I thought I would miss the city more. The hum of trains. The clatter of small restaurants closing after midnight. But the truth is, I think I just got tired. Not all at once. More like water dripping, slowly wearing things down — the pace, the pressure, the polite pretending.
So one evening, I opened my laptop, searched something vague like “quiet towns near Tokyo with train access,” and hours later — I don’t even remember how exactly — I found myself on Chintai EST.
It didn’t look modern. Not in the slick way everything else does now. No pop-up chat windows, no overly processed property photos. Just listings. Neighborhoods I’d never heard of. Rent prices I hadn’t seen in ten years. It made me feel, strangely, less rushed.
I started browsing late at night. At first, casually. Then more deliberately. One property had a photo of the outside wall where ivy had grown around a window. It wasn’t fancy. But it looked peaceful. Lived in. And somehow, that made it feel more real than all the other sites that showed white walls and empty space and said “2DK, recently renovated.”
There’s something deeply reassuring about finding a place that doesn’t care about impressing you. I don’t need to be dazzled anymore. I just want a front door that I can open without holding my breath. A view of trees. Maybe a room where I can leave my books out and not have to clean them up right away.
The site let me search by station, by rent, even by distance to a grocery store. But more than that, it let me imagine — not a “dream home,” just a livable one. That’s a bigger deal than people think. Especially when you’re trying to begin again in the middle of your life.
I read this short piece once — I think it was on Nippon.com — about how more people in Japan are moving out of the cities, not because they failed, but because they want to live differently. That hit me. Maybe I’m one of them now.
The house I ended up applying for is small. Older. The tatami shows wear. But there’s a persimmon tree in the neighbor’s yard, and the landlord grows herbs in clay pots out front. I haven’t signed yet. Still waiting on paperwork. But I’ve already started picturing where the kettle will go. Where I might hang my grandmother’s cloth calendar.
Chintai EST didn’t change my life. But it reminded me that I was allowed to choose something smaller. Something slower. And that, actually, it might be better this way.
