mitcho Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

Linguist, University of Helsinki and National University of Singapore

mitcho mitcho

My Palace Mansion

Aug 18, 2008

I’m certainly not the first one who’s noticed that Japanese apartment buildings often have weird English names (I can think of [[Tony László]] in one of the [[Is He Turning Japanese%3F ダーリンは外国人]] books.) In fact, I moved into my very own “Palace Mansion” myself a couple weeks ago. No, really. That’s the name of the place.

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A mansion? By Japanese standards, yes.1 A palace? Um… not quite. Take a look—here are some pictures from my move-in.

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The apartment has three bedrooms and shared small kitchen/dining room, bath, and toilet. I live here with two other Japanese salary-men who are older than I. We all live pretty busy lives and don’t run into each other much. And, believe it or not, I found it on Tokyo Craigslist.

While it may not resemble a “palace mansion,” it definitely has its perks. For starters, it’s a fifteen-twenty minute walk from my work, which is a great plus in a land of long train commutes. It’s in a quiet, down-to-earth neighborhood—right next to the Children’s Center and a block or two from a old-style shopping district (商店街 shōtengai)—while also one train station away from [[Shinjuku station]], which is a major transit hub.2 There’s a fabulous (and apparently slightly famous) [[ramen]] a couple doors down. And finally, while small, it’s definitely one of the cheapest places I saw.

But let’s back up a moment and let you in on how I got here.

I moved from Taiwan to Japan at the end of June after the end of my Fulbright. 3 While doing the regular job search4 I registered with a search firm with a focus on bilinguals, Robert Walters. I had a great experience with them and ultimately accepted a position introduced to me by them. I started on August first as Online Game Programmer at [[Gameloft]].5

I was weary of blogging about my job search at all during it, but I hope to break the radio silence and start blogging again about my new life here in Tokyo. ^^

  1. マンション (“mansion”) in Japanese actually refers to an apartment complex of at least a certain size. It’s an instance of [[wasei-eigo 和製英語]]—English-sounding words in the Japanese lexicon which, for some reason or another, do not actually exist or mean the same thing in English.

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  2. Um, by which I mean, [[Shinjuku station the biggest train station in the world by passenger volume]].

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  3. If you’d been following me on Twitter, however, you would have been at least slightly more in touch with my life. :p ↩

  4. Some of my best resources included ecentral (where I almost took a job, actually), daijob, and enjapan. I also went to a job fair focusing on bilingual (or semi-bilingual) job-seekers: Career Forum (CFN). I should also express my disgust toward recruit, the big household name among job sites, now operated by Yahoo, just as I found it very difficult to use/navigate and seemingly ill-planned-out. [[YMMV]]. ↩

  5. Speaking of, “the views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.” I should probably add that somewhere… I’ll get on it. ↩