Apr 5, 2021 My wife and I began fantasizing about our dream home the day we moved into our first Tokyo apartment. That place was meant to be a temporary solution until we found “something better” but, five years later, we still hadn’t found anything because we hadn’t really been looking. One day, our 6-year-old daughter, Hana, started crying, without any obvious trigger: “I want to go back to grandma’s and grandpa’s NICE place,” she whined. That particular place would be in Germany. Apparently, it was time to speed up our moving plans. Everybody around us was buying houses, but owning wasn’t for us. With that kind of total freedom comes sole responsibility. We didn’t want to pick up all the pieces all on our own come next typhoon season.