Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Most Japanese will say “bye-bye” when they depart; it’s one of those cutesy english things that has crept into the ritual. Baibai actually means “buy and sell”. I know that because I’ve bought houses and the word comes up all the time and annoys me with its inability to stick in my brain next to it’s meaning. I had to look it up again.

Baibai is what I’ve begun again this morning. I asked my friend to ask his friend the real estate agent to come and talk about putting my house on the market. My friend has told me that I stand to be sued for bankruptcy pretty soon if I don’t. So my friend has called his friend and his friend has come and made photocopies of the fat envelope of documents I can’t read about my house. He says that unlike America (and probably Australia), a loan default isn’t going to result in my having to move to a trailer park. Not for a while anyway.

Here companies are a little less bureacratic about things. People usually have families, and families usually pay in the end, so it’s a system built over the sticky system of family responsibility. The idea that eventually I should come up with the money applies even in my case, and so what I have to do is call the insurance company man responsible for my loan, and tell him that my friend the real estate agent is now working to sell the house. The house is the reason I took the loan, and my solution to the problem will be to sell that house and repay that loan. That’s all good. But how much is the house worth?

In matters of real estate I am still Australian down to the last floorboard. I figure that I’ve put a lot of money into the house. Done a lot of work on the house. It has a lifestyle. Sadly this does not have a translation into Japanese; lifestyle rarely sells houses unless it is rich and famous lifestyle. For the rest of us it is about units of land. Mr Real Estate Agent feels that we could get what I paid to buy it. I want to double that to cover what I really paid for it. I understand that I am being foolish, I want to do it anyway. Mr Real Estate Agent thinks I will lose the people who first glance at the for-sale story. He is right.

It’s an interesting thing for me. I’ve been daydreaming my way through real estate sites for Kyoto. Should I move back there into a steamy shoebox in the warm South? Or stay here in the arctic and battle on. In Kyoto there are now many internet sites for real estate that look like they’re selling cleaning products for modern young couples with one small child and a lot of allergies. It’s a sign that Kyoto is being gentrified, in its own peculiar way. Nothing like that here in Hakodate – here we have the most sensible real estate of a whole country of sensible real estate.

You don’t sell old houses; there are rarely advertisments for houses over 40 years. You sell the land that those houses sit on, with the price reduced to allow for demolition, and they are listed under “Land”.  You can’t get a loan to buy an old house. Land; yes. Old houses, no. If you’re young you won’t even get a loan for the land. That’s what families are for. I suspect that loans might secretly be calculated by the number of children you have in school and parents you have in nursing homes – no risk of you voluntarily leaving your job then.

I have locked into a small security. Probably the insurance company will now wait for me to find a solution to their problem. I am glad to have found the way to solve their problem. Now I just have to find a solution to my problem, which it seems is not going to be solved alongside theirs. If this works I will be debt-free, but penniless and homeless. Even then it will be a trailer park because they will want a deposit. Then I guess it will be – Matsumae.