On a lighter note….I wanted to take a moment and tell you all how I’ve made the transition as easy as possible for myself and C and made our little apartment in Japan into a home. It takes time, but if you’re crafty this post will be for you! I love Pinterest, so feel free to follow me – I have several boards just for Japan.
First, before we even arrived in Japan, I shipped over a poster and some removable wall stickers for my son’s room of his favorite characters. I also brought a twin sheet set, which fits his Japanese futon, but in retrospect, too much trouble to be worth it…I don’t recommend it.
After we got to Japan, C and I went to Nitori (like a Japanese Ikea) and we bought new bedding; futon duvet, and duvet cover. I also purchased some shelves and things to give us much needed storage space in the kitchen. I made some cheap sofa pillows from felt shapes and basic pillow covers from Nitori as well. Felt is a great material – cheap, colorful and easy to work with. You can either just glue it onto the pillow cover with regular white glue or you can sew it on. I did both because I have a child and a cat running around and jumping on the sofa. You can get multi-packs or big rolls of felt at Daiso (￥100 store). Daiso is great for cheap ways to decorate your home. They have a lot of seasonal things as well.
As for artwork, I just printed out a bunch of images that I found on Pinterest and taped them to the wall. Nothing fancy, but they are colorful and fun. We ended up buying a printer/scanner, but you could easily take the images on a thumbdrive to the combini to print them out. We have added some of our own photos and artwork (mostly C’s drawings of pokemon) to the collage.
The only hard thing to find was good Christmas decorations. The best selection we found was at Nitori, though I’ve heard that IKEA and Costco are good as well – they just are not very close to us so we haven’t ever been there. We bought a 5ft tree at Nitori, but lights and ornaments (cheap plastic ones) were SO expensive!!! We hit the after Christmas sales in America while we were home for the holidays and shipped some lights back to use next Christmas. We also hosted a craft party where we made our own ornaments from felt, saltwater dough, origami, and other things. This year I plan on doing the same, it was really fun and everyone went home with a few ornaments made by others as well as their own. We also made cut paper snowflakes to hang in the windows and from the ceiling. Our elf on a shelf also followed us to Japan – what a clever elf! His name is Cramden, and C was so excited to see him on the first day of December. He had to call his grandma and grandpa in America that morning to tell them all about it. Luckily, it worked out with the time difference (and a little forewarning from myself) so they were able to answer the skype call at 5 pm! Little things make all the difference, especially keeping special traditions the same in both countries.
So my favorite places to find things are definitely Nitori and the ￥100 store, Pinterest is my favorite source of inspiration, there are so many things to try! Now just to find the time….
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