Why are there so many bad neighbors in Japan?
I moved to a new apartment last year after two kids moved in above me in my previous place. They were a young couple who would stay up until 4:00A.M jumping on the floor playing VR games.
When I first moved into my new apartment, judging by the thunderous footsteps, what I can only assume to have been a feral sasquatch in heat was living above me. At first, I suspected he was a computer salesman because the second he came home, he would unpack his bag and toss what I can only assume to have been a small collection of AC adapters onto the floor, and I mean toss… like toss…. like… How did you not damage the floor?!!! It seemed as if things were just constantly dropping. Like, do you not know how to hold onto things properly? Do you not have shelves on which to place things? Why is everything constantly toppling over?
He would wake up at 4:00A.M ***every morning*** and do exactly one piece of laundry in the bathtub (he was too cheap to buy a 洗濯機). My best guess is that he was a fisherman of some kind and was washing his work uniform. Why this needed to be done at **4:00A.M… e v e r y… m o r n i n g…** is beyond me, but the smell of moldy, dead fish would then waft down to my apartment. He was either a fisherman or a murderer chopping up dead bodies in the bathtub. Either way, I didn’t appreciate the noise and 4:00A.M. \*(Before anyone asks, he used a special device that you place in the bathtub that swishes your laundry around. It was obnoxiously loud (louder than a normal 洗濯機 due to the reverberating properties of the bathroom) and it would often bang against the wall. )
Edit: also, he got home around 9:00P.M and left for work at 10:00A.M. Why was 4:00a.m on the dot, every night, such a critical, inflexible time to do this task?
I think in all likelihood, he was probably autistic. The management company said they had trouble communicating with him.
Anyway, I finally have a new tenant living above me. I don’t even hear her footsteps. I’m so relieved.
I just needed to rant.
33 comments
Damn. Glad I never experienced neighbours like this. I found a real nice place right now, a single standing house with an empty lot on one side and an office in the other. I’m not bothering anyone, nobody’s bothering me (except bugs, but I’ll get the hang of that). Bliss.
Edit: Previous apartment wasn’t so bad either. The most notable thing was, I could hear the guy below snoring at night lol
And in which prefecture is this?
Ever think your just hyper sensitive? It’s not a knock on you – people get so worked up (as evidenced by you inventing his life) that they just start waiting for noises. Blame the shitty buildings, not the tenants.
If you live in a low cost of living area, in a cheaply built apartment.. then it’s pretty normal to expect people from all walks of life as they are allowed to exist too. It’s like back home when I had my friends moaning about the neighbours in a government funded council estate.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t live next to you. I don’t want someone keeping track of my work, sleep, and laundry habits.
Like how would you feel if you were a young woman moving into a new place, and you found out someone was posting about your sleeping habits, laundry routine, and at-home noise level on the internet?
Ever stop to think you might be the insane one?
If you live in a cheap apartment it doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You’ll hear your neighbors at some point. When I Iived at my leopalace apartment my neighbors snoring was so loud it felt like it vibrated the walls. I used earplugs and headphones. It sucks but you get what you get when you live in an apartment complex 🤷♀️
I’ve lucked out, really. All my worst neighbor stories are from back home. Sure, my old neighbors were chain smokers with a herd of yappy dogs and apparently allergic to closing windows but, shit, at least no one got shot or blew up their shed.
I know the feeling. my previous upstairs neighbor literally got up the moment I would get to bed and usually come back from his night shift around 7am and throw all his shit on the ground and stomp around. but anytime I or anyone made any noises during the day he would start punching the wall and scream to be quiet. now I barely hear the person upstairs and can barely even tell anyone is living there. and I also agree most cheaper apartments in Japan are absolute trash quality that would never exist in my country back home.
Basically it’s having kids in these apartments. We had some above us and they sounded like elephants until late at night. We had a baby and moved into a house, and that was probably for the best cos there’s no stopping our kid running, jumping and throwing things around. I’m not sure how we’d handle it if we were still in an apartment, she just has too much energy. She plays at nursery all day, I take her to the park for an hour afterwards and she is still hyper at night. Back home the standard is you’ll have a house, usually with a garden.
Japanese people are not taught self-awareness and so tend to lack it.
To them, for example, a wall and floors must mean sound is insulated. It is not. Or, their routine must be everyone’s routine too.
I’m have an old man and woman hang out in front of my standalone house at 5am talking loudly (yelling often), every single day including weekends and all holidays too.
I gave the woman flowers as a greeting and tried to talk about it and the fact that it’s impacting my sleep and work performance now, and she fully snapped that she’s awake so I should be too and that she can stand in front of my house if she wants. She then spent 2 weeks spreading rumours around the neighborhood that I attacked her, and even calling any agencies she can to frame me for things like poor trash disposal and harassment, and is now obsessed with me and what time I leave home or come back daily. It’s been 2 months of the obsession now. Oh, and the daily yelling hasn’t stopped. Police say it’s a grey area and that generally the renter loses to the other party if the other party is an owner in the area.
5 years in Japan. Still waiting for my perfect neighbors
And here I thought my neighbor above me who wakes up at 5am and start cooking and chopping bones with a machete every single day was bad enough
My upstairs neighbors have been hammering or something almost every evening for months, someone has a baby (might be them) who I hear often enough, and my direct next door neighbour has a screw or 5 loose – comes home at late hours then just stands in the hallway talking loudly to himself, is sometimes brought home by the police, has shouted random stuff including “I’ll kill you” in 3 different languages from both the hallway, inside his apartment and the balcony, and has yelled random words and numbers in various languages at 6 am on a Sunday from his balcony.
