Week Two: So what's...like?

A couple of notes before I go too far into this week's update (which is actually last week's update and should have been posted two weeks ago, or something):

1. Please do not email me and tell me that I should call you right now. I only have access to the internet at work, for limited periods of time, and usually I leave the headset at home. Mostly, I am not sitting at my desk with my headset on clicking Refresh on my hotmail inbox to see if someone is going to email me to tell me that I can call them now. Assume that, if you send me any email, I will not read it for at least six to eight hours and when I do I will not be able to call you at that moment. If you would like to tell me a good time to call you, that's fine. I'm not upset or anything, but I don't want to give the impression that I am thinking, "Screw this guy, I just tried to call." I did buy some Skype credit, so I can call you on your phone now at 2.5 cents per minute.

2. Since I am new at all of this I am apt to interpret, mishear, and just make shit up for every new discovery. I will try to correct myself as time goes on, but for now understand that my knowledge is severely limited and I rely heavily on input from people who have only been here for a few years and admit that they still struggle to understand.

Living Things

David, an older South African (white) who is so nice I sometimes feel bad for being rotten, told me that the spring is four days of hot and five days of cold. I forget what it means, but I know the weather during the afternoon is warm enough for T-shirts and pants, by late afternoon the temperature has dropped precipitously and you have to have a jacket. I have been stuck out with a group of people on a couple of such occasions and am now amassing quite a collection of borrowed jackets and sweaters, all hanging by my door to be returned. You can never rely on a day to be consistent, as even the warm clear mornings can quickly give way to cold wind and rain.

On a particularly nice day I finally got to go to the city hall office of licensing to sign up for an Alien ID card, which is like a state ID card. You pretty much need it to do anything, rent movies, buy a cell phone, or get a bank account. The whole process was more or less the same as going to the DMV; a lot of sitting and waiting around for about 30 seconds of actual forms and talking with a worker. Apparently there is a lot of bureaucracy here. It takes a little over two weeks from when we signed up for it to be ready for us to pick up (that’s right, they don’t just mail it). Why we had to wait almost a week and a half to sign up for one has never been satisfactorily explained to me.

We filled out all the forms for the bank once we had the card taken care of and opened an account with 100 yen (less than a dollar) and now we have to wait for all that paperwork to go through. The thing about money is that this is a cash society in every sense. There are no credit card machines anywhere, and no checking whatsoever. Petty crime is almost unheard of, so carrying around the equivalent of $500 is normal. One nice thing is that there are machines for withdrawing cash almost everywhere and oftentimes next to them is a machine that balances your account book for you. Imagine if that existed in America, you just opened your checkbook to a blank page in the record section and it printed out all of your transactions and gave you the balance. Nice.

At the end of a long day I was called into a meeting with three other VFMs to talk about getting internet service. In order for us to understand everything that needed to happen, the phone company sent a representative to explain the internet, land phone lines, and cable TV. How she was able to do all of these things is still a mystery to me, and to her, I think. She brought with her the usual grab bag of pamphlets and papers that had all the deals, packages, and plans that could combine the various luxuries into affordable deals, but none of it was in English, thus requiring a couple of workers from the KKB (the office of international relations) to sit in and translate.

A couple of things I have to point out here. The first is this misconception that I (and others, I assume) have about the widespread use of English. English was recently embraced by the Japanese government when they realized that it was becoming the common language for international business relations. As much as they wanted to fight it, they realized that it would be the same as shutting down the ports and letting the rest of the world surpass them. Very few people here speak any English at all (as you will see when I recount what it was like to try (and ultimately fail) to buy a cell phone next week), and those that do can barely hold of conversation, let alone get complex information across like setting up internet in the home.

The second thing is that I have called to set up high speed internet with three different companies, called tech support a few different times, dealt with installation people in person, and worked over-the-phone tech support for DSL and the only thing that I could contribute to the conversation was, "Yes, DSL and cable internet are faster than dial-up." I spent the entire meeting smiling at a very nice looking woman race through several sales pitches designed at getting us to buy the most expensive plan, only to have each summed up in a couple of sentences by the translator. Even then I was pretty much reliant on Russell, who managed to show up about half-way into this hour long discussion, and what his current plan was. "I want whatever you have," is what I said to him, and he politely pointed it out in the booklet for me.

