Our home in Japan

I flew to Japan and the very next day was able to "move in" to our new home in Hario. This may not be, and is most likely not, the case for most people. We were loaned furniture from housing to use while we waited for our household to arrive. It was just basic needs like beds, a small couch, dining set, a lamp for the living room... This is a really great, and free, service that I kinda wish they had in the states as well. :) We were also able to get a dishpack from the FFSC (Fleet & Family Support Center) it included a microwave, some dishes, kitchen utensils, kitchen towels, oven mitts, etc. These services probably saved us a few hundred dollars so we were really grateful to the base for providing them. :D We got our household about a month after we got to Sasebo.

On the website, we were told not to bring heavy furniture, our washer and dryer (because there's a set in the unit already and even out in town our sets are the wrong amperage to work in Japan) or big dining room sets because they will not fit in the units here. This led us to believe that the housing was really tiny. For some people they probably really are in comparison to what they're used to. As for us, this house is the largest housing unit we have ever lived in. Our two bedroom garden style townhouse is about 1200 sqft. Whereas our bedrooms are a bit smaller than most people would like, and there's only one bathroom, and a walk-in closet is an unheard of thing here.. our livingroom, kitchen and diningroom are all pretty well sized in my opinion. :) The livingroom is big and open and square so setting up furniture was easy here.:) We also have a decent (again my opinion) sized backyard. It's large enough that we have a play structure for our son, a small patio set for us and still have plenty of room for a grill and more people to come and have small get-togethers.

After getting here and unpacking, which I did right away, I allowed my husband to walk me through how to use the ac/heaters (the controllers are in Japanese so he showed me what he was told and then I found the manuals for them :)) I did notice small differences between the unit here and our unit in CA. The light switches and fan switch for the bathroom aren't in the bathroom...it's right outside of it. The closets, cabinets and bathroom door all have slats in them to allow for ventilation because it gets quite damp in the rainy season here. We plan on buying a dehumidifier soon. We have a screen door on the front door...but the screen is on the inside not the outside. I believe that this is to better protect it against wind storms or typhoons, but I'm not 100% on that. But the first thing we noticed was that we have absolutely no carpeting here. I am again figuring that this is because it's just too damp and gets too muddy here to bother with carpeting. I actually like not having it though. It's so much easier to clean up after a toddler lol... We also have an outside storage closet. It's pretty decent sized. There are no garages or carports here. Just parking spaces, which is fine. We used our garage for our car, not storage, so we didn't have much to store when we got here. :)

Speaking of cars...we didn't bring ours with us. It's far too much hassle to convert an American standard car to a Japanese standard car and it's expensive. We were able to buy a car from a friend of our neighbor for a fairly decent price. I've heard of, but not seen for myself, cars being sold for as low as $600 and seen them for as much as $5,000. These were all used cars that were being sold by other military members because they were leaving. There are car dealerships here, of course, but I'm unclear on how to buy a car from them. I would recommend having a translator go with you. :) The insurance is kind of pricey here, and it's paid all at once for the year instead of monthly. There is also a road tax, due in April. And a JCI which is a two year car insurance in Japan. So you are really really covered as far as insurance goes...but we were warned several times to not have to use it here. Things get...difficult lol. That is something I would go into, but it gets explained much better in the Indoc classes so I'd rather not misinform people. :) Driving here is kinda daunting at first because they drive on the left, not the right like we're used to. There is a driving class/test that you take at the end on Indoc though and they prepare you pretty well.

View of the front of our house.