The arm’s-length flats of Tokyo [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
From the video, I laughed at the comments of hearing the other tenants.
With my windows open in Sapporo Japan during the summer I can here conversations clearly. I think from the floor below, guessing it bounces off the next building which is but a couple meters away. I know every time the baby wakes wet. During the winter with double windows I don't hear as much but I do hear my neighbor belting out the songs in the shower. Like the commentator in the video, it does create a sense of connectivity. If he's happily singing in the shower then I'm happy for him and it makes me smile every time.
However it makes me a little self conscious and I try to be quiet as possible.
Also very surprised to see a guitar in the video. Most agencies will ask if you have instruments and likely deny or limit your apartment choices.
And/or absolute hell for eg people with difficulty sleeping or early schedules.
Also makes you realise how many weirdoes wear hard shoes and heels inside. Though I guess that’s less likely in Japan given the strong cultural separation between inside and outside.
I recently stayed in a hotel that is right next to a very major highway, and they provided ear plugs for free.
Honestly though they are cheap at 5 times the price for a good nights sleep.
I would absolutely lie if I were asked about it. I don't play any instruments in my apartment except a keyboard with headphones, but I do have a lot of instruments.
They did limit the guitar owner's choices. If you read it carefully it's saying she has to live in a soundproofed apt.
On the other hand, some things that take a lot of space are easier to replace these days. Books? I have a lot but I'm not buying a lot of physical books these days. Video collections? How many DVDs have you bought in the past year? TVs are thin, headphones are common, no need for that big multimedia cabinet that used to hold a TV, stereo and media storage.
This is also going to tend to push some people towards "third spaces" for socializing with friends. There's a very active Starbucks near me that's open until midnight, always packed, and which in addition to a bunch of tables full of laptops has several divided off areas with armchairs that regularly have small groups chatting.
Coffee shop + armchairs you mention is also a time-honoured tradition: the TV show ‘Friends’ is effectively just a camera pinned to that armchair. It’s probably the most famous TV series in the whole western world. People don’t change all that much!
Some cities have hscker or maker spaces, but the result is similar (at least what I've seen) : you can't leave you stuff out (it'll get stolen), make too much noise etc. Nothing like a garage where no one will get on you for cutting bricks with a chainsaw.
More simply we miss paying some bills by living in a small apartment where there's not room enough for a desk to out to do that so they end up on the kitchen table covered with kids' spaghetti etc
But it seems like the larger problem today is that it is hard for people to wrap their heads around that when something becomes available, or even common, whatever enables or let's you explore it becomes more important.
It used to be that to be a musician you had to end up in a studio or a stage (or at least in lessons or rehearsals). People would fly across the world for auditions and recordings. Today everyone can have their studio or even stage at home. But that makes your home so much more important. If you don't have the space, the time, if it is too costly, not connected to a community or unstable then it is a lot harder to become a musician.
And that isn't just true for something like being a musician but everyday things like cooking, reading or exercise were we now have more possibilities than ever. Virtual cycling is for example a thing now.
Within reason, check out what your local library may have. It's not going to be a workshop, but some of the same kind of things have been showing up at local libraries as they shift to meet changing usage patterns.
People with desk jobs often forget this, but that's true of a lot of work, too. If I couldn't climb a ladder, I couldn't do my job. Now, I probably won't be doing this when I'm 80, but I don't want to live every day of my life as if I'm the weakest I'll ever be. Desk jobs and comfy ramblers will still be around when I'm old (or disabled) and can't climb any more.
> This is also going to tend to push some people towards "third spaces" for socializing with friends. There's a very active Starbucks near me
I love "third places" in principle, but I find it funny how many people spend all day sipping coffee in front of a computer ... and then to socialize with friends at night, they go to a place where they pay to sit at a computer sipping coffee. I guess if that's what you love doing, go for it. As Ken Robinson said, "They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads."
But even if you're completely healthy and in great shape, you can have an accident or illness that makes you temporarily unable to climb a ladder. If you broke your leg one day, or came down with a nasty flu or stomach virus, would you want to be living in a place where you needed to climb a ladder to travel between your bed and your bathroom? Nobody is healthy 100% of the time.
This is observation is unfortunately woefully irrelevant to Tokyo. CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray are still very much alive and kicking in Japan. Tower Records never closed shop, and Tsutaya (the local equivalent of blockbuster) has stores everywhere. I don't have statistics, but physical books (especially Manga) also seem more popular.
Hoping to come back to Niseko this coming season if you want to meet up!
A few years back in London, I had friends living in small house/flat shares in Zone 1 who would be paying the same amount as I did for an entire 1 bedroom further out.
