A Japanese home

It's the first time I'm staying in a Japanese home! This is the main experience of a homestay trip that you would never get if you had joined a tour or even a free and easy self planned trip.

The Yoshidas live in an apartment unit. They were kind enough to give us a spare key that could allow us access to the ground floor main entrance gate and also their unit. They didn't impose any curfew so we were free to return any time we liked as long as we let them know if we were coming back late.

Anyhow, Hiromi San seldom locked the door to her unit, I guess it's because the crime rate in Japan is low.

This is the genkan 玄関. All Japanese houses have this area as an entryway to their homes, they remove their shoes in this area and arrange them facing outwards so it will be easier to wear your shoes when you want to leave the house.

The apartment unit had 2 bedrooms, we slept in 1 of them and Yuki San in the other. The main living space could also be divided by a partition to conjure up another room. Hiromi San and the kids would sleep there. There was a tiny kitchen, a bath area and a separate space for the toilet.

This was our room. Notice the yet to be laid out futons in the corner. We had to lay out the futons every night and keep them away in the morning. Hiromi San taught us to layout the futons by ourselves. It was basically layering one layer after another of mattresses, bed sheets and towels.

This is how it looks like after the futons have been laid.

I like these high tech toilet seats. Apart from the button operated bidet on the side, the top of the toilet bowl functions as a tap. After you flush it, water comes out of the tap to refill the tank and at the same time you can use this water to wash your hands after you do your business.

This is the bath. We didn't get to use the bathtub while we were here. Maybe they only use it during colder weather. We just made use of the shower.

This is where Yuki San sleeps. It is a partial study room for Rimu. He has a big collection of trading cards, mostly Dragonball ones. He told me he had around 300 of them and proudly showed me which ones had 4 stars the highest power rank.