So first things first, the reason why we're moving is well because you guys know that I'm pregnant, going to have a baby, I'm 17 weeks today, my baby is as big as a pop tart.

Pop tarts are pretty big, which just kind of blows my mind.

We're in the second trimester and as I get bigger things are just getting harder.

Especially since we moved into this place, which is honestly, it is a blessing to live here.

It's really hard to find an apartment that has two floors and we really liked it because it had two floors had a state, it had some stairs.

It looked like a little mini condo, much smaller than a condo.

It did have some stairs and it was a designer apartment.

So it looked really nice but it is quite old, not as old as a lot of apartments here in Japan.

When you do go searching for apartments, it definitely has its fair share of mold and dust problems, which is the majority of apartments in Japan, I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have problems with that.

That's why they have like a whole section at the grocery store of something called Cobby Killer in Japan where you just bleach and use tons of chemicals to basically clean your apartment.

Another thing is stairs are star starting to get really hard to go up and down.

We also have stairs outside of our apartment.

We don't have an elevator.

So when the baby's born just carrying a newborn up and downstairs is not going to be ideal for us going up and down three flights of stairs every single day is not going to be ideal either.

Also space, we live in what's called two LDK so in Japan the apartment sizes go like three L.

D.

K.

To D K.

One DK.

It depends on the size, so what that means is two rooms means living room and D means dining K means kitchen, so it has a living room, a dining space and kitchen.

A lot of people do live in apartments with young Children in this size.

It's doable 100% but not ideal in my opinion.

Another thing I have to say is that our area isn't exactly family friendly.

Now there are families around their schools around so don't get me wrong, it's not like the most dangerous place in Japan or anything like that.

I do have to say the station, this is a bit shady.

I've been followed a few times.

I've been approached a few times by men, you see a lot of young teens just messing around.

There's always some kind of commotion at night or drunk people.

It's not exactly the best place for a family to live in my opinion and I will share with you where we live when we do move and why I don't really recommend it.

100% felt like we weren't completely entirely safe.

My husband has come and gotten me at the station a few times because I was so nervous and kind of traumatized from those situations and moments I lived here because my work was close by.

But now I don't work at that place anymore so I can go pretty much anywhere.

Obviously my husband works in Tokyo so we need to find a place that's close for him to commute.

Another thing is our bikes have been stolen three times and we found them three times.

And the weird thing was it was only our bikes that were being taken and put places nobody can ride the bike because they didn't take the keys.

So we were confused as to why our bikes were being moved.

We found my bike at a 7 11 down the street.

We found my husband's bike in another parking lot near us.

It was really strange and it kept happening and the police would come and they'd have to fill out all these reports.

It took forever.

But we were very concerned that maybe somebody in this apartment didn't like us because when we did get our bikes back they would be like knocked down.

But at one point like something to cover the bike because nothing to cover our bikes.

So when it rains, it gets rusty, someone kept lifting that cover up and looking at our room number and like it was just really shady stuff going on and it kind of scared me a little bit.

There were a couple of families that lived next door to us.

They all moved out.

Most people moved out actually because we thought there was a suicide that happened below us, which is super unfortunate.

But when we talked to the police, um, it wasn't a suicide.

It was someone who died of natural causes.

A lot of the apartments below us are single apartments, so nobody knew what had happened to him until I guess his sister called and was confused.

It's very heartbreaking that that happened.

But the police never told anybody what happened.

So at first I was like, well, it could be anything.

It could be a suicide which happens a lot here in Japan or it could be a murder which scared me the most because you never know.

It blows my mind that the police don't tell anybody in this apartment because I guess it's like confidential, but like in my opinion, I would want to know if it was a murderer or not because I don't want to live in a place where someone is messing with their bikes.

It could be the same person.

I don't know.

I was just creating all these scenarios in my head and it was just like one thing after another of events happening.

So everybody moved out, the police reassured us at least and told us because they knew that I was pregnant and I was scared that it wasn't a suicide, it wasn't a murder.

It was just someone that died of natural causes allegedly.

So that happened below us.

So it just kind of left this really negative energy, this bad vibe.

A lot of people left, like I said, there were, it was a family that lived next to us.

They were so nice, they had two kids, but they moved out because of the space.

They wanted more space.

I do not blame them another time someone tried to open the door, but I think there's a junior high school kid that lives next to us.

I rarely ever see him come outside.

I don't know, maybe he thought that was his room or something.

I don't know, it kind of freaked me out a little bit.

Our apartment's pretty secure as in like you need a key to unlock from outside.

You can't just like walk into the apartment complex, just all these events that were happening.

It was just like the universe telling us and confirming you should leave, you should leave find a safe place to raise your kid.

It's more about like space safety.

I just, I've been living in this same place for I think five years that I've been in Tokyo.

That is the reason why we're moving.

It's pretty straightforward, We're having a baby and we really want a nicer space and we want to feel safe wherever we're going and in a more family friendly area, if that makes sense.

This apart, hunting has been an absolute struggle.

I'm going to share with you the website that most people look on to find apartments.

I'm not going to share with you my location of where we're looking obviously, but I just want you to get an idea and what apartment hunting actually looks like.

