Our House

Right now we are living in a very old house.  This house is not as old as our house in Syracuse, and nowhere near as old as Jeff's house in Ithaca (built about 1880).  But for Tokyo standards it's ancient.  It was built in 1931, before WWII and is surprisingly still standing.  Considering that "Tokyo was firebombed into virtual oblivion" during the war (source: Jeff, sitting next to me, 2009) our little neighborhood of old, traditional homes is an anomaly in a highly modern city.  We had a Japanese friend over the other day and he said he had never been in a house like ours!

The thing of note about our house isn't so much that it was built in 1931, but that at that time, they hadn't really started building homes to modern standards.  There is NO insulation. None.  The entrance to the house is made of sliding wood and glass paned doors called shoji that would have originally had paper where the glass is now.  The windows are also shoji-like and drafty!  We also have tatami flooring throughout most of the house and a genkan entryway.

Here's the entrance to the house looking through the front door and the genkan into the tatami room.  I like the red door!

This is the front/side of the house (you can see the red door on the far left of the image).  Those blinds that are hung outside don't adjust so even when we do open the window you can't really see out of it.

Our house would be referred to in America as a duplex.   The first window in view is ours, the one on the far left is our neighbor.   This area is in a stange situation in that it has been purchased by a developer who has yet to start construction.  We think someone still lives there, though we haven't seen or heard anything from them.



Here is a better picture of the genkan with the inside doors to the house closed.  You can see the handlebars to Jeff's new bike peeking out.


Behind our house is another really old house that is in disrepair.  It's funny, there is no real way to get to the house other than walking in the alley between our house and our neighbor to the right.  Maybe this is why there are several stray cats living back there.  Well that and the fact that our neighbor to the right , the neko onna or (crazy) cat lady, feeds them.  And talks to them. Everyday. At 7:00 a.m.  I mentioned before that our house has no insulation.  This means that everyday at 7:00 a.m. the neko onna wakes us up as well.   I'll spare you the images (and the smell and the awful screeching cat noises we hear at all hours) of this unfortunate scene. 

We've got some pictures from the inside of our house as well, but those will be posted some other time.

We were up late last night working on our weekend plans.  The great thing about not having jobs is that your weekend can start on Monday!  We'll let you know what we decide, but we're thinking maybe onsen!

mata ne,
melissa