About
About Shin Kimura Ke
Shin Kimura Ke (“the new Kimura house”) is our family — plus Tempo, our British Shorthair — living in a 50-year-old danchi in Tachikawa, Tokyo. A danchi is one of those big public apartment complexes built all over Japan in the ’60s and ’70s.
A home that does the chores for you
When we went house hunting, nothing fit what we wanted. We both worked and wanted fewer chores, so I figured: why not just build it myself? I rebuilt an old danchi unit with IoT gear from the ground up.
The idea was simple: “a home where the house does the chores, so the family gets more time together.” I deliberately picked gadgets that do one or two things well — the kind of stuff you actually end up using every day.
What we’ve done so far
- 2018: Launched “bento,” a renovation brand that rebuilds old danchi units with IoT, and opened a model room
- 2019: Featured in Japan’s official White Paper on Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism as an example of a new way of living
- 2021: Our home was featured on Nippon TV’s “Futtō Word 10” smart home episode (I also supervised the segment)
- As a board member of our danchi’s management association, pushed to automate the lawns with 20 robot mowers
Who writes this
Hidenori Kimura — tech journalist and part-time house-husband. I studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music, and I also compose music and shoot photos and video. I write gadget reviews for Japanese outlets like BCN+R, GIZMODO Japan, and Yahoo! News Japan Expert. I’ve been a house-husband (alongside my day job) since 2016.
Here, I write about tech in everyday life — as a family, not as a reviewer for a magazine.