Will Miss #15 - weird stuff in people's windows (reflection)

I think they'd even let me display one of these in my apartment window in Japan. Here, it'd send the estate agent into a state of total apoplexy.

I can't speak for everywhere in Japan or America and what sort of situations renters experience. I can say that I knew far more people who rented their places than owned them in Tokyo and that I've talked to people who rent places in the U.S. I also, of course, rented for 23 years in Japan. Not once during my time there was anyone told what sort of things they could put in their windows while renting. This included the sorts of window treatments that they could use. In fact, my apartment and many others do not come with curtains, blinds, or any such coverings. You provide your own and, short of something utterly obscene or disgusting, the sky is the limit. There seems to be quite good flexibility for renters in this regard.

I've been home less than a year and rented for less than 6 months and already gotten guff about what I do around my windows. There are enormous clacking vertical blinds where we are living and while we're hosting a friend's cats for 10 days, I decided to pull the blinds aside and hang up a (plain) sheet for privacy so that the cats jumping onto the window sill at night wouldn't constantly make noise. I put the sheet up at 10:30 pm and took it down at 7:30 am. The first night I did this, the woman in charge of the apartments came rushing over to me in a frantic panic because I hung up what she thought was a curtain. Even after I assured her that it was just a sheet, not a curtain, and a temporary situation because of noise and cats that would vanish in 9 days, she still wasn't necessarily happy, but said that, if I was certain to put it up as late as possible and take it down as early as possible, it would be tolerable until the cats left.

Despite the fact that America is supposedly a culture of individualists with great autonomy to express themselves, there are definitely certain areas of life in which there is much stricter control. I was told even before I moved here about apartments and this window treatment business. I can't imagine what they'd do if I put any sort of decoration in the windows given how insistent they are on the purest of conformity (white blinds and only white blinds). I definitely miss the crap people tended to put in their windows to let their individuality show, as well as not being super controlled about what I could put in mine. 

Will Miss #3 - my landlord (reflection)

 My husband and I never had to rent an apartment in the United States for various reasons up until recently. We had no idea what it was like to live in an apartment here until about a month ago. Apartment hunting in general is not fun in either Japan or America, and one of the reasons we stayed put in our apartment in Tokyo for 23 years was that fact, but the other was our gem of a landlord.

One thing that is important to keep in mind when assessing an experience in a foreign country is very different from doing so for a similar experience at home. Our landlord performed triple duty in Japan because he not only rented us a piece of his property, but he also translated and was a buffer for us with services that we had problems dealing with because of cultural of linguistic issues, especially earlier on in our stay there. He didn't merely take our money and fix our apartment, he actually assisted us in navigating the difficulties of life abroad.

In the U.S., the truth is that we don't need a landlord to manage our affairs in such a fashion. We can easily do such things for ourselves because we can speak, read and write the language fluently, and we know the culture (well, pretty much, we're a bit behind). The value of a particular type of relationship very much depends on context. Having an involved and helpful landlord really mattered in Tokyo for us. Here, it doesn't matter so much.

It turns out that, except for the fact that our landlord and his wife were our neighbors and generally very kind and lovely people, I don't really find myself missing the role he played... at least not yet. Right now, we live in an apartment complex which has an agent living on the premises who seems to be pretty helpful and responsive to requests much like our former landlord was. Perhaps we got lucky twice, or we haven't lived in our new place long enough to really test the waters. At this point in time, however, without the complexities of life in a foreign country, I'm finding that we're not really missing our ever-helpful landlord as I thought we might, because we don't need an ever-helpful landlord when we're not fish out of our native waters.

Won't Miss #490 - cut out of the loop with no recourse

I've already mentioned that we had a pretty good landlord, but one thing I realized about him was that he did something that I experienced in other areas of my life in Japan (especially business). For the first 15 years of our time in the same apartment, he told us every little detail of work being done on the apartment building and surrounding area including when his wife would be sweeping up in the front and back areas. During those years, neither my husband nor I worked from home and we just said "okay." In my final 6 or 7 years, I was working from home and had actual concerns about noisy work. I expressed the fact that the noise was a problem or about the times at which work is done (because it can interfere with private teaching). After I did this, the landlord decided to stop telling us anything at all and simply scheduled loud and obtrusive work at his convenience. This is an example of a tendency (which I experienced many times) to tell you as long as no objection is expected, but to not tell you if an objection is even remotely possible. In other words, the idea that your opinion matters or that "harmony" is valued over expediting the interests of the person in power, which are commonly  held notions related to Japan being a culture based on consensus, is an act.*

The minute your interests have the potential to conflict with theirs, they simply cut you out of the loop and you have no recourse but to accept it because there is no law structuring how people are informed. I won't miss that.

*In America, these sorts of issues tend to be governed by law, so you are told what is mandated by legislation. There's no show being put on that your opinion matters or that your concerns are factored into what will be done, and you also have legal power to assert that you should be informed and have veto power when loud construction is going to be going on in the apartment above you starting at 6:30 am and going on all day. In Japan, such matters are left vague so that the power rests with the person who has the vast majority of it already.