Playing the swap card

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This was published 14 years ago

Playing the swap card

Real life ... Takeshita Dori in the shopping district Harajuku teems with pedestrians.

Real life ... Takeshita Dori in the shopping district Harajuku teems with pedestrians.Credit: Rachel Lewis/Lonely Planet

As any home-exchanger will tell you, it takes a leap of faith to take up residence in a foreigner's house. Plus, even before you get there, you board a plane with the uneasy knowledge that complete strangers are simultaneously making their way to your place. This house-country-life swap adventure may well prove to be cheap but will it be cheerful?

I have to admit that, as a first-timer, I was never very confident that all would be well on my recent Japanese home-exchange holiday with my husband and our two sons. Friends who'd done "the swap" in France, Spain and Hawaii had all assured me to the contrary. But it wasn't until I opened the door of a sleek, silver-tiled, four-storey concrete building and felt the warmth of central heating left on for our benefit (it was winter) that I knew everything was going to be all right.

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With a facade masquerading as a cool nightclub, the likes of which could have only existed in urban Tokyo, our modern exchange house thankfully met all my expectations. This was due in large part to the numerous emails and Skype calls between myself and our exchange partners in Tokyo. Via our laptops, we "met" each other, took virtual tours of the homes we would exchange and even checked out each other's children.

We also filled out a simple contract (a download sample can be found on various home exchange sites), detailing house rules, inclusions, expectations and what was off limits in our respective homes. In Tokyo, we were to leave shoes at the front door, water plants and leave the well-stocked larder alone. Our sons, however, had full use of a cavernous basement filled with children's toys and, when we arrived, there were snacks, bread, drinks and a basket full of maps and brochures of "family things to do" in Tokyo left out for us. For our part, we had few requirements for our newly renovated inner-city worker's cottage, but set out the same sort of welcome basket, and also left boogie boards and gifts for our guests' children. Both houses, I am pleased and proud to say, were as clean and as uncluttered as five-star hotels.

The internet has made home exchange relatively straightforward because of the numerous websites devoted to the procedure, however, only some offer swaps in Japan (see below). These are usually with Japanese who have relationships with Westerners, or foreigners themselves.

In our case, six degrees of separation provided contact with an American family on an expat package living in Tokyo's well-to-do Minami Azabu. Having lived in Japan some years ago, I knew this suburb was well located and had the advantage of various Western supermarkets (if my children proved to be finicky eaters) servicing the staff of the embassies and expat households prevalent in the area.

It was also halfway between Roppongi and Hiroo subway stations, which meant our family could quickly get to the tourist hot spots on my list of things to do during our two-week stay; Tsukiji fish markets, Akihabara Electric Town, the Ginza, Sensoji temple, the sumo stadium at Ryogoku and it was in walking distance to the fashion hubs of Aoyama and Harajuku. But I would have been happy just about anywhere in Tokyo - the greater metropolitan area is universally safe, public transport is clean and efficient, and cheap and cheerful restaurants are everywhere. Queenslander Laura Sait had the opportunity to be more deeply embedded within the metropolis when she lined up a home exchange in a typical Japanese neighbourhood earlier this year. She came to see it as an opportunity to meet locals and live in a relatively non-touristy suburb of Tokyo, even though Sait was initially only interested in house-swapping to save money.

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With five in her family, Sait had found Tokyo hotel accommodation costs prohibitive, so she searched online and easily found a number of Japanese houses up for exchange. She registered her family's five-bedroom Noosa home with swimming pool, sauna, tennis court and four-wheel-drive and in quick response, she secured two home exchanges. These she took consecutively, in quite different parts of the city. "The first was an apartment on the Sumida River, near Tamachi Station," Sait says. "It had beautiful views, was modern and spacious."

The family's second exchange brought them closer to the local cultural experience Sait says they would not have had if they had stayed at one of the many Western hotels, such as those in Shinjuku or the Ginza. "Our next house had futon beds and sliding paper doors with a beautiful Japanese garden. It was in Mejiro, a traditional neighbourhood in north-west Tokyo."

Whether in Mejiro or Minami Azabu, a house exchange in Japan is a particularly different encounter to that experienced by many tourists, mostly accommodated in gleaming high-rise hotel towers in upmarket shopping districts. As my family and I walked through narrow back lanes to our home at the end of each day, we passed by much of what makes Japan so culturally different to our own neighbourhood in Sydney: the police box, the sento bathhouse, the automated bus stop, the banks of vending machines, the local shrine.

Yet within days, all this became strangely familiar ... and I felt more invited guest than casual tourist.

TRIP NOTES

exchangezones.com

homeexchange.jp

THE GOOD AND BAD OF EXCHANGING HOMES

PROS

Living outside tourist zones.

Saving money.

Meeting local Japanese neighbours and vendors.

Living in a different architectural style.

Cooking meals at home, especially for children.

Families can all be together rather than split up in hotel rooms.

Couples have privacy.

CONS

Time taken to develop trust with exchange partner.

Ensuring careful preparation of the

contractual document.

Intensive cleaning of your house and rearrangement of storage areas.

Preparing some tourist information for your guests.

Housekeeping of exchange house during and before departure, for example, fresh linen, garbage.

Risk of loss, damage and theft.

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