The place I am staying in Osaka is a studio with meals included. The charges cover an application fee, building maintenance, rent, meals and internet. When I divide the cost of three months in a room of just over ten square metres, the monthly rent comes to roughly the same as a student apartment in a medium-sized German city.
In Germany, that average rent could get you a somewhat larger one-room flat. The trouble with renting in Germany, however, is that you may end up with a place that has no furniture whatsoever. You still have to sign separate contracts for water, electricity and internet, and some flats do not even have a kitchen, so you have to install one yourself.
Of course, ready-to-move-in flats and rooms have become increasingly popular in Germany too, but whether you can actually get one is another matter entirely.
Because I am only here for a short stay, my main consideration was simply whether the accommodation was close to the school. Once I had confirmed that it really was not far away and that the dormitory had a vacancy, I paid soon after receiving the invoice.
After the dormitory received the money, another set of documents arrived instructing residents to download an app-based management system. All communication with the dormitory, meal reservations, residence rules, and information about moving in and out goes through this app.
The app is entirely in English. After downloading it, I played around with its features and was extremely impressed by how smoothly it worked. If tens of thousands of rooms are being run through this system, the administrative costs it saves and the gains in efficiency must be astonishing.
Refrigerators, televisions and induction cookers can be rented separately, although there was already a refrigerator and an induction cooker in my room when I moved in.
I had considered renting a television, but after living in Germany for twenty years, I have developed the habit of not watching TV. I can watch Japanese programmes online anyway, so it did not seem particularly necessary. I let it go.
Apart from the management office, the second floor has a dining hall and a kitchen where residents may cook for themselves after registering in advance.
The dining hall also has a water dispenser, a hot-water boiler and a microwave. Anyone who uses the kitchen must clean it afterwards and sort out their own food scraps and rubbish. No cooking utensils are provided, either, so if you want to cook for yourself, you first need your own pots, pans, bowls and plates.
That made me feel rather “foresighted” for bringing a scouring pad, a cleaning cloth and some salt. Japanese supermarkets have so many fresh ingredients. As a food lover with poor cooking skills whose only standard is “if it is cooked through, it is edible,” I genuinely want to buy all that fresh food, cook it and eat it XD.
Still, I have already paid for my meals, and there is no refund if I skip them. I am a picky eater, though. Breakfast offers a choice between Japanese and Western styles, while dinner comes in only one version, alternating between Japanese and Western food.
After two days, I have to say that the Japanese meals are delicious and the Western ones are terrifying.
Overall, aside from a faint air of “communal management,” more than ninety per cent of life in this dormitory is arranged much as it would be if you were renting a place on your own.
The vacuum cleaner is shared, but every other cleaning supply has to be bought and every bit of cleaning done by the residents themselves. For students living away from home for the first time, that must take a great deal of getting used to.
My concern is simply that, as a short-term resident staying for only three months, I would have to buy so many cleaning tools and detergents. If I cannot use them up, I will only leave someone else with the nuisance at the end. I could shamelessly borrow things, but I would first need to know someone to borrow them from. Otherwise, I will have to make a little effort and see whether I can find small packages.
After all, there is not even a toilet brush in the bathroom!
Residents also have to buy their own laundry detergent, and the laundry room has coin-operated dryers.
But as someone who normally survives on cards and is too lazy even to use cash, what am I supposed to do about drying my clothes?
Fortunately, the weather has been good these past few days, and it is much hotter than Germany. My room's balcony faces the road. It gets plenty of light, though it also gets the full force of the afternoon sun.
So what do you do without a clothes rack?
I turned my attention to the belt I had specially ordered for practising iaidō. And just like that, an improvised clothesline was born.
Shouldn't I be called a little genius of everyday life?
The rules require residents to visit Kyoritsu's management office and sign the physical contract within two weeks of moving in. The appointment has to be booked online, so I arranged to go on the afternoon after my arrival.
Kyoritsu's office is not far from the dormitory. From the subway station, it is only a minute or two on foot.
