The Ogura Mansion: Water...it's all about water!

We've had an interesting couple of weeks with the house, but before I tell you the tale of...not 'woe'...more like 'being poked in the eye with a blunt stick', I'll have to give you some background. At any rate, I did actually promise some of you this background story anyway, so here goes...

The land that we bought is in an area that is a little different from the rest of Beppu City. To cut a long story short, the family company that originally developed it is not...how do I put it...a fully adherent body to policies outside of their own. If you know what I mean. As a result, Beppu City - the bureaucratic beast - will not have anything to do with the area (despite still loving our tax dollars). Sure, they pick up the garbage, this is true, but the roads, street lights, all of that stuff? Nope. The upside is that we bought the land waaaaay cheaper than we would have in other parts of the city. The downside? Well, the roads are the big issue. And what's under them.

Technically, a third of the road in front of our house is owned by us. Another third is owned by the land opposite, and the bit in the middle is owned by the family developer company. As well as all of the water pipes that run underneath it. Residents in the area have tried to give their parcel of road back to Beppu City many time, but it's impossible because 1. Beppu City won't take them (apparently) and 2. all of the water being supplied to the houses in the area comes from the developers, not Beppu City. If the roads went back the the City, then so would the water, and their income.

We didn't walk into this situation blind or anything - we knew that we would have to pay them for water connection, and also get our water supply from them. But! Just before we bought the land, they asked us to pay 800,000 yen (around AUD9,300), telling us that if we paid before April of that year (the end of the financial year in Japan), it would stay at that price, but if not it would go up to 1 million yen (AU$11,730)! Well, as we hadn't actually bought the land yet, we refused to pay, so the kind real estate agent paid them a portion of the sum, and when we bought the land, we paid them as part of the land deal, with the rest to follow when we started building. This was all good and well until last week.

Now, we have a delicate situation on our hands here: on the one hand, we don't want to be pushovers, and on the other, we don't want to ever get on the bad side of this family company, so when they told us we would have to pay almost 1 million yen to get the water connected, we had to tread carefully. They quite like Kaoru, which is great, and he is very good at being diplomatic (so I hear...ha ha), so in the end we managed to get them to shave off some of the extra they were charging. We still have to pay a bit more, but it's not as bad as we thought it might be. Kaoru (weeping) paid them the money last Friday, so now we're good to go with water connection.

And then came water of a different kind. The rainy season.

The rainy season in Japan lasts for around 2-3 weeks, and when it's over, the heat of summer usually kicks in. We had a day or two of almost sunny weather earlier this week, and some more work was done on the foundations, preparing it for the concrete that will be laid as soon as the rain buggers off. Below are the latest photos.

On the 15th July we are hopefully having our next ceremony, which is throwing mochi (sticky rice cakes) into the frame of the house. I'll make sure there's loads of pics of that! In the meantime, I hope that this little tale has enlightened you to some of the delicate diplomatic intricacies needed when building in Japan!