My tiny Japanese apartment
Fri 6 Apr 07 12:25 | Tags: Japan
Okay, this is cool. Remember a while back when I linked to A Very Short Walk Around A Tokyo Apartment, and mentioned that it was very much like the apartment I had in Nagoya? Well, I managed to come across some digital pictures I had stored on a USB drive, and some pictures of my apartment were included therein. Let's take a look at them, shall we? The images are all thumbnailed; click on them for a larger view.
This is the apartment building from the outside. It's fairly nondescript for a Japanese apartment building; when I first moved in there, I sometimes had a hard time finding the building among its neighbors, especially at night when I couldn't tell the color so well. My apartment would be the right-most apartment on the third story.
This is a shot of the kitchen area. The front door is the green door and tiled area to the back. Note I only had one burner, which made it difficult to cook some things, and that it was electric; if I wanted to cook something with the lights on, I could not use any other major electrical devices (such as the TV) without tripping a breaker. Eventually I bought a small gas burner that used gas canisters and used that for cooking instead; it worked much better. My small washing machine is barely visible in the lower-left; not being able to read the Japanese buttons, I had to figure out how to use it by trial-and-error. The bathroom would be off to the right.
And here it is. Note the deep bath tub and the combined shower/sink fixture. There's no toilet in this room; like in the Tokyo apartment, that was in a separate room (and also like that apartment, it had its own little sink above the tank). Note my imported personal goods; Crest toothpaste and Speed Stick deodorant. Japanese deodorant is notoriously ineffective for smelly westerners, and at this point I did not know enough Japanese to know a tube of toothpaste from a tube of hemorrhoid ointment, so I was relying on stuff I brought from home.
Here's a shot from inside the main room, towards the front door/hallway. That's my futon up there on the top; during the summer, I had to move the futon down to the floor and sleep there, because it just got too friggin' hot up there. On the other hand, once winter set in again, the difference between the loft level and the floor level was the difference between being merely uncomfortably cold and "Dear God, my fingers and toes are turning purple." The bottles beneath the mirror are soda and juice bottles, waiting for me to remember to take them to the corner on recycling day. Having limited shelf space and not being able to make pinholes in the wall, I stored magazines and important papers on twine tied between my bed and a light fixture; that's what you're seeing on the left there. It was effective and made for a cheapo dorm-roomy decoration as well.
And here's a shot from the hallway, looking out. Here it's most clear that this apartment wasn't very big, but I managed to do just fine since I didn't have very many things anyway. My window was curtainless; I had to fix that when the summer came on and the scorching sun burned the place up. Some clothes are drying on twine outside the window there. The floor looks like hardwood, but actually it was a linoleum-type covering made to look like wooden boards. My combo heater and air conditioner is barely visible at the top of the image; another appliance I had to learn to use by trial and error.
So there you have it; my cozy, tiny Japanese apartment. Not a bad place to live, all in all. Now if I could only recover those pictures of the Linimo that I lost…
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