Where Do Japanese People Actually Live? Inside a Normal Apartment

Almost every photograph of a Japanese home you have seen is wrong. Tatami rooms with sliding paper screens exist, but roughly the same way that thatched cottages exist in England: somewhere, occasionally, and rarely where anyone under forty lives.

The ordinary answer is a concrete or steel-frame apartment block of three to eight storeys, built between 1975 and 2010, on a street with no name, reached by a bicycle. Understanding it tells you more about Japan than most temples will.

Reading a Japanese floor plan

Japanese apartments are advertised in a code that takes about a minute to learn and then works everywhere.

A number, then letters. 1K means one room plus a kitchen. 1DK means one room plus a dining-kitchen. 1LDK means one room plus a living-dining-kitchen. 3LDK means three separate rooms plus that living space — a family flat.

The number counts rooms you could sleep in, not total rooms. The bathroom and toilet never count.

Room sizes are given in jō (畳), the number of tatami mats that would fit, whether or not there is any tatami. One mat is roughly 1.65 square metres. A six-jō bedroom is about ten square metres, which is normal and does not feel as small as it reads.

The bathroom arrives in one piece

Open the door of a typical Japanese bathroom and you are standing in a moulded plastic shell — floor, walls, ceiling and bath, manufactured as a single unit bath and lowered into the building during construction.

It looks cheap to a European eye and is in fact extremely practical. The whole room is a wet room. You shower sitting on a low stool outside the tub, rinse, and only then get into the bath, which is why the water stays clean enough for the next person to use.

A control panel on the kitchen wall reheats the bathwater on demand. Families genuinely do share one bath of water through the evening, in order of who gets home.

The toilet is almost always in a separate small room. This is not squeamishness; it means two people can get ready at once in a flat with one bathroom.

Why the washing machine is on the balcony

In older buildings, the plumbing for a washing machine was often run to the balcony rather than inside. Even where the machine is indoors, the balcony is where laundry goes.

Tumble dryers are uncommon. Clothes are hung outside on poles that slot into fittings built into every balcony, and the weather forecast on morning television includes a laundry index telling you how well things will dry today. In a rainy week, flats fill with drying racks.

Balconies also serve as fire escapes. The dividing panel between you and your neighbour is thin board, designed to be kicked through in an emergency, and it is one reason balconies stay relatively uncluttered.

No central heating

This is the detail that surprises visitors most, and it explains a great deal about Japanese winter life.

Homes are heated room by room, usually by a wall-mounted air conditioner that also runs in reverse for heat, plus small electric or kerosene heaters. Hallways, bathrooms and bedrooms are simply cold. Insulation in older buildings is minimal, and single glazing is still common.

The cultural consequences are everywhere:

• The kotatsu — a low table with a heater underneath and a quilt over the edges — is not a novelty. It is how a family stays warm in one place.
• The bath is not a luxury but a heating strategy. A long hot soak before bed is what carries you through a cold bedroom.
• Interior doors stay shut, because heating a hallway is heating the outdoors.

Buildings completed in the last fifteen years are far better insulated, and new homes must meet stricter energy standards. But the majority of the rental stock predates that.

What it costs

Rent is quoted monthly, and the headline number is only part of it.

Moving into a 1LDK in a regional city

Moving into a 1LDK in a regional city	Cost
Monthly rent	78,000 JPY
Key money (礼金, non-refundable gift to the landlord)	78,000 JPY
Deposit (敷金, partly refundable)	78,000 JPY
Agency fee	85,800 JPY
Guarantor company fee	39,000 JPY
First month rent and insurance	121,000 JPY
Cost of moving in	About 480,000 JPY

Key money is the part that startles people: a non-refundable payment to the landlord, traditionally one to two months’ rent, for nothing in particular. It is slowly disappearing in competitive markets, and listings advertising 礼金なし (reikin nashi, no key money) are increasingly common.

Most tenants also need a guarantor. Where a family member cannot act as one, a guarantee company does it for a fee.

The neighbourhood is the real home

Japanese flats are small partly because the neighbourhood does the work a larger home would do elsewhere.

The convenience store is the pantry. The coin laundry handles the duvet. The public bath, where one survives, handles the long soak. The station building holds the supermarket, the pharmacy and the bakery. Restaurants are cheap enough that eating out is not an occasion.

This is why Japanese residential streets feel dense with small businesses in a way that suburbs elsewhere do not — and why walking through an ordinary neighbourhood at seven in the evening is one of the more rewarding things you can do as a visitor. Nobody is performing anything. People are collecting children, buying tofu and cycling home.

Questions people actually ask

Do Japanese people still sleep on futons?

Many do, particularly in smaller flats, because a futon folds away and turns a bedroom into a living room during the day. Beds are equally normal, especially for couples and in larger homes. Neither is more traditional in practice.

Are Japanese apartments really tiny?

City centre flats for single people are small by European or North American standards. Family flats in suburbs and regional cities are not unusual in size. The average new home nationwide is comparable to much of urban Europe.

Why do houses get demolished rather than resold?

Japanese wooden houses have traditionally been treated as depreciating assets with a functional life of about thirty years, so land carries the value rather than the building. That is changing, but slowly, and it explains why residential streets are rebuilt piecemeal.

Can a visitor see inside a normal home?

Rarely by invitation, but municipal housing museums and open-air architecture museums display real apartments from the 1950s onwards. The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum and Osaka’s Museum of Housing and Living both do this well.