Home Sweet Home

Here is a quick introduction to my apartment. These pictures were taken the day after my arrival, thus the mess and complete lack of any personal touches. It remains like this today because I am disinclined to go out and buy a bunch of decorations, nor do I like to just hang out in a room that is smaller than my last bedroom.
This is my living space and my kitchen.



















Now I would love to show you the bathroom but there are a couple of problems: the kitchen is not wide enough to get an angle on it, and the room itself is about the size of an airplane bathroom, and an airplane doesn't have a shower, not that you would want to see that anyway.
The kitchen has a single gas burner and small sink. There is no counter space, so if I want to prepare meals, I do so either at my desk or on the floor (this is a joke). A cutting board makes a good surface if I am willing to cover either the sink or burner, but I lose options doing that and I don't have one. Funny thing, everyone I talk to says that when you move into an apartment in Tokyo the room is spotless, but you have to pay a "key charge" to cover it. I didn't have to pay the charge, but the place was pretty gross on arrival, mold in the fridge, on the shower curtain, grime on the burner. Not too happy about that, but otherwise, a nice little place.

Update (3-27): I tried to get a picture of my bathroom, and here it is:
I have since changed the shower curtain to one that is too short to reach the edge of the tub, but not to worry because the floor is designed like that of a shower (you can see the drain in the bottom, middle).

There was an episode of Penn & Teller where they look into recycling. Part of the show was going around this neighborhood and seeing how much people were into it and at what point would they say, this is too much. So, with a team of people pretending to be municipal workers they pull up a truck with various bins of different colors and proceed to pull them out one at a time. I assume you are familiar with the three colored bins (paper, plastic, and cans), but by the end of their little demonstration there were eight different colors out on the curb. At one point the survey taker made a point of mentioning that this was done in Japan with great success to which each responded with immediate admiration. Whenever you are talking about innovation, you can always refer to the Japanese.

Well, they weren't kidding. Not entirely. The garbage system here is meant to deal with the fact that there is very little landfill space. As a result there is garbage pickup five days a week for burnable, paper, plastic, plastic bottles (yes, this is separate from plastic in general), non-burnable, toxic, glass, Styrofoam, and cardboard. Chances are that I missed something in there. The burnable items have to go in a specific bag that you can buy at any store. The government regulates the price, so anywhere you go it will cost the same. The second day we were here we had a little sit down to talk about how to deal with garbage for about an hour that involved diagrams and guides that listed just about everything you could possible throw away in your day to day lifestyle. I still don't get it.