Hi all, here I am again! While I haven’t got a huge amount to talk about right now, I thought I’d report back on the BIG meeting and our rubbish situation.

Firstly, the weather continues to remain warm, with the occasional day where the rain ‘periodically stops’. We also now have the first typhoon for the season heading towards us, although it is technically number 5 for the season. It appears it is going to weaken quite a bit before it sweeps up the east coast, so may not impact us much at all.

Now, onto the report, after that brief interlude. What a fizzer!!!! Of the possible 60 households in our community group, we had just two people attend the meeting – the chair of the community group and our neighbour from across the road! Having printed 30 copies of ye olde rules of the minshuku and the booking confirmation email (which has some details in it that we added about not making too much noise when arriving here after hours) and bought enough drinks and paper cups for 50 people, and being told about a terrible situation a few years ago when a minpaku was closed down due to complaints from our neighbours, it really was almost comical – except it was very serious.

Anyway, we stuck to the assigned agenda and went through our introductions (even though we had met both people before), gave answers for all of the questions posed by the chair in the meeting with our scrivener and, lastly, asked for any further questions (which turned out to be more comments than questions). On our side of the room there were six people, on the other, just the two. In any case, it seems the approval was (implicitly) given for us to go ahead with the application – we just hope the authorities don’t quibble over the lack of participants!

The last item we had to deal with before the fully completed hotel licence application could be lodged with the authorities was the issue of our rubbish. The new rules require all establishments to have a contract in place with a duly registered rubbish collector, so as not to unduly burden the local rubbish collection. To be honest, we suspect this is more about adding hurdles to those who have been advertising via Airbnb than anything else.

Nevertheless, after a few refusals due to the size of trucks vs the size of our road, Takako found a company that seemed suitable. So, on Wednesday just past, a very nice woman came to our humble abode to discuss the possibility of her company taking our rubbish. She was, in fact, the owner of the company and arrived in a very small tip truck (slightly bigger than a Tonka truck). We liked her immediately and decided she was a perfect fit for us, not just our road.

So we have now found the final piece to our puzzle, turns out it was on the bridge over the Kamo river on the way to where we buy our pet supplies…

(sorry, when we saw this piece of puzzle on the ground this week, it was such an obvious fit… )

Moving right along, as far as we know the application has now been submitted. We have been told it could take up to two months instead of the usual one month, but we are hoping that the big glut of applications is now clearing, since the deadline for those operating through Airbnb to be legally licenced is 15 June. If they continue to operate outside the system after that time they can be fined and quite a significant amount, I might add.

On that note, we saw an article in The Japan Times the other day which said that around 80% of listings for Japan have disappeared as Airbnb prepares to implement the new rules which require all listings to be appropriately licenced. Apparently the numbers have dropped from approximately 62,000 to about 13,000. On checking the listings for Kyoto today, there are now just over 300. We can only hope this will help boost our numbers, when we finally have a licence.

That’s all for now, but there will be a lot more next time as we have two festivals to attend this week, which I am looking forward to. Also, we are having some of our neighbours over for brunch tomorrow (a new concept here), which should be fun. These are the people we met during the Kiln Matsuri who were keen to try our cooking and who also helped us with some information for our hotel licence.

It’s hydrangea (ajisai in Japanese) time here now, so here’s a few parting shots…!

Cheers!!!

PS: A few people asked about the insect in my last post; it’s a Japanese Giant Hornet, it is venomous and around 40 people die each year after being stung…

When you have no land for lawn, you put it where you can!