$265 Shoebox

You want floor space with that?
So I'm back in Japan. That was fast. If this was a movie, and my life was the plot (I wish...), then the time since the last post can be considered a missing reel. Hey, Planet Terror did it, I can do it too. I won't even explain the time lost. Instead I'll refer to it like you've already seen that part. Weren't paying attention? Want your money back? Go talk to Tarou in the box office. The homeless guy down the street who lives in a box, not the movie ticket place.

I moved out of my apartment when I left, a strenuous exercise if you don't have a moving team or a car. I can relate to people who have had to move on their own. Your pain is my pain. Man, if I have to think back to the amount of times I had to go into the room, pick up a bunch of badly packed junk, waddle out, along the conchord and into the room next door...
OK, so I only moved 20 metres. I'm in a room that has walls touching my old one, so I can tell how annoying I must have been for the previous occupant. These walls are hard enough I can bend a nail when I try to hammer it in, but they're still like tattoo parlour beads when it comes to blocking noise. What's more, the wall separating me from my roommate would not meet the Oxford dictionary's definition of a wall. Its a shoji, or rice screen door (this one obviously made from fake plastic rice), and it doesn't fit the frame, so there's always a sizeable hole that acts like some kind of stethoscope, funneling the audible activity from next door. Best contraceptive ever.

5mm of plexiglass separates you from an audience
during sex.

I'm lucky my roommate's a bit of all right. A Canadian 30-year-old girl, she works opposite hours to me, but for some reason the noise when she comes home doesn't bother me. I guess after living with 5 family members for so long, I actually prefer a bit of activity. Though she's yet to have fights with me over the TV (we don't have a working one, and who would want to watch Japanese TV. I'd have more fun licking my pillow).

My room, at \30,000/month ($US265) is cheap for central Osaka. But what you pay is what you get, and thus its something of a solo sardine tin. Japanese measure floor space in 畳 (jou), which is the size of a tatami mat. There are 4 tatami in my room, which gives me around 6.6 sq m to play with. Add my futon (3sq m), TV (a completely useless 1 sq m), suitcase, shelves, and accumulated crap, and you have approximately negative 2 square metres in which to reside. We have a bigger bathroom in my parent's house in NZ. This makes that look like a concert hall.

It's not the worst living conditions in Japan I've ever heard of, and it's cheap like the budgie. Plus, without a room like this, I'd run out of fuel for my cynic comedy fire. Tatami burns well. So does the glittery walls. Not wallpaper. Walls. I don't know what they're made of or what they were thinking when they made them

Seems OK from long distance, however...

(I'd ask, but I think the architect died 30 years ago). Still, they don't moult like the room next door. I used to wake up thinking I had the worst dandruff ever recorded, and it sparkled.





On closer inspection, someone shaved a mirror ball onto the walls.
This kind of room is quite common in Japan, where size has to meet costs and demanded rent prices. You'd think the Japanese would have a cute name for them, making light of the cramped conditions. Instead they stole a word from English that is actually more embarrassing than humourous: they're called mansions.