K: Lately I’ve been thinking about property ownership and the security that it creates; also the process of purchasing property. We’ve purchased property in the United States and purchased property in Japan and I feel like the process was really different for both. 

C: Yes, it was. 

K: For me the biggest difference was I know for a fact you dealt with the money stuff, I didn’t. 

C: Right 

K: For me, the biggest difference was how many pieces of property we looked at, how we looked at the property and how long it took. I feel like in the United States, it took way longer. 

C: It did take way longer. I’m not sure that wasn’t just luck though… 

K: What do you mean? 

C: I mean, maybe we just looked, like, were lucky to find we liked in Japan quicker than we found one we liked in the US. 

K: How so? I’m not seeing luck at all. 

C: You’re not familiar with the concept of luck? Or you’re just not… 

K: (LAUGHTER) I’m not familiar with the concept of luck in this context, I’m not understanding… Are you saying because when we started looking in the United States, they took us literally to a crack den the first time? The Real Estate agent didn’t know it had been… it had been standing empty, it was in a decent neighborhood, but it had been standing empty for, I think, six months. 

C: Right 

K: Somebody was squatting there, and the person, or people, who were squatting there was smoking crack, because there was all kinds of crack paraphernalia and stuff. 

It was a two-story; we walked in, the first floor was just trashed, and the Real Estate agent was like, “Do you want to go upstairs?”, and I was like, “No! I don’t need to see upstairs in this crack den, are you out your mind?!” 

C: It may have been raccoons… 

K: (LAUGHTER) Yes, you did say that you thought it was raccoons! Bless her heart, but she was not the brightest bulb in any respect, by any stretch of the imagination, she was a bit dim… 

C: See, I think she was just really trying to sell some property. She wasn’t sure anything else would be any better. 

K: Yeah. Because the house that we ended up buying wasn’t actually in that much better of condition, except it was being lived in at the time. 

C: Correct. 

K: So, we ended up having to rebuild the house. 

C: When we bought the house, it had a room over the garage, which we found out wasn’t permitted. We couldn’t actually use that, so we had to rebuild the garage. But we also didn’t get the keys. 

K: (LAUGHTER) Yes. Yes. 

C: They sent us a note, I forget how because it wasn’t email, I think, it was through the Realtor. “The keys are on the kitchen counter”. 

K: Yes! (LAUGHTER) 

C: This is not particularly helpful when the keys to open the door to get to the kitchen counter are on the kitchen counter! 

K: Yes 

C: Luckily, you being Black and all… 

K: No, wait, I have to tell this side of it…. 

C: Yes, you tell this side 

K: I don’t want you to get lit up, so 

C: OK 

K: So, me and another girlfriend of mine, who is also Black – a friend of ours, were always touting our “ghetto cred”. So we were saying that, because we’re Black and we have “ghetto experience”, that you being so… you’re one of the whitest people on the face of the earth, and to just look at you… if someone were to just meet you there, they’d think you grew up pristine… 

C: Uh-huh 

K: Our friend was always saying that you grew up with a silver spoon in your mouth. I wasn’t, which drove me nuts… but, we thought that because I’ve got ‘street cred’, because I’m ‘ghetto’ – which has nothing to do with being Black – but, I felt like I’m ‘ghetto’, I’ve got ‘street cred’, I’m going to handle this. 

C: Well, the other person was always saying, “You’re white, so you don’t have street cred..” 

K: Yes, she was saying that her Blackness gave her ‘street cred’… I don’t know why she always said that since she grew up middle class. 

C: Yeah, I hung out with her mom, like, it was.. 

K: She was one that was “more silver spoon in the mouth” than either of us were, and I don’t feel that my Blackness has anything to do with my Ghetto Fabulousness. I felt Ghetto Fabulous at the time that you met me because I had been raised in the foster care system, I had emancipated at 16 and I was living in the ghetto. 

C: Right 

K: Like, in the ghetto of San Jose – but the San Jose ghetto is not hard-core. There are gangs and stuff, but back then, I don’t know how it is now, but, back then it was pretty like gang-lite. 

C: I think that word is always political. I mean, look back at the Jewish ghettos, which is where it came from. And I know you’re also Jewish. 

K: Yeah 

C: And then it came to be applied to primarily Black neighborhoods, so I think when people say “the ghetto”, it usually doesn’t have any particular meaning. 

