The Apartment
Welcome to your home for the next year, 2-19-16 Green Heim apartment building! For a mere $200 or so a month for rent and another $100-200 for electricity, water and so on, it's a true bargain, especially in Ushita.
For your money, you get one big room divided into a sleeping-living area, genkan (foyer), and a strip for a kitchen combined with a wall of three closets. One of them unfortunately houses the water heater and is useless. Another has all the junk left by myself and other foreign exchange students including such things as purses, jars, boxes, and some holiday decorations.
You also have a western-style bathroom just big enough to turn around in. The tub is deep but narrow so unless you're very skinny, it isn't exactly fun to try and take an ofuro.
Appliances:
You'll be glad to know that the room is equipped with a heater-air-con fixed in the window. The heater mode is extremely noisy, can be heard next door, and takes a while to get going. Once at work however, it makes things quite toasty. The air-con also works very nicely, making only occasional noises. However, be careful of overusing the machine as electricity rates are steep in Japan, especially during the day. Thus, be sure to set your heat temps low, your air-con temps high, and turn the thing off when you leave the room.
Another appliance you'll have is a small ceramic heater\fan that I left behind. The 3 settings on the fan are handy if you want to save money on the air-con, while the little heater works wonders for its size. Compared to the window heater, it's also much quieter.
There's a TV that works pretty well although lamentably the VHS player had broken a year prior to my arrival. To compensate however, I've left behind a region free DVD player that works very nicely as a CD player too.
The TV can be easily equipped with cable, though I personally am not sure it's worth the extra money. Most of the extra channels were international, with some from the US, or showing old American movies.
A few other devices left behind were a set of cheap speakers and a headset. The band that would hold it to your head is broken, but the microphone still worked just fine.
Lastly, there are two phones. One of course is your (recently repaired) intercom that serves as your doorbell. You also have a combination fax/printer/answering machine/phone, although if you're like me you won't need to use it much. Everyone in Japan lives on their cell phones.
The Kitchen
You might not be able to make a gourmet meal, but you're certainly not 'roughing it' with the kitchen. You get a single stove top range and mini-fridge as well as a microwave, nabe pot, and rice cooker left behind by past exchange students. The only big drawback is the lack of an oven, not that there aren't ways to make brownies in a frying pan.
You should have all the utensils you'll need in the kitchen. If not, go to the Kokusai Center and see if they have what you need, and if not, hit up the dollar store.
A quick note about rice. They sell two basic kinds in the store: Washed and unwashed. (it's all white unfortunately. People never seem to know what you mean either when you ask about brown, orzo, or long grained). Washed...is, well, washed. You can pop it into the rice maker with water, hit the buttons, and let it do its thing. Unwashed rice you ought to soak and rinse, but I found it tasted fine if I simply put it in a colander and ran water through it, shaking it slightly. I think it may waste more water in the end, but it was a LOT easier for me, and a lot less messy.
The cooker is easy to use. You put in a handful of rice or so per person then add water til it just covers the rice.
There are two settings I found of most use: regular cook, and quick cook (you should be able to guess from the kanji). Regular cook takes about an hour and quick cook about 45 minutes if you put in the right amount of water. Still, no matter what kind of rice you use and how much water you put in, there is always a filmy residue left at the end. You can simply wait for it to dry out at which point it easily flakes and can be rinsed out in seconds.
One last note, this one concerning the refrigerator. Like most mini-fridges, there are two modes: melty and ice-cube. Food will keep longer when frozen but doesn't taste very good so I generally tried to find as much of a balance as I could. No matter what though, my ice cream always melted.
The Bathroom
Surely you have heard that Japanese people generally take a 'shower' outside the tub where they wash their hair and shave before popping into the tub for a soak. You really can't do that in this bathroom as it's far too small, but they have a drain on the floor none the less. Unfortunately, this drain is also connected to the tub and sink, and as the pipes are old, back ups that spew water all over the floor are not uncommon while you're taking a shower. Though the water generally will go down in an hour or so and the doorjamb rises up by about two inches preventing the main room from flooding, it's still a major pain and makes it impossible to keep things like toilet paper or napkins on the floor of the bathroom.
To combat flooding you must do two things:
To prevent, use very fine drain-strainer (you can get them at Daiso) to keep your hair and other 'large' particles from getting into the system.
To treat, buy "Paipu Kuleana-". You can get it in liquid form, usually from the grocery store, or powder form from Daiso. Both are easy to use: Liquid you pour into the drain directly, wait thirty minutes, then add lots of hot water. Powder you mix with the water as you pour it down.
