kenleewrites in 日本

Helped Alex to move earlier this week. Employing a moving service would have probably cost him 6 arms and 6 legs. So I recommended renting a van and doing it himself. As he didn’t have a Japanese driver’s license, I became his chauffeur for the day (although it only took both of us about 3 hours to move his stuff).

Rented this mini-van from Nippon Rent a Car. The shortest time period you can rent a vehicle from them is 6 hours. For this particular mini-van, 6 hours including insurance costs ¥7140.

This was his apartment. I think it has a 1DK layout; 3 dedicated spaces for a room, dining room and kitchen respectively. For this amount of space, he was paying ¥88,000 per month.

Are you renting a spacious apartment in Japan? How much is your rent?

Driving back to his old place for the second trip! Those vending machines you see on the left dispense cigarettes and beer. In Japan, cigarettes are referred to as たばこ (ta-ba-ko, from tobacco) and beer, ビール (bi-ru).

I thought living that close to a transmission tower is hazardous to one’s health, and maybe one’s electronics. I do my best to live as far away from one as possible. Do you have a transmission tower right outside your window?

If it’s any consolation, we are all mutants anyway. Bombarded with radio waves, microwaves, Google Wave etc everyday, our bodies probably can adapt up to a certain limit. Beyond that, strange happenings occur.

The first trip moved most of his personal stuff. This second trip was for his furniture and home appliances. His mattress was too long to fit in length-wise, so I placed his clothes rack under it. Besides driving, improvisation is also one of my strong skills. ^^.

Well, he moved from a ¥88,000++/month 1DK apartment into a ¥33,000/month room. His new rent is all-inclusive. He probably won’t see any electrical, water or gas bill again as long as he stays here.

It’s a miracle he could fit everything he had into such a tiny space!

When you rent a car, you usually fill her up before returning her. We travelled 22km and consumed 3.69L of gas. ¥7140+¥464 brings the grand total of today’s move to ¥7604. Not too bad.

In the bottom portion of the receipt, you can see numbers for change should the customer pay ¥1000, ¥5000 or ¥10,000.

An apartment right opposite his old place was being cleaned.

Whenever one moves out from a rented property in Japan, the landlord usually takes a portion (if not all) of your deposit. Part of the amount will be used to clean up the place for the next potential tenant.