K: Our friend always made “ghetto” synonymous with being Black, but that had to do with her own self-loathing. She really struggled with her Blackness; I don’t struggle with mine. I felt like my ghettofiedness, street cred, it came more from the foster care system and living on my own since I was 16 – and the fact that I lived in the actual ghetto. 

It was interesting because my street was at the very beginning of where the ghetto started, and there weren’t any stabbings or shooting on my street, but the next street over, once a month there’d be a stabbing or some sort of violence. But I always felt really safe. There were a couple of times that the street was closed because they were searching for somebody who had shot or stabbed someone and I couldn’t get home, but for the most part, I always felt safe. I never felt afraid, I would walk the streets at night, by myself. 

C: I was never afraid in your neighborhood, but your neighborhood had a lower police presence. You were on the edge of the police presence. 

Two blocks away there was an anti-cruising regulation, so if they saw you driving past them, you’d get a ticket. There was really heavy police monitoring. 

K: Yeah 

C: So, I mean, I think that what’s perceived as a dangerous neighborhood or not, is usually completely wrong. But, that’s beside the point. 

K: Yes, we digress again (LAUGHTER) Digressing… oh, you want to get back to tell it yourself… 

C: Yes, thank you 

K: OK, sorry, sorry, back to touting Chad! Go ahead, tout away babe! 

C: Well, everybody else – by which I mean the other two, wanted to look at the house. We knew it wasn’t ready to move into because there were several problems that had been identified during the inspection and such, but we wanted to get the keys in particular. 

So, we look through the front window, and we could see the keys on the counter in the kitchen, but the door is locked. So, Kisstopher and our friend are standing around – “what should we do? Do we call a locksmith, would it be cheaper to smash a window and climb through…” 

Mind you, none of us were of the size to be wanting to climb though a broken window, I just walked around to the back where there was a sliding glass door and lifted it off the hinges and opened it up and walked in. 

K: I didn’t know you could do that with a sliding door 

C: Yeah, it was interesting you didn’t know that 

K: Well, in the ghetto we don’t have the whole portrait stained-glass sliding doors; although, in one of the group homes I lived in – it was a duplex that had been converted into a single home – both of those had sliding doors, but I never had to break in to the group home, because we never locked the door. 

C: Yeah, I mean, when I was living in a trailer in somebody else’s backyard we had a big glass door. 

K: (LAUGHTER) 

C: Then the other time, I was living in a cabin that literally had a wood stove in it, and there was an abandoned school bus in the backyard… total big door! 

K: I know you grew up poor, but these are like – when we were first together, this is a good snap chat of all the conversations we would have (LAUGHTER) 

We both grew up poor, so we share a lot of the same trauma… but anyways, we’re talking about buying property so… In the United States we hired a Realtor, we saw three properties 

C: We looked at 4 or 5 but a couple of them were just like immediately “NO” 

K: The property that we decided on was interesting, a Native American woman and white man. Because of my Native American ancestry and the fact that you’re white, we went and did some ceremonial passing over of the property and talking about it. Because we had a shared understanding of spirituality and what this property meant and listening to her stories, she liked our ethnic makeup and they decided to sell the house to us. 

C: I want to clarify something, because you said, “Native American ancestry”. A lot of times I see that now being used as some sort of blood–quantum thing, like, “I got a DNA thing and I’m 2% Native American.” Your grandmother was born on a Reservation. 

K: Yes 

C: The only reason you don’t have tribal connections is that she was so angry about the way she’d been treated that she refused to give anybody information on how to contact them. 

K: Yes, and she didn’t have a birth certificate. My grandmother didn’t have a birth certificate because her mother died in childbirth. 

My great-grandfather was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation; he was a slave, and my great- grandmother was 100% Cherokee. When she decided to marry and have a baby with a former slave, her relatives didn’t approve. When she died in childbirth, they said they should have just buried the baby along with her. My grandmother had been rejected by them, and she didn’t see any benefit to being on their rolls. She was fortunate enough that she never needed those resources, because she was adopted by the family that had owned her father. 

They raised her as sort of their penance for having owned her father. They tried to do right by her, by giving her a good education and all of that, so she identified more with them than she did with the Native American side. 

C: She played piano really really well, like at concert-level, she just had a ton of talent because she had been raised in this way. But she was very angry at the Cherokee side of her. 

