Hello, world! Why do foreigners have a hard time renting in Japan? There are many reasons as we'll hear about, but first of all, is it even a big problem? rental accommodation you have like 40% of foreigners who have looked for it have been told no because they're a foreigner and once you haven't actually been told no have been told they need more guarantors or need to prove their Japanese language ability or all sorts of conditions at all That 40% figure comes from the Ministry of Justices 2016 foreign residents survey the first one ever conducted at a national level and by far, the biggest discrimination foreigners face is in securing housing. So hey, hi, I'm Greg. And I moved to Japan from Canada nearly six years ago with my family. My wife is Japanese born and raised in Tokyo, actually. And even we had problems finding an apartment to rent. But I wouldn't consider as part of that forty percent number, because I think our problem was more with the guarantor system. We'll get into that later. However, I did have a chance to talk with foreigners who did have difficulties renting in Japan. This is Erica and she's Brazilian. But both her parents are Japanese. Yes, so my mum is Japanese, she doesn't have a Brazilian citizenship. She's in Brazil since she was eight years old and also my father he is Japanese. When this interview took place, she had just moved to Japan and had yet to find an apartment. The thing is that, for the past two weeks... before that actually, I was trying to get like an apartment and as quick as possible. But it's actually much more difficult than I thought. I think it's mainly because I'm a foreigner and they say it's because of the language. And my mom always say such as like... If you say that it there's going to be earthquake or that she has to leave she will understand that But she cannot like... now she cannot say, answer back, but she will understand, but it doesn't matter further and I think. Interestingly, in that study where 40% of respondents who were refused tenancy because they were foreign only 10% of respondents said that they can't speak Japanese very well. So it's clearly more than language. That's an issue when it comes to foreigners renting in Japan. So actually the first place I went was Leopalace21 That one will be quite easy, because I think they have the own Department and they do all the process. So I... that was the first place I went and actually, she was going to show me like it was Wednesday. She was going to show me some apartments on Saturday. And right after I leave the agency She said that they weren't available anymore To bring you up to speed, Leopalace21 is a well known apartment rental company that will rent to foreigners. So to have trouble finding a place through that company would be quite disheartening. Like I said geared for helping foreigners, although I think Erika's issue with Leopalace21 was really a matter of units no longer being available, but this was Wednesday and the real estate agent wouldn't be able to show Erika units until Saturday. So. so after that, I went on Thursday to another real estate agency that had people who speak English so you were trying to find an apartment, so they did the search and there were just three apartments that would just accept me as a tenant. So we saw these apartments I chose one. And then actually I waited one like one week for the process to finally they saying that they wouldn't accept me as tenant. So I don't know what happened but like at the end, they refused. I don't know. I don't know why. and then I went to another real estate agency, but like they sorted a lot of apartments and then there was just one apartment that would accept it would be easy but it was not a good apartment. And then another one that It could be okay. So I saw this apartment was a very good apartment like three minutes walk from the station. and and I think because the real estate agent was more experienced. then she signed all the right documents. and she said that it would be better to have a contact of a Japanese person In the previous time I had a Brazilian friend that is here for like almost 30 years. It's better to have a Japanese contact instead of a Brazilian person So she explained to me like I need this document for a company. It is better to get a Japanese contact. So we got all these things and it seems that this time it would work. so what Erica was talking about was that even though you search online and can find many listings if the real estate agent calls the property managers or the landlords. There are many that won't rent to foreigners. Especially those that don't speak Japanese. That's why she was only able to see a few apartments However, if you're new to the country and have your company helping you find an apartment the process is so much easier. So when we first came she worked for a company as an English teacher, and the company helped us arrange all of the housing stuff. So they went with us and helped us find an apartment stuff and they sign the paperwork to be guarantors. So that we'd be allowed to live in the apartment and we stayed there for two years and it was like a normal regular apartment and it was kind of out in the countryside it was out in a little town called Kumagaya, So it wasn't in Tokyo. So there's not a lot of foreigners out there. So in other words they were living amongst Japanese. However, this all changed when they decided to get an apartment on their own. I just went onto the internet and tried to find places by myself. And I ended up looking at many different real estate agencies. And then I found this one gem, his name is Taka and Taka explained to me he can show me everything. You don't have to go to a specific real estate agent to see things he can take you anywhere, if you want to see this place he'll take you there. And I don't know if he specialized in foreigners. I think he does. He does. He's the one who opened my eye to I need