Cash on the table: an expat's tale - real estate industry in Japan

Japan, Inc., March, 2003 by Robert Juppe

A COUPLE OF SUMMERS hack, an American guy teaching university in Tokyo approached me at a party. "So, when you getting out?" I was a bit puzzled by the question and asked him what he meant. It turned out that he had wanted to say, "When are you leaving Japan for the summer?" When I told him that I didn't have any plans, he looked at me as though I were a borderline sociopath. "You mean, like, you're gonna stay here?" My willingness to stay in Japan without a mercantile objective seemed to make him uncomfortable, perhaps even a little scared.

It is not often talked about, but it would seem that most Americans come here to make some cash, build up their resume, then get out. Most of them do not want to put up with what they see as a materialistically Spartan life. "I can't wait to get out of this playhouse with this toy oven and furniture and get back to a real life!" griped one young North American woman a few years back. I comforted her with a sympathetic nod, then hit the remote control so that we could watch the munchkins bid Dorothy farewell as she hit the yellow bricks in The Wizard of Oz.

Those who stay on for prolonged periods of time tend to he regarded as spooky, for lack of a better word. So when I tell people I have been here 16 years, I see their guards go up. "He looks normal," they seem to be thinking, but I know they are watching me very carefully.

For the first nine of my years in Japan, I was largely oblivious to reality. I lived on government largesse (Japan's, not America's), a gravy train whose loop, like the circular Yamanote Line in Tokyo, seemed to have no end. I would refute those who spoke of horribly cramped and expensive housing conditions; as for landlords who discriminated, they did not exist in my fantasy world of subsidies. My university overseers would run over and clip my weeds if I so much as hinted at a problem. I often heard Americans complain about cramped and outrageously priced apartments, but I dismissed them as xenophobic cranks and whiners.

Until 1996, that is, when I switched to the private sphere, so to speak. Like Apollo 13 threatening to combust upon entry, I came in through the stratosphere of reality hard. For the first time, I realized that even a cheap apartment carried a huge initial sum: two months' shikikin (deposit), two months' reikin (key moneys and a month's rent plus a month for the real estate agent.

F-san was the first agent I would deal with. As if I were paying for all of the scowling I had done over the years about gaijin complaints, F-san gave strong indications early on that this would not be easy. He kept a handkerchief over the lower half of his face as he talked, as if he were about to suddenly break into a magic trick. His eyes occasionally met mine, and they twinkled bemusedly. Most of the time he spoke to my wife, who is Japanese. I could not help but think that with a cowboy hat and a few magic markers, he would make a great looking outlaw in a silent Western. Occasionally, his eyes would shift to the side, communicating a message that said, "Are you still here?"

My wife kept insisting that he was holding up the handkerchief because he had a cold, but I suspected otherwise. Then came a hard blow during the contract signing. He pulled the contract away from me gently, lowered the handkerchief just a tad so that I could see the outline of an evil smirk, and said, "You cannot sign for the apartment. Your wife will have to do that."

"But I work full-time," I protested. "I have three jobs, and she doesn't have a single source of income!"

He nodded in mock sympathy and my wife shot the a glance so full of reproach that it reminded me of those hypnosis glasses sold from the back covers of Archie comic books. The agent delivered the deathblow by reminding me that we might be rejected by the owner.

So my wife signed and I left, humming a snatch of a Negro spiritual and then breaking into a couple verses of "This Land is Your Land." /It turns out that after the agent told the owner about my salary, the owner had said how nice it was to have such a fine person living in her flat.)

Soon after, we moved into our new digs. To call it small would have been a gross understatement; not only did I have to discard 60 percent of everything I owned, but once settled, I found that I had to go outside to change my mind.

We lasted two years. My wife decided she wanted a slightly bigger place, so while I was away in the US for several weeks, she covertly arranged another move. It is no mystery why she did this surreptitiously, and it is no secret why the Japanese don't move very often. I had thought that they were merely family-oriented people with strong Confucian roots; actually, they hate each other in their familial settings just as much as everyone else in the world, but no idiot will pay the equivalent of six months' rent for the privilege of moving ... well, except for my wife.

She made sure that I never even met the real estate agents this time, but somehow, she got my name on the lease. She did this, I suspect, largely to soften the blow of parting with an amount just shy of a lottery jackpot. I settled into a two-bedroom apartment 40 minutes from Tokyo at about $1000 a month. A parking space was an additional $60. I scoffed and bleated, "What dope would buy a car, living so close to Tokyo?" Three days later, my wife surprised me with a used car she had picked up so that we could live more of an "American" lifestyle.