Except that Google Maps once again led me to the building next door, and I wandered around for a while before finally working out which building was the right one.
The reception desk at the entrance and the security gates in front of the lifts have become little more than decoration, so I simply took the lift to the eighth floor, where Kyoritsu's office is located.
After leaving the lift on the eighth floor, Kyoritsu's office is down the corridor on the right.
The door was closed when I arrived, but once I went straight in, I found a room full of people going through the signing procedure.
I had assumed the signing would be one-to-one. It was not. People with roughly the same appointment time were all gathered in one meeting room, and the contracts were standardised. Whether tenants could actually amend any of the terms is something I remain doubtful about.
Still, it was only a short-term contract, and I had not been charged a deposit, so I did not quibble too much.
Only when I arrived did I discover one important problem: I had forgotten my passport!
At first, I thought this was extremely serious.
It turned out that Kyoritsu has already digitised the process. Both the passport and the language-school admission document can be submitted as electronic files through their website.
In that respect, it really is far more advanced than Germany.
In the room where I was signing, there was also a Korean person and a young Taiwanese woman, with her parents seated on either side of her. Two large suitcases stood by the door.
I watched the Taiwanese woman's parents review the contract with such care. Her father even read out every clause and explained what it meant. At first, I assumed he might once have done business or studied in Japan. But when I looked again, no: he was simply holding up his phone and letting AI translate it.
From beside them, I heard him saying things like, “This means that if there is a fire or some other loss, the dormitory will not compensate us. They will not refund the money if the contract is terminated early, either. It was the same with the contract in Britain...”
I thought to myself: Huh? She has already studied in Britain? Then surely she already has experience of living abroad?
At that moment, a Kyoritsu employee came over, handed me my contract documents, and pointed to the signature lines. She said that the second line had to be signed with my parent's name.
I actually said “Huh?” out loud and replied in English, “But I am already an adult. Do I still need a parent's signature?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw both parents across from me, especially the mother, swallow hard.
The Kyoritsu employee hesitated with an “Uh,” perhaps because she did not know how to say “joint guarantor” in English. In any case, what she meant was that a second person's name was required.
I answered, “Then shall I put down my husband's name?”
The mother opposite me swallowed again. She seemed extremely wary of my status as a married woman, perhaps afraid that I might be a bad influence on her daughter or something like that.
I had no idea how long the young Taiwanese woman planned to study abroad. The contract was only three pages long, yet from the moment I entered until the moment I left, they never once left that signing room.
When you sign a contract on site, you are usually more or less held hostage by it anyway. I used ChatGPT to translate and explain mine, confirmed that none of the rules were too outrageous, and found that the basic principles were no different from renting independently in Germany: any changes to the interior required permission and had to be restored afterwards.
The room also had to be cleaned before moving out, or additional charges would be imposed.
That reminded me that I had forgotten to photograph the room when I moved in, and the manager had not given me an inventory form. At that point, all I could do was rely on trust.
So I dashed off my signature, uploaded the documents, and waited for the staff member to return, after which I intended to make my escape.
Then another young Taiwanese woman came in. It turned out that the suitcases belonged to her.
The Taiwanese mother sitting opposite me greeted the newcomer very politely and asked:
“Did you come here to sign the contract straight from the airport?”
The woman replied, “Yes! I just arrived, so I thought I would get things done first.”
The mother said admiringly, “You are so independent!”
I coughed inwardly and thought: if you had not accompanied your own daughter here, your daughter could be independent too! Why praise someone else like that in front of your own child? Even if your daughter truly is not independent at all, shouldn't you also think about how she was raised that way?
By the time the busy Kyoritsu employee reappeared, the young Taiwanese woman's internet connection seemed to have gone wrong and she could not submit her documents. I, meanwhile, rose quickly and swept out with style.
East Asian parents and their habit of worrying and doing everything for their children: even in 2026, the tradition lives on.
What kind of landlord will Kyoritsu turn out to be? Let us wait and see over these three months.
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