Granny Included

At Diane and Hiro's on Friday night, I was told of the latest adventures in house-hunting. They had seen a property that looked excellent on paper -- an older house, built during WWII (which means the owners were either very very poor or very very rich) which came with a large lot of land surrounding the house. When the open house rolled around, they eagerly visited the property.

The land was as large as they had thought it would be, however it also had a number of outbuildings on the property that nearly completely filled the lot. There were storage sheds, a second small house, and even a detached tea room, surrounding a miniscule patch of garden. The house itself was a fair size, with 4 large tatami rooms downstairs which could easily be converted into one by taking out the screens between, and 2 tatami rooms upstairs which seemed to be the guest rooms -- with the very ornate scroll work stretching the width of the 2 rooms over the paper screen doors.

The woman that lived in the house was in her seventies and was looking to move to Osaka as her children were there and she wanted to be closer to them. Apparently she was a fairly energetic seventy year old grandma, who took pride in showing the house to these two strangers. Diane was first startled by the samurai suit of armour standing in a corner of the genkan, then fell in love with the engawa, which are hallways that run across the front of the house, creating a space between the rooms and the outer windows. (During a jog last night, I concluded that those hallways are for the very specific purpose of drying laundry, as rainy season has started and what else are you to do with it?) She was also very impressed by the tea room as it had it's own building with a short step to the main house.

She was slightly less impressed by the toilet. Being built during the war as the house was, it is really more of an outhouse in style -- a board with a hole in it that you squat over. However, according to granny, it was somewhat poorly constructed as when you stand, you naturally lean forward, which means you hit your forehead on the wall in front of you.

The other drawback to the property was the older grandmother it included. In the little house on the back lot lived a ninety year old woman who was either a stepmother or mother-in-law to the woman in the house. As such, she would not be moving to Osaka. It was expected that whoever bought the property would buy the land under the second house, but not the house itself. The tenant would pay rent for the property and ostensibly live there until she died. Naturally Diane was concerned that this would mean the purchasers would have to assume some level of responsibility for the old woman, such as checking to make sure she hadn't died during the winter and such.

Curiously enough, they lost interest in the property.