Rental apartment

If you stay in Japan for a certain period on business or some pleasures, it’s quite usual to rent apartments. To find your living places, you may ask the staff of your companies or close friends in Japan to arrange troublesome transactions for rental apartments. Fortunately if you can secure temporal space to live in Japan with those helps, you will be satisfied for the present regardless of the rooms are small or not. Since you know your rooms are rental, you must be using them with the greatest possible cares at least not to give any damages to the rooms.

When it comes to money, you may complain about your rental rooms. You have to pay not only one of the most expensive rents in the world, but also deposits or even key money calculated on the rents. Particularly when you pay them at your own expense, it's natural to think of accepting small apartments. During you are living in the apartments, you are not fully satisfied with the rooms. These complaints, however, are somehow acceptable because you are notified in advance or brace for some of the unsatisfactions before living there. The complaints in apartments are not only those. You might face more serious and sometimes inconvincible troubles when you leave apartments to go back to your countries or move to another place.

Nowadays there have been a lot of troubles when you cancel the rental contracts with apartment owners. Many of the troubles are that tenants are claimed for repairing costs you don't have to pay even though you use them carefully. The claims are automatically subtracted from your deposits you pay in advance before you enter the rooms. As a result, this fact does not come to light as far as claims are small. In some cases, however, the claims amount to so much that only the deposits can't cover. It's not until you receive the unreasonable bills that you find ripping off.

The background behind it is that apartment owners want to remodel the rooms as clean as possible within limited budgets to catch new tenants. It's likely that the cutthroat competition among owners looking for tenants makes them excessive behaviors.

According to the civil code ruling the contracts between tenants and owners, it’s obligatory for tenants to return to the original state. Tenants should restore the damages caused by their own willfulness or negligence. This doesn’t mean you have to restore your rental rooms perfectly as they were when you rent. Namely you don’t have to take responsibility for natural wear and tear. Everyday understands that properties deteriorate somehow over time from normal use. Despite of such an act, contracts are private matters. You take the greatest cares about special clauses in rental contracts that are given priority to over existing laws. It's important to confirm which side takes responsibility for the restoring costs when tenants leave apartments.

Here are the examples of restoring costs compiled by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in each case as below.

<Examples of restoring costs>

1.Tenant’s charges

2.Owner’s charges