Apartment Hunt in Sendai

Finding a suitable place to live is an important part of the moving process. Each location comes with its own specific challenges, which are usually compounded if you are not a citizen of the country you live in. If you are a particle physicist, chances are you know what I'm talking about.
In Geneva, finding a place to live takes a couple months in my experience. Once you've found a place, as a postdoc you probably need to find a guarantor, and enough money to cover the deposit amounting to about three months of rent.

The housing market in Sendai is thankfully much less crowded, giving you a much larger choice of apartments. The approval process, however, is rather prohibitively difficult for foreigners:
After finding an apartment on one of the Japanese-only web sites, you contact the agency for a viewing appointment. If you like the place, you need to get approved for credit, which is basically impossible for a foreigner without a Japanese bank account. (Which I am sure you can't get without a permanent address in Japan. The typical catch 22 for foreigners.) Luckily (?) there are companies who help with getting approved - against a not insubstantial fee. I addition, you still need a Japanese guarantor; apparently retired people don't qualify for this.
When you have all of this together, you need not one, but two hanko - the Japanese replacement for signatures on legal documents. This is a stamp of your name and it uses a special ink. Apparently there is simple version, mitomein 認め印, and a more complicated version, jitsuin 実印, and to sign the rental agreement you need both. You can get them at a hanko-shop, and then they need to be registered to your name at the ward office.

Like I said, prohibitively complicated. For foreigners Tohoku university has a number of resources.
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/?pg=100113145442
https://www.cefix.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/house/default_e.asp
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/index-e.cgi?pg=130527113858
There are a number of reasons why I chose to go to the open market instead, and for the ILC I'm sure some people prefer to live on campus, while others rather live in the city. Enabling this choice is one of the action items when the ILC gets approved.

A new year, a new job, a new continent

I will be joining the Tohoku University group at the beginning of next year. This is an exciting opportunity, but it required yet another international relocation.
A few lessons learned:
- Do not move between the years, if you can avoid it. The holidays complicate everything.
- Give yourself enough time for visa applications. 2 months is not too much, particularly if paper work needs to be sent back and forth.
- Give yourself enough time to sell your stuff. In particular electric gadgets that operate on a different voltage than what you find in your new destination.

With the new year I plan on updating the blog with accounts of the research in my new group as well as situations I might encounter as a European in Japan. That's at least my new year's resolution.

Now I need to find a suitable apartment. Wish me luck.