After visiting Japan in 2007 for the Worldcon (Nippon 2007) Charlie Stross wrote in his travelblog that Japan had “got our future, damn it!”. I’ve just moved into a new-build apartment in Tokyo and thought I’d share some initial impressions of up to date living conditions in Tokyo, some of which clearly represent Charlie’s impression, but some of which are not ideal or futuristic.

So, first the futuristic stuff. The apartment building has FttH. Before now we’ve relied on 3G mobile “broadband” which is better than dial-up speeds used to be but not even up to the limited cabled broadband got in Reading (about 5,5Mbps contended). It’s fast enough to download stuff if you’re willing to wait a bit and things like Youtube do work, just you have to wait sometimes for it to buffer up before watching. However, the length of time a large atatachment takes to upload on email is noticeable and the initial lag in connection makes some applications like webmail a bit tedious at times. Anyway, $wife asked me whether the 100Mbps service was sufficient. We didn’t really need to go for the full 1Gbps that’s on offer did we? No, even I can’t see the need at present for home access at 1Gbps. 100Mbps has always seemed blindingly fast in the office. So, I’m waiting for that to come in. The apartment comes ready-wired network wise, although doesn’t have a WiFi router. That can be fixed (it’ll be slower than the base speed, but WiFi is more convenient for my handheld unit and while I usually use the laptop on the desk, being able to use it on the sofa [once we actually buy one] will be useful).

I’ve blogged before about toilets in Japan.  This time I’ll cover some of the other plumbing options available. There are boiler controls in both the kitchen and the bathroom. This allows one to set the exact maximum temperature of the boiler output, which is useful to keeping energy use under control. Howeever, it hsa another purpose as well. The boiler control also provides automatic bath filling and temperature. The only problem is that there’s a completerly manual plug in the bathtub and so you have to remember to put that in before setting the bath filling from the kitchen. It’s slightly odd that there isn’t a servo-controlled mechanical plug (there’s a mechanical plug in the bathroom sink after all and it’s just one more minor piece). That way one could set a bath filling from the kitchen. This voice (in Japanese of course) tells you when it’s five minutes from done and when it’s ready. The “five minutes from done” is when the water has filled the bath. The reason that’s not “ready” is that the water then gets circulated round and heated back up to the set temperature. One can then switch off the auto system or leave it continuing to heat the water.

The kitchen and bathroom sinks both have pull-out spouts on the taps which conceal hoses inside, allowing easire use for some things. The kitchen tap also has a built-in switchable filter and a spray/stream setting. I’m sure some of these things are available in the UK, of course, though I’ve not come across the re-heating bathtub concept there.

Now, other than the nice sink, the kitchen does have some  issues. Some of this is, I think, the inexperience of the company that built the block. This is the first time they’ve built a place with larger apartments for sale (mostly before they’ve built small places for singles [maybe a couple]) like the one we were in before. Some they sold to buy-to-let landlords and others they rented themselves. Floors 1-7 of the 14 storey building are still like this but 8-14 (we’re on 9) are larger places for sale. Now, back to the kitchen. There is incredibly limited storage space. It’s not that there’s no room. In fact, there’s a whole section about five foot wide where more units could easily go. We’ve been to furniture stores loking at sofas recently and there are these big but (re)movable kitchen units that Tomoko tells me lots of people have in Tokyo. That would be for peolpe renting apartments,though, surely. Anyway, all of the storage is drawers with no cupboards and it’s all under the one surface containing the hob and the huge sink. This leaves us with limited storage space and limited work space, including no drainage for the dishes. We’ve got the contact details of the company that supplied and fitted the kitchen and we’re going to get a quote for putting in wall cupboards and floor cupboards/work surface in the gap. Oh, and the extractor fan hood has a relatively sharp corner which while it doesn’t project over the edge of the counter beneath it, is still slightly dangerous for my head, being at forehead-height.

Now the thing which really does surprise me. The windows are all single glazed. Tokyo is colder than the UK in the winter (though very dry with not much snow these days) and much warmer in the summer. There is extraction from all the rooms allowing the fitting of combined heater/cooler units in each room (we’ve got to get at least a couple of these units in before the summer heat hits, but we moved in just late enough that we’re coping without heating – well, the main living room has underfloor heating but that’s pretty expensive to run and only really keeps the floor warm, and doesn’t heat the room that much). As well as the temperature and condensation issues (when it’s cold outside single glazing gets very cold on the inside of the pane and this causes lots of condensation, whereas decent double glazing prevents the inner side of the inner pane getting too cold) we’re on a main road, near a police station. It’s quite noisy out there overnight and there are reasonably frequent sirens even late at night/early morning. Double glazing wold keep much of that noice out, but very few places in Tokyo have double glazing fitted. Tomoko has lived in one place which had it, but most of her places haven’t. None of the apartments we looked at, new or old, had it. Nor is central heating at all common here. It’s all single-room electric air blower heating. Of course Japan has no significant gas reserves unlike the UK and subsidises a nuclear electricity industry so the difference in gas/electric prices for heating isn’t that much. Still, it’s different if not odd. The double-glazing things is definitely odd, and if we can afford it in a couple of years and are defintiely staying in this apartment longer term, we’ll have to look at getting the three windows and two patio doors replaced.

That  mention of patio doors brings me to the last issue. We’re on the 9th floor, as I mentioned. We have a huge balcony which is going to be pretty much unusable for most of the time. Even when the weathere is clement, the wind this high is too high for laundry to be safely left out there, and it would be to loud and windy. Mabe this is why people have cloth awnings as I ‘ve seen on some places, but they’d severely restrict the light coming in, I think. All we’ve got out there at present is $wife’s plants and I’m not sure how they’ll cope with the constant wind. given the limited space available, I think the balcony is a fetish that isn’t really practical. Everyone in an apartment thinks they have to have a balcony because it’s the apartment equivalent of a garden. But once you get above the fourth for fifth floor it’s just not that useful. A small one maybe, including for emergenyc evacuation, but this one could be a third the size giving more usable indoor space without much extra cost. There are some apartment blocks just a bit further East in Tokyo (over the Edo river – we’re in the Sumida river to Edo river area [right in the heart of what was downtown Edo]) which are 25+ storeys tall and still have balconies on them. I’d think the wind up there would make it dangerous even to step outside.

Oh, a final last issue. We had them put in a small set of coat hooks because although all Japanese dwellings have a “genkan” for you to take your shoes off, almost none of them include coat hooks. Unfortunately, they’ve put it in above the sensor for the automatic genkan light (no light source from outside there so you really need it) so we can only put my hats on there. Good job $wife had already bought a coat stand for the previous small apartment which fits in the genkan for our coats.