To the Japanese, Tim Exley’s priorities are spot-on. One of his first tasks after buying a dilapidated farmhouse in the Chiba prefecture, about 60 miles east of Tokyo, was to build a huge wooden bathtub.

The Japanese like a good soak at the end of the working day and Exley’s bath is large enough for four people. It is made of pine and stands in the middle of a mud floor in a wooden shed that once served as a kitchen and bathroom for the nearby main house, much of which is about 100 years old.

Now that he has somewhere to relax in the evening, he is turning his attention to keeping racoons out of the roof and bamboo from breaking through the foundations, and staying warm this winter.

“I was out here visiting a friend a couple of years ago and he wanted to show me this old farmhouse that he called ‘the ghost house’,” says 42-year-old Exley, a freelance computer troubleshooter from Welton, near Lincoln. “Once I saw it, a lot of things drew me to the property. It’s in a bend in the river surrounded by bamboo groves, mulberry trees and rice paddies.

“You could hardly see up the drive for the tall grass that had grown and it was obvious that it needed an awful lot of work. It had been empty for about three years and was full of junk — the rats had been in — but it still had a nice feel to it and I knew it was the sort of place where I would be able to relax.”

He bought the house for £24,000 in February 2003, not bad considering the district of Kuwata, on the east coast of the peninsula, is within commuting distance. There are, however, complications that are common when buying property in Japan, Exley discovered. He does not own the 1,500sq m of land where the one-storey house stands or any of the six other outbuildings that make up the farm. Properties and land are divided among the family when the homeowner dies without a will — a common occurrence in Japan.

As a result, the land is owned by several individuals and — equally commonly — not all of them see eye to eye. Japanese law has very strong provisions to protect the owner of a house standing on somebody else’s land, however, and Exley expects to be able to buy the entire plot within a few years for about £60,000. By that time, he hopes to have turned the main house into the ideal weekend retreat. The genkan entrance, where everybody slips off their shoes, is tiled and has two steps up to the wooden floor. A veranda runs round two sides of the house, behind glass doors onto the garden. Sliding paper doors open into two rooms with tatami-mat floors.

Exley has kept one room in the Japanese style, but the second room has large armchairs and a sofa that are more comfortable for a westerner. The portraits and incense sticks of the family shrine, built into the wall of one of the rooms, have been replaced by a vase and contemporary pictures.

There are two large but dark bedrooms to the rear of the building, a family room and small kitchen with a gas stove, sink and cupboards. Another room is presently Exley’s working area but will eventually become a new kitchen.

“I’m enjoying doing the building work and even though I’ve had builders come round and offer to fix the house up, I’m learning more about the house by poking around myself,” he says. Those explorations in the house, outbuildings and garden have uncovered a bundle of pre-war bank notes, two overgrown greenhouses, two wells, frogs, snakes and wild vegetables, including bamboo shoots, rhubarb and ginger.

He recently spent £200 installing insulation in the roof and his next task is to insulate the floor, which is raised off the ground on pilings to allow cooler air to circulate in the hot and humid summers.

“After that, I’d like to replace the walls, which are wattle and daub tied with string to split bamboo and were put in when the place was rebuilt in the 1960s,” says Exley. “They’re old and where the straw and mud has come through, they cause a lot of dust. Unfortunately, it’s coming through in a lot of places because there was a pretty big earthquake here in the 1980s and that split some of the walls open. I’ve been here in an earthquake and it does wobble quite a lot.”

After 15 years in Japan, Exley is in no hurry to return to Britain to live and plans to invest in a small apartment in Tokyo to use during the week. But along with the bath, one of his earliest investments at the farm was satellite television. “As long as I can get BBC World and see that all’s well with the world, that’s just fine,” he says.

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