How we dodged a bullet and rented the right property for our English school
The Bulletin (Issue 23)
If you’ve not been following how my wife and I came to be self-employed English teachers in Japan, the saga began with the decision to teach English in Japan, to teach from home and continued with a move to rented accommodation above a soba shop.
Then one January afternoon, the soba shop owner popped upstairs to our place to formally announce he would be taking legal action to force us to leave.
We still had a year and a half left to pay of our rental contract, had dwindling student numbers (our bread and butter) and now were facing a legal threat to our existence.
What were we to do? Hire a lawyer and spend what little time and money we had preparing for a legal battle we would probably lose? Search desperately for somewhere else (there was nowhere else) to move the business to and go into debt for the remaining contract? Move the business back to our house? Give up and find a job in Tokyo? None of our options looked very appealing. Thinking back to that winter, we were facing the darkest days since we had gone into business for ourselves.
We needed someone with influence who could give us unbiased advice, someone we could trust and someone who had our best interests at heart.
We didn’t know anybody exactly like that. So we invented one.
My wife, not for the first time, had the best idea. She contacted the first real estate agent we’d dealt with in Japan — we had gone with him to buy our family home because he was the only one in Abiko who had responded to our emails from the UK back in 2006 when we really didn’t know anything but he’d humoured us and answered all our idiotic questions, when so many other estate agents just didn’t have the time or inclination to bother with such atypical customers as us.
We told him our woes. He promised to help, so we put our faith in him. And, although he was semi-retired by now, he just happened to know one place that an old pal of his had on the market. His pal was having trouble renting it out because it was a very old (by Japanese standards) house — the rooms were small by modern standards, the windows were all single pane and it had space for only one car. It was at the end of a residential dead end of a street. We didn’t have high hopes but thought we’d drive by and check it out just to rule it out, if nothing else.
Even in the rain, late at night, we knew we had found the truly ideal place for us. How could we be so sure? Well…
We could afford to rent the whole house out, yes the rooms were small (it had three six-mat rooms and an 8-mat living room with adjoining 2-mat kitchen), but we’d be swapping an ungainly 32-mat open space for ready-partitioned off rooms, not to mention a proper entrance hall, and it was only five-minutes walk from our current rental place.
The house was at the end of a dead-end-street. What we lost in ease of car access, we gained in not having neighbours who would object to noise (there was only one immediate neighbour and it turned out she was hard-of-hearing anyway). And no finicky neighbours above or below us.
There was a path that lead directly to an unused road that had been under construction for 10 years. But it was paved and was the perfect place for the Mamma-tachi to park their Toyota kiddie-battlecruisers.
The place had character. Built in 1966 by the architect father of the landlord, the house had funky wooden-bolt window shutters, south-facing windows in all rooms and just enough shrubbery and a fruit tree to be friendly — the atmosphere that every school should foster but rarely can in the septic white cells that pass for commercial property in Japan.
Then we had a stroke of luck. Our existing landlord, probably fearful of the potential legal hassle from the soba-shop master, offered to null and void our existing rental contract (otherwise we’d owe him 18 months of rent) and as a sweetener to get rid of us, he’d pay us back our key money and rental deposit — two months worth of rent — if we promised to be out of the place by the end of the month.
We furrowed our brows and hummed and sucked air until he’d walked down the stairs, and then we laughed out loud, not metaphorically, actually literally and heartily. We’d landed on our feet… (and would be laughing in our new place for years to come).
If you want to hear how that went, I’ll talk about that on this Friday’s Staffroom podcast. And do leave us a comment if you’ve been enjoying the story so far.
All the best,
Patrick
Interior views
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