K: Yes, and she was also very angry at being the descendent of a slave. 

C: Yeah 

K: In hearing that story, the wife said, “I really want you guys living in our home”, also hearing the way we wanted to redesign the home. They hadn’t had the resources necessary to change the home in the way we wanted. 

Her children came and visited us after we finished remodeling the house. They said it was exactly as their mother would have wanted it to be. So that to me, was a very intimate process. 

We lived in the same cul-de-sac – we were the third owners of the house, and the first owners lived in the same cul-de-sac and they said the house was the best it had ever looked, much better than when they’d lived there. So, we sort of had the whole genealogy of the house – everyone approving of what we did. 

C: Also, the house next door to us was purchased by people who had originally put an offer in on the house that we bought. 

K: So, it really felt intimate, and really personal like we got the house because of who we were. 

C: It was also really fraught with paperwork, which I think is the nature of the US, we had to go down and get Title Insurance and that kind of thing. Even though, you know, we had met all the previous owners, it was still necessary to go through the Title Insurance and make sure there were no liens and all of that. 

K: What are those things? 

C: what are what things? 

K: The things you’re listing off, because some people might not know what Title Insurance and all of that is. 

C: Title Insurance is basically insurance that nobody else actually owns the property that you’re buying. So, if you don’t have title insurance and somebody comes along and says, “Hey, you weren’t able to buy that because the person who sold it to you didn’t actually have the right to sell it to you.” Then, it’s a big problem. 

So, if you go through a Real Estate agent, and Realtors are a subset of Real Estate agents; that’s a trademark thing, then they ask that you get Title Insurance. It’s not strictly required, I don’t think, if you don’t get a mortgage. It’s a good idea anyway. It protects you in case somebody else makes a claim that you didn’t have the right to purchase the property. 

Liens are basically if somebody borrowed money against the property or didn’t pay taxes, there’s a legal right that sticks with the property, so you want to make sure that the property is free of liens. 

K: Right, and there were some issues with the property that we didn’t inherit, that the former owners had, with taxes and such. 

C: Which we knew about before we completed the sale, so 

K: So, them selling the house to us, and we were able to help them alleviate all of that, and they had enough money left over to buy a farm up north. 

C: They actually went to live on the Reservation with her extended family. 

K: Yeah. 

So, for me that felt like we were doing something good for the owners and it felt like we were doing something good for their children. We lived in the home and it was just really intimate, it was an intimate and beautiful space. 

and it felt like we were doing something good for thier children and we lived in the home and it was just really intimate, it was an intimate and beautiful space. 

We designed it for parties, because at the time our son was really young, I think when we bought the house, he was 6… 

C: He was 5, he was 6 when we moved in, he was 5 when we bought it 

K: Ok, yeah, because it took us a year… did it take about a year to rebuild it? 

C: Yeah, it took about a year to rebuild it. 

K: It was really nice that we were able to get him in a house while he was young and he was able to pick all of his own furnishings, pick what colors he wanted the walls to be. Every room in our house was a different color; our bedroom was turquois, his bedroom was blue, and the rest of the house was sienna and something else. We had a pink room, and a lime green room. The bathroom was mint green, so every room was a different color and it was really looked a lot nicer than I’m making it sound. 

At least for us it was nice. When we sold it we had all the walls painted white. But we got to pick everything. 

C: Well, we had a great contractor. So… 

K: We had an amazing contractor 

C: I’m going to say his name because there’s no identifying information, Chuck was our contractor. We’d interviewed a few different contractors looking for somebody to do it 

One guy came, his business card was made of shaved wood, but it was really clear in talking to him that he was on drugs at the same time he was trying to sell us his services. 

And I have neurological issues and things, and so… this was like, on drugs. 

So, we decided not to go with him, for you know, personal reasons 

K: Yeah 

C: And another guy was really wanting to kind of tear down the entire house and rebuild it and make it a lot bigger and just, didn’t understand what we wanted with it… 

K: Yes 

C: Just wanted us to spend a lot more money than we wanted to make it a lot more house than we needed 

K: Yeah 

C: And then Chuck said, Chuck was about 65 or something when he bid… 

And he said, “Look, I’m old, I’m not cheap, I don’t negotiate on that, but I do really good work… 

K: “so, if you wanna haggle on price just go ahead on and find somebody else” 

And we’re like, “No, come and talk to us” and he had so many… he sat down and listened to everything that we wanted and how we wanted to live. 