For all of those who are interested in when I can call them at any time, day or night, and just chat for hours on end, here is the deal. To get a land line phone would cost $200 to install and about $40/month to have (no kidding), but overseas calls would not cost that much, and you can receive calls for about as much as you would pay for long distance inside the US. I was supposed to get a sheet on this when I arrived but only received it this week when Stuart overheard Juniper complaining (rightfully so). A Keitai (pronounced kay-tie, a cell phone) cannot be purchased until I have my Alien ID card, which is supposed to be available on the 12th of this month. The problem with keitai is that international calls will cost about 10 to 20 cents more per minute. I signed up for internet, but who knows if that actually went into effect since I need the Alien ID to get a bank account to get the internet. With any luck I will have a keitai on the 15^th or so and the internet on the 23^rd.

Food

For lunch I just had a sandwich that was made up of a dumpling of mashed potato and mayo, breaded and deep fried, served on top of a hotdog type bun with shredded cabbage and more mayo. It was delicious. If you think that's a lot of carbs, I have seen the same thing in grocery stores with spaghetti and tomato sauce. Everywhere you can buy some kind of food item to go you can get sandwiches. They come in a variety of styles, yet the only thing that I can find that resembles an average American sandwich is ham, cheese, and lettuce. Everything else is an experiment from the fried mashed potato, to fried pork, egg and curry sauce, cream cheese and fruit, and potato or egg salad. All of them are served on white bread with no crusts or a sub roll and cost about one or two dollars each depending on where you go. I prefer the cafeteria on the first floor of my work building, Building 8.

When people ask me what I eat here I pause and try to remember. I guess I never put much thought into it before. A friend of Mik's, the head of the department, was in town the other day and came out with the crew to the Hub one night. He's a white guy who now lives in New York whose family moved to Japan when he was younger and he went to an international high school with Mik. He told me about twenty years ago finding anything American to eat was impossible. You ate what everyone else ate and you liked it. Since then with globalization, fast food, mass production, etc, getting a burger, and I mean a serious American burger, has become easy. You just walk on down to the TGI Fridays and order one.

When I say American burger I have to clear something up, beef here is not quite the same as it is in the states. For one thing, it's not all beef. A grocery store meat section will have a small area dedicated to non-seafood where you can by a ground pork/beef patty that has the ratio printed right on the label (6:4 for example). Ordering in most restaurants will yield the same result, a beef patty that tastes a little off. If you don't mind the mixture, then you can get by just fine. For those of you who hunger for pure red meat goodness, you have to search around a bit more.

Pure beef, as in steaks, is also tricky to come across, and when you find it you'll notice a lot of fat marbled in. I cannot say for sure why this is, but I assume it has something to do with high fat meat being cheaper, as it is in the states. I know of Kobe beef where the cows are fed beer and massaged daily to deliver the fattest, juiciest, most tender, most expensive hunk of cow you ever had. I have never actually seen a well stocked beef section, nor have I wandered into a restaurant even by accident and seen Kobe on the menu. Some day I'll break down and order one just to say that I did, but that activity exists on the list with eating deadly puffer fish. The likelihood of either happening is slim.

But aside from strange beef and sandwiches, I have not eaten any true Japanese food yet, not any like you might imagine. There is a restaurant with a traditional layout near the school run by a woman who can only be described as a Japanese Fran Drescher. The only word I could understand was "chicken," and she said it a lot. I was there with a group of people who all ordered lunch, but I left as soon as the food arrived. Since this was only lunch and each meal cast about $8-9, I wasn't hungry enough to get a full meal right then. It was also the kind of place that I would have to come back to with my camera just so you could appreciate just how different it was.

