My wife and I are chewing on the idea of buying a house. We’re looking at fairly traditional areas around Tokyo. We have a passing familiarity with 町内会 but don’t really understand the full implications.
1. Are there published membership fees for 町内会 similar to HOAs in the US?
2. Is participation/enrollment mandatory?
3. Do they have the power to significantly influence the livability of an area by instituting rules/regulations?
4. If yes on the above, what kind of rules could one expect?
Would appreciate any information.
Cheers
9 comments
My uncle lives in a house and he pays it.
He hates it because they make him fill a bunch of paper, collect money house by house, make reports, make special bank account to deposit this money and all that. Even the japanese neighbor said it’s mendokusai.
I heard it’s not mandatory to be part of it, but if you don’t then your relationship with your neighbors could go downhill.
Oh almost forgot, not sure how often it is, but sometimes he’s like the leader of street? or something like that, and he has to check if everyone is disposing the trash correctly, and if not, he has to collect the trash and store in his house and dispose on the correct day.
1: no idea about HOAs but we pay a whopping 1200 yen a year (I suppose the amount will vary by location, but usually you’d be looking at a level in the thousands of yen)
2: no; but depending on neighbourhood, membership might make life easier
3: no, that’s the local government’s job. I imagine a well-organised 町内会 might liaise/work with/influence local government.
It will all very much depend on the local 町内会. We don’t have much do to with ours apart from paying the annual fee (which we take in turns to collect) and passing on the monthly circular.
We pay 2400 yen a year that goes into a fund. We also have the option to donate additional so we just give 3000 yen total. It used to help pay for festivals, but now not really. It’s available for folks who might have a house fire, or if one of our private roads needs repaired among other things. It also pays to give a small gift to the volunteers who make sure kids get to school on time.
It’s an old fund that has a lot of money in it. Some people don’t join, so they wouldn’t have access to it if the need arised.
It can be annoying when it’s your turn to do whatever. Like we rotate the garbage station cleaning duties monthly. Yearly the header for the block is rotated and that has to attend weekly meetings, collect dues and set up the cleaning schedule. Ultimately they clean the garbage station if the house assigned doesn’t.
They have no influence on our property like an American HOA does.
I’m in the one for my neighbourhood.
It’s mostly just passing a clipboard of notices to the next house in the list. This year it was my turn to collect the fees (¥3000/year). I was able to introduce myself to everyone, which was nice. I put a postcard of my cat in everyone’s post a week in advance to let them know and share my phone number.
It’s optional to join, but only one home in our block doesn’t do it.
1. In my neighborhood the fee is 2000¥ a year.
2. It’s not mandatory, my block has 10 houses and only half of them are in.
3. As I asked some Japanese joining will give you the chance to immerse with locals and activities, most of them are volunteer cleaning or things like local matsuri. Might be good to consider if that area is tradition-rich and you have children who might benefit from that.
For us:
– ¥6000/year
– take turns keeping the trash area clean for a week (about 2 or 3 times a year)
– before COVID there was a huge yakitori party at a park with alcohol included so neighbors could mingle that used up the remainder of the fund but we moved in when COVID happened so we’ve never participated and instead we get like a bunch of various sized burnable trash bags at the end of the year.
Not Tokyo (Osaka) but I pay around 4,200 per year.
I’d say 90% of the families in my neighborhood participate. We have monthly meetings, usually on Sunday mornings, and being part of the association guarantees you some ‘perks’ (money) in some situations like when you have a baby, when you get married, if somebody in your family passes away, etc.
Associating isn’t mandatory, but for sure there’s this pressure when you move in, they expect you’ll join them because everybody else did, you know. My wife liked the idea since they have this library at the community center and it’s pretty close to our home.
About rules, I’m confident they can create some nice/useful/dumb/silly/whatever rules they may like, but luckily here we got none of it. All they ask is for smiles and to keep participating.
If you guys don’t want to participate, just say no.
central Kyoto here and 5k a year. All houses but one are in it, including renters. Had a prior renter (younger Japanese guy) who refused to join up but still gamely passed the notice board along.
We get…. info. A newspaper. City stuff. And come festival time a little party and …. lots of toilet paper and kleenex, oddly enough. Kids, however, get candy and snacks.
We pay about 30,000 a year to be in ours. Seems expensive compared to everyone else here. The main roles are to hand notices on to the next house, turn up for cleanings, look after the garbage key four times a year, and do the kids school patrol twice a year. We have lots of events through the year like festivals and BBQs, and most things end with a nomikai and bento. It’s optional to join but almost everyone is in it.