I also hear the water going down the pipe for I assume upstairs’ shower, which has a leak somewhere which then tends to drip annoyingly loudly for another half hour.
On the other hand, the apartment is super cheap and quite spacious. (And I probably make noise for my downstairs neighbours without realising it, so I can’t complain too much 😅)
If I manage to get the job I want I will be moving to a new city.
Looking forward to getting quieter neighbours one day 🙂
Very weird for you to assume that someone you don’t even know is autistic
Having lived on the top floor of one of these sanity traps, I can say without a doubt that the noise you hear down below is about 20 times louder than whatever is happening up there. I would tiptoe around my place and get screamed at.
The people at fault are the landlords. Eat the rich.
Can I ask is it a low end rental? I’ve always tried to stay at nice apartments and never have really had problems
I’m your new tenant dude, your are so f*cking loud man. The world does not need to hear your phone calls and for good gods sake stop calling your ex and eating Taco Bell. Smells like something f*cking died off the titanic.
Unrelated but I don’t understand why people in this subreddit will write random words in Japanese, is the word washing machine too powerful to have an English equivalent? Or is it some meme I’m not getting?
I think it’s really hard to have a lot of quietness around you in Japanese apartments. I mean, even couples use love hotels because they’re afraid of making noise, that really says something about the lack of sound proofing. Perhaps your neighbors were shit but I think it’s also important to lower your expectations. I have only experienced neighbors from my current home, one side is the sweetest oba chan ever who brings me fruit and home made sushi and insists that my kid comes play in her garden despite him making it a great mess and all she does is laugh it off. The other side I hardly see or hear but they seem friendly. I guess we’re lucky.
It’s weird to know that much about your neighbours
10/10 for quality of rant, would read again.
I once lived in a bizarre “mixed use” building above a pachinko place, with the apartments being used both for residential purposes and as offices. On one side was an office (a 1K) used by a lawyer and a shrill middle-aged lady who was an assistant or something, and she liked to have occasional hysterical arguments during the day, which wasn’t so much of an issue as I still worked in an office most days. The other side was a gloriously vacant 3LDK, until it was occupied by some sort of company doing no idea what, but whatever it was seemed to involve endless conversations until well past midnight in the room next to my bed. Oh, and there was a slightly psycho young lady living on the other side of the corridor, I only encountered her a few times but every time she acted… strangely. And one day a turtle turned up at my balcony door, no idea where that came from but it disappeared again. Don’t recall any issues with above or below in that place, but I do remember I could faintly hear the dulcet tones of the pachinko place several storeys below through my pillow.
When I bought my apartment here, I made sure I have to be living on the top floor. Better do it to other than have it done to you.
Though the insulation of the new building is pretty great. Unit right next to the elevator and never heard a peep.
I feel you.
Walls used to be so thin where I lived back in France I could tell what my neighbour had for dinner when he was taking a crap in the morning.
I’m glad I live in a house now.
Congrats!
>(he was too cheap to buy a 洗濯機)
Bruh why can’t you just say washing machine 😅 Idk why people always throw in Japanese words like they’re trying to prove they know the word or something
I pay a premium for my apartment and I never heard my neighbours. I only know they exist by running into them once a week or so.
I’ve never experienced bad neighbours in Japan. Sorry that you have, but I’m not sure your experiences are representative of the entire country…
I know how you feel, OP. My nextdoor neighbor has the tendency to open and close their balcony doors every day at 3 am for some reason. Every day on the dot.
I live in a house in Yokohama on a hillside. Once, years ago, my shade umbrella was blown over the side. It hit my neighbor’s house causing a small indentation on his siding. I inspected it and promised to pay for a replacement even though it was minor. Weeks later he presented me with a bill for over 4M yen which included the replacement of his kitchen flooring. We were stunned. I called the builder of the house to come over and inspect. He told the neighbors that my umbrella couldn’t have possibly caused any inside damage. Why would neighbors be so weird? Hard to understand.
i feel your pain. i had an upstairs neighbor who would practice wrestling moves on dead bodies at all hours (or that’s what it sounded like) when he wasn’t dropping heavy metallic objects…
There’s no sane neighbours in Japan, prove me wrong!
These mentions of Leo Palace really take me back. I had neighbors who would occasionally stay up blasting music until the middle of the night. I wouldn’t have cared except the walls were so thin they would vibrate with the beat. A few times I set up my speakers against their wall and cranked it in response.
I guess they must have moved at some point as the noise issue eventually ceased.
Shitty building standards and way too many people with mental health issues. Plus, opposed to the meme of Japanese people always preserving the wa, never met this many self-centered assholes with zero awareness for their surroundings anywhere else.
Sure, woodworking in your apartment at 1:00am is a great idea. You’re right, doors need to be slammed to the point the walls shake – that’s what they’re made for. You’re right, our common wall is a great replacement for a punching bag. No, of course it won’t bother me if you sleep all day, then watch shitty anime all night while singing along to the music full blast. Your “lifestyle” as you call it is important.
That’s why I would never buy a mansion here. Never know who will be living beside you. If you rent the place, you can easily move.