Tips for Visiting Tokyo

This week I hosted my first visitor from the states. Having gotten a bit more settled and acclimatized to Tokyo I had forgotten how overwhelming it can be at first. My first impression can be found here, but I wanted to put down a few tips for those of you planning on coming to visit me out here, or just Tokyo at some other point in the future.

In a lot of ways Tokyo is a difficult city to experience as a Tourist. Tokyo is really several massive cities all stitched to together with the most complex train/subway system in the world (see here). Each one of these places has a different character, and different things to do. I've been here two months and I still haven't gotten around to many of the major city centers, including Tokyo Station! Each of these major hubs are teaming with literally thousands of restaurants, bars, and clubs. It's can be overwhelming just trying to pick a place to go eat.

In no particular order here is my list of tips for visiting Tokyo.

1. Visit for at least one weekend. Tokyo is a crazy city with tons of stuff to do, even on the weekdays, but really the most fun cultural stuff happens on the weekends. The nightlife is wild and not to be missed. But even if that's not your scene the best people watching happens on the weekends, with people dressed up in crazy outfits, role playing different anime characters etc. Also in a city this big every weekend there's some festival, concert, or other event going on somewhere. Tokyoites work hard, play hard, if you're coming to visit come for the play bit.
2. Try and book your flight so that you are scheduled to arrive before 9pm. The last buses and trains leave from the airport around 12-12:30 after that you can get stuck and have to take a taxi that can cost well over $100. Really you should be fine landing any time before 10:30, customs is super efficient here, but if your flight is delayed you can get yourself into some trouble. So I would recommend planning in a buffer, if only not to worry about it.
3. Bring lots of cash, and exchange money once. For foreign visitors to Tokyo getting access to your money can be very difficult. No places will accept your debit card, very very few will accept your credit card. You can withdraw cash from Citibank ATMs but the fees are outrageous. Most restaurants, bars, cabs only accept cash. I would advise that you try take out as much cash as you plan on spending in Tokyo out before you get here, plus maybe 20% because it's expensive here, and then exchange it all at the airport.
4. Do research about how to get from point A to point B. Getting to and finding places in Tokyo can be challenging for the uninitiated. There is very little English direction. Most streets don't have names, and sprawl maze like through the buildings in no discernible pattern. The addresses, make sense in a way, but are totally useless for helping you find places. Having an iPhone with google maps helps a ton, but it still doesn't work nearly as well as in the US. Most places websites will have an "access" page which will explain how to get there, study it before you head out.
5. Helpfully in Tokyo there are maps everywhere, but it's important to keep in mind that up is not always north. The maps are oriented to reflect the position from which they are viewed. So if you are facing south looking at a map, up will be south on the map. If you assume that every map is oriented north you will quickly end up lost, confused, and traveling in circles. It took me weeks to figure this out.
6. The trains stop running between 12ish and 5am. Keep this in mind when planning your trips. Cabs are pricy, and explaining where you want to go can be a challenge if you aren't going to a major landmark. If the cab doesn't have GPS knowing the address will be useless.
7. When in Tokyo plan on staying out all night. This logically follows from 1&6, people in Japan love to party, and in true when in Rome style plan on having quite an adventure. Naps before heading out are recommended, as well as an open schedule for sleeping the following day.
8. Nomihodai, see here.
9. Don't freak out when every shop clerk starts saying all this stuff to you in Japanese, it's usually just something like "welcome, good morning/afternoon/evening, it costs this much, you're paying me this much, I'm giving you this much change, thank very much," in polite Japanese all this can be a bit wordy, but you aren't expected to respond. Smile, nod, don't over think it.
10. Don't worry about trying to have "The" Tokyo experience. As far as recommendations for specific things to do or see, I think maybe after two years I'll have seen enough to give a knowledgeable opinion. But there's tons of fun stuff to do and you can't do it all, don't worry about trying to see the right things or eat at the right places, go for convenience, and simplicity and you'll be much happier for it.

Hope that doesn't put people off too much, come visit it's definitely worth it!

Three Outfits on the Keio Line

Tokyo is known for being a fashionable city. I thought these three people were a great illustration of the diversity you'll see just walking around. The woman in front is wearing some very stylish dress thing. Behind her to the right a girl is wearing a Spongebob t-shirt. To the left you see a construction worker wearing the super baggy pants that are very common among laborers, and which apparently serve no function besides looking cool at least according to this article.

