and tell you that you're doing the right thing, you don't need an agent these days. A good lawyer for the paperwork and a willingness to negotiate face to face with the seller is all you really need now. Private sales are really taking off in the western world but Japan, I have learned, is about 20 years behind the rest of the developed world. Here the estate agent is still king of the hill. All sales still go through agents who clip the ticket. Even advertising on the internet is controlled by real estate co-op's so just sticking an add together and listing it online with the major sites is not possible. So, while we have found a company that is less unenthusiastic than the rest, I have put my own add together on this blog. Lets see if I can't do any better than them. So if you would like to own a nice western style house on a hill in Japan have a look. You will find it in the "pages" box over there on the right.....All the hard work is done. You just need to move some furniture into it and you are living the dream.

If you are a foreigner and want to either buy or rent a house or apartment there is next to no support here. Agents tend to view foreigners as either too difficult to deal with or an easy mark to unload a dodgy property onto. Any foreign resident of Japan will be able to relate tales of woe and frustration on this subject. Agents by and large don't speak English and their advertising is all Japanese only. Banks look upon you with suspicion and you will often have to sell your soul to your employer in order to get a guarantor.

Rush hour......convenient?

Another frustration I have is the mindset of the average Japanese agent. To them, there is only one kind of property that is worth listing. That is one that is right next to a train station or big shopping centre. Once you get beyond 4 or 5 Kms from these their interest wanes really quickly. Our house is 18kms from the station. This is termed "isolated".  I'm sorry....Living on a sheep ranch in the Northern Territory of Australia where just the access road is 50kms long is isolated. A house that is a 3 minute walk from a convenience store and a school is not isolated. When you have postal and courier delivery to your door, streetlamps, electricity, water connection, telephone and high speed Internet, cellphone coverage, good TV reception and a local community hall you aren't exactly living on the far side of the moon. Talk to an agent however and you will get the feeling you are. The fact that many people can now work from home via the internet also doesn't figure in their calculations.

It's something I find hard to understand. I just don't get why anybody would want to live near a railway. They are noisy, dirty and ugly. Sure I understand that it's convenient to be able to walk to a station but what could be more convenient than walking out your front door and getting into your car. You don't need to go shopping for food everyday. A little forward planning and a decent sized fridge/freezer allows you to cut this down to once or twice a week. If you insist on fresh fish everyday you can stop by the supermarket on the way home from work or school. Cars are just better than trains or buses. If you really want to have a lifestyle and gain a full appreciation of this country you need to have a car. This house comes with plenty of parking. 

Another thing it has is space. You get 3 good sized bedrooms and a front yard. If I had kids I would definitely want this for them. Those egg box mansions with their tiny balconies look to me to be about the most miserable place you could bring up children. I remember being a child (yes its long ago but I still remember it) and playing in my parents back garden. We had grass and small trees where we could play and have picnics and pitch tents and do all the things kids love to do. I would want my kids to live in a place where they could play and explore in safety.

City apartments...dreary

 The other thing I don't comprehend is why people want to live right on top of each other. How can having to listen to your neighbours arguing with each other be a good thing? There's no privacy in the cities. You know what they're having for dinner because they're cooking it 2 metres away from you. 

I have travelled on trains during the rush hour in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. The people I saw on them look utterly miserable jammed in there like sardines in a can. Your average salaryman looks like a zombie hanging there off the handstrap

The agents then bring up the fact that this house is not new. Again, I don't see the problem with this. You can buy older houses for a fraction of the cost of a new one. The last owner of this house paid Y26 million for it. 15 years later when he defaulted on his mortgage he still owed Y8million. I would much rather live in a 15 year old house with a small mortgage than a new house with a 25year repayment plan.I know not everyone is handy with a paintbrush but even if you hire an expensive reform company it will be cheaper than buying a new one.

Environmentally speaking, it's better for the planet too. This is the home of the Kyoto protocol and extreme rubbish sorting. Why do they make a big deal of sorting glass bottles for recycling when they will tear down a perfectly serviceable house in a heartbeat?

I don't think that just because they think and do things differently to me that they must be automatically wrong. It's not a case of west is best. The people here I talk to seem to aspire to such things as a large modern house with a garden and a nice view. It's the fact that they seem to be prepared to sacrifice so much for this so called convenience that absolutely flummoxes me. Life is short. There are no prizes for dropping dead from overwork. You owe it to yourself to enjoy your life as much as you can. If you are a raving party animal who stumbles home drunk every night then an inner city apartment might be the best thing for you. For the average salaryman with a wife and a couple of kids the key to a better existence is a balance of work and lifestyle. The idea is starting to catch on and I refuse to believe that these things have not occurred to some other people here. An agents job should be to accentuate the positives, eliminate the negatives and sell the property.