Falsely Advertised Tokyo Homestay
Post date: 14-Dec-2009 10:33:45
During our trip around the world for the past 5 months we have stayed with many families all over Europe and Asia. Applying for a homestay has been very challenging in some countries. In other countries, we received email replies right away saying either that we could or could not stay with them.
Japan turned out to be the most difficult country to find a homestay in. Right up until the last minute we were emailing dozens of people asking if we could stay with their family for a week or two while we were in both Osaka and Tokyo.
Now, when I think of a homestay, I think of where I'll be sleeping, who I'll be sharing the house with, and I imagine what the daily routine will be like, cooking and cleaning and the such. During my travels, I have experienced both paying for a homestay and having the homestay offered for free (a hospitality stay). By and far, the people I have had hospitality stays with have developed into friendships more that the homestays. Never the less, homestays have been great fun, too.
What I hadn't, up until my time in Tokyo, experienced was a homestay where I didn't actually stay with a family of that country. In my experience, when you do a homestay, you live with a family of some sort, and you sleep in the guest room/basement/spare office/ect. This all changed when I met Akihide Fukumoto. I'm giving his name because I do not want anyone else to take him up on his homestay offer until they know what they are getting in to.
To begin with, he kindly offered to meet us at the Tokyo train station to pick us up when we arrived from Osaka on the Shinkansen. This was great news for us, because Tokyo is kinda a big city. He was no where to be found when we departed, though. We waited around for an hour before we began to look for a pay phone to call him. When I finally reached him, Akihide had trouble remembering who we were and why I was troubling him at all. After some explanations, he told us to wait where we were and he would be right there to pick us up. Excellent, the matter was all worked out.
Exactly one more hour later, Mr Fukumoto shows up. Giving us one brief look, he begins to explain which trains we need to take to get to the house we're staying at. Now there's two very subtle points I want to touch on here. First, he's not in fact picking us up at all, he is directing us to the trains and moving us along. Second, he's not actually taking us to his house where his family lives, we were given an option of which house we could go to and he made it clear that neither of which were in fact houses that Japanese people lived. We could have stayed in the building he lives in, but he only has one key and we would have to call him to enter or exit the building and well we've seen how reliable it is to get a hold of him.
For the sake of time, I'll skip past the next hour of him telling us to walk to X and then him driving to meet us there, then telling us to walk to Y and him driving there again to meet us. I'll also only briefly touch on his explanation that even though we dragged our luggage all over the city for a few hours, we were "forbidden" to enter the house until we paid him immediately. I'm going to jump right into the homestay and all that it had to offer.
Without dragging this on forever with pepperings of attitude that tend to follow my explainations, I'll list out what exactly we experienced at Akihide Fukumoto's homestay in Tokyo:
- First off, it's not a homestay at all. It's a flop house where 10 separate people live in cramped conditions and at exorbitant prices. We were all renting rooms and sharing one kitchen, bathroom, shower and washing machine.
- There were constant renovations going on. Many times at midnight and later, yes later than midnight on some nights.
- Extremely small rooms 5' by 10'. Room for some padding on the floor and a small mini fridge.
- He attempted to sneak into our room to see if the fire alarm was still working claiming it was an emergency.
- He attempted to kick us out of the bathroom at midnight so that he could do some more repairs on the shower.
- The house is very dirty, it's dusty everywhere in the hallways and entry way, the kitchen is disgusting, there's misc boxes of stuff lying all over the place.
- There's a lot of dust in the house....a LOT, to the point of affecting our health and breathing while we were there.
- And for some reason, whenever he stopped by, he insisted on turning our heat off.
During the time leading up to our arrival in Tokyo, Mr. Akihide Fukumoto set off some alarm bells with me, but he was one of the few people who even replied to us, so we had little choice but to go with him. He responded to very few of my emails and when ever I asked any questions about him or his family, he never replied back with any answers. He never did give us the address of the place we stayed at, I only finally found the address out (to tell taxi drivers) by looking on Google Maps when I got there...very weird that he refused to tell us the address when we were staying there.
Mr. Akihide Fukumoto himself is a dishonest and untrusting person, full of deceit and lacking in any form of respect. But, his character is not what I'm discussing here, so I'll stick to just explaining his falsely advertised homestay in Tokyo.
So let's get one thing perfectly straight about Akihide Fukumoto's homestay in Tokyo. It's not a homestay. He is renting out a room. He's got many rooms, in fact. You're renting a room to sleep in and that's all. All available space in the house has been converted into rooms to rent out.
He has two listings that I can see on the internet. One at homestayhub.com and another at homestayweb.com (where we found him). If you are looking for a homestay in Tokyo, I suggest looking elsewhere because you are not going to find the Japanese family and the bonding experience that you're expecting. The reason I wrote this is to ensure that you have the correct expectations if you do decide to take up Akihide Fukumoto on his "homestay" offer.
Here's some photos of the place:
At least we had a window.
This is actually one of the cleaner days for the kitchen.
The washer is a dryer, too. Pretty cool.