One month in Tokyo - the good, the bad and the dengue!
We moved back to Tokyo in June 2023. After having lived here previously from January 2018 - April 2020, I am so grateful, and still can’t believe, that we get to have a second bite at the cherry.
When we moved to Tokyo for our first stint here it was under the mindset of “this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that we’ve sought out”, “it will be a cool thing to do in our twenties” and “why would we not?!” It was a very easy and a very quick decision.
It would be an understatement to say that we absolutely LOVED our time in Japan. So it was a surprise to us (and probably our family and friends too) that we found the decision to return to Tokyo much harder and deliberated for many months. In its very nature, it was no longer a once in a lifetime opportunity, we were also now in our mid thirties and we could think of fair few reasons why we should not.
But luckily, we thought of enough reasons why we should, and here we are. So I’ll give you a rundown of our first month in Tokyo!
T minus 2 days: final day in London
To begin with, can I confess that I’m really pleased that the “T” can stand for Tokyo in this instance.
When we moved to Tokyo in 2018, I had to go to A&E on our final night in London (you can read about it here ). But I had learnt my lesson and this time there were no vacuum cleaner related foot injuries hours before I had to board a long haul flight to start life in new country.
We’d already said goodbye to family and friends earlier in the week, so luckily we didn’t have the extra emotion of goodbyes on our final day and could just work through our to-do list…’cause let’s not romanticise what a massive administrative and logistical task it is to wind down your life and move to the other side of the world. But if you like to-do lists then consider making moving house a new hobby, because to-do lists galore await you.
I had finished work and said goodbye to the drama and thrills of Westminster a few weeks ago, and Wil had also taken time off to prepare for our departure. But he went to the office on our last day in London to tie-up some loose ends, return his laptop and say goodbye to the towers of Canary Wharf. So, whilst he was in the office, I spent the day doing various errands including meeting the estate agent for our end of tenancy flat inspection. The estate agent asked “oh are you moving far?” So I replied that we were, in fact, moving pretty far from our flat in Greenwich. About 9,558km to be precise.
We’ve moved house so often that saying goodbye to our home wasn’t a gut wrenching feeling, and it felt routine even if circumstances and the days that were to follow would be anything but ordinary.
Wil met me in Greenwich after he finished work and it was time for our final dinner in London. We opted for takeout pizza from Franco Manca and picnicked on the grass in the grounds of the historic Old Royal Naval College.
Miraculously the weather was good enough to do this and it was nice goodbye to our year living in historic maritime Greenwich and to London as a whole. And then it was time to get in a taxi and head to our hotel by Heathrow Airport for our flight the next morning.
T minus 1 day: fly to Tokyo
Here are some mandatory airport shots. One of us packed more lightly than the other.
Due to the pandemic, we’d not even been back to Japan for a visit since we last lived there. So getting on a plane with a five year visa in our passports did seem a bit extreme.
Wil spent most of the flight churning through films while I just watched La La Land and snippets of Crazy, Stupid, Love. Yes, you’ve guessed right. I have a thing for Emma Stone. And also Ryan Gosling.
Our flight departed from London on 9 June and flew into 10 June on the flight which happens to be Wil’s birthday. So he turned 34 onboard!
To our surprise, one of the flight attendants came over to us before landing and gave Wil a birthday present! For those wondering what was inside, there was some chocolate, keyring/tag for a bag and a model plane emblazoned with “happy birthday!”. For those of you who know Wil, you’ll know that he was obviously thrilled about this. Here is the mandatory birthday present smile photo.
Day one in Tokyo!
We arrived in the Land of the Rising Sun on a grey morning in rainy season.
As we loitered at baggage claim, a sniffer dog stuck its nose in Wil’s backpack with considerable vigour. Wil hasn’t started smuggling illicit goods inside his daruma collection yet but the sniffer dog could impressively smell traces of apple from the day before (it’s illegal to bring in fresh fruit from other countries I think). I resisted the urge to say “how do you like them apples?” to the sniffer dog and the polite immigration official that came away empty handed.
