Welcome back to Where No Mangoes for the Home Style: Kyoto Edition!

Brought to you today, as ever, with our motto:

Where No Mangoes: A brief respite from the hurley-burley.

I thought you might like to see where I live, and what a very typical apartment in Japan looks like.

My job here comes with housing: faculty housing for faculty. Temple University also provides apartments for students coming to Kyoto; they have rented apartments in 4 locations spread around Kyoto at present, and are building themselves a fifth one, which is an exciting university foray into local real estate. My apartment is in one of Temple’s current buildings: the Leo Palace.

Which lands us at the fact that all I had to do was roll up just over three weeks ago and find this place.

For the earlier 8.5-month sabbatical I have blogged about here, I booked myself a succession of places to stay around the world, which is very do-able with the internet but also a bit fraught with some unknowns. Except for Beijing, where I imposed myself on the generous hospitality of my younger brother, to the huge dismay of his two very vocal cats, Big Kitty and Little Kitty. (Little Kitty has since crossed the Rainbow Bridge, but there is a new white cat in residence now named Luna. The cat distribution system always wins.)

Before setting off for Kyoto I’d received helpful and detailed directions via email from the very efficient Temple University Japan staff. This included things like a photo of the Leo Palace building, a photo of the entrance, and a photo of the lobby, with the codes for the lobby door and to my apartment. So after the 25-hour trip all I had to do was push a few buttons, and I was home.

It was a marvelous feeling to have pushed all the right buttons and arrived!

My new home is a 2-room apartment on the 5th floor, with a view from the balcony of the entire western side of Kyoto off into the mountains. I love this view, and head out there first thing every morning with my toothbrush, and later with my coffee, to observe how things are going. A local farmer is now growing rice in a nearby urban field which my apartment overlooks; I will have exciting updates to share about this later.

I sleep in a loft bed. There is some very clever storage built into the apartment. And I have a high-tech toilet that practically talks to me.

“It has everything!” I reported to the capable staff at Temple University’s Kyoto campus, in a happy email letting them know I’d arrived on schedule.

The next day it dawned on me what my apartment also has: labels and signs everywhere in Japanese. I was going to have to do a considerable amount of translating my apartment.

Here is a sample of things which were going to need translation:

And that is just things in my apartment which require translation. Outside my apartment is: the rest of the country.

I did not embark on this translation task immediately, even though I have the Papago translation app on my phone. Instead I just got my wifi working. Which meant that it was a total surprise to find out just yesterday that I have a light over my kitchen! It was activated when I put my phone down on top of a mystery button which is part of the stove. Surprise! My kitchen lights up! This was a truly delightful discovery. I had earlier tried out all the stovetop buttons, but they didn’t all do things, and I wasn’t yet clued into what they were supposed to do. So apparently the overhead kitchen light button is only activated when you put your phone on it. Good to know.

This is my kitchen area. Note the overhead light! It illuminates my sink and cooktop, which doubles as my prep space and dish-drying area.

Did I mention that my apartment has a balcony? Here is a view of early sunset from my balcony.

This is the entrance part of the apartment, and it has the shower room to the left, the washing machine also to the left, the toilet room to the right, and the kitchen area also to the right. You always take off your shoes when you enter a Japanese home and many shops, so this is also my shoes off/shoes on area.

The main room is the living room, which is for sitting, working, hanging up clothes in the closet at one end, ukulele strumming, yoga, and sleeping.

This is the loft bed, and with it, your introduction to (or fond remembrances of) Japanese bedding. You get a futon mattress underneath you, and a duvet over the top of you, which gets a sheet cover on it. There is a soft squishy pillow, and a traditional buckwheat-filled hard pillow.

If there is a pillow fight and this is all you have at the ready, my sincere advice is: do not go for the soft squishy pillow! With a buckwheat pillow you can knock somebody’s lights out. And victory is yours, my friend.

I can see a lot of Kyoto from my loft bed.

I have already managed to dye the sheets blue, after washing them with some of my clothes. Oops.

The apartment came with some cooking and cleaning supplies, and bedding, towels, and laundry stuff. But then there is coffee, so one of my first acquisitions was all of the items seen here in this “Making Coffee” display: filter, coffee, mug, and drip thing.

The apartment was equipped with just one knife. This one. Which says a lot about what they expect you to be getting up to in the kitchen upon arrival in Japan.

And here is some of that very clever storage: in the steps up to the loft bed!

That’s just ingenious. There is also a tall thin cupboard near the front door, and sliding doors to a storage space under the loft bed. So much storage space! I don’t have anything yet that actually needs storing, but if I do acquire something, it is nice to know I will have somewhere to put it.

The main comedy area in the apartment so far seems to be here, in the sink-bath-shower space. Since all the water for these features emanates from the sink, and you have a knob which you move to send the water to spout from the appropriate delivery mechanism, it is entirely possible to decide to pop in to wash your hands and the shower nozzle immediately douses the entire front of your outfit. Because someone forgot to set the knob back to “sink.”

Ha ha ha. Very funny.

So do you have one of these? I do. I was sort of hoping someone might be able to tell me what it is. It is way up the wall, outside the comedy sink-bath-shower room, making it hard to approach that really small Japanese label to try some translation.

And the high-tech toilet! No way can I leave that out. It does all sorts of things! The seat can heat, there are various spray modes, everything has a temperature setting, and also there are some other things I have not yet figured out. I have not yet fully translated my toilet, and that is not a sentence I ever expected to type.

Some public bathroom toilets in Japan have many more buttons. Mine seems very buttony but is not the fanciest in terms of options by a stretch. At one I visited you could select to have music playing, and there was also an option to initiate very loud flushing sounds. Not loud flushing — the flush was an automatic function that happened later. Loud flushing sounds, if that would in some manner offer an optimal ambience over the options of music or providing one’s own sound effects. I suppose it is nice to have a choice.

At the Temple University campus where I am teaching here in Kyoto, everything is very new, including the restrooms. There are four toilet stalls in the ladies room, and if you stride past them they each have a sensor which smartly lifts the toilet lid as you go by. If you decide to march to the furthest one, it’s like they are each saluting as you pass in front! It’s probably the closest I will ever get to experiencing what it is like to be a general.

This apartment is turning out to be lovely. It’s very quiet, and the building has excellent soundproofing, which may have something to do with the Japanese cultural propensity for privacy, or perhaps is just from all the structural requirements to keep it from collapsing in an earthquake. I hear birds by day, and at night, some chirpy frogs down at the local flooded rice paddy.

And did I mention that I have this lovely balcony outside the living room? I will close with a sunset view from my balcony.

Balconies are one of my all-time favorite inventions. And there will be one at my next apartment, as I will be moving to a different part of town at the end of this summer term of teaching. There are more mystery buttons in my future.

ホームスイートホーム
Homu Suito Homu = Home Sweet Home