Another thing that I want to address is there are apartments that don't allow foreigners unless you have a Japanese husband or wife.

I know it's crazy.

My husband didn't believe until we went to talk to an apartment company and he looked at the apartment that we were thinking of going to see and it said no foreigners allowed and the apartment company actually had to call them up and say there's a foreigner here.

Foreigner here but her husband is japanese and they were okay with it.

There is a lot of racism and discrimination when it comes to renting apartments here.

It's not easy for foreigners.

Actually if you're just a foreigner in looking for apartment, don't expect anything shiny and beautiful when it comes to the look of the apartment.

The reason why they do this is because there are a lot of foreigners that rent apartments that just leave and go back to their own country and they don't pay the fees and they try to avoid it, which is how some foreigners ruin it for all of us basically.

Fortunately I'm married, I have husbands that is japanese that can do a lot of the negotiating.

I remember my husband didn't even have a job.

I lived in Japan for seven years at that point and I spoke some japanese and I had a legit job and they still wouldn't let me sign the apartment contract or anything like that.

Some apartments want to be able to communicate with their tenants, which is understandable.

So that's why there's a lot of no foreigners allowed when it comes to apartment hunting.

That's one thing that you're going to struggle you could possibly potentially struggle with.

So I have a plug in here to show you in english.

There is no english on this website um and kanji can be very overwhelming, especially if you're looking for a place like for example, I mean it's google translate so like this is not china website, it's called sumo is the most common website to find apartments in Japan.

You actually have to manually go on here and look on your own unless you hire a realtor.

So I just wanted to share with you what this looks like.

So basically you can choose your area in Japan where you want to live, let's go to rental.

Let's try Tokyo, you can check based on where your train line is or where you want to live near what area you want to live near.

This is like the process of apartment hunting.

I swear to God you guys any place that's like directly in the city, you're going to find a really really cheap looking old apartment that's very not spacious.

Let's see if we can kind of look outside and around Tokyo because that's where a lot of people live anyway.

So now if you scroll down more you can choose like more things.

So realistically a lot of people spend.

Especially if you're like a family maybe max 1008 100.

That's really expensive but we can do that.

Let's do 2000 just for fun and giggles.

2000 or less.

$2000.

Usd.

I'm talking in dollars just for you guys to understand a little bit more.

You can also do you are apartments which is urban renaissance apartments.

It's owned by the government.

I lived in one and I was in Nagoya and it was super nice but the ones here are not nice.

I will looked at you are apartments and they're just not ideal.

We're probably not going to do all of these here because I just want to show you what apartments might look like.

If you don't specify any of these things you can choose.

Like how far you want to walk to the station, the size of the apartments were looking for more like a bigger space.

So three L.

D.

K.

Two L.

D.

K.

Is what we're living in now.

So you kind of want to avoid this if you're living by yourself.

Maybe you just wanna one V.

One L.

D.

K.

Or um a two K.

Two K.

Two L.

D.

If you can find it you can choose like new construction, How old do you want the place to be?

But I did find that it doesn't matter how old the apartment is because some apartments actually renovate.

We're looking for a place with an elevator and air conditioning and all of that stuff.

So you can choose that here as well and get super super specific.

But the more specific you are, the harder it's gonna be to find an apartment.

So here's a three LDK apartment.

This is like family sized apartment is pretty cheap for a family sized apartment.

It is 34 years old and it's about nine minutes on foot to the station.

But you can actually click on this and look at what it looks like.

Some apartments don't show you exactly what's inside shows that there's a tatami room and there's the size.

So six J.

Means the size, it's like six joe or like joe or something.

I think that's how you say it.

The size of the room is based on tatami mats.

So this one square is one tatami mat.

So this room is about six tatami mats in size.

This is what the building obviously looks like.

And here's some really crappy pictures and a lot of the pictures that are taken are really crappy to begin with the kitchen looks pretty decent and pretty nice actually.

The bathroom looks pretty dated.

I just have to say that this is a very common bathroom though in an apartment.

Like it's something that you would see in most japanese apartments.

This is a nice spacious room, has wooden flooring closet space.

Here's another room that's in the apartment.

I don't know if you can see this but this is the sink, this is a pretty standard sink that you'll see in a japanese apartment and a balcony.

If you click on the view details part and you can probably see the pictures a lot more closely.

You probably should do this to begin with.

And then here it tells you the key exchange fee usually in japan you pay a deposit which is usually two months of rent for something called gift money.

In Engl where you give money to thank the landlord for letting you live in this space.

So you pay a pretty penny to the landlord saying thank you and I call this thank you money so you have to pay a good amount of money to say thank you to the landlord for lending you this apartment and then there's the guarantor fee and the moving fees at the end of it.

Moving fee is about 7000 to 10,000 U.

S.

D.

This apartment that we're living in now was 7000 or $8000.

Again I'm saying this in dollars because the majority of you are in the States, it's about $15,000 to move into this place which is extremely expensive and that's before paying a moving company which is usually an extra $1000 just to move apartments unless you get like a really cheap service which we did last time and we regret it because it took forever and my husband was doing most of the work and then you have to pay move out fees.

So it's literally going to be over 10 $1000 just to move apartments here in Japan.