Last weekend we took a drive to Tokyo to set up my son’s apartment for university. (Cue the Toy Story 3 feels…) Tokyo is a very different place from J-List’s home prefecture of Gunma, located 100 km north of Japan’s capital. First, land in Tokyo is an extremely valuable resource, which is what you get when you cram the population of the Netherlands into half the area of Rhode Island. Everything is smaller and more cramped there, including tables in restaurants, which are half the size of what we’re used to in Gunma, and vending machines, some just 10 inches deep, to avoid sticking out into the street. Driving in Tokyo is a real challenge — we actually found ourselves on a road that was so narrow my normal-sized car (a Mazda CX-5) could not use it safely. Happily, Tokyo’s public transportation network is so good, there’s no need to use a car, once we get all my son’s stuff moved in.
The lack of available land in Tokyo obviously means that space for apartments is also quite dear, and my son’s new place is a humble “1DK,” which denotes an apartment with a single main room and a small “dining-kitchen.” (By contrast, a “3LDK” would be a three bedroom living space with a large-ish central living-dining-kitchen.) Room sizes in Japan are always measured in tatami mats, e.g. how many standard Japanese floor mats the room would hold if it were a traditional Japanese room, even for “Western” rooms with normal wooden flooring. His room is a an 8-mat room, of medium size for Japan. My son’s new place is an アパート apaato, a word which denotes a normal rented apartment in a building made of wood, but higher-end units in taller buildings are known as マンション (mansion), a slight redefining of the English word. The rooms seen in anime series like Clannad or Hidamari Sketch would be “apartments” in Japan, while the more luxurious living spaces inhabited by Taiga Aisaka, Yuki Nagato or Misato Katsuragi in would be called “mansions.” The cost of living in Tokyo is obviously higher than Gunma, though I was pleasantly surprised at the reasonable monthly rent of my son’s place (around $USD700 per month).
Apartments and “mansions” in Tokyo.
