My Apartment

I know that everyone is just dying from curiosity: What does my apartment look like? I`ll answer that with pictures and words, but first let me tell you some important things. First, I do not live in a city. I live in a rural area that is about 20 minutes by train to the nearest big city. Looking out my window I cannot see any buildings higher than mine (three floors). There are rice paddies to the south and lots of wires. Lots and lots of hanging wires. No unobstructed views around here. (I should say to the east, across the train tracks there is a hospital that is five floors and it is a taller building than mine; I just don`t have a view of it.) Other people live in the Inaka (the countryside) too, but many people live in a city near other English speakers. I am alone except for a Kiwi (a New Zealander) who lives 10 minutes away by bike. It sounds to me like the people in the city tend to have dirtier apartments!

The first area, and one of the most important, is the entryway (genkan). Here you take your shoes off when entering. There is a appropriate way to do it: kneel, take off your shoes, turn them around so they face the door. I don`t do it at my place of course; nor do I offer slippers for my guests. But you still have to take off your shoes! One nice thing in my apartment is a small wooden cabinet in the entryway that has shelves for shoes. My big shoes don`t fit perfectly on all the shelves, but then again, I don`t use all the shelves. If you take two steps from the shoe area, you can go left to my bedroom or right to the bathroom. Keep going and you`ll go into the kitchen.

My bedroom is nice, it has a bed, a wardrobe and a traditional closet (sliding doors of regular height--about my height, not quite 6`--hide a huge area with one shelf halfway up and another smaller set of doors are above the main doors with another shelf area). The bedroom is 6 tatami in size. Tatami are traditional mats. When I tell others my bedroom (and my living room) is 6 tatami, they automatically know the size. The picture at Wikipedia is exactly the layout of my 6 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami)--wish I had those beautiful doors in my room! The door frames in my place are just barely over my head. If you are taller than me, you will be doing a lot of ducking in my place.

The bathroom is nice. Like the bedroom it has a solid sliding door fusuma (the bedroom has two actually).

(Forgive the dim picture of the bathroom sink.) To the left of the sink is the toilet. It has one of those wonderful efficient tanks that with which you can regulate how much water goes in and you can wash your hands on top, too. (Toilets are going to have to have their own blog, don`t worry.) To the right of the sink is the shower/bathtub. The shower area is nice enough, I don`t have to crouch much to get m head under the nozzle. The hot water heater is on the porch near the washer, so it can take a while to get the hot water to the bathroom. It is a stand-in-shower area and you have to cross through it to get to the bathtub. I am not so sure what I think about the bathtub. For anyone to use it, they would have to sit with their knees bent to their chin. That is fine with me though as I actually never used the bathtub in my last apartment in New York City where I lived for three years.


If you ignore the bathroom and the bedroom, you`ll go into the kitchen/dining area. It is the biggest room in the house. All the amenities you could ever need--except a real oven. I have a two burner stove, a microwave, a rice cooker, a 3/4 size fridge and a sink. What? No toaster? Don`t worry, the microwave does that just fine. The kitchen, like the living room, has a sliding glass door that goes to the balcony. Right outside the kitchen is my washing machine. In the picture you can see one of the plants that the community center gave me. Very nice people there! They also gave me an electric kettle that looks nothing like a kettle and which I never use--I just boil water on the stove.

Also in the kitchen pictures you can see my futon--that long white padded looking thing. That is the traditional Japanese bed. Mine doesn`t fold up, so I usually throw it to one side in the kitchen. Why the kitchen, you ask? Because I am to lazy to take it to the bedroom. Now, I am sure you are really confused. Why don`t I take it to the bedroom? After all, all isn`t that where I sleep? And don`t I have a normal bed too? Yes, I have a normal bed, but right now it is to HOT to sleep anywhere but the living room where the A/C unit is. I drag the futon into the living room, slide the shoji (the sliding-glass doors with the small frames) shut and kick the A/C to 26C and sleep there.

My apartment is plenty large for me. Next door to me is a family of four. I am sure the little ones share a room. What is the living room for me is probably a bedroom for them.