Hello World, Greg here.
Ever wondered what a brand new Japanese home looks like?
Well you're watching this, so I guess so, let's go check one out.
But first we'll have one of our friendly neighbourhood real estate agents
introduce himself.
I'm Tomita from Sanshin Realty. Nice to meet you.
The most popular house with buyers is a 4LDK with a garage.
Oh right, what does 4LDK mean?
L is for Living room, D is for dining room,
and K is for kitchen.
4 is the number of bedrooms.
Homes usually have two toilets, and what's common and a big selling feature
is a big large living room, dining room, and kitchen area.
Ok, now it's time to enter, please meet our guide.
I'm Junichi Goto from Sanshin Realty.
Is this a normal, average new house?
It's a new detached house.
Is it a typical house?
It's a typical house.
Hahaha.
Alright, I should explain the laughter.
We were laughing a bit because John and I thought this was a bit more expensive
than the average house, or at least what the average household could afford.
How much is this house?
It's ¥45,800,000.
And we weren't wrong. These homes, which as of today
works out to be about $400,000 US dollars
are about $100,000 above being affordable for families
making the median household income (¥4,880,000JPY/$43,500USD)in Edogawa,
which is a ward within Tokyo Metropolis.
I think the average annual income of buyers are between
¥3,000,000 and ¥5,000,000 (USD$26,000 to USD$44,000)
But to be fair to Goto-san,
it's fairly close to the average price of new homes I saw
when touring around Edogawa.
Anyways, let's get back to the tour.
Here's where you can park your car.
You can even park a pretty big van.
Up here is a light.
Over here you can place your family name plate.
This is an intercom.
It has a camera
so you can see visitors.
This is the entrance area.
This might be unique to Japanese homes.
And this is where you have to take off your shoes.
This is a door stopper.
This protects the walls from being damaged.
There's a magnet
on both the door and the floor
and you can step right on it without it being in the way.
Wow, amazing!
Sorry, if you've ever watched Japanese tv,
that oo, sugoi is a pretty typical reaction :-)
Something that might be surprising, is that until recently,
single pane windows were the norm in homes,
but times have changed.
Over here is the window in a bedroom on the first floor.
This is a special double-pane window.
This is the same window, but
this one makes it hard to see inside from the outside.
Windows like this use special glass
so that you can have
privacy from neighbours.
This is a 24-hour vent that can circulate air throughout
the whole house. When you push, it opens.
In order to get air into the room from outside,
you push it open.
When you're away like on a family trip,
you can circulate the air.
Just push this panel to close it.
Push it a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.
Now we're going to enter the second room
on the ground floor.
This access panel is inside this room on the first floor.
So what you can do with this,
is open it up here.
From this access point,
service people can maintain
the gas and water pipes.
And here's the 3rd room on the first floor.
There is the TV outlet.
This is the closet.
Talking about houses in Tokyo,
land is limited,
so you may have neighbours close to you.
So on the first floor,
there are special shutters on the windows.
You close it and you're fine.
You do it like 1, 2, 3.
If you try to open it,
it won't.
As I was watching the demonstration,
I thought, the locks are nice and all,
but are home burglaries even an issue in Japan?
Turns out nope, they're not.
Now let's peruse the last room on the first floor, the restroom.
This is a toilet washlet.
On this single panel, you have buttons for males and females,
for the strength of water,
to move the spray forwards or backwards,
and to flush the toilet.
On the panel there's a button to warm up the seat.You'll really like it in winter.
Hot water's next. You can change the temp. This washlet has functions like this.
And I agree 100% that a warm seat on a cold day is glorious,
especially since central heating is virtually non-existent in Japanese homes.
This is called barrier free
and this railing is for elders to hold on to for their safety.
When we go up to the second floor, we see the living room.
As you can probably imagine,
you can put a TV here,
a sofa here,
and the family can gather.
This is an intercom
with a camera.
When you hit this button,
the outdoor camera
will show who's visiting,
and you can see the face on the monitor.
And you can also talk to the person.
From my experience touring new houses,
interphones are quite standard,
but I'd say this next floor heating feature is not.
Over here is the floor heating.
This control panel is for setting
the floor heating in the living room area.
This is the dining and kitchen area.
A mother can cook the food over here,
and the children can wait here,
and get the food like this
and eat here.
Ah, the good old image of the stay-at-home mom making meals for the kids.
The space is designed so you can see everywhere.
You can easily watch kids playing;
it's very convenient.
Over here, behind me, you can put the fridge.
And here, you can put the cupboard.
In the cupboard you can put your rice cooker.
You can use the space for whatever you want, like storing food.
You can spray all around the sink with the shower head.
Inside the sink faucet there's a water purifier cartridge.
It's in shower mode now, and this changes it to regular water,
and then purified water.
Down here is a gas stove.
You can take apart this stove and it's easy to clean.
Down here you can push buttons like this.
In here you can cook fish.
You can use these to control the temperature.
This is a lock in case your child pushes this.
It won't work when it's locked.
As you can see, full sized ovens are not usually built-in,
but sometimes you will see small dishwashers.
In the kitchen you can find a dishwasher.
There's a plenty of storage space. You can store pots like this.
On the side of the kitchen, there's a remote control panel for the bathtub.
You don't have to go to the bathroom. From the kitchen you can do everything.
By the way, you need a control panel,
because the water heater is on demand and tankless.
Over here's the washroom.
Of course, you can use this for the water temperature,
and then shower...
There's a 3 panel mirror here.
