Since there won’t be a lot of meetings and things this week I decided I wanted an office for the week to get some computer time in.

I had been looking around for places to rent by the day/week before I came here and a pretty good site I’ve come across before in my researches of co-working space is Loosecubes. They’re a site where anyone can post that they have free office space available. There’s quite a lot of good places there actually (even in Tokyo) but there was one place in particular whose own website I had come across before. That one was Moboff (short for Mobile office).

Moboff has several locations, but their Shinjuku location looked really awesome.

We tried to reserve an office through the website but since it was such short notice (I basically wanted access from yesterday) I didn’t want to wait several days for a reply. So I just showed up at their front desk and asked if they had some available seats.

They normally only rent out per month with a required membership fee, but after the receptionist called up the owner and a little bit of hassle (because there was no system in place for what I wanted) they were kind enough to give me a deal and let me in on a per-day fee.

The space is awesome, there’s everything you’d expect (coffee machines, internet, good chairs) and the room and layout is great, it was easy to get productive there.

The only downside was that the place was practically deserted. Now I’ve only been there one day and it might be a fluke, but it seemed like they could really use some more business. Perhaps opening up to per-day or per-week customers is a good idea.

Normally if you pay per month for the shared-office you don’t get assigned a desk, you just come in the morning and hope there’s a desk free and take that one. This doesn’t bother me at the moment but if I was looking to be there long-term I would want a fixed desk so I could put a screen there, but for that you need to rent a private office.

Personally I don’t see the reasoning behind this, they shouldn’t be charging full price for a “maybe there’s a desk for you, maybe not” kind of thing. And if they only have enough members to fill the desks (so there’s always at least one free) then why not assign permanent desks? Just rent out all the desks and people can leave their stuff there if they want. I don’t want a private office because that defeats the whole purpose of a co-working space, I want to meet other people.

It was permitted to drink at your desk, but not eat, I suppose because food can cause quite a lot of smell which might bother other people. With the whole of Tokyo available right outside the door I doubt I’d bring food very often anyway though.

Overall my first impression is really good. If there had been reserved desks it would be a place I would definitely want to use long-term. But as it is right now, it’s a perfect place if you just want a productive space for a day or a couple of weeks.

The location is great, about 10 minutes from where I’m staying. It’s on the 20th floor so there’s a great view and it’s really close to Shinjuku station if you want to do something after work.

Hello good friends! It’s been a while and I said I’d update so here comes some updates! It’s mostly going to be pictures because it’s late and so forth.

Overall, things are going swimmingly over here! I love it as usual and I managed to spend some awesome time with Emanuel (he loved Tokyo too). I’ve done some shopping and been keeping busy as usual!

I’ll probably write up more details later. For now, here’s some pictures!

I went and bought a really nice kitchen knife that’s the kind that I’ve been wanting. It looks very traditionally Japanese and the shop I bought it in seemed really legit so I hope it’s good quality.

He stamped my name on to the knife, which was pretty neat.

I went to Meiji Shrine with Emanuel during the day of new years eve and we found a bunch of priests walking around.

This is the temple at night, after standing in line for about an hour and thirty minutes to get to the front.

We went into an arcade and Emanuel managed to win a bear.

Required photograph from high spot.

Me and Emma in one of our favorite places.

And a group picture of me, Emma, Emanuel and Sherry.

And this is just a picture of the 30th floor in an office building I’ve been having meetings in.

Hi, Emma here. Fredrik and I looked around at Gaijinpot for apartments in Tokyo. I love looking at apartments, wether it’s Swedish real estate through Hemnet or apartments in Tokyo. So I’m highjacking Fredrik’s blog to showcase some of our findings.

First, let’s take a look at what apartments we’ve stayed in so far;

Apartment 2007 & 2009, ~13 sqm

I remember the initial shock walking into this “apartment”. The actual living space is probably smaller than most people’s bathrooms. But it didn’t bother us. And apparently we liked it so much (lol) that we returned to exact same place 2 years later. Since we were only there as tourists, staying just a month, we didn’t really care that much about the living standards. After all, you don’t spend that much time inside. There were some good subway lines within close distance, that’s all we needed.