IYI - Mrs. Watanabe - Japan's Housewife Currency Traders

As I was plugging along at work one day I looked up from my computer to see a group of 30 or so middle aged Japanese women standing around looking at me. I'm not entirely sure what they were saying but I imagine it was something along the lines of "one of these is not like the others," and they found it amusing.

The group of women were being given a tour of our office, and were followed by another equally large group of women a few minutes later. A bit confused as to what was going on I turned to a coworker to ask who they were.

"Agents" he said, meaning our primary insurance and financial planning sales force

"They're all women?" I asked, a bit surprised as in the US this was a traditionally male dominated position.

As it turns out financial planners in Japan are overwhelmingly female, because househbold finances are usually managed by women. The typical サラリーマン (sarariiman or salaryman) is only trusted with a small monthly allowance.

Even more surprising is how many of these housewives mange their money, by becoming day traders in currency markets. These so called "Mrs. Watanabe," try and earn a little (or a lot) extra on the side by betting on the movements of exchange rates. See this Reuters report for background.

Unfortunately the etymology of this term has evaded my furious googling efforts.

Mrs. Watanabes are a big deal in currency markets. It's been a bit difficult to track down exact estimates but most sources I've seen attribute 30% of the volume of daily currency trades to individual Japanese traders, the majority of which is done by women.

The major factor driving Mrs. Watanabe to the FX markets has been the persistent low interest rate environment in Japan over the past two decades, combined with low equity (stock) returns, which means there aren't a lot of options for domestic Japanese investment with decent safe returns.

The so called "carry trade" is an investment strategy where you borrow money in a currency where interest rates are low, and invest it in a currency where interest rates are high. It's generally viewed as a high risk strategy because exchange rates are notoriously volatile. But the strategy was and is popular with the financial cowboys running hedge funds in the US and Europe. It turns out that this strategy is widely employed by your average investor in Japan, with Mrs. Watanabes leading the way. Even my company offers consumer financial products denominated in foreign currencies to take advantage of this trend.

I find it fairly amusing that the exchange rate movements caused by the massive amounts of money sent around the globe by these amateur housewives has routinely confounded professional analysts and has led a lot of the "master of the universe" types in NYC and London to lose lots of money. This happened notoriously in the mid 2000s when the Yen refused to appreciate despite improving economic output in Japan, and most recently after the 3/11 earthquake.

After the earthquake almost all the professional analysts expected the Yen to fall in value relative to other currencies. Japan after all was experiencing a major economic catastrophe. But what they didn't count on was the horde of Mrs. Watanabe's suddenly needing the cash they had invested overseas to deal with the emergency, this actually triggered a "flash crash" or spike in the yen when the news out of Fukushima worsened. This was investigated by the WSJ here.

Basically as everyone was going to sleep in NYC and London, all these people woke up in Japan and suddenly electronic markets were flooded with Yen buy orders, 90% of them for values less then $100,000 - a much lower value then a bank or professional traders would put in- and the value of the Yen shot up to a 16yr high against the U.S. dollar. Now in off hours a lot of traders employ stop loss orders to try and limit their losses automatically when they aren't around to trade. This sudden move in Japan caused many of those limits to be hit which further compounded the trend.

I haven't been able to find any statistics on how well these housewife currency traders have performed on average. It's easy to find reports like the one above on some people who have done very well for themselves, but I'm sure there are just as many stories of people who have ruined themselves as well. It you get enough people all flipping coins, someone gets heads 100 times in a row, and someone tails. I wouldn't advise it as an investment strategy, even if you think you know what you're doing there's likely some other force on the far side of the globe influencing things in ways you don't understand - like Mrs. Watanabe.

Kabukicho - A proper red light district.

Kabukicho is the red district residing on the northeast side of Shinjuku station. If wikipedia is to be believed, and having been to the area myself I'm inclined to believe, there are over 3,000 bars, nightclubs, love hotels, massage parlors, and hostess bars. This is all in an area geographically no larger then say Faneuil Hall back in Boston.

The night of my first trip to Kabukicho started out innocently enough. Drinks at the local Hub Pub, a British style pub located in Tokyo Opera city, a giant skyscraper and pinnacle of high culture.

Conveniently located a five minute walk from my apartment and about thirty feet from the giant statue Opera man.