If you do this, you can see your whole body.
Haha, we can see ourselves, look.
Oh, are you in the mirror? Sorry.
It's OK, it's OK.
Over here you can put the washing machine.
You guys don't use dryers in Japan, right?
You can plug in the hair dryer here.
Oh, I'm not talking about a hair dryer.
Ah, a laundry dryer? No.
While there is typically no spot for a vented dryer,
you can get 2-in-1 washer/dryer models that
don't require a vent and can fit in a space like that.
Instead, we have this over here, isn't this good?
From here you can go straight into the bathroom.
Like the kitchen, there's a control panel.
On a cold day, you can put the heater on,
and on a hot day, you can push this cold air button.
When it's moist in the bathroom, there's a fan.
And for laundry on a rainy day, if you hit this dryer button,
you can dry your laundry on a rainy day.
This is the bathtub.
Maybe it's unique to Japan,
there's not only a shower, there's also a tub.
Over here, when you take a bath with little children,
you can still have space and sit down.
There'd be water up to here,
and you can take a bath with your children like this.
In case you didn't know, bathing with family members is quite common and normal in Japan.
Over here's the shower.
You take a shower standing up, and when sitting down, can control the height.
From here you can sit down and take a shower.
Over here there's a shower and underneath there's a faucet.
You can place a bucket here to keep water in.
This is for when you want to put water in the bath,
this is to reheat the water when it gets cold.
And over here there's more settings.
The bathroom floor is easy to clean.
The water will swirl around and this will catch stuff like hair.
You can then unscrew it and clean it.
In older bath units, the drainage area also goes under the bath tub.
Thankfully newer units seal off the bath tub and there's only
this one small drainage area to worry about cleaning.
From the washroom, you can use this door to get to the bathroom.
So you enter and when you come out you can put your towel here.
I don't know if this is completely obvious,
but in Japan, the bathing room is separate from the sink,
which is separate from the toilet, so three people can use the area at the same time.
In addition to the 1st floor toilet, there's one on the 2nd floor. Inside it's the same.
From the 2nd floor, you can go upstairs to the 3rd floor. So let's go up.
On the third floor in the hallway there's a closet.
This is the third floor bedroom.
There are so many laws when you build a house in Japan,
and because builders have to follow the laws,
over here you can see how the ceiling in this room is slanted.
If we take a look at the outside, you'll see the slant he's talking about.
While houses can be built extremely close to each other,
there are rules to ensure that each house can receive
a certain amount of daylight sun hours.
This closet over here is different from the closet on the first floor.
It's a walk-in closet and it even has a light.
From the room on the 3rd floor you can access this balcony.
On this balcony you hang your laundry out.
Every room, the stairway, the kitchen, and so on,
have a smoke detector.
Over here in this room up here is a smoke detector.
Here I go!
You can do it! You can do it!
Peep. It's working.
That was a test.
This is a room on the third floor,
and just like the other rooms, it has no lock.
In Japan, only the toilets and bathing rooms have locks.
I think that while you want privacy in your room,
it's only really family living in the house, so there are no locks.
Another reason for no locks in rooms is
so that the kids can't lock themselves in.
When houses are built in Japan,
they're built according to building codes and laws.
In order to ensure the house is structurally sound,
but still has a wide open space like this,
the four beams at the corners need to be exposed.
Even though it needs to be designed like this, isn't it stylish?
On the balcony, laundry racks are attached.
First, you can adjust the height. This makes it level.
To use it, you can raise it like this, and also adjust the height down.
The third stage is for when it's not in use, and you store it like this.
While we previously saw that the bathroom has a heater fan built-in,
the most common method for drying clothes is still to hang dry them outside.
As such, balconies are a standard feature.
In Japan, we use siding like this for the exterior walls.
In the case of a fire, it doesn't burn easily.
It shouldn't break, but the sunlight
can fade the colour over the years.
If that happens, you can paint it over.
It is supposed to be good for about 15 years or so,
before it needs to be maintained as it gets cracked.
This window is a kind of wired glass.
Inside of it there's a wire mesh.
When a fire occurs, it won't break apart into pieces.
To complete the tour, let's check out some outdoor features.
Outside, you'll find the water tap.
When you open it, you can access the water.
You can connect it to a hose if you want to wash your car.
Over here is the water meter. The main water line is here,
if you open it you can use the water.
Over here is the gas meter.
Up here is the electric meter.
There are 2 pipes here.
This grey one is for
toilet and bathwater.
The reason why the pipe is outside,
is because the bad smell can escape from here.
It's way up there, because even if it's smelly, you won't smell it from below.
The other white one is to collect rainwater
from the roof and the water goes into
another pipe that connects underground.
Oh goodness, we didn't take a look at the back yard.
Here ya go! Okay, it's fairly non-existent.
It's not that houses in Tokyo don't have yards, but due to the price of land,
only the wealthier can afford it.
Still want more housing videos?
Well, whether you want them or not, there's more, more, and even more coming!
First and foremost, thanks to the realtors at Sanshin
for organizing the new home tours. It was fantastic.
And thanks to all those on Patreon for supporting these videos.
As always, much appreciated.
Many thanks to my nephew and wife for the language translations.
Oh, yeah, John! Thanks for interpreting for me, but let's be real,
your biggest contribution was being a portable light stand.
But you were a very good one.
His channel is Only in Japan and he's got some fun vids,
so all you watching should check them out.
And thank you, dear viewer, for watching!
What are new homes like where you're from?