Our soon-to-be home in Iizuna, photo taken in March 2010
Well, our loan was approved and we are well on our way to finally getting a house of our own! We have been renting all these years, which has always been big on convenience yet small on size. Now, we will have a home of our own, and one with a lot of great features!
The search was a long one, in part because it is very difficult to find a previously owned home on the market in Japan. Simply put, the Japanese have some strange idea that one should never buy a house that has already been lived in. Add to it the fact that people hardly ever sell their land over here and you have a very slim market for buying residential property.
Our own desires complicated the search. We were looking for an old Japanese house to fix up and live in. We found quite a few, some in great condition and others not, but all of them had problems that just made us change our minds in the end.
For example, we found a great old Meiji farmhouse with lots of rooms and in good condition — but it was in Hakuba, on the side of a steep hill, with a hog farm nearby. Far away? Check. Danger of the house falling off a cliff? Check. Horrible stench? Check. Granted Hakuba is fantastic for it’s sweeping alps views, but that house didn’t have any. Pass.
Then there was a 20-year-old modern house built in the traditional style. Great living room. Big open spaces. Nice mountain and river views. But it was right next to a road maintenance barn. No thank you. I don’t want to deal with dump trucks roaring out in the morning and returning in the evening. And the place has no insulation on the walls. And the upstairs bedrooms are ridiculously small, even by Japanese standards. I don’t want to be there.
Tomomi did most of the searching, finding listings online almost every day. Some were in town, others were out in the countryside. For a while, we were set on living on the mountain where the local zoo and botanic garden are, but a lack of good listings ended that hope.
At some point, Tomomi said, “What about Iizuna.” Iizuna is a mountain that towers over Nagano City. A highland area known as Iizuna Kogen wraps around it, and the area includes a well-known tourist destination known as Togakushi. We considered some listings in the Iizuna Kogen area, but never went out to see any of them.
Through all of this, there was this one listing for a big house in Iizuna Kogen that, for some reason, didn’t have an asking price on the website. At first, we looked at the photo and figured, “well, a house that size is beyond what we could get a loan for.” We forgot about it for a while, until about a month later, when we saw that the listing was still there. Nobody was buying it. We figured we could go up and take a look, ask about the price, and if it was too much, we only would have wasted an afternoon up in Iizuna Kogen, which is a nice place to be anyway. So we went up to see it.
And then we found out the asking price. From that moment, we knew this was the place for us. It was large enough for our family, yet at a good price, and now we are getting it. Since we decided to buy, we have been up there to visit several times. We have discovered that there are lots of walking paths in the forest, complete with picnic shelters and in one spot, a nice grassy meadow for the kids to romp around in. The whole area is in Joshinetsu Kogen National Park. The surroundings are quiet, peaceful and relaxed. No noise from the neighbors. No motorcycle gangs. No frog-filled rice fields.
We close on August 4th this year, but we are moving up there in March, when Anri has finished first grade. Can’t wait!
Our original plan was to fly to Honolulu and then on to Lihue on February 1, but with all the problems Japan Airlines has been facing lately, that schedule didn’t go exactly as intended. We were informed that our flight was cancelled and that the airline wanted us to take a different flight later the same day. But since the later flight meant that we would miss our separately purchased connecting flight on Hawaiian Airlines, we asked for and got a change to a JAL flight one day earlier. Changing the Hawaiian Airlines flight would have cost $100 per person, even though the original tickets cost about $80 each. Not worth it. We figured it would be better to fly to Oahu on the 31st, stay in a cheap Waikiki hotel (plenty of those!), and then take our originally scheduled Hawaiian flight out to Kauai. With this little problem solved, we booked a room at the Holiday Inn in Waikiki and on January 31, flew off to Honolulu. The flight went without incident, and we got to watch the movie “Up” on the way.
Weblog Top Page