to call and see if you can actually live here. He knew based on the addresses. He's like no that building won't allow foreigners... this one will he had to check a couple like on the phone or whatever. But he had really good knowledge on Just finding places that we would be allowed to live in. It's not wasting our time either. He was really great about that. So Taka, do you know place he's from a realtor company was called? -Tokyo's best. -Tokyo's best realtor. It's something like that. Actually, its Tokyo best realtors at Tokyobestapartment.com in spite of having the best name Taka was quite helpful I'm Taka and I'm at tokyobestrealtor. The biggest things is the screening process in Japan when you rent apartments. and the landlords have different expectations. Most of the landlords they don't deal with foreigners so often. Of course, they don't speak English. Like we go to real estate agencies and when they call the owners and say that the tenant won't speak Japanese then they just reject. And it's like that. It was very difficult to find an apartment that whose owner would accept me as a tenant. Communication, language, No.1 Because when I called property managers The first thing they asked me is if my clients can speak Japanese or not and in my experience if I call 100 landowners or property managers, maybe 5 say okay If you don't speak Japanese, 5%, in my experience. I didn't know, sogoi. But if you speak Japanese well maybe 70% or 80% There are main problem is language, communication. If you use a real state agent, it's easy get past the screen process. Okay, so it's obvious that language is the number one issue preventing foreigners from renting easily in Japan. But it's also true that it's not the only issue. As such I asked David chart about it as he helped conduct kawasaki city's survey of foreign residents and was the author of the chapter that discusses the problems of discrimination and human rights among foreigner residents. Why don't these landlords want foreigners in their buildings? It's a really good question and we don't know. Kawasaki city has done quite a lot of work to educate landlords and estate agents that foreigners do not spontaneously combust and destroy your building. One possibility is concern about foreigners going home with unpaid rent arrears Because it is impractical terms impossible to pursue that if they come back to China or Vietnam. Theoretically, yes, there are legal avenues, but they're just not going to work so that's one theory. Another theory is that it's concern about the foreign residents fitting into the local community. Their abilities to communicate with your neighbors. Their abilities to separate the trash out correctly. Particularly their ability to separate their trash out correctly. For some reason that seems to be a really big issue. Well garbage, garbage is important. Because in Tokyo really strict about sorting out the garbage. Most of the complain comes from the garbage stuff. Involvement with the local Neighborhood association. Will they play loud music late at night? Will they cook food that smells weird? That sort of concern also seems to be an issue. 後, party. Some foreign client, they like having party. But... For Japanese, not so common to have a party at home. For some foreigners there is probably concern about the stability of their employment situation. Obviously that doesn't apply to everybody but to be perfectly honest if it's the white foreigners who are working at a Kaiwagakko the English language conversation schools. It would not be unreasonable for a landlord to be concerned about the stability of their employment because those places are not the most stable of employers. So it it can easily be a combination of a range of really quite reasonable concerns. As well as unreasonable don't want any of these horrible foreigners in my nice building sort of racism. But we don't know it's a bit difficult to find out because most Japanese landlords if asked they're not going to say, oh it's because I hate foreigners. Tatemae is a thing. They will come up with other reasons. I think it's not as much of a thing as some people say I think Japanese a lot of Japanese people the majority of Japanese people really do have no problem with people with foreign roots. But even the ones you do, I'm not going to say that, especially not to a city survey. I'm John Daub and I have a channel called Only In Japan introduces Japanese culture too. It's kinda like what you do, Greg. Yeah, okay -And I heard you in a TV series, are you on Tokyo Eye? -Yeah. What do they call you? Well, I guess they say I'm the self-proclaimed master of moving All right. How many times have you moved? Dare I say about eighteen. This is the nineteenth move, the apartment I'm living in now. Wow, okay. Okay. Yep, I talked with John Daub. Because after nineteen moves, he must have learned something. For me in my personal experiences. It's always about of alleviating risk to the landlord or to the agency. What can I do to help them say yes as much as possible? That means having more paperwork than the Japanese renters that come in here. Looking better than the Japanese renters. Having things so well-prepared that they can't say no to you. And in that light it always alleviates risks and make them feel comfortable with accepting me. Because one of the biggest things with moving into a Japanese neighborhood, especially here in Tokyo is are you can you be a harmonious part of the community? And that's something I think that we don't care about so much in the West but here in Japan it's a big deal. Will you'd be disturbing your neighbors? Will you be a problem and create more work for them? more work for the landlord? And if you can speak Japanese, of course, this is pretty good, you're making it easier for them and making them easier to feel that you can fit in but it's not a deal breaker it has a lot to do with your personality That's why I tend to dress