I hadn't counted on the Hub Pub showing an Australian rugby match and the rowdy pair of New Zealanders and a Brit I met watching it. After the match they invited me along to the Dubliners pub in Shinjuku down the street. A few beers later, 1am or maybe 2am was rolling around and one of the guys was inspired to head out to Champions, a dive bar tucked away in a small alley in the middle of Kabukicho.

Once you enter Kabukicho, the streets get narrow and every inch of each building is covered with neon signs.

Each building has at least 5 or 6 different establishments.

Unlike say Las Vegas, Kabukicho doesn't have the feel of some over commercialized caricature of a red light district, it feels like the real deal. The government seems to allow these places to operate unobstructed. There are simply so many establishments I don't know if it's possible that they could all be regularly monitored. No single place seems big enough to draw attention to itself. Despite all this, like everywhere else in Tokyo it's perfectly safe, no one gets robbed. There are no fights.

The density of these bars/clubs/message parlors means that there's fierce competition to get people in the door. There's all manner of specialization on display.

This place seems to cater to the um, "I like the size of your gun" crowd. Maybe American soldiers stationed in Tokyo perhaps?

The clubs also hire armies of pushers to make sure no male, particularly fair skinned gaijin males, walks through Kabukicho un-accosted. Some are dressed in slick cut suits and just casually ask you if you're looking for a girl tonight. Others, often other foreigners, come at you with a full court press and will persistently follow you for blocks trying to get you into a club.

This particular evening I had a Jamaican guy in an LA dodgers cap come up to me. The interaction went something as follows, recreated based on my hazy, overstimulated recollection, as I'm walking to the bar.

Guy: Heyyyyyyy mon, you look like a rich mon, looking for sexy time.

Me: Sorry not interested

Guy: Hey mon where you from, mon

Me: Boston,

Guy: Ohhh Boston mon, I'm from Jamaica I've been to New York, LA

Me: That where you got your hat?

Guy: Of course mon, I love Americans, what you looking for tonight mon, anything you want we got it, you want massages, girls, clubs, dancing, anything you want mon.

Me: Sorry man I'm just heading to Champions with some friends

Guy: Oh mon, that place is nothing, you tell me what you want.

Finally we made it to the bar and he gave up.

Ah champions, a bar where the beer is cheap, and the karaoke is cheaper. Many of the details are a bit hazy, but I distinctly remember at one point a couple attempting the duet "A Whole New World" from Aladdin. To be fair I think world may be the most difficult english word for native Japanese speakers to say, all the characters in the Japanese alphabet consist of either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel, save one. World ends with three consonants, and r next to an l (which doesn't exist in Japanese and is approximated in borrowed words with r) to boot.

Despite the lyrical challenges of the performers, it seemed an appropriate theme.

A whole new world...

First movie theater experience in Japan - emphasis on experience

I went and saw the final Harry Potter last weekend here in Tokyo. First off, several things to note about this movie theater in Japan

• You choose your seat when you purchase the ticket. Actually, I thought this was pretty smart. There was no pressure to get to the theater early, and this prevents the inefficient practice of small groups all sitting one seat apart from each other so bigger groups can't find seats.
• Ticket prices are higher, But they don't gouge you on the food. I'm getting the sense that there is less "cross-subsidization" in consumer pricing in Japan.
• The food is also pretty good
• Booze is available at the cafe, which you can hang out in because you don't have to save your seat.

Once seated the lights went down, and this very loud, intense, short movie was shown involving the movie theater...

No seriously it was really intense, full on sensory assault, like white knuckles holding on to the chair.

My advice would be to go mildly inebriated to help take the edge off.

I couldn't find the exact version I saw, but here's one along the same lines. Imagine you are watching this this on a giant screen filling up your entire range of vision, in a dark theater, and with a sound system turned up to 11.

I know I saw a different version, because I distinctly remember a rocket propelled toilet being fired from the jumbo jet robot.

As far as I can tell what's going on here is... well... actually... I've got nothing

I've noticed some page views coming from Japan, can someone here help me out here?

A lot of Japanese visual media seems, at least to this gaijin, to be really intense. Anime in particular. This seizure inducing media exists in sharp contrast to the general culture of civility and politeness. It's an interesting dichotomy that I don't understand.

Following this, um service announcement? commercial?, we were treated to previews.

Here's one involving a bunch of ninja's in training

Any guesses as to what the main plot arch here is?

