japan

Tokyo is one of the expensive city in the world. Looking for a fairly cheap and comfortable accommodation should be easy since i have many years of experience traveling around the world on a budget.

But I was wrong.

I thought by using AirBnB or Agoda, I could easily get a budget accommodation but it was not. The cheapest accommodation that i can find using these 2 websites is USD100. I was hoping to get a private room at around USD10-15 but seriously you cant find any of it in Tokyo.

Tokyo is in the world of its own.

After endless googling, I found out that budget accommodation can be found by searching for sharehouse. It is a house with rooms where tenants share the common place (bathroom, kitchen, living room) together. I really dont prefer to share bathroom with strangers but in Japan, but I heard that the Japanese society treat hygiene as an important aspect of their daily lives, so will give i t try. Most sharehouse only offer monthly rental, so it will still be hard for travelers to look for accommodation for less than a month. Typically the sharehouse monthly rental fee is less than JPY100,000 which way cheaper that AirBnB and hotels.

Some points to be aware when renting a sharehouse:-
1. initial fee is around JPY30,000 – JPY50,000 which is for preparing the rental contract.
2. for short term rental (less than 1 year) , most sharehouse will request a contract cancellation fee which can be as high as 1 month rental fee.

And Japan doesn’t a de-facto website that gathers all sharehouses just like how AirBnB does. Honestly Japan is moving backwards as compared to the rest of the world. So, I had to contact each of the sharehouse by EMAIL!!! and surprisingly they are quick to reply in a few hours (but some replied after 1-2 days) . I can’t imagine how they can work that fast without using Apps to automate their work. So here are the list of sharehouses that I contacted. Somehow the number of sharehouses will be limited when you are above 40 years old . Maybe they dont encourage old people to come here since they already have a lot of oldies here themselves :-

Sharehouse name	Age Limit	Minimum rental period	Remarks
Sakura House	no age limit	1 month	Famous place but often no vacancies
GGHouse	no age limit	1 month	Reasonable price but room is small
Oakhouse	no age limit	1 month	Decent rooms but a little pricey
XROSS HOUSE	depends on location	1 month	most of their sharehouses have age limit (18-39)
interwhao	18 – 45	1 month
BeGoodJapan	no age limit	1 month
Bamboo House	no age limit	1 month	Famous place but often no vacancies and price is reasonable
Share-share.jp	18 – 40	1 month
Kizunaya Share House	no age limit	6 months
Fineselect.jp	no age limit	6 months
Wabi Sabi House	no age limit	1 year
Edison LLC	18 – 35	???
TOKYOβsharehouse	18 – 39	???
Couverture	less than 40	???
share-share.jp	???	???	no response from them via email
tokyosharehouse.com	???	???	no response from them via email
Share Parade	???	???	no response from them via email

I ended up renting at GGHouse because most of the sharehouses at my desired area have been taken up. I started looking for a place to stay 2 weeks prior to my visit to Tokyo which is quite late. You need at least 1 month prior to your arrival in Tokyo to start looking for sharehouses if not you’ll run out of choices. GGHouse has a lot of sharehouses in Tokyo but their rooms kinda small and the rental fee is reasonably priced.

You could also checkout homii.jp (Japanese version of AirBnb but with an added taste of culture exchange) where you will be living with a Japanese host.