- Bethany "Bitsii" Nakamura moved from the US to Japan for an English-teaching job in October 2021.
- In 2022 she acquired a free abandoned house on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bethany "Bitsii" Nakamura, 35, about her experience moving to Japan and living in a formerly abandoned home. Nakamura has since moved in with her husband elsewhere on Shikoku. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I chose to leave the US in 2019, at a moment when I needed to do some soul searching.
I had read that to get back in touch with yourself, you should think about what you liked as a child. I was thinking about 10-year-old Bethany, and I thought she would think it's really amazing to go and live in Japan and teach English. So I decided to do that and I'm really happy I did.
Before my move, I was an interior designer in America and was burning out between corporate priorities and the focus on financial gain. I didn't think that I could go back to the American corporate lifestyle.
The long hours were not fun and it's highly competitive. I think it kind of pushes people to be competitive with each other when I would like to live in a world where we're working together instead of trying to fight for ways up the corporate ladder.
I started applying for jobs in Japan when I was living in New York. It took me about two years to get the English teaching job that I wanted — I didn't get the original position I applied for, so I reapplied the next year and landed it.
I was told teaching English is a good way to move to Japan — the government makes it easy for English teachers to move here.
Since it was organized through my employer, the visa process was all extremely hands off for me.
They helped with things like getting a hanko, which is a name stamp, and helped me set up a bank account. My first apartment was subsidized and maintained by my employer. I paid around $60 a month. It was extremely affordable. It was a one-bedroom apartment around 500 square feet.
They also gave me use of a car that I could use for work and basic living purposes like to get groceries.
I found my abandoned home through word of mouth
There are a lot of vacant houses in Japan, especially in the countryside. Akia Banks is like realtor.com for vacant houses, except it's run by the local governments. There's not enough incentive for real estate agents who are working off of commission to spend their time selling these properties.
They have listings of properties like these both for rent and for purchase, but I found my house through word of mouth.
The grandma who owned the house was over 100 when she passed away. It was left to her son who is in his 80s and lives on another island. He doesn't need a house.
I was offered the house for nothing, I just had to pay utilities which were about $136 a month. It depends on the municipality, but taxes could be anywhere from $2,000 up to $50,000 — I don't think this house would've been that high because it's so remote.
I've seen stories about people who have renovated abandoned houses. I thought, "Okay, I'm an interior designer. I'm going to do this, too."
It's a beautiful house. It's from the Showa era, which was from 1926 to 1989, and includes the seventies which is fun and retro and very nostalgic. It's got tatami mat flooring in most of the house, a beautiful traditional Japanese flooring made of multiple layers of grasses that are densely woven together. They're very comfortable, so you can feel comfortable laying down on it, or it's very common to just sit directly on the floor.
There are two levels and then there's also this pressed glass for a lot of the windows with a retro pattern on it.
It's a very special feeling in the house because it blends this seventies retro moment with traditional Japanese Kominka Folk — Kominka is the Japanese word for old folk house — in a really nice way.
The main level is 1,000 square feet, and the second level is an additional 250.
From a Western perspective, I think you would call it a one-bedroom house. The upstairs is a bedroom area that has two large closets. However, the way that it was lived in, there were many futons in the closets that you would pull out onto the tatami mat flooring and you could sleep, like, nine people.
In traditional Japanese houses, people don't necessarily have their own rooms. It's more about how many futons you have.
Living in the house almost feels like camping. You are so connected to the outdoors because you have to go outside sometimes.
The front area of the house has windows that face the main town. It has this interesting material that is a mushroom color, but it also has glitter in it. It's very strange.
My interior-designer brain could not fathom what to do with that wall, but after spending time in this space, I understand how smart of a house it actually is and how much wisdom it holds.
Some of the things that were specific to the Showa era were the patterned glass. Pressed glass windows are very common here. It's a different approach to privacy.
In America, you might think of the countryside as lots of space and acreage with horses, but here the countryside can still have houses that are very squished together. Having these pressed glass windows was the design response to the situation.
How Japanese culture views homeownership changed my perspective
The countryside in Japan is facing stark depopulation, and it's something that people here know about and are concerned about. I thought renovating would be my gesture of gratitude towards this place, but then I realized there's nothing wrong with this house.
I had made assumptions after watching HGTV-inspired YouTube videos about abandoned houses in Japan, but it's not necessarily realistic.
That was an interesting learning moment. I wanted to enjoy the house for myself too, but it was also a way of being a good neighbor and wanting to use the skills that I have to maintain the property.
If you are aware of the culture and how people in the countryside actually live in their spaces, the house did not need to be changed. It was clean and beautiful, I just didn't understand it yet.
After living in the house, I decided not to buy it. I was registered as an official resident of that home, but I didn't have a typical lease agreement. No registration, no deposit, nothing to the government, just utilities.
I personally don't think that it's a good idea for foreign people to jump into homeownership in the Japanese countryside right away. Moving from America to Japan is a very different culture. It's a different real-estate market. People might not know right away if it's a good fit for the long term. And once you own a home, it's very difficult to get rid of it. In the US, houses appreciate in value, and in Japan they depreciate in value.
I think that there's a lot of buzz because of the shock of the $0 price tag, but it's not necessarily the way towards financial freedom. It's not the answer. In America, homeownership is seen as the ticket towards long-term stability, and here it's not.
For someone like me who's only lived in large cities in America, to go to the Japanese countryside is an even bigger cultural shift. It's not necessarily something that you can understand quickly. It might take two or three years for someone to really have a solid understanding of how they interact in the community, what their expectations are, and how the community will react when we do things that we don't understand.
In my community, self-promotion, making a financial profit, and the individualization of anything having to do with money and personal benefit is disgraceful. If someone is running their own business, of course you have to talk about money, but that can be really challenging.
I got married and am moving from my main property to my husband's property, which is also in Shikoku. His property was also a vacant house, but this house was only vacant for two years.