We’ve been in Kyoto for a while, so we thought it was time to share some photos of our latest flat. Which, in many ways, is emblematic of our entire experience in Japan to date: unexpected, but usually good. Also, we live in the most minimalist place ever!
So. Full disclosure. Yes we did look at the pictures before we booked this place and yes we did, sort of, notice that there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff burdening the rooms. Of which we have two, more or less. And not very much else.
Kitchen and Bathroom
The bathroom is off in a corner, with the usuals, but not quite as you might envision them. The toilet is a Japanese toilet, with dozens of buttons and a warm seat. Which turns out to be very handy, given that there isn’t really a way to heat the bathroom. The shower, as is usual in Japan, is a shower head with a stool (Japanese people shower sitting down). Then there is a deep but not long tub; we’ve seen this called a soaking tub. With a lovely view of the itty bitty private garden. We’ve learned that many Japanese people shower and bathe every day: you shower to clean yourself before getting into the bath (often a public bath, called an onsen, which is a fantastic experience!). The shower room, like the bathroom, is unheated.
The kitchen is part of the main room, and it’s quite small. In order to do any prep you have to move the dish drainer, usually over to the washing machine, or the floor. The fridge is tiny. We have two burners and no oven, and a few dishes. But the only real problem with this setup is food storage: the under-burner cabinet has dishes in it, which we’ve had to pile up in order to have a pantry.
We’ve been cooking up a storm in Kyoto, picking out stuff we don’t recognise in the grocery store and working out what on earth to do with it, so we’ve accumulated quite a collection of mysterious items. Indeed, first-day minestrone has mutated nearly beyond recognition. On the plus side, the light in the kitchen is good, both from an over-head stove vent and from a clever skylight.
Living space
This is why we travel, right? To experience another culture. How lovely are these tatami mats? And the screen doors and everything else. Oh wait; there isn’t anything else. Well. We exaggerate: there is one item of furniture, a low table, at which two people might sit while they eat dinner, on the floor (see featured image). And there is a window nook with cushions, and a Go board (which we’ve shoved into the closet; see below). There is also a coat rack, on which we have hung basically everything we own.
Note: we broke down, found a small IKEA in a Kyoto mall, and bought a stool. The goal was to get a table and a chair from them, but those weren’t in stock, so we spent US$18 and doubled our flat surfaces. We thought we’d sit on this stool, but more often we use it as a table. Since, you know, we spend a lot of time on the floor.
Bedroom
It turns out that the beds – which are two futon mattresses, placed on the floor and folded up during the day – fit best in the room with the kitchen. We know because we moved all of the furniture around eight times in the first few days we lived here. (As you can imagine, ‘moving the furniture’ was not very effortful.) That main room also has a heated floor, which makes it nice for sleeping. These folded-up beds are a pretty comfortable place to sit; indeed, they are the only comfortable place to sit. Besides the floor.
There’s a small closet in this room (you can see the door to it just beyond the futons in the above picture). The instructions for the flat say that one is not to use this closet for storage space, but we have shamelessly disregarded these instructions, and have piled the extra slippers and toilet paper and towels and cleaning supplies very, very high so that we can have at least half a shelf for our unmentionables. The rest of our possessions are in an open suitcase on the floor. All of which is sub-optimal, but – luckily – we wear the same clothes every day so it doesn’t matter all that much.
And there’s a pretty little garden, which cheers us up endlessly as we sit on the floor and look at it.
Entryway
There’s also a place for coats and trash and to take your shoes off. Which is where we keep our suitcases and everything else we don’t want to have sitting around on the floor.
Kyoto Location
So why did we pick this place? Because it is in the heart of Gion, the geisha district of Kyoto. Which means beautiful, traditional wooden homes (like ours!), and also means that we see geisha several times a week, walking down romantically lantern-lit streets. We are close to the Kamo river with lovely bridges spanning it, and beautiful views of the mountains beyond, sometimes with snow on top. And there are a number of great restaurants (surprise!) in our neighbourhood.
As always, we try to look on the positive side. A completely unexpected bonus of the absence of furniture is that, since we spend so much time on the floor, we have regained our youthful flexibility. We can now both stand up from the lotus position without using our hands!