WTF is this? Part 1 Answer! Pachinko Parlor

Sorry for the long delay in getting back to this I know the suspense has been killing everyone.

The building above houses a Japanese pachinko parlor.

Walking around Tokyo you'll quickly become familiar with pachinko parlors. These are mini casinos that house gambling devices a bit like slot machines.
Officially gambling is illegal in Japan, so it's a bit surprising how ubiquitous they are. By some accounts the annual turn over in the pachinko parlor business is about $300 Billion. Which according to Wikipedia anyway, is about the size of the estimated global narcotics business. So what gives, how can these supposedly illegal gambling institutions operate so openly and so profitably?

Pachinko parlors manage to avoid infringing on the anti gambling laws but not paying out any cash prizes on the premises of the pachinko parlor. Lucky patrons are paid in tokens which must be brought to a separate establishment where they can be exchanged for cash. This "separate" establishment could be located directly adjacent to the parlor. However, parlor staff are prohibited from telling customers where they can go to exchange their tokens.

There seem to be several areas of Japanese society where they seem to be very concerned with whether or not the letter of the law is being carried out, without any regard for whether the actual consequences of the implementation are meeting the goal which was the reason for it's existence. Prostitution would fall into this category as well.

Apparently over 90% of the pachinko parlors in Japan are owned by ethnic Koreans. It's also rumored that many of the token exchange locations have connections to the Yakuza, or Japanese mob.

Also, I believe I promised a prize to the correct guess. So congratulations Brian Pierce! You're now the owner (proud I'm sure) of the hip shaped pillow pictured below.
Let me know your address and I'll have it sent to you, in the slowest, cheapest possible method. So be patient.

If you need a haircut the Dude abides

In a rather strange scene I found myself getting a haircut for the first time by a barber sporting dreadlocks. An older Japanese man who goes by the name Kaz, he runs a salon in Harajuku called "Dude."

Having lived in London for several years and married a British woman he spoke excellent English. In fact, it was this trait that first led me to seek out the Dude in the first place. Haircuts didn't run cheap, but then again nothing does in Tokyo, and fortunately you don't have to worry about tip. While I may have balked at the price a bit, I was sold with the "dude quote" found on the "who's dude" page of his website.

If everyone in the world was a dude

The world would be more peaceful...!!

Stay chilled, stay dude

Really how could you turn down that pitch.

An avowed fan of "dude culture" we were quickly debating the finer differences between surfer dudes and snowboarder dudes, slacker dudes. He lamented that his fellow Japanese compatriots just don't seem to get it, and that Harajuku which was once considered bohemian had become more upscale and commercial.

He's actually moving his shop to Shimokitazawa a place so hip the cats sit in chairs.

Which would actually be more convenient for me, the haircut was great.

Scaling Fuji-san

Mt. Fuji is one of the most iconic images from Japan. At 12,388ft (3776m) it's Japan's tallest mountain, and an active volcano. It towers over the surrounding landscape, many thousands of feet higher then anything in the vicinity. Located sixty miles southwest of Tokyo, it can even be seen on a clear day from the city.

As it turns out, since I arrived during the rainy season here in Japan with few clear days, the first time I got to lay eyes on the mountain I was standing on top of it.

I had the good fortune of meeting someone at the SoA pub night, within a week of arriving to Tokyo, who was planning a trip to climb Mt. Fuji with her coworkers on the second week in July. She graciously extended me an invitation to join the crew and I jumped at the chance.

The plan was to leave Friday evening climb through the night and watch the sunrise over Japan from the summit. It felt a little odd working all day Friday, knowing that instead of heading off to a bar after work I was going to climb a mountain. I've climbed larger peaks in the past, but it was always a journey just to get to them, which allowed some time to put of psychological space between everyday routine and the adventure. With Mt. Fuji it was like deciding on a whim to go watch the sunrise from the hill in you're backyard, except that the hill was over 12,000ft high.

After work I met up with the rest of the crew at Shinjuku station, where we got on the 7:30 bus that took us directly to the 5th Station at Mt. Fuji. The 5th Station is the standard starting spot for the climb up my Fuji, located at about 7,500ft above sea level. The bus trip took about 2 hours.