He gave us some really great advice and input, like when we wanted – we had this garage space that was just huge – from the garage to the edge of the sidewalk you could fit six cars. We were able to build another room and put the garage in front of the room and still have room for a two-car garage, and two parking spaces in front of the garage. 

C: Two by two, so four cars could park in front of the garage and two in the garage, and then a room behind that. 

K: He gave us the solid advice – “You don’t want that room to be a step down, because it’ll always look like an added-on room. You have to raise it up to the same level.” That was really gorgeous advice that made the house so much more beautiful. 

C: It was. I had always grown up with sunken rooms, so that was thing. I didn’t know it would make that much of a difference, but it really did. 

K: Yeah. Then he suggested that we do sky lights, which was absolutely beautiful 

C: Yeah 

K: And that we did a curve, all of the edges in our kitchen were rounded, but the curve, like some people do an L-shape, we had a curve, and we had a curved cabinet above it with a lazy0suzan in it, because he connected us with really great stonework people and a really great cabinet person, that was really just a cabinet fanatic and was a person at the forefront of the cabinet-bed movement. 

C: We went to the cabinet guys house and all of his furniture was actually cabinetry 

K: Yes, it was really gorgeous 

C: It was gorgeous! 

K: Really, really gorgeous 

C: It sounded a little bit extreme, when he described it, but then he was like, “let me show you…” 

K: He was at the forefront of that movement, which now is really popular in small spaces, to have your bed in a cabinet. 

We were really lucky with all of the craftsmen that Chuck was able to connect us with. So again, that led to the intimacy of the experience. 

C: And we moved in when they weren’t done yet, so it took a year, but we moved in before the garage and the room next to the garage were finished and there was a wall sealing it off, so we’d see them every day for like 3 or 4 months. Not every day, we did not work them 7 days a week, we’d see them 5 days a week 

K: Yes, and they came to our wedding 

C: They came to our wedding, yep. 

K: Because we bought the house before we were married. 

C: Yep, all the guys who worked on it came to our wedding. Yeah, and Chuck was a former architect who decided he liked being a contractor better so he knew all this stuff so… it was a really kind of personal experience. 

K: Really intimate 

C: Really intimate, really great, so that was buying property in the US. A lot of paperwork, a lot of time building it, but kind of a very intimate experience. 

K: Yeah 

C: Buying property here in Japan was different. 

K: It felt really… I don’t know the process of finding the home was so different, because we searched online, because the floor plans in Japan are pretty standard. 

C: Right 

K: Once you understand how to read the graph that they put online, it’s actually so much easier and quicker to just search online for the floorplan you want, how many rooms you want, all of those kinds of things. I think, this is where luck comes in, because the building was brand new. 

C: Yeah, it wasn’t completed yet. 

K: Yeah, so how did you find it? 

C: An acquaintance of ours suggested it. They said, “Hey, I saw they’re building a building near a transportation hub.” This was one of our primary requirements, because of my not driving and we don’t have a car and all of that, so we wanted something close to public transportation, and not way out in the middle of the country. 

K: Yeah, and I also wanted to be close to a grocery store. 

C: Yes, we have a grocery store down the street and a subway station across the street. 

K: We have two grocery stores, depending on which direction you walk. 

C: Well, we’ve got 3 depending on how far you want to walk too 

K: Yeah 

C: So, it’s nice 

K: And lots of convenience stores! 

C: I think that’s everywhere in Japan. Convenience stores in Japan are like Starbucks in California. 

K: Yeah (LAUGHTER) 

C: I worked at one place in California, and at the intersection there was a Starbucks on each corner. There were four Starbucks at one intersection! 

But yeah, we found out about this place, and in Japan the seller pays all of the costs. In the US, usually the buyer and the seller will split the costs. 

K: Which costs are you talking about? 

C: The Real Estate agent is paid entirely by the seller in Japan, whereas in the US the fee is usually split between the buyer and the seller. Also, the closing costs, that’s all paid by the seller in Japan, and because we bought it while it was being built, it was all paid by the builder and there was no Realtor fee. 

So, Japan is starting to change a little bit, but it used to have a kind of culture of, you don’t expect a building to last longer than twenty years. 

