Originally published at: Tokyo's 95-square-foot "microapartments" | Boing Boing
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The small spaces
work for the lifestyletake advantage of many young Japanese.
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Sometimes yes, but not necessarily. Some people don’t mind having a small apartment, especially in a good location. I own a 133 sq. ft (12.4 sq.m) apartment, and I’m really happy with it.
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I’m assuming that these do not accommodate the larger of us human species, like myself.
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For me i can only see myself renting such a small space if I’m mainly using the apt to sleep in and not a whole lot else. Not that i need a ton of room but I’m definitely a homebody, so staying in such a small space would drive me crazy
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Interesting article. But holy shit.
I had a friend that used to live on the upper west side in Manhattan in a walk up apartment and I thought THAT was tiny.
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An unblocked version of the article here…
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That’s actually a great deal compared to my similar cubic ft. apt. in Seattle.
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My niece and her husband have a third floor walk up ~500 ft² apt in midtown. Two bedrooms (small and smaller) and what I imagine a small bathroom (didn’t take a peek). When you walk into their apartment it’s a room that is simultaneously a foyer and a kitchen. They don’t have a living room or a space for a place to eat. (The building stairs are very slanted, so you feel drunk when you walk up the stairs. 
)
They are 6’2" and 6’5" and my niece is pregnant.
They 
their place.
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I think the idea of these are great except for how do you handle clutter or basic acquisition of items?
I mean what do you do with your collectible beer can collection!
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A preview of your future as a dweller in cities with jobs, young people of America.
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Oh gosh, I hate to be a cynic but they will not be able to stay in that small place once the kid arrives.
But best to them, genuinely.
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I mean, a (vintage) dorm isn’t all that much bigger and many survived a year or two in them. (Lets ignore the current style of luxury apartment dorm living)
Japan has a culture of community bath houses, so the bathing needs are more readily met than you might think. And when we visited on pandemic-eve we found that decent, prepared food wasn’t super expensive.
Sure, it’s not a place to grow old in, but it can be a start.
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I think the appropriate name for this is a dorm room, and yes, would have felt luxurious as a college student.
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Yeah, but the view sucks.
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Yea, my friend’s kitchen was also the foyer. Her place was a studio. Great neighborhood, she loved it. It was also super cheap at the time because her employer owned the building and she got reduced rent for it.
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Gotta say, I thought of dorm rooms, too. My freshman dorm had two bunkbeds (four residents) in just slightly more area. University of Arizona, 1973.
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There’s a bunch of Englishspeakers-living-in-Japan youtube channels that do tours of these tiny Japanese apartments. I really enjoyed this one: Inside Tokyo's WEIRDEST TINY APARTMENT - YouTube
He interviews some of the people living in them to get their perspective on it and how they make the spaces work. The woman in that video later accompanies him to other micro apartments to provide perspective on how she’d make it work, and she genuinely seem to get joy from the tiny spaces.
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Never too small is a YouTube channel highlighting some pretty tiny spaces. Few of them are feasible for people with modest incomes, but some of the ideas are great.
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