I didn't want to have flatmates, they saw it as an acceptable compromise.
The majority of people I speak to outside of the big city bubble see living in flats/apartments at all as subpar/odd. It's a compromise for city living.
They consider that 'micro' accommodation is exploitative and have minimum surface area regulations, all of this while having a rhetorics about "affordable housing"...
In my opinion they should focus on enforcing standards and amenities and let people be creative on the rest.
For example, there are very creative things being done in Asia (e.g. Hongkong, Japan) that create comfortable, modern flats in very small spaces by using sliding, folding, and making use of the whole volume.
A famous example in Hongkong: http://www.edgedesign.com.hk/2007domestictransformer
In the mid 20th century we engaged in a huge campaign of housebuilding, the result being that my relatively poor family were able to rent a terraced house with garden front and back for decades. I owe pretty much everything to that.
Today? Nothing.
Local governments don't care, landowners don't care, the national government doesn't care, no-one is seriously protesting, it's just not a thing.
I'm considering moving out of the country soon, and if I do, this will be the number one reason - we've basically gone back to a feudal society in which you either already own property, or else you fight over increasingly small scraps.
My best understanding of why this is happening is that this is all based on some sort of silly ponzi game in which everyone pretends that their home is worth lots of pictures of the queen's face, and when the majority landowning generation retires, they'll all swap houses and somehow loads of money and labour will appear from somewhere to look after them.
Also, since interest rates on savings accounts are practically zero, people look to real estate as a safe investment -- further driving housing prices.
Nah, I'm talking about the actual existence of places to live. We used to _build new places_ all over the place, speculatively.
The local and national governments used massive plots of land to build huge estates.
We stopped doing that. The numbers and prices and stuff are besides the point. The home that I am currently occupying will, barring nationalization or excessive tax, be in my family for the next 60 years. The price of it is essentially irrelevant. What matters is that it exists, as one house which homes one family.
The housing doesn't have to. It's effectively unlimited, only bounded by construction materials and political will.
We have the former. The latter is severely lacking.
Outside of London there are many areas were real estate price are low.
The main issues in the UK are that most of the jobs are around London and that the public transports infrastructure is poor (actually even roads) yet expensive. So many people end having to live around London while paying up to £500 a month to commute on unreliable trains.
Another issue is that flats are frowned upon and usually poor quality.
I totally agree. It makes me irrationally mad that some cities like London and Los Angeles enact policies meant to prevent small apartments on a pretense of lofty words, completely ignorant to the fact that commute distance is one of the largest factors in one's happiness and well-being.
This is one of the best examples of "no skin in the game" decision making, as the vast majority of decision makers live in relative comfort and it costs them almost nothing to pass this type of policies which signal value, don't have immediate obviously bad effect and are not strongly opposed by anyone. However, the cost is paid by the countless people who spend hours in traffic and, consequently, the environment.
I'm slowly coming around to the idea that trying to move to a major city is just daft unless you're very wealthy. You're intentionally choosing to compete on a stage that you don't have to compete in and there are generally huge stacks of rules set up to ensure that it's difficult for you to do so.
And why shouldn’t it? They’re already living there, paying taxes, participating in the economy, and participating in the community. Everyone else, however, only might live there. There’s no guarantee.
“My friends and I would make much better use of your grand piano than you do, so it should be taken from you and given to us.”
Hence the second half of my post. Let them have their fun.
If I want to live in an 80 square foot box, as long as I'm keeping it clean and safe, you really shouldn't have a say in it just because you have a place down the street.
One of the worst parts of democracy is the deletion of individual rights and the majority telling the minority how they should live.
Both of these scenarios have happened. I don’t agree with you. This isn’t democracy in action, this is fighting back against unrestrained capitalism which would make everyone’s living conditions equally miserable in an effort to extract the most money possible out of them.
And as an aside, it’s not as if the apartment owners have no say in the process either; its worth wondering why they aren’t throwing their considerable power around as well.
I recently saw a report that showed an older man who worked as a dishwasher in Hong Kong. He lived in what could be described as the upper half of a bunk bed in a closet. Certainly undesirable, but definitely better than homelessness.
Edit: formatting
Meanwhile all of northern England suffers from underemployment. The obvious solution is to not concentrate jobs in one place. It makes me irrationally angry that people can't see the obvious solution when it's staring them in the face.
That's as far as I see it how the UK has evolved. Basically everyone with money lives in London or the Home Counties, so service employment is heavily biased towards there.
I don't see how you can fix that without forcibly moving people.
Beyond just enabling lower income people a place to live, if you had dorms like that available in SF for $740/mo I think you’d have a long, long line of young tech workers signing up to move in.
