Saturday, August 27
Our Japanese house isn’t really a traditional Japanese house. It’s actually a Western style house in Japan. This house is about 2 years old and it was built by the current owners, Andrew and his wife. They have 3 girls. We are lucky because this house was built with a 5-person family in mind. It is about 1200 square feet, which is fine for us because our home in California is about 1600 square feet, so it’s not a huge difference. I think this is a pretty good sized house for Japan, however here in Minoh a lot of houses seem to be good sized. When you walk or bike around you see a lot of nice domestic and foreign cars so I think this is a community that is living comfortably. We are not at the rich end of the city though. That’s on the other side, closer to the international school and also over by Osaka University.
There are 4 bedrooms and 1 toilet upstairs. Downstairs is a living room area, dining area, kitchen, bathroom with toilet and bath, laundry area, and an office. Here are some photos of our home for the next year. First the downstairs:
Here is Kaiyo in the living room playing WiiU, which we recently discovered was left here. He’s been sitting here in his pajamas pretty much the whole day. Adjacent to the living room is the dining area.
This is the kitchen. It is small but incredibly organized. There are a lot of cupboards and drawers and an immense amount of things crammed into a small space. It is super inspiring actually. I should take a few more photos of the cabinets. Later I will write a post on all of the wacky Japanese appliances, which will include a closer look at the refrigerator, stove, “oven”, rice cooker, etc. We even have a dishwasher!
This is Halyard in his usual position in the office. Gaming and texting. This is our cat Maneki in his usual position in the office as well. For some reason the office is his favorite place, probably because he loves to chew on cords. This office has a lot of shelf space. Andrew left his monitor and printer for us to use, which was very nice of him. He also left a large selection of books on the wall behind Halyard that you cannot see. This office is awesome because John can come in here at any time of the day/night to do some work without bothering anyone. Because of the time change, who knows when he’ll be in there!
On the left is the Ofuro – the Japanese bath. There is a very strict ritual concerning the bath. First you hit some buttons and it starts to fill itself up. It can be set digitally to a certain temperature. The bath talks to you when it is almost full and again when it is ready and then it automatically shuts the water off. While the tub is filling up, you put big covers on it to shield it from the shower spray, and then you take a shower. You can’t get in the tub dirty! Once you are all clean, and the ofuro has talked to you in a friendly voice to let you know it’s ready, you can take the covers off and get in. It’s set to a crazy hot temperature like a hot tub. So you have to get in slowly. Then, when you are completely drained of energy, it is time to get out. The bathwater stays hot at the temp that you set it at for over an hour. That way more people can use it after you. I’ll add more pictures of the tub’s electronic panel of buttons when I finish my Japanese appliances post.
On the right is the toilet. The toilet is quite literally a very long blog post by itself so I am going to leave that for later. Japanese western style toilets are bidets and the Japanese people love them. The toilet can also talk to you. My kids had fun testing them out. If you look carefully, you can see in this photo that the toilet is plugged into the wall.
Here is the large sink outside of the shower/ofuro and toilet areas. The laundry machine is next to the sink. This machine is actually a washer/dryer combo! First you can wash your clothes – if you can figure out the Japanese buttons, of which there are many – then after the wash cycle is over you try to figure out which button activates the dryer. So cool! But the whole process for each load takes around 4 hours so that’s really much too long! There are two other options for drying clothes. More on that later. There is again a lot of cupboards and drawers in this small space. I think this house was designed for people with a lot of material goods!
When we got here we went out and bought a cat toy so that the cats can scratch this post and not the drapes or furniture. They are very good about sticking to their toys. On the right is a photo of our small outside patio. The table expands to seat four people but I’m not sure the space is large enough. We will have to try that out someday.
Now going up the steep stairs to the second floor… this is a view from one of the bedroom windows. There is a pond out there and I think it’s main purpose is for irrigating the rice paddies around us.
Here is Halyard’s room. As I mentioned before, this house belongs to 3 daughters. So there is a feminine decor to the rooms. Halyard hasn’t mentioned if he minds or not. At any rate, this is the first time that he has ever had his own room to himself so I think he’s willing to overlook the decor. I tried to clean up all of their rooms before I took photos! On the right is the view from the balcony that extends outside both Halyard and Kaiyo’s rooms.
Here is Kaiyo’s room. Kaiyo was the first person upstairs so he called dibs on this room right away. He said his main intent was to get a room that did to have a flower or pink colored chair. However, this is also the largest of the three bedrooms. So that was lucky for him. His room has the most shelf and drawer space. Also, in both of the boys rooms there are trundle beds underneath their beds! (Uncle Chris and Auntie Leah: note the BB8 rug on Kaiyo’s floor that you gave him for his birthday!)
Here is Avalon’s room. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Avalon was very unhappy about her room. It is by far the smallest and the bed has those rails that she does not like. She has accepted it though and I think she likes her room now. The desk actually slides under the bed – here it is halfway in and half out, and she really liked that a lot since it gave her a feeling of more open space. There are a lot of drawers under her bed and in her closet, and there is a large bookshelf at the end of her room. So the room is laid out very nicely for the compact space.
Here’s where we can usually find Pickles. He is often under or somewhere in a nook under our bed. This is the second toilet upstairs. This singing, talking, automatic flushing toilet is the same story as downstairs so I’ll leave that for later.
Lastly is the “master” bedroom. I guess it is the largest but it’s not very large. It does have a gigantic amount of closet space relative to the size of the room. There are also dresser drawers along the entire side of the room at the foot of the bed. It has a decent sized balcony outside the room – the main purpose of which is to hang your laundry to dry.
That’s the home tour! Kaiyo made a home tour video for his You Tube channel. It’s pretty funny. When I can figure out how to post that on this page I’ll get that on here. In the meantime, if you want to see it you can go to his You Tube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQgW-1wD1DQI38GeQjp10hg
Channel name: TheOther Geek
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