On the plus side, the toilet never had any problems save that the 'light flush' does nothing so you almost always have to use 'strong flush'. Also, the shower has great pressure, though it's incredibly hard to keep from either burning or freezing yourself and it takes forever to get hot water. There is also a good-sized mirror and sturdy towel rack.
Cleaning the bathroom is a bit difficult since as mentioned there's a high doorjamb making it impossible to sweep. Being all white however, sweeping becomes very important especially if you're going to have people over. My recommendation thus is to use a damp rag to get up the dirt.
As for as cleaning products, you can pick up decent tub and toilet cleaners at Daiso or the grocery store as well as steel wool, towels, and sponges.
Furniture and Other Stuff
The worst thing about the room is undoubtedly the bed. If you're a very skinny person, I pity you.
The bed is horribly uncomfortable no matter how many futons, egg crate pads, zabuton, pillows, and stuffed animals you pile on it. This is due to the fact that instead of one big box spring base it is divided into two halves built on sturdy wooden frames, but with the centers long worn down after years of use. Thus, you are left with the effect of having a small mountain in the middle of the bed, bruising your hips, back, and internal organs. (I actually did get bruises and severe back pains if I slept just wrong).
You are left with 2 futons, a thin mattress, a down-pad (and it was expensive for doing little good!), an egg carton comforter, and a few zabuton which make sleeping on it tolerable though never truly comfortable.The bed also comes with a single pillow that was extremely well used when I arrived, and looked it. Unfortunately, there is no pillow case that comes with the room so it may be something you want to pack with you. You also can get a new pillow for the year although they generally cost around $30.
As for blankets, you get a zipper sheet to wrap the main mattress in, a much mended but warm comforter, a plain blanket, and a plush and very pretty komatsu blanket which someone left behind when they moved out. Komatsu in case you don't know are little stove-tables commonly found in Japanese households. Even without the stove, the blanket is fantastically warm in the winter as well as being very soft. There are no conventional sheets included however, so if you like those, you will have to bring them with you or pay a small fortune.
Other pieces of furniture include a narrow chest in the corner, and a long desk\table that is built into the wall from the kitchen right around the windows. There is also a very small chair in the room, too low for me to find useful as anything more than a moveable table, as well as a little red table that sits nicely on your bed or the floor. Finally, there are lots of Daiso-bought organizers, a built in wall shelf for books, and some very useful baskets for keeping all your stuff straight.
About Laundry
As there are no laundromats to be found, it is a lucky thing that on the first floor of the building there is a washer and a dryer. However, it is nothing to get excited about. The dryer costs 100 yen to run and really doesn't do anything and the washer.... oho ho ho the washer...
Perhaps if you're lucky by the time you arrive they'll have a new washer that costs less than 200yen a load, eats money like crazy, and breaksdown almost as often as it works. If not, when the machine dies on you, tell the people at the Kokusai center and they will be able to tell the landlord. However, it usually takes at least a week for the repairman to arrive.
Another problem is that there really is no place to let your clothes dry, and the dryer does very little good. Most Japanese apartments have an outside balcony, but not this one. You can of course use the ledge in the hallway, allowing the water to fall to the first floor and thus annoying the people down there. Technically, it's also against the rules.
I ended up hanging a clothesline from the towel rack in the bathroom to a strange peg above my bed. If you follow my example, make sure to lay down towels under the clothes so they don't ruin the floor.
There's also a useful little clip-rack in the restroom for small items like socks and undergarments. However, you should not hang anything on the rack over the window. Although it looks sturdy enough, after it fell on my head one day, it has never been able to stay up there. When I left, I had used a combination of super glue, screws, and putty and as far as I could tell the mixture was working, but nevertheless, I would leave it purely for decoration.
About Noise
The only other major problem I had beyond the bed was the noise. The apartment is situated on a big curve on a narrow mountain road that unfortunately also is heavily traveled from about 5:00 AM by busses, trucks, and those annoying vans that go around with tapes of advertisements for businesses and political candidates (they're like the ice cream truck but only selling in words, not goods). With the curve there, these trucks don't just drive past, but have to stop and go around the corner slowly with much revving of engines, throwing up of dust, and rattling of the rather thin walls and windows. Often, I awoke startled, thinking there was an earthquake, but no, it was only the bus passing by.
The sunlight can also be an issue if you're trying to sleep in. The windows face the east, something that is considered good in Japanese tradition, but is very annoying as the sunlight blasts into the room and your eyeballs after about 5:30. There are Venetian blinds that do a decent job, but you can supplement them with the large bamboo mats I left behind, hanging them up with push pins. Even so, it's usually very difficult to sleep past 6:00 AM. ...Of course with classes and homework, it's just as well.