Thierry Richards leads an organization called Tokyo Marunouchi Partnership, which works with businesspeople near to Tokyo Station in the Marunouchi area. Thierry is also completing a PhD on the famous Japanese social critic and thought leader Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) at Kyoto University. Thierry was born and raised in the UK. His father was from Antigua in the Caribbean and his mother from Ireland, but they met in the UK and so Thierry was born and raised in the UK. Thierry and his wife came to live in Tokyo in 2010 and now have three children who have all been born and raised here in Tokyo.
A Highly Satisfactory Earthquake-Resistant High-Rise Apartment
My wife and I came to Japan from the UK at the end of 2010. When we first moved to Tokyo, we knew very little about where would be good to live. We had very little experience of Tokyo, other than a few summers in Japan, and another week in the Spring of 2010 where we looked at a few areas to get a feel for the city.
However, we had some friends who would be our supervisors for the first stages of our job, and so, knowing nothing, we simply chose to live near to the family who would be supervising us for these first years. They lived in Kachidoki, in an apartment building called the Tokyo Towers, which consists of two apartment buildings, each of 58 floors. And so we moved into the same apartment building as them on the 11th floor.
It was a good apartment for us to begin life in Tokyo, as a couple with no children. It was a 2LDK apartment, about 70 square metres in size. We were in the apartment for the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, and we were amazed at the remarkable engineering of the apartment buildings. The force of the earthquake was dissipated by the buildings swaying a little amount for a long period of time in order to absorb the shock. Someone once explained the engineering of this to me, and I was astounded at the technical innovations which earthquakes have necessitated in Japan. With us being on the 11th floor of a 58-floor building, our apartment shook and then swayed, but not too much.
Then, later than year, our first child was born half a year after moving into the apartment in the summer of 2011. We put our baby in the second room in the apartment. And this alerted us to one aspect, which could be improved: the second bedroom was right next to the living room, only separated by one door. This ended up meaning that we did not feel comfortable watching television or being loud in the living room once our baby was asleep in her room for the night. So, we would watch TV on our computer in our bedroom in the evenings, rather than using the living room.
The first two years of life in Japan involved full-time language study for me, before beginning work full-time. Then, towards the end of our third year of life in Tokyo, my wife’s parents very kindly and generously gave us some money, which meant that we were able to buy an apartment, without requiring a loan. It felt like a wonderful kindness and a great help to get us onto the property ladder. So, we chose an apartment in the same Tokyo Towers apartment complex, but the adjacent building, Sea Tower. We have lived there for ten years now, and in that time we have been blessed with two more children.