Off the hook for smuggling contraband, and armed with our new gaijin cards, we clambered into our taxi and were ready to start our life in Japan!
About 40 minutes later we pulled up outside the studio flat in Koenji which would be our home for our first month in Japan. Reassuringly, the studio flat was exactly what we expected and absorbed us and all our luggage.
Japanese living spaces, particularly their size, always seemed to interest people back in the UK so I’ll give a bit more detail here. The flat was dinky by UK standards - it was 25㎡ in total and much smaller than just our lounge had been in Greenwich! So you’d think we’d struggle to be in there for a month but it was well designed, well proportioned and functional with good storage so we were fine! Our room was split into thirds - (i) lounge with a little sofa, coffee table and shelves, (ii) kitchen with a proper hob, fridge, microwave and small dining table and (iii) bed and wardrobe area. (Wil wants me to reassure you that we also had a crapper.) So, there was plenty of space for us and all the stuff that we had in our suitcases to live comfortably for a month - but living there on a permanent basis would absolutely be a challenge!
So back to our first day. We napped and then headed to a combini. Here’s our first haul.
We then napped some more and went out in the evening and here’s the birthday boy enjoying some tempura for dinner.
So how was our first day? Surreal doesn’t even begin to cover it. We were shattered from our final week in the UK, jet lagged and in a bit of a daze. Our brains absolutely could not comprehend that we were living in Japan again. Our final few weeks in the UK had been “go, go, go” mentally and physically. It was nice to finally have a day in which the to-do list only had two items: eat and sleep. And that’s all we did.
Week one in Tokyo
We’re sensible nerds. When we travel, we do the whole “let’s acclimatise to the time zone as quickly as possible” thing. But not this time. We spent many hours that week in our apartment, in a half dressed state, sleeping when we wanted and not when we should, and squirrelling around looking for food like deranged toddlers. No offence to the well dressed toddlers with a healthy sleeping and eating routine but I’ve not met many yet.
When we did manage to get ourselves dressed and out the door, with some semblance of well-functioning adults, we met up with our estate agent and put a lot of time into house hunting.
We previously lived in Shimokitazawa and we loved everything about it - the feel of the area itself, the backstreets of Setagaya ward more broadly, the great transportation links, and we absolutely adored our flat. But we fancied a change this time round (and felt perhaps we needed an area that felt slightly more grown-up this time!)
The area around Yoyogi Koen station was top of our list as we’d increasingly spent more and more time around there and adjoining Tomigaya when we lived in Tokyo previously, and we had really liked it. We also added Nakameguro and Dainkanyama to our shortlist of areas.
We saw quite a few dud flats in the shortlisted areas (and beyond) but by the end of the week we’d made an offer on a flat we liked! We were excited but it would take a couple of weeks for background checks etc so we couldn’t celebrate just yet and continued to keep an eye on any new listings that came up!
Whilst the house hunting was essential it’s not exactly always enjoyable. So the highlight of the week was meeting up with a close friend from our first stint in Tokyo. As we spotted each other on the street, we literally ran to each other! Most of our close friends have left Tokyo so, as you’d expect, it was wonderful to see each other again and to be retuning to Tokyo with some ready made friends this time.
Month one in Tokyo
Following the first week, which was a bit of a blur, the rest of the month went by incredibly slowly and at times felt very stressful. It felt like it had three distinct phases.
Phase One W/C 19 June: Wil successfully starts work!
Wil started work and immediately went off to Vietnam for his first week. Luckily all went well on his first project with his new team. Plus he had some time for sightseeing on the weekend.
Meanwhile, I felt like I was on a solo holiday in Tokyo for the week Wil was away. I visited some favourite spots around the city, met a friend from when we lived in Tokyo previously and spent a fair bit of time on estate agent websites and viewed another potential flat.
I also took the opportunity to spend my evenings doing things that Wil wouldn’t be too keen on including a stand-up comedy night that specifically advertised itself as “not for people who are easily offended”, a small intimate event with live painting and music, and worst of all…a networking event.
