This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hilary Tang, 23, a recent college graduate from Hong Kong who purchased a home in Hiroshima, Japan, with her college friends. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I graduated from Minerva University in San Francisco last May.
I was planning to work at a startup in San Francisco, but I decided that I wanted to take a gap year. At Minerva, our cohort is pretty diverse, and I have quite a few friends from Japan. One of my friends had this concept: “There are these akiyas, but no one actually buys them.”
I actually never saw any of those videos about akiyas before, but I did know about the 1 euro house in Italy thing. I didn’t know there was a similar concept in Japan.
My friend was initially planning to buy a house with his high school friends, but they backed out very early on. After they backed out, he asked if we were interested in buying a house.
That was in June. We bought the house in late July, and then we got the keys on August 6.
At first, we were trying to recruit people, but no one really wanted to. We even tried to recruit outside our school. I tried asking people from Hong Kong, but no one wanted to go somewhere random and buy a house in Japan because there’s quite a lot of risk.
From the initial six people who bought the house, five people are from my university.
Courtesy of Hilary Tang
Then two other people joined, because my friend’s friends also came over after we started the renovation. They’re from Japan and really liked the house, so they decided to chip in as well. So currently, we have eight people.
We always wanted to have eight people in the house — it’s just easier if we have a bigger budget.
We wanted to buy and renovate the house for less than $20,000
After we assembled the people who decided to buy the house, we had an initial meeting to understand each person’s motivations and expectations, because that would determine what kind of house we buy and how we want to treat it.
When we were talking about things we would want in the location, something that was common was that, firstly, we all preferred being in nature or easily accessible to nature. Within the group, most of them are Japanese and already live in Tokyo, Osaka, or another big city, so for them, they wanted to have a second house in a more rural area.
Secondly, we wanted somewhere that is easily accessible, even internationally. Another friend is planning to work in the US, and there’s also a Korean member, so it’s better if there’s more motivation, or it’s easier for us to actually go there if there’s an international airport nearby.
And thirdly, we wanted somewhere with better weather and with lower earthquake and tsunami risk.
Courtesy of Hilary Tang
We ended up finding a house in Hiroshima.
The house itself was 1.8 million yen (or $11,371), but the price was negotiated because the house was initially listed on the website at 3 million yen.
We also had to pay the agent fee and other fees, so we spent about 2.3 million yen in total.
The house is around 315 square meters (or 3,390 square feet), and almost 500 square meters of land.
We have nine Japanese-style rooms, which are rooms with tatami flooring, and two Western-style rooms, which are rooms without tatami flooring.
Initially, we wanted to do the whole renovation within $4,000, but since we have more people chipping in, our budget expanded. We still haven’t used up our original $20,000 budget. Just for the renovation, we’ve used around $1,262, as of start of October.
We hang out there once a month, but we’re also thinking about renting it out
We’ve been staying in the house the entire time we’ve renovated it, and luckily the house was in better condition than we expected.
Courtesy of Hilary Tang
The timeline was so tight that we couldn’t actually go there to see the house before we bought it. But the agent did a video tour, and we looked around, and it was quite nice.
We also talked to our neighbors, because the person who lived in the house passed away about five years ago, and then afterward it was left vacant. But before he passed away, the neighbors said how the previous owner was really diligent with cleaning stuff; that they always saw him cleaning, even toward the end of his life.
When we got there, we realized it was actually a lot more well-maintained than we thought, so we didn’t have to do a very big renovation. At first, we thought we’d have to change all the tatami, or rebuild certain parts, or put down certain parts. But it turns out there hasn’t been a super big expense that would require us to rebuild the entire thing.
We did paint and also repaired some curtains and lights because they weren’t working. We added a fire alarm and air conditioning because they only had one or two aircons, and it gets really hot in Hiroshima during the summer and really cold in the winter. Those wooden houses don’t insulate very well.
When we first got there in August, there were five of us. Then maybe for the first three days, there was always someone new coming, because there are a lot of friends who wanted to come here. So there are always visitors, and they also helped out because there’s a lot going on — we even had friends’ parents come over as well.
Courtesy of Hilary Tang
That’s been my favorite part.
You see sides of people that you don’t know. Everyone has some sort of expertise to bring. For example, some people are really good at painting. Our friend helped us paint the bathroom wall — he wanted to paint a Fuji mountain, but none of us really knew how to paint. So I’m really glad he came and helped us paint.
There’s a girl who went to a lot of auctions growing up, so she specialized in artwork and helped us go through the things the previous owner left behind.
It would be nice to do Airbnb and learn about the process and to experience what it’s like to manage an Airbnb. Maybe with the house on Airbnb we can cover at least the running costs every year.
Still, we want to prioritize us hanging out.
Every month we try to gather there, and so far we’ve been going consistently once a month.
We wanted to create a place we could always come back to whenever life gets a little overwhelming, where any of us could take a break, have some space to ourselves, and take time to process whatever was going on in life.
We see this house not as an investment, but as a shared place among us.
