With the potential tenant having made her decision after much careful deliberation, a real estate agent in Tokyo calls a property management company to check whether the 30-square-meter apartment in western Tokyo is vacant.
"Would the landlord mind having a foreign tenant?" the agent asks, and after a brief conversation, he looks across at the house-hunter, frowns sympathetically and crosses his fingers to form an X before hanging up. "Gaikokujin dame" ("No foreigners"), he explains, is the reason for the denial.
Nearly 40 percent of foreign residents who have looked for housing within their past five years in Japan have been through this soul-destroying experience of rejection, according to a recent Justice Ministry survey of non-Japanese living in the country.