Living in a Gaijin House in Japan

Travel Story by Tom Thumb

Tokyo, Japan

After months of scraping by teaching English in Thailand, I finally decided to follow the advice of my fellow travelers and head to where the money was - Japan. Some people preferred to arrange their jobs and interviews in advance but, being an impulsive kind of traveler, I just jumped on a plane and went.

Finding some freelance work teaching English was fairly easy by scanning the classifieds in the www.tokyonoticeboard.co.jp, but the real hassle was finding a place to stay. I soon learnt that when you look for an apartment in Japan, you need to go through an agency. The thing is, they expect you to pay one year's rent in advance. Then came the deposit money and the key money – apparently, quite distinct payments – plus the commission for the agency and a 'gift' for the landlord. In short, just to move in to an apartment I would have had to come up with around $3000.

In desperation, I turned to the last resort of the traveler in Japan, the Gaijin-house. A Gaijin is anyone who comes from outside Japan, be it Argentina or Germany or anyone else; and I soon found myself in a tiny apartment with 7 other job-seekers from abroad. There were two bedrooms, each with two bunk beds and the next 3 months were characterised by people snoring during different shifts of night and day.

There was a small central living space in the apartment where all 8 of us could hang out (if 3 of us remained standing!) and we passed many an evening discussing why we were each paying $300 a month for the privilege of living in such a dump. On top of that there was a small shower which was – wait for it – coin-operated, meaning that we had to pay an extra dollar each time we wanted to get clean.

Not content with fleecing the poor working Gaijins to this extent, the landlord frequently let himself in and demanded to know why the washing up hadn't been done. I stumbled awake one day at noon to find the landlord tacking up on the wall a poster about the importance of keeping the apartment clean. When he went into the kitchen, I tore it down and the look on his face when he returned was priceless. True to the Japanese tradition of non-confrontation, he let it pass without a word.

Still, the other English teachers, bar tenders and I had fun, buying 100 yen noodles and drinking the cheapest beer we could find in a quest to save some money, all the while teaching verb tenses or serving cocktails. It only got really bad when a couple of young Japanese guys moved in and began watching soft porn on the television 24 hours a day. Whenever we returned to the apartment, at least one of the guys was sat in front of the box and we wondered just what they were doing there.

I came to Japan to experience the culture, but between trying to make a buck and never being able to afford going out anywhere, I found myself stuck in the foreigner-ghetto of the Gaijin-house. Finally, I decided to call it quits and headed out with a couple of thousand bucks saved to travel to Thailand where the money would last longer.

My only regret is that I didn't break open the coin-operated shower before I left.

Illustration by Bob Veon
(Bob Veon's Website)

Read more about the author of this story:
Tom Thumb