Finding a house

I speak Japanese and that made finding a place much easier in the end, but I looked at English language options first. I looked on Craigslist and Kansai Flea market as well as other classifieds, but most places are in Osaka and most are for smaller places. There were some guest houses as well, but I never considered them seriously. I ended up looking at a few there, but nothing I felt would work for our situation. We could have made some work, but it would have been less than ideal. I expanded my search to Japanese options. One option was the "monthly mansion." These are furnished places rented by the month. They are nice in that you don't need to buy anything, but they are expensive. In the end we decided it was cheaper to go with a regular place even with all the renting costs and buying furniture. Yahoo fudosanya was a good place to look for places to rent but you still need to go through an agent. I recommend that you do your research on agents. The Flat-A agency seemed good and they showed me several places, but a place I found on yahoo fudosanya was held by Choei, so I went to them. It turns out that I might have also been able to have Flat-A show me even something held by other agencies. Choei was helpful, but they charged a good deal more with their various fees. With all the fees it was much more expensive than I expected. I ended up needing about 450,000 yen to get started with the house. Still we are pleased with it and everything worked out in the end.