Well, for me it was a rather spontaneous move.

I had been living in Osaka for about a year and a half year while working at Nova in the multimedia center there. It was a pretty good job, but I was getting bored of it, so I quit.

After that I was unemployed for about a month, just hanging around and not trying very hard to get job. I liked Osaka, but I felt like I had been everywhere and done everything the city had to offer (I'm sure that's not true though). Then, I started thinking maybe I should move and try out somewhere else in Japan. I thought about Tokyo, but it just seemed like a bigger Osaka. Finally I thought, why not Okinawa, it's like Florida (where I'm from) and it's a little more rural than Osaka, so I can swim and fish and do other outdoor things the city doesn't really offer.

Well, I talked to my girlfriend about the idea and she was all for it. We had been to Okinawa on vacation once before and really enjoyed it, so I bought 2 tickets the next day and starting looking for an apartment.

We found a decent apartment, a 2DK for 44,000 yen a month with no key money or deposit, in Naha City, and only a few weeks later, on April 20th, we were in a plane heading for Okinawa. When we got here it was really hot and we had no bicycles and didn't know our way around the city, so it was often quite difficult and exhausting to get around. Then it started to rain... and rain... and rain... I had been throw the rainy season in Osaka before, but this was something else, truly a monsoon season. It turned our to be one of the heaviest rainy seasons in recent years. The rainfall amount was double the normal average.

It was fun hanging out in Okinawa, even during the rainy season, but neither of us had jobs and we couldn't keep living like that. While the Okinawan job market was notoriously difficult to get into for English teachers, I had seen a few 'success stories' on the internet, so that gave me some confidence. After sending out a few resumes and getting a few fewer replies, I had an interview at a small English school near my house. Lucky, I got the job and started working on June 1st.

Since then it's been a rather rough ride. I took a pay cut coming to Okinawa, but I had borrowed money to get here. In addition, my taxes (based on my Osaka salary) were pretty high, so it was hard to pay all my bills and my taxes, etc. It's been about nine months now though, since I came to Okinawa, and I'm finally able to eke out a lifestyle that I enjoy. I have a rent-a-lease car and enough disposable income to enjoy the weekends.

I guess that's my story in a nutshell.

John

Don't have much time to write now, but I'll give it a shot.

Japanese apartments are often called a 1, 2, or 3 followed by (L,D,K). Basically the first number is the number of bedrooms. L=Living, D=Dining, K=Kitchen. A 1K is a one bedroom apartment with probably a very small kitchen. A 1DK gets a little bigger, and finally a 1LDK has one bedroom and then another big room.

The LDK part isn't 3 separate rooms usually though. It depends on the size of the kitchen/dining/living room.

Here's my rough estimate of the size of each room class.
K=1-3 mats (1 mat a little less than 2 square meters)
DK=4-10 mats
LDK 11 mats +

So my apartment is 2 6 mat bedrooms and an 8 mat DK, and a bathroom.

Sorry I can't be more specific,

John