Our home in Maborikaigan. It's a great house -- three bedrooms, tiny living room, big kitchen, 2 bathrooms...

The toilets have heated seats, which is kinda weird -- makes you feel like a really fat person spent a really long time on the pot just before you...but given how cold it gets in the winter (insulation is apparently untranslatable and/or unheard of here) you grow to just love it! Toilets also have bidet and other functions. There's a little nozzle that protrudes out from the bowl (kind of like the frother nozzle on a cappucinno machine...and, more ominously, kind of like an anal probe. Let's just say that so far, have not been adventurous enough to try any of the many functions of our toilet.

House has a history behind it...is owned by the father of lead guitar player of a band called X-Japan (they broke up in the late 90s, but I think still exist in some altered form; in their heyday they were a kind of hard core glam rock band--big hair, big makeup, but also apparently strains of The Smiths...) Anyway, the lead guitar player (Hide--pronounced hiday) committed suicide in the late 90s (not in this house, though according to our neighbours, he did spend time here!). In life and even moreso in death he had/has a huge cult following...sort of an Elvis thing...rumours that he's not dead, etc. There's even a museum named after--and completely devoted to--him. (We went -- it was cool).