The beginning

25 Jul 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic reached the world my company asked everybody to work from home on March 3. Few days later our badges got deactivated and going to do office required a good reason and pre-approval. Originally we all hoped that this will be a temporary situation and we will be back in the office in a few months, but as the situation was getting worse, those hopes quickly perished. Later in the spring we were told that no one will be required to go back to the office before the end of 2020. Some offices might reopen, but we’ll have the option to work from home until December 31.

Mid June I read an article about people moving to rural areas across Japan as new lifestyles emerge due to virus. Specifically the article talked about the service called ADDress, which allows users to reside in property across Japan for a fixed fee. I really liked the idea of moving around Japan, and thought that I’ll give it a shot in 2021. Why not earlier? Well, I was still waiting to see if my company would allow permanently working from home, and at this point I was also still trying to figure out things with my wife (we moved to Japan together in July 2019, had some issues, she moved back to Hungary in January 2020).

Then in late July things changed. My company extended the working from home possibility until July 2021. This also implied that productivity was not impacted significantly by working from home, which makes it likely that we will have some working from home options even after that date. Discussions with my wife also made it clear that she is unlikely to return to Japan anytime soon. These removed all reasons to wait. Meanwhile I had a great bike tour to Nikko, and realized how much I like the countryside: being close to nature and the friendly people. Overall by the end of July I decided to give up my Tokyo apartment and signup for ADDress.

Getting information on ADDress turned out to be rather tricky simply due to it’s name. In Japanese I had success searching for ADDress 住み放題 meaning ADDress all-you-can-live, but that only brought up Japanese results. I would be very happy to read a foreigner’s blog about using the service, but even if it exists, I failed to find it so far.