TOKYO -- Olivia Burrell, a 32-year-old Canadian gospel singer, was fed up with living in Lilliputian studio apartments in Tokyo where she could see (and smell) her kitchen from her bed.

Three months ago, she took the plunge and moved in with five Japanese women living in a spacious 6-bedroom apartment in Harajuku, a buzzy neighborhood in the city center.

But, so far, her roommate experience hasn't quite been the Japanese version of "Friends" she had envisioned. Ms. Burrell walked into the kitchen one evening to find no fewer than eight separate bottles of dishwashing liquid on the kitchen counter, all neatly lined up and labeled with their owners' names.

"My roommates are neat and very courteous," says Ms. Burrell, who has lived in Japan for seven years and who had lived with roommates in Canada. "But this whole concept is new here, and people don't naturally want to share things as much."

Japan has no real tradition of roommates: People have preferred to live in their own tiny places. Now, fed up with a dearth of reasonably priced apartments in desirable Tokyo neighborhoods, a growing number of relatively affluent women in their 20s and 30s have started to create demand for a radical new segment of the Japanese real-estate market: apartments to share.