6 Things I Hate About My Japanese House

I love the house I rent in Japan — except when I don’t.

A photograph of a washitsu with tatami flooring (bottom), off-white walls, a small brown folding table with a tray garden (zen garden) and a sign with two lines of vertical Japanese writing, a sliding door (left), a round ceiling light with a shade (upper left), and a hanging wall decoration with the painted image of a person (center-right). Photo by Ryutaro Tsukata from Pexels.

I have lived in the same rental house in Japan for about five years. There are some features of it that I love and would definitely want for any house I live in moving forward. Some of its features, however, are downright annoying, like…

1 — No hallway outlets or outdoor outlets

I really don’t get this one. Y’all don’t vacuum your hallways?? Does everyone but me have a Roomba?? Do you use an extension cord every week just to avoid having outlets???

Luckily, there isn’t too much I want to plug in outside. The biggest problem we had with the lack of outdoor outlets was during the first year we were in Japan because we wanted to put up our plug-in Christmas lights, so we had to run the cord through a cracked open door. Not the smartest move, I admit in retrospect. The next year, we bought solar-powered Christmas lights instead. Japan did win that round, because the solar-powered lights come on automatically at night time and don’t raise our electric bill.

2 — Limited sound insulation

The layout of our house is a bit odd, but we essentially have two bedrooms on our second level. One of them has an air conditioning…