K: Which is strange because there’s a lot of old buildings 

C: Yes 

K: Like the building my office is in is what, like 50 years old? 

C: No, it’s not that old, it was built in 1972. 

K: OK 

C: So, that makes it 47 this year, that’s three years away from 50, come on! 

K: (LAUGHTER) 

It’s still standing and functioning. I wouldn’t want to live in it, because… the reason I wouldn’t want to live in it is that you can only run one or two aircons at a time, and it has three rooms. 

C: Aircons are air conditioners 

K: Yes, air conditioners and heating units. You can only run two at a time, and I think you can only run one if you want to cook rice. 

C: Right 

K: So you can’t run two heating systems or cooling systems plus have a refrigerator plus cook rice. So, to me, I think the building needs to be rewired. 

C: Probably. But if they rewire it, I think they’d have to bring it to current earthquake standards. 

K: Yeah, because it’s seriously not up to code. 

C: Right. Japan has a lot of earthquakes, so the earthquake code here is really stringent. So, new buildings, like the building that we’re in now, has some kind of device… it doesn’t have a pendulum like the skyscrapers, it wobbles a lot in earthquakes. 

K: And on windy days 

C: And on windy days, yes, it will start to sway. 

K: It has a gyrating foundation, there’s springs in the foundation 

C: Yeah, so that’s different. But this is the first time I’ve ever lived in a building this tall. I don’t know about you. 

K: Me too 

C: Yeah? 

K: Yeah, me too. We just learned something new about each other! 

C: Interesting 

K: I’ve never lived in an apartment building that was higher than two stories. 

C: Interesting. I’m trying to think if I did… 

K: My dad lived in a high-rise, but I didn’t live with him at the time and so, I guess, because was it three stories? 

C: It was three stories when we lived together 

K: Yes, that’s the highest for me, three stories. In California, at least in Santa Clara county, it really is uncommon to build buildings higher than three stories because they usually build them wide over lots of land rather than 

C: Urban sprawl… In Japan you have a lot of concentration around train stations, so you can kind of, if you like to the map where the prices are different colors, a heat map/price map of colors, you can identify where the train stations are by the prices of the buildings. 

K: So, square-footage-wise, and cost-wise, because I don’t want to say how much our house is exactly, but, did the house in the US cost less per square-foot than the house here? 

C: Square-foot-wise, including the renovations that we made to it, the house in the US was double what we paid for this, and it was two-and-a-half times the size. So, if we doubled our place, we’d have to add another half again to make it the same size as the one in the US. 

So, yes, this place is more expensive on an area-basis 

K: Yeah 

C: But cheaper overall because it’s so much smaller 

K: It doesn’t have any amenities either. It has parking and that’s it. 

I guess there’s a little table in the lobby, so technically… and there’s a maintenance staff that cleans the building, but there’s no amenities, like there’s no pool or any of that stuff. 

C: I mean, we live down the street from the Ward gym, so if we want to go swimming or whatever, we can. There’s a public pool 

K: But let’s be real, we’re not doing none of that (LAUGHTER) 

C: (LAUGHTER) Well, Rasta’s gone a few times and played volleyball or gone swimming and such 

K: No, Rasta uses it, but we don’t. 

So, for me, I think I feel like the floorplan that we made… Here’s something I find similar about both the house and where we live now. I absolutely hate having bedrooms at the front of the house, and both places have bedrooms at the front of the house. 

This drives me bananas because you can’t ever open your bedroom window, or your bedroom window curtains, not that I do, because of my Lupus and Porphyria, but… it’s just baffling, like, why would they put our room right next to our front door? 

C: But, in the US, we had a situation where you know, we had the house and then the next street over the house on that street our backyards faced each other, when we put up a fence, well within regulation, you could only have a 6-ft. fence… 

K: And with all of the four houses that touched the fence besides our owns permission… 

C: Yes, everybody’s permission, but the neighbors, our backyard neighbors, complained that they could no longer watch us. 

K: Yes! (LAUGHTER) Because we had the lattice on top of the fence, and so they were unhappy with the lattice. 

C: Yes, but they were also unhappy when we got curtains, so I don’t know… your bedroom thing has never made sense to me in a visceral way, but I know you have it 

K: Yes, and so, with this one because we really love an open floorplan, the house in the US had an open floorplan and this place is an open floorplan. It could be a four bedroom, but instead of making it a four bedroom we made it a living room, dining room and kitchen. There’s a wall that we got, a sliding partition rather than a solid wall that’s fixed, so we have the living room which goes straight into the dining room. That’s all open space and you can see the kitchen and we currently have our bedroom in the living room. 

