From “You Cannot Rent” to a Company-Paid Move: Renting in Japan, 2020–2025

I have signed for four different kinds of housing in Japan in five years, and not one of those moves was decided by taste. Not one was really decided by budget either.

Each was decided by paperwork — what my residence status permitted, whose name could go on a contract, and who was paying.

That is the part nobody tells you before you arrive. You research neighbourhoods and rents and commute times, as if the question were where do I want to live. For the first few years, the actual question is narrower and far less romantic: what am I currently allowed to rent?

Contract One: When Renting Was Not an Option (2020–2022)

My first home in Japan was not mine, and could not have been.

I arrived in January 2020 on a researcher visa with a period of stay under three months, which meant no residence card — and without a residence card you cannot hold a lease, a phone number, or a bank account. The solution was my senior from ITB, whose apartment I shared for two full years.

I have told that story already, so I won’t retell it here. What matters for this one is the shape it left behind: for my first two years in Japan, I had a home but no housing contract. The lease existed. My name was not on it.

That arrangement ended for a mundane reason rather than a dramatic one. The two-year rent contract ran out at the same time my Master’s did, in February 2022. Both things finished in the same month, and I had to decide where to live as an actual tenant for the first time.

Contract Two: The First Lease in My Own Name (2022–2025)

The apartment I moved into in February 2022 is still the one I recommend when people ask me whether Japan is affordable.

It was a 3K in the Umezono neighbourhood of Tsukuba, for ¥37,000 a month.

Three rooms plus a kitchen. Not new — genuinely old, in fact — but sound, quiet, and completely pleasant to live in. In Tokyo that figure does not rent you a room. In Tsukuba it rented me an apartment big enough that I never once felt short of space during three years of doctoral work.

This is where I want to be careful, because “Japan is expensive” and “Japan is cheap” are both lazy. What is true is that Japanese rent is priced by address with a severity that surprises people. The same money buys wildly different lives depending on which city you are in, and a research town an hour from Tokyo is one of the best trades available in the country. My tuition situation meant money was not abundant in those years; the rent is a large part of why it never felt tight.

I did not choose a 3K because a single student needs three rooms. I chose it because I wanted somewhere big enough for myself and my future family — and in time, that is exactly what it became. My wife and I lived there together for the rest of the PhD.

So the second contract was the opposite of the first: my name, my lease, my choice, and a deliberately forward-looking one. It held the entire doctorate — the pandemic routine, the papers, the defences, the job hunt — and I left it in March 2025 when the PhD ended.

Contract Three: A Furnished Apartment and Eight Boxes of My Own (2025)

Then came the strangest housing of the five years, and the one I had never heard of before I needed it.

Starting work meant moving out of Tsukuba before I knew where I would end up. The training period (研修) came first, and where I would be placed after it was the open question. That is a genuinely awkward gap: you have to live somewhere, but signing a two-year lease while the post-training posting is still undecided would be foolish.

The answer was a furnished monthly mansion (マンスリーマンション) in Kawasaki City, near Yomiuri Land station, from April to August 2025.

A monthly mansion is worth knowing about. It is a short-term rental that comes furnished — no deposit-and-key-money ritual, no furniture to buy, no two-year commitment. It costs more per month than a normal lease, and that is precisely what you are paying for: the right to leave. I was lucky that the place I found was fully equipped. Plenty of short-term rentals are not, and that is worth checking rather than assuming.

The standard line about a monthly mansion is that you arrive with a suitcase. I didn’t. I arrived with a suitcase and roughly eight large boxes — size-160 boxes, the courier bracket where length plus width plus height comes to 160 cm or less.

Leaving Tsukuba after five years meant a real sort-out. We sold most of the large furniture and threw away whatever didn’t justify its space. Even after all that, what was left was nowhere near a suitcase’s worth:

• books
• plates and cutlery
• a blanket, a futon, an electric blanket
• electronics — IH stove, hair dryer, microwave, oven, air purifier

That is the part of moving that genuinely surprised me. Furniture is the visible problem and the easy one to solve, because someone will buy it. What actually follows you is the unglamorous infrastructure of daily life — and none of it is individually large enough to feel worth discarding, which is exactly how you end up with eight boxes.

