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Home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike
Indiana’s early-morning dew
High up in the hills of California
Home is just another word for you

Ahhh … the crazy gypsy at last has landed.

Although home is none of those places listed in the Billy Joel song, it sure is nice to settle down somewhere and be quiet. Even if the transition isn’t totally done and will stretch out into September when we receive our shipment of household goods (HHG), this sure is nice.

Last night I spent the first night in the new place where the Ensign and I are going to live, where our crazy puppy will eventually join us, where we’ll bring our baby home from the hospital, where he or she will learn to walk, etc. Although the housing process went, I think, unusually quickly, it feels like it has been forever.

As some know, the Ensign and I married quite recently (61 days ago at the time of this writing), which is, of course, a necessary upheaval from me — a packing up of all my earthly belongings, and a throwing-away of the tons and tons of junk that tends to accumulate from a childhood spent too long in once place. This was already after an upheaval (for me) from my DC home after I lost my job last August, and an upheaval for the Ensign from his TX home to attend 12 weeks of Officer Candidate School in Newport, RI. He was able to get more or less settled in VA in a location which also became my home after our marriage. Three weeks later, we had to pack it all away again. Then it became a matter of living out of suitcases for about a month as we traveled to Hawaii on our honeymoon, and then lived out of the Sasebo Navy Lodge until yesterday (well, I lived out of the Navy Lodge … the Ensign departed with his ship three days after we landed here). Even though the wicker furniture is a temporary FFSC loan, it will certainly be nice to put away the suitcases for quite a while, our suitcases which are a bit worse for the wear after two countries, two hemispheres, six hotels, and five flights.

Allow me to explain a bit about the housing process here in Sasebo, Japan … and part of the reason why JapanBases.com is not your best bet for Sasebo housing. With the Ensign gone, it was my responsibility to find housing. Our original plan was to live out in “cho” or “town” in Japanese-style housing with tatami mats and an ofuro and tiny kitchens and the like. However, we are currently living in Main Base housing, which is a rare opportunity, as another housing complex called Hario (about 20 minutes away by car with one free-for-servicemembers MWR bus running business hours M-F) makes up about 80% of Sasebo housing. The reason I think we got Main Base so easily is that one is ranked on the waiting list by the date you detached from the last duty station of record (for the Ensign, VA). Since we took time off for a honeymoon, that date was farther away than people who took little or no time off from their last duty station of record. Therefore, our priority for our expressed preference of Main Base housing was greater.

As soon as you begin looking for housing (i.e. as soon as you register for and take a housing seminar), you will most likely be offered Hario housing, probably in a tower. Hario housing is great for families with children — there are two schools, the larger commissary, a satellite branch of the health clinic (BHC) and dental, a “Family Readiness Center” (a place for kids to play), and a lot of family-oriented activities and support for kids and moms (and a bunco group) etc etc etc. While perfectly fine, Hario is not at all my style … I don’t roll that way. Also, the prevalence of towers looked just like where I used to live in DC. While it was a great place to live at the time, it’s not a place I hope to revisit.

I had imagined the Ensign and I moving to Japan into a typical Japanese house. We would soak in the ofuro every night, I would make a lot of rice, pickles, fish and Japanese-style foods, and I would do my best to learn the language, the geography, and the locals. In other words, to live a Japanese lifestyle while living in Japan. What’s the fun of living one’s own, regular lifestyle if one can do that anywhere and at any time? Where’s the adventure in that?

I had my mind made up when attending the housing seminar. We were definitely going to live in cho. Maybe we’d even sleep in a futon on the floor at night and roll it up and put it away during the day. We’d have a genkan where everybody would take their shoes off before coming in the house, and everything was going to be awesome.

I had this in mind when faced with a wall of cho listings. In the housing office, there is a map on one wall and a few walls with tri-folded listings of all the houses available to rent. If the picture, dimensions, location and price strikes one’s fancy, one picks out the tri-folded paper to note other details: what sort of kitchen, how many parking spaces, whether pets are allowed, any special cho requirements (some neighborhoods require you to participate in clean-up of any shared resources), etc. Picking up to two at a time, you can bring them to the front of the desk and have someone call to schedule an appointment to view the listing. You will then be given a description of a car and a time to meet the realtor, usually out the back gate. The realtor, who usually speaks minimal English, will take you to view the cho. If you like the cho enough, notify housing and arrange a second viewing with a translator to ask any in-depth questions you have.

I did this once and it was awesome. The cho I saw was older (built in the 70s) but it was fantastic. It said it had parking for six cars (!), but I think they meant six abnormally small cars all squooshed together. It had a small and slightly overgrown yard, but the fact that it had a yard at all was a rarity. It was relatively large for a Japanese house, even though there was no storage at all (also not surprising). It had a bedroom downstairs suitable for a queen-sized bed, a hallway/breezeway looking out onto the front yard. It had two rooms with tatami mats, separated by the sliding rice-paper doors. The kitchen was small, but it had a place for an oven. There was an ofuro, a shower (separate, of course, as an ofuro is for soaking and relaxing and the shower is for cleaning oneself) and one tiny dedicated toilet room. The winding stairs could fit one person only at a time, and the rooms upstairs, while hot, were gorgeous, even if they were quite dated-looking with wood-paneled walls. I could forgive the wood-paneling as the upstairs bedroom had a balcony and a lovely view into the valley over which the whole house was perched.