Apartment 2010-2011, ~24 sqm

Now when we came back in 2010 we wouldn’t just be tourists, we would actually live there, for a year. So we amped it up and splurged on a 24 sqm apartment. That’s 11 more than last time! And a lot more central. And more expensive. I liked it, it was practical, small and cute.

If you’ve never been to Japan, these places may seem insanely small. Well, they are. But you get used to it. Next time we return and stay for a longer period I want a bigger place though. And I want a kick-ass view overlooking Tokyo. So, as I mentioned in the beginning of the post, we browsed for some apartments just for fun. But still reasonable ones. All apartments have a monthly rent of 15 000 SEK / € 1 600 / ¥ 200 000, are between 50 – 70 sqm and are in central Tokyo. (Our previous apartment was 10 000 SEK /  € 1 100 / ¥118 000  per month, but it was intended for short-term stays)

Apartment #1, Concrete wall to the left

Now this is more classy, huh? What I’ve noticed is that they very often leave the concrete walls exposed. I love that raw feeling.

Apartment #2, Concrete bathroom

Apartment #3, More concrete walls

This is what a typical cool-looking “house” in Tokyo looks like to me, you see them everywhere. I think about 4 families live in this complex. Or maybe the double. If I can’t live in a skyscraper, I could definitely settle for this.

This is one crazy house! It’s 45 sqm and a few stories high. A bit too “open planned” for me, I wouldn’t want to use the bathroom. Imagine the reaction when you have guests over who want to use the toilet.

Excuse the horrible montages, it wasn’t me. These last three images show my current dream apartment. 2 bedrooms, 54 sqm, 15 000 SEK / € 1 600 / ¥ 200 000 per month and it has the view! Just look at that big window!

Well, some day

Even now, I can not perceive the size of Tokyo. I love that fact. I simply can not put into my mind how large it is. The following video reminded me of that fact.

And so in an attempt to try to visualize the size of Tokyo, I want to compare it to Sweden. I’ve wanted to do this many times before but haven’t prioritized it. It is actually harder to create a decent visualization of this than I first thought. Here is an attempt, but it is far from perfect.

Let’s start with some definitions. The Greater Tokyo Area is an area that is sort of considered to be Tokyo to many people. If you live in the Greater Tokyo Area you probably work inside Tokyo and you live within Tokyos train network and things like that. For all practical purposes you live in Tokyo, but you might officially be living in a different district than Tokyo. In this area 32.5 Million people live.

Let’s overlay the outline of Skåne, the part of Sweden in which I live, on top of the Greater Tokyo Area. The green outline is Greater Tokyo and the red outline is Skåne. The grey parts in this map is indeed city. So Greater Tokyo is basically like building a very large city over all of Skåne and putting 3 times Sweden’s population in that city.

Greater Tokyo vs Skane

Let’s do the opposite and put the outline of Greater Tokyo on top of Skåne, just to be more clear in the illustration.

Skåne vs Greater Tokyo

There is significantly much more green in that picture. But in the bottom left we can see a small patch of grey, that’s Malmö. Sweden’s third largest city. Let’s compare Malmö to Tokyo.

Malmö has a total of 650,000 people living in it including those that don’t really live in the city but in towns on the outskirts that are officially part of Malmö. Tokyo is the one region that is officially called Tokyo, which is significantly smaller than Greater Tokyo. In Tokyo there lives around 13,000,000 people. That’s 13 million compared to 650 thousand.

Let’s put the outline of Tokyo on top of Skåne so we can continue from the picture above.

Tokyo vs Malmö

The green is Tokyo and the red is Malmö. Pretty interesting. But I think it is better illustrated by putting Malmö on top of Tokyo.

Malmö vs Tokyo

There you go. For those familiar with Malmö you get a pretty good idea of how big that area is, and as you might be able to imagine from the map, that grey area is covered with skyscrapers.

Let’s zoom in on the interesting part of Tokyo, the most lively centre. It’s illustrated in the blue square below and is roughly the size of Malmö, just slightly larger.