a little bit nicer when I go in to sign contracts Because you're judged more on your outer appearance in Japan than you are I think anywhere else in the world. I think John made some very good points. The Japanese are very risk-averse. So renting to a non-Japanese speaking foreigner who probably doesn't understand all the little unwritten rules can cause problems That's why I was so glad to have my Japanese wife to show me the ropes. However, if you're new to the country and don't have that Japanese person to show you around and show you what to do. Where can you turn to? If you're in Kanagawa Prefecture, which is to the west of Tokyo. It'd be the NPO Kanagawa housing Support Centre for foreigners. One of the super helpful things that they do is have pamphlets that explain things. So we have the living guide for foreigners. We have terms for rental housing and we have rules for living and in here, you'll find stuff for the disposal of garbage, the kitchen a big section for noise. Bathroom and toilet balcony common space, a whole bunch of stuff. But first let's talk about noise. It may seem weird to you But keeping things to a certain level of quietness is expected even inside of your own home. If you've ridden on Japanese trains, I think you can appreciate how quiet they normally are and how Japanese homes are probably quieter than those of other countries. So the building we lived in old ____. when we moved in, we were like the first foreigner that moved in. And all of the other people that were living there were Japanese some people were family. Some of it was like just like single guys, whatever. And it was all the people working. -And It's incredibly quiet\N-Yeah, it incredibly quiet and that was really clean. It was really nice and when we moved in I believe that we may have been the first people that were allowed to move in as foreigners because maybe the management company had just changed the rules. And everything was great for like a year and then slowly all of the people that were living there had like cycled out and that happens a lot, people move out of apartments and things like that a lot. Because your contracts they end up. Just looking for new places and their job changes, you know, so they were all being replaced with Foreigners. So it slowly got more and more and more noisy. And upstairs, we would just hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, two o'clock in the morning back this direction that direction It sounded like they were moving their boxes. It sounded like they were moving boxes and we couldn't really figure out what they were doing. We went up and we talked to them several times. Like, could you please stop this? Could you please stop this? Oh yeah, yeah, I will do that. It just got to the point where we're like a year in -We would make...\N-You couldn't sleep. We would tell the guarantor that you know, we went up when we talked to them. So we'd have a record of this conversation that we were having with the people upstairs. So once one year had passed with us having this problem then we really bit into it and We told the guarantor you need to come over here, and we need to contact the police. So once we contacted the police, they went upstairs and they found out that nobody upstairs had that actual address on any of their cards like their residence cards, so they got kind of suspicious and the cops left and the the situation was calmed for that day And then in the following days there was an exodus of all the people from that apartment. when I came home I saw they had a van, and they just loading the van with all the stuff. So we have a lot of suspicions about what we think they were doing up there. They were definitely like mailing things back home and buying things here and shipping them there. We have that impression because we'd see boxes outside of our place. And we also think that it was kind of... I think it was a like a jumping point where people would I think people coming into the country and they would stay there for a little while and then they would move on to different places. and so it was a transient population of people that kept coming in and so they're always changing so they didn't care about like annoying their neighbors. So I can be annoying and then I get to leave, you know. So that particular apartment was like really really difficult to deal with. It was very difficult because of the situation and all the other apartments it turned into a lot of students. So that's like university kids right and they were coming here to study from different countries in mostly around Asia. And they were totally fine when you talked to him and asked him to be quiet. But they were university students, they were like living dorm life, but they were in an apartment, so they would have like, you know drinking parties with their friends and stuff. And we know what is the trend to have a job and like live a normal life. The people next door being quite noisy, You know a few times a week. So the whole environment is completely shifted. Like Tuesday night parties. Every Tuesday night there was people always have party, and we were like: "well, it's Tuesday night, that's the way it is." Yeah, so it became... The atmosphere of the building completely shifted once all the Japanese people had left and then all the foreign people had moved in. So that's only a single and anecdotal example of how foreigners can fail to follow the rules in Japan. But even Japanese can fail at following the rules as well. Take my family for example. We lived in a マンション which is the Japanese term for a mansion So kind of a fancy place, but really it's just an apartment. Well, this is a concrete building. And it's a building full of families actually. And we had noise complaints because kids be kids and they run around. And so even we tried to keep her kids quiet. And we got complaints. So, It's a tough thing to do However, at the end when we exited. We