My Cute Stinky Apartment - the Basics

The entry you’ve all been waiting for: my cute stinky apartment – the basics.

I live on the first floor and there are three other apartments in my unit, but there’s another unit attached on the side and maybe 5 or 6 sets of units more next to ours. Technically I should have gone around and introduced myself to my neighbors and brought them little presents (in Japan, you don’t receive housewarming presents, you give “please-welcome-me-to-the-neighborhood” presents) but I’ve been pretty busy and tired so that’s fallen down the priority list. I know the woman upstairs because she was good friends with my predecessor and another ALT is in the unit next door. It’s teacher housing, so everyone who lives here is a teacher of a family member of a teacher. The system makes sense, because the education system is very dynamic and teachers move schools as often as every 3 years.

When I first arrived, K-sen made a big show about feeling sorry for me having to live there. He opted to find his own housing, 1) because the teacher apartments suck and are old, and 2) because he didn’t want to be surrounded by co-workers. He must like his privacy, (a way in which we are alike) because he’s mentioned the pains of having to live near co-workers more than once. It’s funny though, I kind of thought all the teachers from my high school lived somewhere else because I never saw them. In fact, I rarely ever saw anyone.

Until the other night when I happened to run some errands after work, then I saw about 3-4 of them in a half an hour, and found out they’re all living in the unit next door. This makes me a little uneasy, I had no idea they were so close! Now I’m worried I’ve been playing music too loud or using the wrong drying racks in the yard. The teachers I saw are good people, but again, privacy is an issue. Fortunately I’m on a slightly different schedule because I don’t *have* to work as long of hours as they do (though I’m trying to because I want to be treated like a normal teacher as much as possible).

As I may have mentioned *cough* the apartment has an aroma. Usually it just smells like old, like the unfinished wood that makes up 70 percent of surfaces and the finished wood that makes up the rest, has absorbed every musty odor in the last god-knows-how-many years. Being that my predecessor was a little on the inhuman side when it came to cleanliness, I’m sure it’s made it all the more worse. There’s also a big 2’ x 1’ corner of black mold in the side room, a chunk missing from the wall in another side room, and a large musty closet in every room that will never stop stinking. The closet thing is weird, because floors are cement, the walls are thin wood, and there’s almost nothing in them. What could be making/retaining the stench?? Anyway, my biggest issue is that the pipes smell like sewage, which I think is a my-apartment-problem, not a Japan problem. I haven’t noticed any plumbing issues here outside of my domicile. Another big problem is that the kerosene tank is in the genkan (the traditional Japanese entry to the home). I have only one outside door, and so whenever someone enters the apartment, they smell a gas station.

But that important thing to remember is that, in spite of all this, it’s dramatically inexpensive. I know some people paying $500 or more, but they live in considerably nicer digs and usually in bigger cities.

I pay $60 per month lol

My Cute Stinky Apartment - the BATHROOM Edition

ANOTHER entry you’ve all been waiting for: my cute stinky apartment – the bathroom edition.

The Japanese bathroom system is as such: there is a room the size of a decent closet and it is completely tiled all the way around with enough space for two bathtubs. Only about ¼ of that space is actual bath tub, I have a traditional sitting tub which is about half the size of a U.S. tub, but it’s a lot higher. The other ¼ of that space is filled by the machine that heats the water. Everything is gas and it’s old, so there’s a complicated water system: I have to open the knob on the gas hose, switch the dial to open, hold down the dial, crank the flint (?), continue holding until the little blue flame gets big enough, turn it to shower, and then turn on the water. At that point, hot water runs from my faucet and I can control it with little numbers. There’s another dial that controls between shower handle and tub faucet…yeah…

I usually just shower in the tub because the plastic in the tub is treated to resist mold and the plastic boards that make up the floor outside the tub are ridged for traction and I see them as giant mold traps. I do have the traditional Japanese system, a small open space in front of the tub with a plastic bucket overturned so you can sit, and a plastic basin for pouring water over yourself. I have nothing against this system and if I ever go to an onsen or somewhere else where people will be watching me bathe (lol) then I’ll do it, but for now I kind of don’t like the idea of sitting bare-assed on a bucket.

Because I’m having house guests for the weekend (I wrote this on August 29th lol), I scrubbed the crap out of the bathroom, which is annoying because there’s so much tile. It took me 30-45 minutes on 3 separate occasions to finally get the whole thing done, but I’m sure in the future it’ll take a lot less time since I’m maintaining it, unlike The Pred. I’m glad it’s finally clean though. I assumed everything was going to be quite stained, but surprisingly enough after I scrubbed the turned it all back from grayish black to baby blue.

It’s kind of strange to me that this room has a shower door and opens right into the living room, but there is a curtain you can pull that blocks the view. The toilet is not in this room. The toilet, again in Japanese style, is in its own tiny closet-sized room (porto-potty size) off the entry way, not in the actual apartment. This kind of makes sense, toilets are gross and you might want a few more doors between you and your roommates when you’re attending to business, but since the room is so small and poorly ventilated, it does nothing for that sewage smell I mentioned before. Sometimes people use slippers going into the bathroom. In Thailand where the toilet was in the fully tiled shower room it made sense because it was always wet or skanky, but this room is relatively clean and if you keep it clean, well, I don’t see the need to use slippers in my own home. The toilet itself has the sink attached so that the water you don’t use on your hands goes into the toilet tank, which is very eco-friendly, but it also upsets me because the basin is shallow, you always get water everywhere, the water only comes out when you flush the toilet, and you can’t make the water hot. So in short, I use the kitchen sink for pretty much everything. There’s a little cleanser ball in that toilet sink that’s supposed to automatically clean the toilet when you run the water, but pretty much all its succeeded in doing is making the room smell like old lady flowers and sewage instead of just sewage (not an improvement) and on occasion it stain things blue because water inevitably splashes from the sink.

