The
Living & Workspaces gallery is open! Take a peek at my living and workspaces over the years. You can see my first workspace back in 1998 besides a few other bits and pieces. Below is just a snippet of the gallery - read more or
go there now! ;-)
Above: 2001. I joined Job Dragon as a Contents Producer after I quit Nature. I was only here for 3 months however as times got a bit tough for JD and they had to let a few of us go. Luckily, JD is in the recruitment business and they tried to place me at a few internet related companies. I managed to get 4 offers. One was from
Sapient (who have packed up their JP office), one was from Ebay Japan (who also packed up), there was another from a Japanese web development company (
DML) and the other was from Amazon.
While Amazon offered less than Ebay, I decided to take the job at Amazon as Website Manager. Amazon at the time had a stronger and larger (workforce) presence in Japan and I was just more familiar with what Amazon was doing. This obviously was the correct choice as a year later Ebay Japan pulled out of Japan - they came in too late. Yahoo Japan Auctions was and still is the dominant player..
DML was a laugh. Some guy came into the interview and whipped out his laptop - after asking me questions like "How many years have you been married", "When did you graduate", "how many years have you been working" and such, he finally said - you are worth X yen - no more. The guy continues to say "The computer has made it's calculations and as I said - you are only worth X yen." Rather than take into account my past experience and achievements, they took a look at my personality and thought that I might make it and then let a computer decide how much I was to be paid - you will experience similar experiences in many Japanese companies.
Thinking about it a bit more - JD Hired me, Fired me and Placed me!
Above: 2003. This was our kitchen space in Higashi Matsubara Tokyo - we stayed in an apartment literally made of paper and mash. The walls were so thin you could hear people sneeze next door. Unfortunately, this is what most Japanese have to put up with - appalling living conditions - appalling as in very thin walls and flooring. This may come of a shock to some of you but most houses in Japan are categorized as "Consumables" (消耗品) - just like printer ink, paper, blank media.
A search on Google shows that on average, houses in England last 141 years, France 86 years, Germany 79 years and American houses last 103 years. So how about Japanese houses? 20 poxy years! Sounds ridiculous huh? Well check out the
facts on google.
A poke around these results bring up some reasons why this could be.
- Quality of material used - Japan does not really have too much natural materials left and many houses end up being built by cheapo materials which don't last long.
- Another thing is the fact that Japanese *generally* don't like anything second hand - using something that somebody else has touched is not really appealing to the folks over here. After a house has been lived in for 20 years, nobody is interested in living in it - the value drops to next to nothing.
- The rest seems to be a mystery to everybody...
So don't even think about buying property over here as an investment - people will look at you as if you had a carrot stuck up your nose.
So what about the place which I paid a load of dosh for?! Well if I wanted to sell and get back roughly the same price that I paid, I would have to knock down the whole house and build a new one - the actual house can be built for cheap - about 10 million yen (about 100,000 USD) - its the land that makes the difference. This is very common practice in Japan and is called Tateuri. Basically this is where somebody who owns land builds a new house on top and sells it bundled with the land. Many people however just pay for a piece of land and then have their house built to order. This is known as Chumon Jyutaku (注文住宅) and may take up to 6 months to build (depending on the size of the house).
I was in a bit of a rush to settle down in a quiet place so settled for our current place (which is not bad really) but or next place will be a made-to-order Death Star ;-)
Above: 2004. This is the apartment that we rented after coming back to Japan - we chose a terrace house this time - we had both floors but as with all terrace houses - houses were attached on either side. The noise was terrible.
There was a riverbank nearby though which was rather nice. Futago Tamagawa was the place. The worst thing about living in this area was the train. The Denen Toshi line is said to be the most packed line in Japan - not sure if that is true but it certainly felt like it - even at 7am in the morning. Ladies have to be careful about perverts touching them up and men have to be careful and keep their hands in the air as there are ladies who accuse men of touching them - a way for them to claim for compensation - it can be weird over here I tell you.
Above: 2005. Living area in our new place. The Mac Mini was an experiment to see if I would really like OSX - after a few days of owning it, I spent as much money as I could lacing a Power Book with all the upgrades! The Mac Mini is now our media center - we use it to watch downloaded open source movies ( open source movies huh? ) listen to muzak and surf from the sofa. The jet in the corner is from Macross and so is the guy on the window sill.
Above: 2005. Computing room by night on the third floor. This was taken when my wife was still using that steaming pile of maggot ridden rotten veal (Dell). I ordered the phone that you see on the desk from the US which has excellent speaker phone capability - Japanese speaker phones are the absolute pits - they really are the worst phones in the world.
Our workplace in Harbor Steps Seattle - had a great view from the 20th floor. We were initially set up in corp housing facing the sea and decided to get an apartment facing the city - correct choice - apartments facing the sea heated up like ovens during the summer.
See more in the
Living & Workspaces gallery.