In the US, trading a very long commute for lower housing costs is widely understood and socially acceptable, I wonder why trading a tiny space for low rent and a short commute isn’t.
Because it's a race to the bottom. In EU society minimum standards of accommodation are socially acceptable. Allowing people to exploit the desperate to all possible extents is anathema to any humane values.
Japan is already a caricature of extremist employee exploitation. It's not something to emulate. I wonder why such a basic observation of the situation isn't obvious to people "in the US".
My roommate and I don't even know what to do with our living room. Spend money filling up a space we don't actually care about? Nah, we've just been collecting free shit to throw in there because we really don't care.
Thanks for keeping me from being 'exploited' though.
I've lived in central Tokyo in a rather large 1BR running ~$2,300 per month and now reside a bit further out paying ~$1,600 for a smaller 1BR.
Many people in Tokyo live ~45 minutes commute to work (via admittedly crowded trains) and pay significantly less for reasonably sized studio apartments.
From what I understand, it is NOT a choice for the people of Hong Kong.
It's possible to have a decent place if you look around. Obviously a different story in the video at 80000 JPY/month (750 USD/month).
Any suggestions for someone visiting that does not speak Japanese?
Umm, no. People do not speak English unless it's hotel or airport but you have plenty of signs written in English to support moving around. People will try if you ask simple questions though.
Your question was specific to Japanese language barrier, but one external suggestion: August is pretty miserable in Tokyo unless you're acclimatized to hot and humid environments, try to avoid that month.
Now we moved to the countryside, baby is much happier here. Can run, can jump. The teenager can finally play guitar and piano, something she had zero place to do in Tokyo. I now have a room where I can do some little electronics. Impossible in Tokyo.
Tokyo is a city that grinds lives, it is chilling to witness.
Here she just goes into the field or in her room when she want to practice clumsily the chords she learns through youtube.
To give you a concrete figure, I live in Manhattan and have a cross-town commute (i.e. takes longer than an up/downtown commute of similar length) of 3 km that takes 10 minutes. I could easily do a longer commute no problem, and it might even be good for me since I'd get more daily exercise.
The fact the option exists is better than nothing. These people did not seem under duress and it was a choice they made over alternatives.
That said, it's a symptom of a wider problem when full-time workers are in spaces that small, it tells us not enough units are being built to accommodate demand. Just like SF's insane rents are symptomatic of a wider problem and not merely the fault of wealthy people. More units would help as well as more jobs in local communities instead of concentrating all the good jobs inside a small city core (i.e., they said they did this to avoid commuting, wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to commute at all?).
And to the person who mentioned Hong Kong's "coffin beds", I agree, those were straight out of a horror film and very sad to see.
In Japan, with it's work culture of long work hours and most people working at the same office for very long time, these apartments certainly makes sense.
>In Japan, with it's work culture of long work hours and most people working at the same office for very long time
This is not something that should be venerated above all else. It should be condemned.
It's not that uncommon in the US to hire a cook to come cook meals at a college co-op house or fraternity/sorority. My dad's co-op at MIT did this in the 60s. The cost of a cook spread out across several dozen people is very low, and you end up saving lots of time spent individually cooking while getting quality food at much less than restaurant prices.
There's also the issue that, absent having a cook that cooks for everyone, you'd need much more combined kitchen space (whether that be a single giant kitchen or one per apartment) so that everyone could cook individually, and that in itself takes up more space and is more expensive.
And in not-dense cities, people tend not to live in buildings with enough units in them to even support this. That's why the university thing is kind of an edge case; it's people living in dense housing situations in not-dense places.
While I’ve never lived in one, the few times I’ve seen inside, they’ve been in incredibly clean. People I know who’ve lived in these places generally have nothing but good things to say about them. They’re often not cheap, though. From what I’ve seen, they’re usually in central locations, and priced more than a similarly sized room with your own kitchen/bathroom out in the suburbs.
Tiny homes are illegal in almost every single municipality due to zoning restrictions.
Are the arm's-length flats regarded similarly in Tokyo? More of an experiment than anything else? You can live here for a few months, but if someone gets upset, you might have to move?
Do these tiny flats exist legally, and is their existence expanding I guess is my question?
The second lady's apartment in the video for example... the pile of electrical cords amongst all of her clothes looks like kind of a fire hazard that some landlords would give you flak over in North America if they saw that.
The US is lucky to have so much open space which lets people build their own tiny homes. The tiny homes don't feel cramped because they're surrounded by nature, with beautiful long uninterrupted views out of the windows. No noisy neighbours or traffic nearby either.