C: Because, why not? 

K: Thank you! 

C: It’s called the “Living Room” for a reason 

K: Yeah, because we’re living in it! What! 

What’s known as that tatami room in Japan, there’s these masks that are made out of woven grass that are called tatami’s and most places in Japan have one room where those masks are in it and it’s called the tatami room because they function as a tea room. At least historically they function as a tea room and where you would entertain guests and that sort of thing. 

Our tatami room is actually your office… 

C: Yes 

K: and our pantry, we use our futon closet… in Japan there are closets that have sliding doors on them, if you open the sliding door it has one shelf so that you can fold up your futon and put it in there during the day 

C: They are really deep, they’re like four-and-a-half feet deep 

K: And we use that for our pantry where we store all our canned goods, because the kitchen counter, the cabinet space in the kitchen is ridiculous. We have plenty of cabinets, they’re just really shallow 

C: Yes, they’re really shallow. A large plate does not fit in the cabinet 

K: Yeah, so, I’m not upset with our cabinet space, because we don’t have a lot of dishes, but I do like to eat and store lots of pasta and lots of canned foods. I like to keep so much food in the house that we could whip up a Thanksgiving dinner just based on what’s in the house. 

C: Just don’t expect turkey 

K: Yes, because that’s what we did one year. We were like, “Ok, let’s just use all this stuff!” 

I really like canned goods and pasta and rice and all that, so we use the tatami room as our pantry. Before we did that, we used some of our bathroom cabinetry as our pantry and I didn’t like that as much. 

C: Yeah, our linen closet we used 

K: We don’t have a lot of linens 

C: No, we don’t 

K: That’s something that has changed, in the US we had tons of linen, and here I think we have like a winter set and a summer set and that’s it 

C: Yes 

K: Now that cabinetry is basically empty, then we use our old room that was our room for clothing storage – it’s filled with nothing but clothes and some workout equipment. Then room that used to be Rasta’s room is now your nap room. 

C: Yes 

K: The nap room and reading room 

C: Yes, if I need to get away for sensory issues, or whatever 

K: Yeah and also it can be perfectly climate controlled for you in case I’m wanting a different temperature in the house or you’re needing to cool down or adjust or what have you 

C: Yes, central air conditioning is not popular in Japan. It’s mostly split units so each room is heated on its own. That makes my office sometimes a little bit uncomfortable because it doesn’t have any walls that connect to the outside, so three of the walls connect to the inside and one wall connects to our neighbor so there’s no way to put an air conditioning unit in that room. 

K: Yeah 

C: Usually a fan can take care of that during the summer and a blanket can take care of that in the winter. 

K: Yeah. We had a Real Estate agent for both purchases. We found our Real Estate agent in the US by just driving to a strip mall. You had driven past a strip mall and seen a Real Estate agent and we just walked in. 

C: Well, it’s actually different than that, because in Japan Real Estate agents compete for listings, but multiple agencies might have it listed, which in the US, you have the multiple listings service. But, in the US, our Real Estate agent negotiated with the seller’s re agent. 

K: Yes 

C: In Japan, you’re always only dealing with the seller’s Real Estate agent, and so when we bought this place, we actually were just dealing with the agent for the builder. They had one model unit completed, so to finish the sale, we actually came to the building and brought the down payment in cash and brought the income, or hanko – the stamp that has to be registered 

K: Yeah, because you don’t sign, you stamp things in Japan, you don’t sign them. 

C: Yes, so we had a stamp and got it registered at the Ward office, basically City Hall, and then, when we stamp that they had to put revenue stamps in the contract which, I forget how much they were then, but revenue stamps can range from one dollar to a thousand dollars or more. They cost, usually if we get a visa, it’s 8000 yen, which is right now about $75 dollars. 

They said, “We’re not sure we can sell this to you because you’re foreign.” I had actually prepared for that, and had printouts of the relevant laws, saying there’s no restriction on selling to foreigners in Japan 

K: Yes 

C: So, it’s perfectly legal to be foreign and own property. It’s really hard to get a mortgage if you’re foreign and are not a permanent resident 

K: Yes, and don’t have collateral. 