Square we zoom in on

In this little square, we have all the common tourist spots. This little square inside Tokyo, inside Greater Tokyo, is the area we managed to slightly explore in a month the first time we were in Japan. Or to be honest, we didn’t even explore half of it.

Zoom in on that square

When we lived in Tokyo the past year we lived in Nakano, which is leftmost dot on the map. The other dots are the different famous areas, those that are written about most in tourist books and blogs. Odaiba is my favorite area to just relax and walk along the “beach”. Akihabara is my favorite area for electronics and Shibuya is my favorite area for partying.

When my mom came to visit for a week we rushed around every day and we managed to see these 10 spots in 6 days, so we did almost two places per day and that was a very high pace. These 10 places are the bare minimum you should see if you ever go to Tokyo. And these are just a small square within Tokyo, which is a small area within Greater Tokyo, which is just one part of Japan you should see.

So today I found out where we’re going to live in Tokyo. The first month I will have a very, very small student dormitory room “with a small fridge, a desk and a bed”. It’s shared bathroom, shared kitchen and shared living room.

Now, this whole thing isn’t super-cheap, but it’s not really that expensive either. It does however seem like either the organization arranging this education or the school is trying to milk a whole lot of money. Transfer from the airport costs 2500 SEK (28000 YEN), while taking a taxi will cost significantly less (20 000 YEN). We won’t be making transfer arrangements with them. But worst of all are these living arrangements, it’s around 6000 SEK a month rent for one of these rooms, and I can get a one room apartment with kitchen and bathroom in the center of town for less.

This picture pretty much explains how sucky the living arrangements are.

Living arrangement

It’s about the same travel-time from the place we used to live to the school. But we paid less for the apartment where we used to live, and that was a real apartment, and as you can see; it was actually close to the interesting stuff in town.

Soooo, yeah… We’ll be looking for an apartment from day 1.

Preface

As you may know I tried to get into an exchange program to study a year in Japan. Sadly, I was not accepted into the program. Probably due to my somewhat lacking study-plan, I did not have time to fully prepare and contact the schools to get a course-list and such, and probably partly because students are ranked on their student-related social-activities, of which I have none. All my social activities are about trying to build a company and improve myself by studying outside of school. Anyways, for the application I wrote a Statement of Purpose, a letter saying why I wanted to study in Japan. I’m somewhat happy about it so I thought I’d publish it here. It is slightly edited to remove things specific to the school the application was meant for.

This text is obviously geared toward studying science and technology in Japan but could easily be applied to a more general sense of why one should always consider studying abroad.

Statement of Purpose

In a globalized marketplace one must know what is great in other parts of the globe. This is why I have always been very interested in traveling and experiencing other cultures first-hand.

During my personal travels I have been to Japan twice, staying for a month each time. Of all the places I have been, I have always felt most at home in Japan.
Japan has a bustling science community filled with extremely bright and innovative people. If I had to choose one thing that signified Japan with me it would be technology. As an Engineering student I put technology at first hand, I believe we can solve the worlds problems and change the way we think, act and live with technology.

Japan is constantly evolving technology and solving difficult problems with innovation. In my view they are far beyond the rest of the world in many fields of study. I think I could gain great insight by studying technology in the Japanese way.

I am convinced that I will be part of Japanese society at some point in my life. If not during my education then in my work after school. It is a wonderful country with so much to offer, so much diversity and culture and an absolutely wonderful atmosphere of peaceful and respectful people.

I believe that I could benefit hugely from being able to take part of the Japanese education system and being able to experience the country and the science taking place there during my own education. I think it would lead me to become a much better scientist and engineer.

What I would like to do while studying in Japan is of course to continue my current educational direction, which is scientific research and technological development.

I have also chosen to study in Tokyo because I have been almost all over Japan but I have yet to find a place so wonderful as Tokyo. Wether I’m emerging myself with technology in Akihabara or enjoying the wonderful scenery of Tokyo Bay from Odaiba, Tokyo is the one place in the world I truly feel at home.