That (aside from lack of heat and a/c, which is typical, and which can be rented from the base) was the main drawback to this cho. Its location, while it was only about 5-10 minute drive from the base, was on the side of the mountain. This translated into several tiny one-car roads which narrow unexpectedly, with many hairpin turns, only navigable thanks to convex mirrors placed at the apex of each turn. I’ve seen these sort of roads on the Amalfi coast in Italy where I was certain the bus that I was riding was going to speeding off one of these cliffs and I would die, or else it would run headlong into approaching traffic, or something. Some of the roads also reminded me (with less dramatic beauty) of the Connor Pass in Dingle where a friend of mine lives. In short, the roads were that tiny. Although the Japanese navigate such roads like It Ain’t No Thang, I myself only very recently received my Japanese driver’s license (the Ensign has not yet got his). Although I’ve done it before, I’m new to driving on the opposite side of the road, and I don’t know what conditions are like on that mountain when it is rainy, snowy or (God forbid) icy. The house itself was perched at the intersection of three such roads. Even though I loved the house, I think that the person who built that house not only did so before there was a road there, but also, possibly, had a deathwish.

Although the cho with all its quirks struck my fancy, the roads did not. Much to my relief, on my return from viewing the cho, I was offered Main Base housing, for the reasons I listed above.

I mentioned earlier that we were able to “express a preference” for Main Base. This can only be done by turning down one’s first offer of housing, which is almost always Hario. We were offered a Hario tower apartment, which I didn’t want because it was Hario, and also because — something the Navy doesn’t really care about — I wanted to bring my puppy Bertie whom I yuuuuuuuuuuvvvv, but who would not be allowed in anything other than the ground floor of a garden-style townhouse. If you turn down your first offer of housing, you technically forfeit your right to a government-funded move (i.e. you have to pay for it), but since none of our stuff has arrived in Japan yet, our stuff would come straight to our house anyway, so it didn’t matter. (NB: If you turn down your first offer of housing because it is inadequate, I do not think that applies; however, this does not take your dog into consideration. Technically for us, Hario was adequate, but we didn’t want it. If you turn down your second offer of government housing, your name gets taken off the waiting list and they stop looking for places for you)

Anyway, after looking at the cho house, I got a call from the housing office which let me know, much to my shock, that there was a ground-floor townhouse available on Main Base — something which never happens. I was a bit caught off-guard. The visions of those beautiful tatami-matted rooms were hard to suppress. Main Base housing would definitely be more Americanized, which had its advantages (washer/dryer, oven, dishwasher, a/c) and disadvantages (upstairs neighbors, American bubble, would I ever leave base?). After talking with my husband — and with his boss adding his $0.02 — it was hard to say “no” to all the advantages living on Main Base had to offer, especially considering the baby in our immediate future (and that the Sasebo hospital is nearly walking distance from housing). So … we took it, sight-unseen, because it wasn’t ready to be seen (due to cleaning) until move-in day. That was a bit nerve-wracking, to be sure. However I was assured the unit was recently renovated and that it was very nice, despite being about 200sqft smaller than the cho house I had viewed.

Moving day was yesterday, a feat made much easier thanks to the Family Member Assistance Team (FMAT), which for me was one dude and a van, but it was all I needed for the six huge suitcases and several small bags from the Navy Exchange (NEX) with things like sheets, towels, soap and toilet paper to make the space livable.

I didn’t have a vision of what I thought our unit was going to look like, but what I got was certainly not what I expected. Everything was new and beautiful. There’s not a single scratch on the hardwood floors (necessary, due to all the humidity). The closets which appear to be a bit narrow are very deep, and have one layer of storage immediately accessible above clothing racks, and another layer with separate doors above the main closet (I would need a step-stool to reach them). There are separate a/c units in both bedrooms and in the living room, the washer/dryer are full-sized and American and do a fantastic job, the bath is ofuro-sized, and it has the Japanese “dedicated toilet” room as I call it with an American-friendly toilet (as opposed to the hole in the ground typical to most Japanese toilets), whose handle has, it appears, two flush settings — one for normal, and one for, uh, “big”!

And also, the kitchen is huge, and has LOTS of cabinet space — possibly more than at our previous townhouse in VA.

And possibly best of all, I can have a DSN phone line on base housing — free calls to and from my husband when he’s on a ship! — AND the location is a much easier walking distance to Sasebo’s downtown. Last night I walked to a ramen shop for dinner (so! tasty!) and watched Japanese baseball (no commericals!).

More good news — again, I assume since we whiled away our time between duty stations, our first shipment called Unaccompanied Baggage (UB) — things like our dishes, silverware, pots and pans, clothes, vacuum cleaner, and a few other things — will arrive tomorrow!

WOOT! I JUST LOOKED AT THE LIST I MADE AND OUR WII IS IN THAT SHIPMENT!

At last! A time and a place to settle down!

If I travel all my life and I never get to stop and settle down
Long as I have you by my side, there’s a roof above and good walls all around…
I need you in my house, ‘cause you’re my home

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