a home in the 'burbs
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
We've been looking at what it means to have to pay two months' rent in deposit plus one month's rent to the (illegal!) key money plus a month's rent to the real estate agency, plus a few hundred dollars in a fee to some company to act as the guarantor. In other words, pissing away fifteen grand for no value.
So we have given up on renting a house that we could otherwise afford and will have to live somewhere considerably cheaper. Which means an older house and further from the city center. We've cancelled an application for a house in Chofu, which was already pretty suburban, and are looking further afield.
Also, it's o-bon, a cultural event that's somewhat like a mix of Thanksgiving and Hallowe'en: the spirits of the dead return to Earth to check up on their families, and those families get together. This isn't a holiday per se, but in normal times the city effectively shuts down. And so for us it meant no viewings of apartments or houses this weekend.
On Thursday, and then again today, we went to a distant place north of the Kokubunji station on the Chuo commuter line. There are two small train lines run by Seibu (a typical trains plus retail operation) that head north from that station into the sprawl that's currently being built on farm land.
Thursday's house was in a place was Kodaira. Kodaira in Japanese is 小平市 - small plain city. I'd initially misread it as 小半市 - small-cut city, which would also have worked. The house was built just last month; the inside shots posted to the website make it seem great. The rent was so low it was actually a bit surprising. There was a lovely cycling road cut through a long swath of the former productive land to a place called Kichioji. There, I'd be able to get on a secondary train line to Shibuya, where my office is.
We discussed it despite not having seen the inside and applied. Then late that night Mari discovered that the place was half a block from a major national juvenile correctional facility. She read of a number of stories of escapes. It explained why the elementary school was especially fortified - I'd wondered why there were bars on the windows. We decided that it was a pretty unpleasant asterisk to have hanging over our daily lives, and that The Boy wouldn't be able to do things like play basketball in some green space, and that The Girl would have to be escorted everywhere.
So we cancelled that.
Today we went back to Kokubunji, and took a second Seibu line in a somewhat different direction. Both neighborhoods are pure suburban sprawl: there's nothing interesting about the terrain, it's just flat. There are plenty of fields and places where people grow ornamental bushes and trees and so on, and the soil looks good (to my ignorant eye). There's not much to learn about the quality of the elementary schools online, and there aren't any interesting places to go. The streets aren't very walkable because again there's nowhere to go and the streets are all short - having been built by short-sighted developers. There aren't even strips of paint that mark sidewalks in most places in this country. There is zero chance I could cycle the 20+ kilometers to work because there just aren't any connecting roads. It took some doing, but I managed to find the house in the vast sea of houses. It's the one with the brick-colored roof, just "down" from the one with the blue roof in this image. Note that despite this being sprawl, it's still dense: there is a third row of houses tucked in between the rows along the street.
But the rent can't be beat, and The Boy's commute would be only thirty minutes or so.