29 Aug – Home/fire insurance. This needless to say differs from property to property, but most permitting agencies need tenants to join up for at least a fundamental insurance plan covering damage in the eventuality of a fire or earthquake.
Supposing that the average one-room, inner-city Tokyo apartment such as the one pictured above expenses around 60,000 yen (US$610) per month, accumulated the individual costs of simply moving into a flat (excluding transportation costs, movers’ fees etc), you’re considering at the least around $2,500 right off the bat. Although some property owners and estate agents are now actually coming to realise that compulsory gratuities are incredibly old-fashioned and get only for partially refundable safety deposits, you may still find nevertheless hundreds of thousands of landlords who demand a non-refundable money repayment only for the privilege of, well, spending them money every month to reside within their property.
5. Bureaucracy
All this talk of ridiculous traditions and long-standing guidelines like gratuities paid to landlords brings us nicely onto the theme that is general of in Japan. We realize that this is certainly theoretically a listing of things that Japan gets wrong, therefore just what we’re really saying listed here is that Japan gets bureaucracy so very “right”, for the reason that it positively excels at making inane processes even more laborious and painful, and that changing even a rule that is single a Herculean effort.
We realise that the main reason we could enjoy surviving in a nation like Japan where everything runs so efficiently – trains arriving on time every day that is single first-class customer care; everything from planned roadworks and deliveries being completed bang-on-time with zero fuss – is basically because you can find plenty rules and expected standards here.