The toilet’s not all bad though, it comes with a “little flush” and “big flush option,” and the seat is heated, which will be nice in winter because there will not be heat in the genkan and it’ll be like doin’ your business outside.

Well, my toilet room is on the up-and-up anyway. Just last night I finished the linoleum project The Pred started (when I arrived it was half pink and white linoleum, half 1960s stained gold blob flowers). I also removed the big plush stained pink kitty carpet, the big plush stained pink kitty toilet seat cover, and the big plush (not stained!) kitty toilet paper roll cover (good god!). Maybe I’ll buy a small area rug, maybe not.

I really don't like the idea of putting *anything* in that room, including myself.

My Cute Stinky Apartment – Everything Else

The Final Installment of the Apartment Chronicles.

The rest of the space is composed of many closets, the 3-rooms of tatami that all meet in the central living room, and a kitchen. In my opinion, tatami kind of smells like hamsters. This creates some weird feelings when walking through a city hall filled with tatami and wondering where the barn is. Mine in my apartment is older so it doesn’t smell quite so much as fresh stuff, but with tatami you have to be careful about getting it wet and bugs can live in it (I’m told you do NOT want to look under tatami because inevitably it has gotten wet and things ARE living under it!). It’s also a little impractical because you can’t wear shoes or put too heavy of things on it. It’s cute though, and not entirely uncomfortable.

The living room is wood squares, as is the kitchen. One of the rooms is my bedroom, which has room only for a bed and some plastic storage bins. Another room is the “office,” and the last room wasn’t used by the Pred, so right now I set up the western style dining table (though I don’t use it) and on occasion I hang my laundry to dry in there. Most people use it as a drying room, from what I hear. The ALT next door took all the doors off all the rooms, seeing as they’re just sliding screen style Japanese doors (you can’t see through them, they’re made of what looks to be white plastic tablecloth lol) and it really opens up the layout. I think my plan is to take the doors off the office and make an omega-room. Then maybe I can use those doors to cover the big old hole in the wall.

I think the mold is subsiding in the other room based on my efforts, though all the same, the wall is visually ruined. The Pred thought the only way to fix the mold issue was to put a couch against it. Admittedly, it eased the smell a little, but also ruined the couch, maintained the smell, and was, oh, a health hazard? My solution was coat after coat of bleach. I win.

Anyway. It’s annoying because all the lights are cord-pull lamps in the middle of the room hanging from the ceiling. I’m getting used to it, but you have to click them a few times to get fully on and fully off, and they don’t always turn on when you pull them. There’s a Japanese style floor table in the living room, along with a tiny tv and a gas heater whose pipe runs across the room and over the doors. Anyone taller than me would be quite pissed off constantly at the lowness of the pipes. I barely brush them if I’m not careful. There’s a washer and drier in my living room, but apparently that’s where they’re kept in every apartment in Japan. My drier is broken, so it’s pretty much just a storage shelf and an eyesore. The walls in all the rooms are ugly and ruined and stained. I thought about re-wallpapering or painting, since I pay almost nothing, but it seems silly to invest in an apartment. Still, it would make it smell better and be more comfortable, so maybe I’ll check prices. I moved a low couch into the living room when I found it stowed away in a closet (huh??), though really it’s like a foam loveseat. Still, it’s cute, and it’s a little more comfortable than the floor chairs we’ve got. I have other options, but I kind of like keeping it a little Japanese.

The kitchen is a little disappointing. It’ll be livable when I finish cleaning it, but there’s little storage space, the kitchen faucet is too high and always splashes, the surfaces are cheap and hard to clean, I don’t have an oven, my workspace is the plastic top of a plastic dresser that is ¼ the size of my desk at work. The range always makes a mess and there’s so much grease from The Pred that I’m sure it’ll take me all year to get it maintainable even if I scrub at it a little more every time I clean.

There’s also a little storage place across the way for my bicycle and yard stuff. If I had more stuff, I would fill it because it’s quite large, but as is, my closets are mostly fully of junk and air because I own so little. WELL, I do own a few boxes full of broken clocks, it seems no one who lived here before knew how to throw them away in the Japanese garbage system lol.

Weather wise, it’s so cool here that even though there’s not any kind of air control, all I have to do is open the windows and I get a great ocean breeze, no matter how hot the day. Winter will be another story, I’m afraid, since everything is thin and un-insulated (what the heck, this is Hokkaido, what were these contractors thinking??) I’ve been told already that I’ll spend a crap ton on kerosene and still probably only heat one room. The apartment is very moist, since our climate is moist and there’s little ventilation, but the heater will dry things out in winter and in the summer I can have the windows open. The only crappy time is days like today, where it’s been raining for days straight and nothing really ever gets dry.

I’m looking into getting a dehumidifier for a few hundred dollars, since everyone hangs their laundry here, the primary selling factor of dehumidifiers are how quickly they’ll dry your laundry in the same room, not how they’ll keep your basement dry. It’s really interesting to see the labels list all the clothes the dehumidifier can dry at once in under an hour, instead of cubic feet of drying capacity. It’s expensive, but for half the year I’ll be desperate for it. Still, my apartment is the same price for a year as my apartment at school was for a month, and it’s very, very conveniently located, which is more than I can say for the apartments of almost anyone else I know. On foot, it’s 15 minutes from school and the ocean, 15 minutes from major shopping and the bus terminal, and 5 minutes from one of the biggest train stations in the area.

In summation, my apartment is old but I’m creative, and yesterday I bought 2 bottles of Japanese febreeze, some scented oil, and some dehumidifiers.

LET’S DO THIS!