We got lucky.
The exchange students before us were the first batch to have have come from our university, so they had to go through a lot of pitfalls. One such problem has to do with rent-related fees.
In Japan, there are such things as 'rei-kin's or "gift money" wherein you have to pay your landlord a certain amount of money (usually two months) to thank him/her for having you. The place where we're staying, owned by a corporation called Leo Palace, prides itself for not incorporating such system. However, they do require payments of certain maintenance fees upon a tenant's signing of a contract (roughly JPY 150,000). Pretty steep, huh? That's what you have to pay just for moving in and don't expect to get it back (it doesn't include the rent too). Anyhow, I guess the students that came before us complained to the university here and they tried to find a way to solve the problem: Instead of signing a one-year contract, they signed up for two-years, meaning we don't have to pay the JPY 150,000-bureaucratic fee. Yay!
That's what I gathered from my limited Japanese; I hope my ears didn't fail me this time. In the meantime, yay!
PS. My apartment's still a mess... the second picture shows my very own flight of stairs. I live on the second floor but my door is on the first. Talk about weird.
The exchange students before us were the first batch to have have come from our university, so they had to go through a lot of pitfalls. One such problem has to do with rent-related fees.
In Japan, there are such things as 'rei-kin's or "gift money" wherein you have to pay your landlord a certain amount of money (usually two months) to thank him/her for having you. The place where we're staying, owned by a corporation called Leo Palace, prides itself for not incorporating such system. However, they do require payments of certain maintenance fees upon a tenant's signing of a contract (roughly JPY 150,000). Pretty steep, huh? That's what you have to pay just for moving in and don't expect to get it back (it doesn't include the rent too). Anyhow, I guess the students that came before us complained to the university here and they tried to find a way to solve the problem: Instead of signing a one-year contract, they signed up for two-years, meaning we don't have to pay the JPY 150,000-bureaucratic fee. Yay!
That's what I gathered from my limited Japanese; I hope my ears didn't fail me this time. In the meantime, yay!
PS. My apartment's still a mess... the second picture shows my very own flight of stairs. I live on the second floor but my door is on the first. Talk about weird.
