Osaka house size

[mindstalk]

Where I'm staying in Osaka has an internal space of around 28 square meters, I estimate, which is 300 square feet. This isn't counting the not-very-usable stepped entranceway (where you'd leave your shoes) but is otherwise an overestimate (I treat my armspan as 2 meters, it's probably a bit less. I've been here almost five weeks so far, out of seven scheduled, and am considering extending my stay. The biggest problem is that the stairs are more like a ship ladder, so it would be annoying to haul stuff like books up to the bedroom/storage room. As a traveler in an era when a whole library fits on my phone, that's not much of an issue for me.

And it actually is a tiny house, just barely detached from anything else.

(It's slightly more than one armspan wide at the widest, and around 3.5 armspans long; I'm 5'10".)

The lot is basically the size of the house; Japan doesn't seem to require setbacks or yards. You can *have* a yard, but zoning doesn't hide the opportunity cost of having a yard instead of another house.

Comments

[l33tminion]

Yeah, empty lawns don't seem to be much of a thing in Japan, and laws that require lawns are a crazy Americanism. I remember in Choshi (which is a small town on the far edge of the greater Tokyo area) seeing a cabbage field squeezed in next to a convenience store, without any berm of mowed grass in between.

[mindstalk]

Yeah, I think the yards I have seen have been more like tiled courtyard and/or various plants, more like Berkeley then like lawns. But I dunno. Mostly they have walls so.it's hard to see.