Phase Two W/C 26 June: Dengue!
Wil got back to Tokyo from Vietnam on Monday morning and was under the weather with unhelpful symptoms like a fever and headache which can be signs of a plethora of illnesses. But over the course of 36 hours, we deduced he probably had mild dengue fever. I don’t particularly enjoy being a nurse, but duty called and I stepped up and nursed him back to health by the end of the week, just in time for him to enjoy some sashimi on Friday night.
In non-dengue related updates, the application for the flat we liked in week one was accepted!
Phase Three W/C 3 July: Flat drama
This week felt pretty horrendous at the time. I won’t give you a blow by blow account of the saga but various things didn’t go to plan.
Shit tons of our money (equivalent to four months rent) was missing somewhere in the ether between UK and Japan instead of being in our landlord’s account. Therefore, we weren’t able to move into our flat on the planned date. Turns out the estate agent had not translated the bank account name fully into English so the transaction failed as the name and account didn’t match. Estate agents in the UK have a terrible reputation but perhaps that reputation is global. And before anyone gets all uppity with the “maybe you should learn more Japanese”…we had paid a ridiculous fee to the estate agent for their international and English services to precisely avoid this sort of debacle. We had to make a second payment and it took my bank over 6 weeks to trace and retrieve the missing funds!
So with the missing money and not knowing when our second payment may reach the landlord’s account our moving date was an unknown so it made it incredibly hard to plan anything, including alternative living arrangements!
Here are some highlights from when moving day did arrive:
(i) moving day come as a bit of surprise with a call from the estate agent at 5:15pm, after which I then had 45 mins to make it to the other side of the city to collect the keys or wait until the next day to move in;
(ii) I was feeling triumphant after having collected the keys and got on the metro to go to the flat. I’d had a mild migraine all day, but rushing around in the heat made it worse and the nausea kicked in. I luckily made it to some toilets in a metro station for a celebratory moving day vomit. I’ve never been more grateful for clean free toilets in Tokyo metro stations; and
(iii) much to our shock, the electricity supply to the flat was not on when we got there. It was gone 7pm by this time and the flat was and boiling hot. We moved our suitcases in using our phone lights but it would be impossible for us to stay at the flat that night. Some utterly wonderful friends gave us refuge for the night.
So it turns out that the electricity supply to the flat was turned off whilst it was unoccupied. Due to the debacle of our move-in date being up in the air, the estate agent had forgotten to notify the electricity supplier that we would be moving in that day. The estate agent sounded extremely sheepish when I called him. Apparently the only estate agent I can rely on is Phil Dunphy.
So although moving day is a day we’d happily forget, we successfully moved in the next day. We spent our first night at the flat, with all the utilities working, and woke up feeling pretty jolly. To avoid unpacking, we went out for a morning coffee and stroll around the local park. As we were doing so, we realised that it was 9 July 2023, which marked the end of our first month in Tokyo! So, here’s a self-indulgent selfie to mark the occasion!
Setting the scene as I wrote this blog:
Location: Mostly on the Chiyoda Line around the city over the course of a few days and then finished off on the sofa at home
Weather: debilitatingly hot…I now consider 31°C degrees to be a cold day
Soundtrack: I can’t remember as I wrote this over a few metro journeys but at some point I probably listened to bits of the Ashphalt Meadows album by Death Cab for Cutie. What a blast from the past. I used to listen to them in sixth form and early on in university, but hadn’t listed to them in years until I saw they were playing in London earlier this year. We decided to go and see them (the venue was full of depressed looking elder millenials…by which I mean older than us) and Ashphalt Meadows is their latest album.
Bonus fact: Japanese company Toridoll has bought Franco Manca, so maybe the sourdough pizza chain will make it’s way to Tokyo. For those in UK, Toridoll own Marugame which seems to have at least taken London by storm with new branches popping up all over the city in the past couple of years.
