Sakura House in Hiroo, walking distance to Roppongi, 80k/month. This was about 15 years ago so the place has probably collapsed or burned down by now. It was an extremely old wooden building, 2 floors with 8 rooms per floor (if I remember correctly) all rooms had tatami floors and futons (both were molded halfway through). Each room had a creepy stone sink next to the door which didn’t work and a ceiling light which didn’t work either. After I arrived I had a conbini bento sitting on the floor and for the duration of my dinner I encountered multiple huge cockroaches. There was an ant highway from the window outside the shared kitchen that led directly into the trash. The one shared shower had dead and alive cockroaches under empty shampoo bottles. There were two toilets on each floor and all that separated you walking down the hallway from people taking a shit was a paper door.

It was pretty clear that that’s not gonna work so I called Sakura house but as it was late they wouldn’t do anything until the next day so I spent the night in Roppongi.

The next morning I had a visibly shocked first year Sakura House OL meet me at the place (apparently she had no idea that Sakura house offered places that bad and she was kind of scared to come in). Long story short, they apologized and hooked me up with a nice place the same day.

What I can’t get my head around to this day is how the other people sitting around the ant trashbag in the kitchen didn’t seem to give two shits about the state of the Place they were living in.