The japanese property market

There are three of us. Seated in the glaring luminous light of a young trendy estate agent in the hip luminous student district of Shimo Kitazawa. Before us are fifteen young 20ish something male estate agents. Each has the slightly feminine, highly typical big hair and skinny figure of a successful middle class Tokyo man. There is one woman, the secretary, who seems to be there for the sole purpose of being the butt of everyones joke. Each is bowing away as the three of us attempt to explain our housing requirements for the next twenty months. In Japanese. (just to confirm at this point we have had a grand total of 4 hours of japanese language training...)

Estate agent english is as minimal as Daiwa scholar japanese, and there is a great deal of miscommunication going on. Shamefully, after the initial `konnichiwa` and the `Harrro`response (the old joke of the japanese not knowing the difference between R`s and L`s is quite true but leads to many misunderstandings), we are stuck and resort to a lonely planet phrasebook which annoyingly fails completely to include a section on handling real estate. Also, annoyingly, photographs of the apartments on sale are few and far between, which means guessing from the kanji where something is compared to a station, what year it was built, how big it is or what it looks like. Oh yes and what is not mentioned at first is that about 90% of properties are excluded to us. Being a Geijing or a foreigner, for a reason no one has ever convincingly explained to me, is enough to warrant a landlord refusing to rent to you. It is not worth arguing. Particuarly if the argument is conducted through the medium of a `yahoo translate` program or a lonely planet phrase book.

The three of us line up with two or three estate agents and a computer before each of us. Awful translations follow and convince me of the lack of development in the area of electronic translations. Every once in a while I attempt to act out what I want in my house, madly yelling that `I love windows` while pointing desperately at the window in the room, or I struggling through the phrase book to find myself hopelessly confusing everyone. At one point I jauntily think I have found a new word for thank you or cheers, only to discover that I have yelled `Cheers` (the word meant for accompanying the clinking of glasses together rather than the expression of appreciation one makes for all the hard work someone has gone through to understand that I want to live near Shibuya station). The whole office erupts into laughter and the stupidity of the whole exercise seems to clear to all the suited up estate agents as well as to us.

Four hours later we emerge. We have viewed one property.

A cupboard of a room costing 450 pounds a month - thank you very much. It barely managed to hold the kitchen sink and came, as do all japanese flats, completely unfurnished. That means, no gas hob, no light bulbs, no washing machine, no curtain rail. It is as though Japan was designed to function as one big long vocabulary lesson. We shriek enthusiastically. Two of us yell that `we`ll take it!`. We toss coins. We work out who`ll have it. We hand over our referee details (this has to be a japanese person of reasonobly high esteem). We smile and laugh.

Only to discover today that the cupboard was, like everything else, only available to japanese people. We console ourselves by refusing to eat noodle soup and rice for the umpteenth time this week and instead, like naughty school children sample our first taste of bread since we left Britain. We buy it from a bakery endearingly entitled `Smell of Scandinavia` and suddenly it seems okay that we seem to have an impossible task before us and that racial descrimination is habitual rather than frowned upon in the property market in Japan.