My apartment in Japan

My apartment in Japan

In picking where I wanted to live, I decided to stay near Fussa which is on the western side of Tokyo and close to work. It is also home to a United States Air Base, Yokota Air Base, so there’s a good amount of Americans in the area.

After looking at some options with the apartment company Leopalace, I decided on the apartment complex below. The pictures were taken from their website.

It’s around 200 square feet.

Bed
Bed
Dining room table and desk
Dining room table and desk
Kitchen
Kitchen – look at that counter space!
Floorplan
Floorplan – Japanese toilets are often in a separate room from the shower/tub

Needless to say, it’s going to be different. It won’t be furnished so I’ll be finding a pillow and a mattress as soon as I arrive. It also won’t have an oven, clothes drier, or counter space.  But I just view it as staying in a dorm room for six months – shouldn’t be too bad.

Getting to work

I won’t have a car in Japan so my options for getting to work are the train or biking.

By train:

From my apartment (at the bottom of the map) to Fussa train station is a 10 minute walk. I’ll take the train northwest for two stops which takes ~5 minutes. From Ozaku station, it’s a 21 minute walk to where I’ll be working (the red marker). Total time ~36 min

By train

By bike: 

I think I’ll have access to a bike over there, so if I follow the main street (249), I could probably get there in about 15 minutes. I’ll probably bike to work fairly often. Hopefully it doesn’t rain very often.

By bike

It looks like the road 249 is fairly wide with dedicated bike lanes based on Google Street View, so it shouldn’t take me more than 15 minutes.

Street view of Japan
Notice the 7-Eleven on the right – Japan has about 3.5x the population of similar-sized California, but also has twice as many 7-Elevens as the whole United States.

I’m looking forward to my trip and I keep saying, if anything, it’s going to be something completely different.

33 days until I fly out.



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