One substantial thing couldn’t come, though: cars weren’t permitted at that address, so the Suzuki Lapin stayed parked back in Tsukuba for the entire four months — and once Tokyo was confirmed as the destination, I sold it.

So: four months living in someone else’s furniture, with my own life stacked in eight boxes beside it.

Contract Four: The Move Where the Company Paid (August 2025)

At the end of August 2025 I moved into my first Tokyo home, and this is where I finally understood what changes when you stop being a student.

The furniture all had to be replaced. Tsukuba’s had been sold; Kawasaki’s had never been mine. The eight boxes covered the small infrastructure, but every large item was gone, so moving in meant furnishing an apartment from scratch — the one move in five years where the shopping was the project.

Second-hand would have been a perfectly good answer. It is how I bought my car, and Japan’s used market is genuinely excellent. I bought new anyway, and the reason was the move itself: this was the first address I expected to keep for a long time. Something you will use for years justifies its price differently from something you will use for four months. Paying more for new wasn’t extravagance in that context — it was just arithmetic over a longer horizon.

But the contract itself was the easiest of the four, because my company covered most of the move-in costs: the deposit (敷金), the insurance, and the agency fee (仲介手数料).

If you have not rented in Japan, that sentence understates itself. Japanese move-in costs are front-loaded to a degree that catches foreigners badly — deposit, agency fee, insurance, guarantor arrangements, often key money on top, all payable before you have slept a night in the place. It is normal for the upfront total to run several times the monthly rent.

My student moves were fully self-paid. This one was not. Same country, same rental system, same paperwork — and the bill arrived at somebody else’s desk. That contrast, more than the commute or the salary, is what made starting work feel like a change in category rather than a change in job.

What Actually Decides Where You Live in Japan

Line the four contracts up and the pattern is uncomfortably clear:

Not one row is about preference. Every row is about status — legal, then logistical, then financial. Your taste in apartments becomes relevant surprisingly late in the process.

I find this genuinely reassuring rather than bleak, because it means the housing problem is not a matter of luck or charm. It is a matter of sequence. Each status unlocks the next kind of contract, and they arrive in a predictable order.

If You’re Planning Your First Apartment in Japan

Five things I would tell my 2020 self:

1. Check the period of stay on your visa, not just the approval. Under three months means no residence card, which means no lease at all. Plan where you will sleep for that gap before you fly.
2. Choose the city before you judge the price. A 3K for ¥37,000 and a room for ¥80,000 exist in the same country, an hour apart. If your work or study lets you live outside a major city, that single decision outweighs every budgeting trick.
3. If your next address isn’t settled, find out exactly what a short-term place includes. A furnished monthly mansion meant I didn’t have to furnish somewhere I’d leave in four months — but I was lucky mine was fully equipped, and many aren’t. How much you sell, store, ship or re-buy is a personal call, and there’s no single right answer; just make it knowing what the temporary place actually provides.
4. New versus second-hand is a question about time, not status. Japan’s second-hand market is good enough that there’s no reason to rule it out — I bought my car that way. But if the address is one you expect to keep, new can be the better value per year of use. Match the purchase to how long you’ll have it.
5. Ask what your employer covers, in writing, before you sign. Deposit, agency fee, insurance and moving costs are all things a company may pay, and the totals are large enough to matter. Nobody will volunteer the information.

Five years in, the apartment I still talk about is the ¥37,000 one. Not because it was the nicest — it was the oldest of the four — but because it was the first one that was actually mine, and it turned out to be big enough for the life that showed up next.

Check the Current Rules

Rent levels, move-in cost conventions and residence card rules all change, and they vary enormously by city and by building. My experience covers 2020 to 2025, in Ibaraki, Kanagawa and Tokyo. Verify residence status requirements with the Immigration Services Agency (出入国在留管理庁), and treat every figure here as one person’s record rather than a current market rate.