How many square metres ¥120,000 buys, by neighbourhood

Neighbourhood guides are almost always sorted by liveability. Good shops, safe streets, close to the station. If you commute somewhere every morning, that is the right sort.

Spend most of the day inside the room and the axis changes. With no commute, distance from the station is worth less, and whether there is a second room is worth a great deal more. That trade is mostly settled at the moment you pick an area, which is why it deserves thinking about first.

The listings, sorted by space per yen

Here are the current listings ranked by rent plus monthly fee, divided by floor area. Higher up the table means more space for the same money.

	Per sqm	Examples
Central, name-brand	¥7,300–8,600	Ginza 8,605 / Akasaka 8,531 / Hiroo 8,050 / Shinagawa 7,734 / Daikanyama 7,374
Around the Yamanote edge	¥4,800–6,400	Ebisu 6,343 / Azabu-juban 5,809 / Meguro 5,298 / Hongo 5,033 / Jiyugaoka 4,983 / Sasazuka 4,854
Out toward the ring roads	¥3,000–4,700	Ichigaya 4,497 / Nishidai 4,156 / Senkawa 4,029 / Musashi-Koganei 3,790 / Fuchu 3,351 / Mejirodai 3,030
Beyond that	¥1,100–2,900	Kyodo 2,922 / Oji 2,212 / Adachi 2,066 / Kitami 2,037 / Sagamihara 1,512 / Osaka 1,136

There is only one way to use this table: do not read down it, read across it at your own budget.

Two real listings make the point. Daikanyama at ¥130,000 all in gives you 17.63 sqm. Nishidai at ¥132,000 gives you 31.76 sqm. Nearly identical money, 1.8 times the floor area.

You can absolutely work in 17.63 sqm — that room is listed here, and it is a good one that clears office use. But 17.63 sqm means the place you sleep and the place you work are the same single room. For a month that is nothing. At a year it is something. The only real question is whether you make that call before choosing the area or after.

Famous place names are less reliable than they look

Something the sorting exposed: the two Azabu-juban rooms come in cheaper per square metre than the Daikanyama one — ¥4,850 and ¥5,809 against ¥7,374.

The reason is mundane. The building matters more than the place name. A small older building and a large new one price differently on the same street. “Famous area, therefore expensive” and “quiet area, therefore cheap” both fall apart as soon as you compare actual rooms.

That lesson came from scouting buildings in person, and it generalises: a well-known building does not imply a good room in it. The address and the apartment are two separate questions.

Rooms that permit office use cannot be found by area

The condition people working from home most want to know — can clients visit, will company registration go through — scatters almost independently of neighbourhood character.

Seventeen of the currently listed rooms permit office use. They are spread across Chuo, Chiyoda, Minato, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Meguro, Setagaya, Nakano, Kita, Itabashi and Katsushika, plus Mitaka and Fuchu. Central and peripheral wards in roughly equal measure. Only one of them clears company registration as well.

No map or station filter will find this. It is decided property by property, by the landlord and the managing company, and it appears nowhere except the terms box on the listing sheet. Which means the search order inverts: rather than narrowing by area and then checking conditions, narrow by condition and then look at where the survivors happen to be.

What to settle before picking an area

Working from home, the order goes like this.

1. One room or two. This decides your budget and your area at the same time
2. Is there a wall you can put a desk against. Count it on the floor plan, not the photos, subtracting windows and storage
3. How many sides get light. Two-sided light genuinely matters if you are home all day and barely registers if you are out from morning to night

Those three are unpacked further in What “SOHO” means in Japanese rental listings.

The figures are current as of listing and terms do change. Talk to us before making a decision on any specific room.

If you would rather fix the budget and then see what it buys, start with the rooms below. They sit in different bands of the table, so the difference an area makes shows up directly.