Our Apartment

We chose the second floor apartment with the two tatami rooms. This is the view we get to wake up to every morning:


This was taken on our balcony, which you get to through the doors in the bedroom:


We sleep on a futon on the tatami, and it gets rolled up every morning and put away. There's a lot of storage in closets in this place. We thought we'd need a room just to store things, but with all the closet space here, we really didn't need an apartment so large. I'm not complaining though! Here's our kitchen:


And in the same room, the dining room/living room space, and the door leading out onto the other end of the balcony:


We have a room we will probably not use much:


And a room that we'll probably use as an office and guest room, so that when we have guests they can experience sleeping on the futon in a traditional tatami room:


This room has traditional paper doors that open out to the sun room, a covered balcony with another awesome view:


The bathroom arrangements here are somewhat weird, though our toilet doesn't have all the high tech features many others do, like a heated seat or bidet. It does have two flushing levels, and instead of just filling the tank when you flush, it runs through a faucet into a built in sink that drains into the tank, so you can wash your hands using the water you will later flush with. You get charged for water twice here, once for clean water and again for any sewage water that goes down the drain, so little things like that sink are common. It also saves space in the tiny toilet room. The floor in the shower room is a material similar to what you'd find on the floor of a tub or shower, and there's a drain in it. You close the door and shower in the room, instead of having curtains or something around your tub.Our bathtub, which an adult (or at least a Japanese adult, we haven't tried it yet) can soak in completely:


Our shower area, with a mirror and shelves for everything, also two places to hang the hand-held shower head for multiple uses:


That's about it for now. We'll be taking more (and better) pictures as we get furniture and get things set up. View from the sun room: