Name: Inside Tokyo's STRANGEST Tiny Apartment
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:59:01.000Z
Duration: 14 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This tiny Tokyo apartment is, well, different.

To-infinitive

Now, from the outside, you wouldn't even be able to tell.

It's quite unassuming, almost even normal.

But, then you walk inside the building, and you are greeted by, well, this.

Each of the units we're going to see today are really unique.

Well, they're actually two separate staircases, and they lead to completely different places, so if you take the wrong one, you'll never get where you want to go.

If you come home inebriated or a little extra tired, you'll never get to your house.

There are elevators, and they're color-coded.

You see, the green elevator here leads up to the fancy rooms, and then the red elevator here leads to what we'll call the affordable rooms.

And that's the side we'll start on today, but we gotta take the stairs, right?

Also, the staircase is completely opposite to the elevator.

So that's fun, and completely not confusing at all, but this place is gorgeous, and it kind of feels like the silo from GoldenEye.

This is actually what it looks like up at the top.

There's this giant pole here, which kind of blocks your view the way down.

To get from the bottom to the top is 13 floors, and took me a total of, actually it was pretty quick, maybe about a minute and a half, two minutes.

Probably wouldn't have been faster if it wasn't like the seventh time I've done it.

And despite going all the way up there, we're actually right here on the second floor.

So at first look, this room seems very normal, but has several hidden features.

Now it's Japan, so we start here by taking off our shoes, and right here in the entrance is what I thought was closet space originally, was actually a hookup for your washing machine, your breakers up there.

Now, this space does feel disproportionately large, especially considering the size of the rest of the room.

So as we go into the room itself, you notice that there's this big curved wall along the side, which makes the room a bit of a weird shape and challenging to use.

So they've just plunked this here closet slash storage unit, very awkwardly, just right here.

It has definitely got some depth to it, and the average Japanese person might even consider this to be huge, but I don't know if this size is a plus or a minus, solely because of the amount of space that it takes up in the room.

Like with the camera right up against the wall, this is all the space you have between here and, like, could you, you could lay down, technically it works.

So I wonder, that is exactly three meters by two and a half meters.

But our first big puzzle for the day is where and how would you lay out your bed, which is definitely not a problem in the next unit we're checking out, which is a massive contrast to this one.

This is the room as a whole, assuming that this would be your living space.

Also, the wide-angle lens does not change the size of the room.

See, punching in, it's the same size, you just see less of it.

You have a little kitchen space over here with an induction heater, tiny countertop and sink.

And then this here, I'm guessing just plunks right, right open like that, with a switch for all that, okay.

This is literally just one big plastic capsule that gets installed in here and they can be a challenge to clean.

Sometimes you actually have to remove these panels right here, otherwise it gets really moldy inside.

But some of the newer ones are really neat because they'll have like a dryer function built in so you can hang your clothing and just dry it in there.

I did a whole video where I showed that in Sherry's apartment.

Now, you do have your own little balcony space.

And as you can see up here, people will hang their clothing.

But oh boy, are these lower floors noisy.

You're right near a major road and a highway, about 20 minutes from Ikebukuro Station by foot.

And in here, you'll have your emergency escape ladder, which will attach to here.

Especially considering the fact that this is so far from the station on foot, it's much more expensive than I was expecting.

This right here is just your normal intercom for the front door.

But this right here, I've never seen one of these before.

And it took me just a minute to figure out exactly what it was without using Google Lens.

If you're anything like me, you would see the band and the channel and everything.

And you would kind of be right, but you would also be completely wrong.

You see, nowadays, we've got Hulu and Netflix and all of these things.

And this was that for music 30 years ago.

This is a streaming box for music that gave access to some 70 channels.

And I had to kind of search around the apartment to figure out, well, where does the sound come out of?

Because you see, there are no speakers anywhere in the entire apartment.

These over here are lights, and then this down here is an air conditioner unit, an actual kind of rare and interesting one.

You've got this right down here, which is just a vent for airflow.

And then when I looked over here, I noticed that we had a port here for fiber optic hookup.

And then right here beside the TV hookup, there are actually speaker and audio hookups right here.

And this apartment is nearly 40 years old.

You should have seen the nerdy smile on my face when I found that for the first time.

But aside from this, one of my favorite features is just how tall the ceilings in this place are.

The ceilings in here are actually so high that I can barely touch them even if I jump.

Now the question is, where do we put the bed?

With this much vertical space, I think your best bet would be having one of those kind of bunk beds where the bed is actually up here.

You have a desk here, maybe a little dresser or something there.

If you do it well enough, you could probably even just completely get rid of this thing over here if they let you.

A lot of Japanese apartments are very, very strict about what you can and can't do.

Can't put holes in the walls, can't hang things on the wall.

Okay, so this next unit is wild, but it's up on like the 12th floor.

So while the red side of the building has four units per floor, the green side only has two.

And this one right here, this is our unit.

And this place is actually so big and luxurious.

Starting right in here where you have your massive bath and shower room.

This feels kind of excessive by Japanese standards.

And this, that's actually just a really nice bath and shower though.

This is what you get in here and this has to be one of the biggest baths I've seen in  Definitely one of the nicest showers.

If I ever renovate, I want something like this in my place.

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Inside Tokyo's STRANGEST Tiny Apartment

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