did have our landlord say that we kept the place of very clean, so we did that. I haven't had much experience living in different countries, but I did recently travel to the Philippines and here just check this out. This is like 11:20 there's a concert right there. Humph So, yeah. What's the norm culturally in some countries are even areas might not apply in Japan. and there needs to be education to help people become aware of this. One of the things I had no clue about when moving to Japan was chonaikai, or neighborhood associations. Let's say you speak Japanese fluently you get along with your neighbors and your neighborhood associations and you're an all-around nice guy our family. You can still have issues. Like my family did when we first moved to Japan our issue is that we hadn't been living in Japan for over a decade and we had new jobs. So even though we had a local guarantor or Japanese brother gainfully employed. I might say. We still have to pay a guarantor company. for landowners property managers if clients use guarantor company. It's easier for them to correct unpaid rent. Much much easier than Individual personal guarantor. Recently, the trend is to use guarantor company rather than providing personal guarantor. Even Japanese, yes. Kawasaki city long time ago, almost 20 years ago have a system where the city organized a guarantor for people who find it difficult to get someone to serve as a guarantor for their rent. Not just foreign residents, but also older people, single parents family, that sort of thing. This has had much less impact than would have been expected. The absence of a guarantor does not appear to be as big a problem as was initially thought. There are a whole bunch of other factors there's one case in the interviews where someone who got a guarantor through a guaranty company was told that he needed another guarantor. He needed an individual Japanese guarantor as well. And for foreigners I think the guarantor situation actually worked out very well for us because they're ready to work with foreigners for some of the guarantor companies. And ours actually was our communicator with the management company and the landlord, and they... I got my money's worth about that. I having them help us . if you have a linguistical issues that company will be that middle-ground for you where you can communicate with them in English And then they communicate to whoever they need to communicate with in Japanese. And they also would help us {\i1}leave with like utilities{\i0} and things like that as well if we had a problem with that so They do have more of a function than just like an insurance policy for the payment. If you have to generalize about why foreigners have a hard time renting in Japan. I think perceived risk is a plausible explanation as to why. There's that risk that the foreigner won't be able to communicate. Won't fit into the community. Won't follow the rules and just won't pay the rent. And it all comes down to two words. Alleviate risk and make it easy for them to say yes! When I first interviewed Erika, it was in October. But I had the chance to chat her again in December, and I wanted to know how her current rental situation was. It's been ok. The only problem that's very loud. So I've been having a lot of hard time to sleep. So I'm actually sleeping like Midnight or 1:00 a.m. Because it's very loud like the street and there a lot of bars and near the station. So a lot of people coming and going. I think what happened with Erika is that A: She only saw the apartment during the daytime. But more importantly B: I don't think she was shown the cream of the crop of apartments. Which I don't know how she could have been since your choices were so limited. I first meet clients at office and see the core databases and pick up the ones. We listed the best five ones from the market and then go seeing inside Well, which means you know, you see the five top Apartments on the market and then you can simply just if you feel good for one apartment, that's the one, actually. Taco was never my realtor, but this is exactly how it worked with my realtor when I was looking for a place. Erika was only shown two places. But maybe instead of renting she should have tried to buy. To purchase is much easier than rental, for foreigners. In fact three years ago. I myself did this developers or homeowners don't hesitate to sell to foreigners. I mean after the sale goes through they don't have to live with us. if you have the cash It's much much easier than renting properties. Oh, yeah good caveat, you only need cash. However, and this is only my own personal example. Is that once you have permanent residency, getting a housing loan is rather simple. All you need is that permanent residency card your income tax records and to make enough money that the bank feels comfortable giving you a loan. It's all with the numbers and figures. Admittedly, I was very fortunate. In that I was married to my Japanese wife for over ten years. So by the time I moved to Japan I only need to live her for one year before they gave me permanent residency. And once I had that even a freelancer like me with three years of tax records can get a 0% down housing loan. So they do give loans to foreigners. It does happen. And I just thought it was really funny that it was a lot easier to buy a place than it is to rent one. So I hope this video helped give you a little bit of insight into why foreigners have a hard time renting in Japan. The Japanese government has recently announced plans to create 100 new support centers for foreigners as well as funding for language training. So hopefully things will improve in the future, Because the government also passed a new bill, meaning that there will be many more new foreigners coming to Japan whose population is already at peak levels Thanks for watching. See you next time. Bye How does your country handle new immigrants where you're from?