By the time we arrived at the staging area it was well after dark. Mt. Fuji loomed over us unseen in the darkness. We got started down the trail at 10pm. From the 5th Station it usually takes 5-7 hours to reach the summit. Sunrise would be around 3:45-4am. Even this relatively low elevation offered good views of the surrounding area. We could see the lights of Tokyo and other cities in the distance. The low cloud cover turned orange by the city lights stretched out below us.

Unfortunately the camera didn't quite capture how cool this looked.

The trail started off with a flat to moderate pitch traverse. This made for fairly easy going until we reached the 6th station, which was really just a small police hut that warned people not to continue on without cold weather gear. After the 6th station the trail turned sharply upwards and proceeded pretty much in a straight shot right up to the summit. I was a little surprised by the steepness of the terrain. I was kind of expecting a walk, but ended up having to do a fair amount sustained scrambling for about 5,000ft to the summit.

The trail up to the summit was punctuated by stations 7, 8, and 9, and several other smaller rest huts, that sold progressively more expensive supplies. Trekking through the wilderness this was not, but the huts were old, small, and rustic enough for it not to feel like some commercial ride.

We made it to within a couple hundred feet of the summit when we saw the first bit of pre-dawn light.

As the light slowly got brighter, the landscape below was revealed and we realized just how high above everything we were. It was like looking down from an airplane window.
Those little hills way down there are actually mountains themselves.
Hiking up Mt. Fuji is a very popular activity, near the summit there was a bit of a traffic jam.

The main cause being this shrine marking the entrance to the summit. At the shrine many people like to stop and take pictures, holding up everyone else. At the summit it was freezing, and once you stopped moving you definitely felt the cold. I was a bit unprepared, I had brought layers but I really could have used a winter jacket and a warm hat.

Here's me trying and failing I think not to look cold and sleepy.
Here's the rest of the crew doing a better job of it. That's me in the goofy orange hat that I borrowed because my head was cold. These pictures are all courtesy of Myleen, who is on the left in the red jacket.

I was feeling the altitude pretty bad at this point. A splitting headache, shortness of breath, kind of feels like a hangover due to the dehydration. I drank about 4 liters of water on the way up but it still wasn't enough. I've climbed taller peaks then Mt. Fuji, but always after a few days of acclimatization at altitude. Here I went from sea level to 12, 300ft in less then 7 hours.
Mt. Fuji is an active volcano, it last erupted in 1708. This is the crater.

The trail down was different then the one up. It consisted of long, wide switchbacks of loose volcanic sand. The way down was probably more treacherous then the way up, the sand was sliding everywhere and it was easy to loose your footing. With the fatigue factor it was easy to see people rolling their ankles or worse on the way down. When this picture was taken it was about 6am, I had already been up for 24 hours.

Once we got down it took us another 3 hours to get back to Tokyo. You would think we would then go right to bed, instead one of the guys invited us back to his place for a Barbecue. We arrived around 2-3pm to find an American and a Brazilian (more coworkers of theirs) who had been drinking all day and preparing food for us, including hand made sausage. Pretty sweet way to end the trip.

If your curious to see what I look like after 36 hours with no sleep and 12,ooo vertical ft, here you go.

I call that my le tired face.

Overall great experience, it was nice to get out of the concrete jungle for a change. One of the really great aspects to Tokyo is the proximity to really anything you would want to do outside. You've got massive mountains and the ocean both right there. Definitely won't be my last Japan mountaineering adventure.

Waking up to a shaking apartment.

So after living in Japan for over a month I finally felt my first earthquake. There have reportedly been several already but I hadn't noticed one yet.

This morning though, just before 10am, I was lying in bed why I noticed a slight rumbling in my apartment. I had never experienced in an earthquake before so it took me a few moments to realize what was going on.

At first I thought maybe there was a train going by my apartment.

Then I realized there are no trains that go by my apartment.

That's when it dawned on me there was an earthquake going on. It continued for maybe thirty seconds to one minute. It felt like the building continued to sway for a bit after the rumbling stopped. It's a bit of weird feeling having the earth shake. Every experience in my life up to this point has been building the intuition that the ground is solid, stable, and the point of reference for every moving thing. In an earthquake, unlike being on a rocking boat you don't have the sea or anything to give you a visual sense of how your swaying. You can just feel and hear the movement but you look around and there's no visual evidence that you're moving.