C: Right. We took the money from selling the house in California, and used that to buy this place. So that wasn’t an issue. 

Then they said, ‘well, there are restrictions associated with being in this building, we want to be sure it’s ok with that. You’re not allowed to have pets bigger than you can carry.” 

K: Yeah (LAUGHTER) 

C: And I said, “Well, I’m really strong and I’d like to have a miniature elephant.” They actually had a discussion, when it became clear that they were taking me seriously, I had to say “I’m sorry, that was a joke”… 

K: They were trying to figure if he could carry it, and if it wouldn’t grow any bigger than he could carry… 

C: Right, so a lot of people in our building have dogs or cats, but they’re all really small. I haven’t seen any large dogs in the building. Even the standard is “Can you carry it” 

K: One of the buildings that we looked at had a dog-washing station, and I thought that was cool 

C: Well, the building we’re in now has one too 

K: Where does it have a dog-washing station? 

C: It’s between the stairwell and the locked door that leads in from the parking area. 

K: Really? 

C: Yes 

K: Oh, I take it back, I guess there ARE amenities! (LAUGHTER) We obviously don’t have any pets, because I am a terrible, terrible pet owner, and you’re a terrible pet owner, so if we had one person who would be willing to be responsible for the pet, I think we would have an animal. 

C: I’ve never owned a pet. My family when I was growing up had a dog and hamsters, but they were never my responsibility and I never wanted them. I had really, really severe asthma, well, I know now that I would have been fine with a pet, but the doctors at the time said “No indoor pets”. So, my brother had a hamster, which I guess didn’t count for some reason, but we always had an outdoor dog. 

K: Hmmm. So, growing up, I had at one time, a boa constrictor, a bunch of ducks, some rabbits, cats and two dogs. So, I don’t remember how many ducks I had, because we had two ducks and then a bunch of little ducklings, and we had some rabbits, I think only two rabbits at the time, one boa constrictor, and I think three cats and two dogs, and then later on in life, we had seven cats and one dog. For me, most of my life, anytime I lived with my mother I had pets, and then when I went into foster care, most foster homes had some sort of animal, like a dog or something. Then in the group homes there weren’t any pets, and then when I moved out and lived on my own, I didn’t have any pets, and then I had one relationship that lasted for five years and we had a cat. 

C: Yeah 

K: I had three cats at the time, but at no point in time was I ever responsible for any of the animals. 

C: I guess that I lived in a bunch of different people’s hoses, with their permission, but I kind of fostered out informally through the church, and the place I usually stayed had three cats, and then I briefly lived with somebody who had four ferrets. I don’t recommend living with ferrets. 

K: I once had a fish, well, my girlfriend at the time had a fish. So, I feel like everybody, other people I lived with had animals and I benefited from those animals. I only ever had one pet that I considered my own and that was a cat, but I wasn’t responsible for the litter or any of that, because I was really young at the time. So, I wasn’t into actually caring for animals, I like loving on animals, and petting them and enjoying them, but I don’t like changing litter boxes or walking a dog or any of that. 

C: It’s interesting looking at that thinking about how much of our life is structured around having it be possible for there to be days where neither of us can function. Like things from not owning a pet to living near public transport to having a pantry full of things that could be kind of instant food. 

K: Yeah, that’s… to me, I felt like both times the buying both places were really straight forward. I think we were fortunate in that we really organized ourselves before and we were also fortunate that we had the resources, and I think having the resources made it fairly stress-free both times. 

C: Yeah it did, and the laws too, if we’re in a different country, I know Singapore doesn’t allow foreigners to own property, and Thailand… 

K: Just one of the reasons why we don’t live in Singapore 

C: In Thailand, you can’t own more than half of the property 

K: And in Mexico, foreigners can’t own property 

C: Yeah, and I know that Japan is not completely standard, but you can buy property as a foreigner here, and Nagoya doesn’t have the kind of Real Estate bubbles that Tokyo goes through, so the price of our apartment, estimated price has been pretty much constant for the last 10 years. 

K: That was buying property in the US… I feel more like the kind of property we owned in the US and the kind of property that we owned… 

C: Well, we also had some fun stories 

K: Yes, so thank you for tuning in and listening to this weeks’ ramble! 

C: Come back again to hear more pointless stories and digressions.

K: Bye.

C: Bye bye.