Apartment

As mentioned earlier, our apartment and furniture has been provided by my husbands company.  If you are curious about Japanese apartments, here's what a western style one looks like (no tatami flooring) which means we have a western style bed and not a futon, a western height table with chairs and a sofa.

You can see that this is a fairly normal looking setup with some sort of pergo or manufactured wood flooring.  The whole wall to the left in the picture is sliding glass doors and windows that open out on to a tiny balcony that goes along 2 walls of the apartment.  The view is of the grocery store parking lot that is next door.  Not too scenic but very convenient.  We are on the second floor.

Kitchen is tiny.

This is what passes for an oven in Japan.  They use it primarily to bake fish.  I also have a toaster oven which I successfully managed to bake chocolate chip cookies and they turned out pretty good.  I'm fairly proud of myself for that one.  Not only was I able to find and identify all the ingredients, but I was able to make them in the tiny little toaster oven.  I miss my kitchen, appliances and nice kitchen gadgets.

This little drawer is supposed to be the dish washer.  It sort of washes dishes, but you can only put 4 small plate and glasses in there at a time.

Jeff and I bought the bread rack between the fridge and the cabinet that has the appliances on it.  This freed up some more work space and has worked out really well.

Looking back the other way.

This is the big bedroom. This is a double bed and we have about 9 inches on either side of the bed for tiny night stands.  Any more than that and we can't open the closets.  I do have to say that all the doors are really pretty heavy wood doors for both the rooms and the closets.

This is our guest room/den.  When we have people visit  we will need to move the desk out so that there is room for a double mattress. Future guests, I hope you are ok with a double blowup mattress, that about all we have room for.

The bathroom/shower room is pretty interesting.  The whole room is the shower.  There is a drain in the floor.  The main control to turn on the hot water is on a control panel by the kitchen.  This controller can also be used to fill up the bathtub.  You can set the water level and temperature.  There is also a lid to the bath tub to keep the water from cooling down.  Normally a Japanese person would shower and then soak in the tub once they were clean.  No soap or bubbles are added to the water and since the washed first, the whole family would use the same bath water before draining the tub.  The other thing that is interesting is the shower room has a drier.  Once everyone is done showering you put the drier on so that the room dries out.  It is so humid here that if you didn't, it would never dry and get moldy.  The added bonus is that it also dries your towels and any laundry that didn't dry out side.

This is my least favorite part of the apartment.  The washer/drier that does both poorly.  It washes a little better than it dries but not much.  This silly contraption can hold about 1/3 the amount of stuff as the washer I had in Boise.  The drier function goes up to 5 hours and even that is not enough to dry a small load of towels (2 bath towels, 2 hand towels, 2 kitchen towels and 2 wash cloths).  That is why the room drier is awesome.  I have a clothes line on the balcony that I use when it is not raining but it is still very humid here so it takes a long time for things to dry.  It's been an interesting learning process.

Well, there is the basics of my Japanese apartment!