But take away the countryside location of these homes and could the tiny house work in an urban environment? I doubt it. The future for housing for most people on the planet (including the US) is in cities and urban environments. Can you live in a tiny home where you don't have long, uninterrupted views out of your windows? Or where you only have windows along one side of your dwelling (e.g. single-aspect apartments). Do you feel you have enough privacy when your apartment or house is joined with your neighbour's home?
Millions of people already live in homes like this and have to contend with these issues. Can we have small or modest-sized homes that give us light, space, privacy, quiet and comfort in a noisy urban setting? It's one of the most pressing and important issues in housing design - and one that architects and home builders have failed to address.
Yup, they will be older but often you can find ones that have been fully renovated.
Sure, there's the earthquake issue but something tells me those cardboard boxes aren't much better at safety.
This is only anecdotal but my impression is that everybody wants to live in a newly built house and then after a few years move again into another flat in a newly built house. So, there's at any point a whole lot of empty and just fine places in Tokyo. I just wish their rents would drop further.
We should think really hard about whether to accept this and make an argument: "no one forced those ppl in it". It's not the point. I'm sure we can do better. Is it beyond our abilities to figure out a good living condiditions? in year 2020? Really?
I'm horrified by the idea that in order to have a decent job, I'd have to live in such conditions. Can you imagine if it's not few ppl, but hundreds of thousands? All of New York?
No, thanks.
Keep in mind that we'd need to supply that space to everyone. Picking a low number sounds like a good idea if you don't suggest turning every park into a sky scraper or "removing" part of the population so there is more space to go around.
Some people just don't have much stuff and doesn't have claustrophobic issue.
Some people just prefer location or cheaper cost.
I choose micro apartment anyday over shared house.
More space is just wasted empty space for me.
Commuting is hell.
Being an Island has nothing to do with the crowdedness.
Hong Kong is just as crowded in Kowloon, which isn't an Island. London is pretty crazy packed too and isn't an Island.
4.5J (6 sqm) and 6J (9 sqm) is fairly normal for an urban apartment.
For a whole apartment (even excluding kitchen/shower)? Let's be generous and say it's double. Where in the west is 18 sq m. not closer to a cupboard than a house?
The catch is that there is a loft which doesn’t count towards the square meterage.
In contrast, an 18sqm place can have a kitchen with two burners where you can actually prepare food, a door between the kitchen and your bedroom so you don’t stink the place up while cooking, and can even have separate rooms for the toilet and sink. A lot of people I've met consider this pretty luxurious, at least in central Tokyo.
They’re generally aimed at students but plenty of single adults like myself lived in them too, mainly people who aren’t home much, eat out and socialise lots. It’s a place to sleep, and walking distance to work (and home, after a night out).
I now live on a quarter acre in a rural city but I didn’t regret it when I did it, I saved plenty of money and enjoyed the city life for a fair few years until I started a family.
It was very nice. The only reason I moved into a 2-room apartment was because I wanted a sofa.
My walk-in closet when I lived in SF was probably about 12m^2.
I've never stayed in a hotel room that large (neither in the US nor in Europe), more like 20sqm including the bathroom/shower.
> My walk-in closet when I lived in SF was probably about 12m^2.
Everything is relative. If you're living on a super yacht, a 30ft boat appears tiny.
That's more or less correct, to give you a data point in Italy the minimum legal size for a hotel room (double, up to 3 star hotels) is 14 m^2 + 3 m^2 (minimum) for the bathroom, but usually they tend to be slightly larger. (the minimum becomes respectively 15+5 and 16+6 for 4 and 5 stars).
For the single it is 8 or 9 m^2 (8 up to 3 stars, 9 for more) + the bathroom (again 3, 4 or 5 m^2 depending on stars).
For 1 or 2 stars hotel it is not compulsory to have a bathroom "en suite", there must be as many bathrooms as (respectively) 40% or 80% of rooms.
On the other hand, the very minimum size that you can legally call apartment (i.e. that has the "dignity" to be identified as "self standing") is 28 m^2 at national level, and a number of cities are increasing this minimum size (locally) to 35 or 40 (or even more).
I’ve lived in this 9 square meters space before (in Tokyo as well) and as a single person it is eminently doable. What do you really need from your home besides a place to sleep between work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami (section "Size")
Let's see what happens in 15 years...
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
This isn't really a "solution." It is more like enabling the system to continue the way it is.
People defacto forced in to these out of necessity, not choice.
I think it’s great that people have this choice. Especially for people who don’t spend much time at home anyway, what’s the issue with providing a cheaper option? And on the flip side, if places needed to be larger, it’ll drive up the cost for everyone.