It didn't really feel too violent. There isn't even anything in our apartment that could rattle around. I figured it must have been a very mild earthquake, but then I learned it was actually magnitude 7.1 with the epicenter off the coast of northeastern Japan, the same place as the big one back in March. I'm sure the shaking was much more intense north of Tokyo. Apparently, it triggered a tsunami, but the wave was only 10cm high.

More in Japanese Toilet Technology

Real Japanese genius.

Seriously Japan is like 30 years ahead of the US in bathroom technology.

Gaijin Foibles

If you're looking to read something a bit more eloquent on life as an expat in Japan, you could do worse then to read this piece by the Economist's Tokyo bureau chief.

I can certainly relate to this bit.

Living as a foreigner in Japan, for all its attractions, has many such small humiliations. You may be on a noble quest to plumb the depths of the Japanese soul, but you will take so many wrong turns you end up wondering whether you are indeed too brutish to make sense of it.

I thought I would stop in a traditional Japanese bar/restaurant by my place last night for dinner - as we don't have a fridge, any pots or pans, or microwave yet. I sat down and the guy working behind the counter had already placed what looked like some kind of sea snail in front of me, kind of a palette cleanser I guess.

Now going into this place I figured that the menu wouldn't have English labels or pictures. Really I'm gastronomically flexible and adventurous enough to just order anything at random. What I hadn't counted on was the place not having menus. This made ordering food rather challenging as I couldn't just point and say "これ お願いします(kore onegaishimasu)" or "this one please give me."

There was a black board behind the counter that had the list of dishes on it, of course since most of these involved Kanji I couldn't read (although I knew a few of the meanings) I couldn't say which one I wanted. After trying for a few minutes to explain that I just wanted him to pick anything and bring me some food, he gave up trying to understand and just came back with a beer.

Nice and all but I'm very hungry.

I sat there for 15-20 minutes trying to think about how get some food.

Then it dawned on me,

すみません (sumimasen - excuse me)

I point at the food board and say

二遍目と五遍目　お願いします　(nibenme to gobenme onegaishimasu -2nd one and 5th one please give me)

He says something to the chef - great success!

He comes back a few minutes later with a small bowl of what looks like raw octopus on seaweed, and some small raw pieces of white seafood - not entirely sure what they were but they didn't have the texture of fish. Turns out those Kanji did not mean what I thought they meant.

Interesting meal wasn't bad, but interesting.

I spilled soy sauce on my shirt...

The first thing on my to do list is buy a bed

Followed by a pillow, then maybe some sheets.

The reason being I have an apartment but no furniture. Last night I slept on a thin sleeping pad -called futons here but these aren't anything like the American kind.

I moved into my new apartment yesterday, concluding a rather stressful 4 week search. I'm pretty happy with the result, a coworker who transfered to Japan with me and I decided to get a place together to save money. We managed to find a relatively spacious 2LDK ( 2 bed rooms, living/dinning/kitchen room) in Hatsudai. Here's the view from my new window.

The tower to the left there, is the Tokyo Opera City city tower, in the lower right you can see some stairs that are the entrance to our building. Hatsudai is located one train stop or about a 20 min walk west of Shinjuku, one of the major centers in Tokyo. I'll be writing about Shinjuku a bit later, it's a pretty wild place. We picked the location because it was convenient for our commute and from Shinjuku you can get almost anywhere in Tokyo fairly easily.

A view of our street. Lined with lots of small shops, restaurants, cleaners, etc.

So here's the tour of the new apartment, you enter into a short hallway.

The bathroom and toilet are on the right.

The toilet itself is probably worth a post in and of itself.

Does your toilet have a control pannel? Don't worry if you can't read the button labels which are in Japanese there are illustrative pictures for each function.

The top button at least is labeled in Katakana as ビデ or "Bi de" (for the native english speakers out there pronounced "bee-day"). The toilet features a heated seat with several different temperature settings. One of the smartest features of the new toilet is the water basin on top. When you flush the toilet, the water starts running automatically allowing you to wash your hands with the water being used to refill the toilets tank. I thought that was an ingenious idea to conserve water.

The heart of the apartment is the common living/dinning/kitchen area. You enter at the end of the short entrance hallway.

The glass door in the back leads out to our small balcony. Here's the view of the room from the glass door. You'll notice we have literally no furniture, or a refrigerator for that matter - items also on the to do list.

And lastly here is my room. Certainly smaller then my room in Boston, but not small by Tokyo standards by any means and it's bright with large windows.

Now all I need is a bed...