# Furnishing your new apartment in Japan



## Editor (Aug 20, 2009)

In simple terms there are two groups of people who normally move overseas, those who want to relocate forever and those who move for employment purposes. A new discussion has been opened on the Japan thread which covers the subject of furnishing your apartment. This may sound like a very simple choice, to ship in [...]

Click to read the full news article: Furnishing your new apartment in Japan...
Please come back to discuss the story here in this thread.


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## larabell (Sep 10, 2007)

Editor said:


> Please come back to discuss the story here in this thread.


There are two things that weren't mentioned in the article (unless I missed them):

One important consideration to make before shipping over your existing furniture is size. If you're from the US, Japanese apartments will likely be *much* smaller than the equivalent Stateside apartment, especially if you end up living close to a major city. I cannot imagine trying to fit a US-sized sofa or dining table into my current place and I have quite a bit of space compared to most non-celebrity foreigners living in Tokyo.

The other consideration is what are you going to do with the stuff when you leave. The reason many employers lease furniture for ex-pats coming over for one or two years is because they can just pick up the phone and tell the leasing company to come pick the stuff up. You can't just leave it out on the street like you can in some countries (when I lived in LA, anything left out on the street with a "Free" sign on it disappeared in less than a day -- not so in Tokyo). Sometimes you can manage to give stuff away to other incoming ex-pats (which leads to yet another source of furniture -- the free classified in Metropolis, etc) but if you end up having to hire one of the many companies who specialize in hauling stuff away, you're going to pay through the nose. Take my word for it -- the first time I moved I decided to get rid of several pieces of furniture that wouldn't fit into my new place and I ended up paying as much to dispose of them as I paid to buy them in the first place (I know one friend who bought a pair of tin snips and dissected an entire washing machine so he could toss it in the non-burnable garbage and not pay the large-item hauling fee).


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