What I have eaten here was a mix of Americanized foods and foreign foods that are not Japanese. I ate Thai noodles at a Japanese version of Denny's that also has things like club sandwiches (again with the sandwiches) and pancakes. There is a Subway on Skip Dori where I managed to get a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato only after having the girl behind the counter go through all of my topping options six times. Every time I asked for lettuce she would get confused and list them off again. At home I eat rice with whatever I can put of top including vegetables, soy sauce, some other sauce I have yet to identify, and curry sauce that you can buy already prepared. In Kichijoji, the best place for food thus far, there are crepe stands that make the entire block smell delicious, an Italian restaurant with good pizza and pasta (but you get larger servings when a particular chef is working), and the best Indian food I have ever had (but this is part of a chain you can find anywhere). Another good chain is Dotour, a coffee place that has this chicken salad bagel sandwich that I could live off of if the need arises. There is a shop on the way to school that is going to get a lot of my business this year.

Shopping in general is a challenge as everything is in another language and made by companies that I have never heard of and sold in stores that are just plain ostentatious. For general home stuff I go to Don Quixote, which is like a Target Greatland (for those of you who know what that is) crammed into about 1/8th the space. I know I mentioned this before, but you really have to imagine trying to shop with dodging everyone and not knocking over any number of eight or nine displays in a three square foot area. The rice machine I bought there had about eight boxes stacked in an area of one square foot. An old woman was kind enough to hold all of the signs hanging down from the top box while I pulled a machine out from under the display model. She then asked me a few questions, made an eating gesture, and laughed. For all I know she could have been asking if I eat human waste, but I nodded nonetheless. I also found a generic jar of mayonnaise there, which is strange because I was told that people here really like it and yet I cannot find it in anywhere else.

For the official tour of Kichijoji I learned a bit more about the shopping capital of the city. Thankfully the elder VFMs thought it wise to put together a map of the area and decorate it with key locations that we would find interesting. One of my favorites was the foreign food store, which is really just more stuff you can buy elsewhere and a few new things. What was nice is that they had Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, a total comfort food for the future, even if it costs about $2.50 a box. If I wanted extra cheese I can buy a small block for $5 and make do.

The best thing about Kichijoji right now is that is just far enough away to bike to if I ever just want to do some shopping. Denny, Another VFM in her third year (who reminds me a lot of Connie from Eastern) gave me her old bike so I can get around. It is a bit old, has only one speed, and rusted out in parts, but rides really well and will last until I start making money and can shell out for something better. After a twenty minute ride I just park it in a bike lot and pay about 100-200 yen for several hours of parking. There is a machine that you feed money into and locks each bike into place, though don’t expect it to keep the bike safe as all anyone has to do to get it is pay the 100 yen and the latch opens.

Getting Around

Outside of getting used to having a bike, I laid low this week and just got used to being at home for a while. Since I was going out every night, I think I have gotten pretty used to being in a strange place most of the time, not understanding signs and conversations I happen to over is no longer a Kafkaesque nightmare but a minor nuisance. What couple times I did go out I learned that just because you have been to a place and wandered around for three hours doesn’t mean you can assume you have a grasp of the area. Within a few minutes of getting off the Shibuya train I was completely lost, realizing that there are multiple exits from the station each leading to a separate wing of the neighborhood. Finding anything that was familiar took about 45 minutes, and by then I had lost track of what I had gone out there for.

The same happened in Shinjuku where, after months of sporadic emails, I have finally been able to put a face to the name Joy. Joy is the friend of a friend of mine who gave me some advice about Japan when I was first starting to gather information. She showed me around Shinjuku again, giving me more insight into the area and what some of the hotspots are. When I arrived home I was struck with an incredible sense of loneliness that everyone warned me about. Joy was excited to know someone, anyone else that she could talk to and hang out with. People have said they made friends here who are not in the office, Japanese and foreigners, but the way that Joy almost seemed to need me made me scared to think that I might be spending a lot of time alone in the future.

On a more positive note, this week was the start of the Sakura (cherry blossom) bloom and all of the trees are covered in small, pink flowers. I have already put up a few pictures, but people here take it a lot more seriously than we might the autumn leaves changing. Many women will go out in Kimonos, parks will be filled with people who have set up a place the day (or longer) before to have a good spot for picnicking, and everyone has a camera. Public drinking is acceptable here, but eating and walking are strangely looked down upon. Since most of the time I have been in Japan has been accompanied by sakura blossoms, it’s hard to appreciate it as much as everyone else. The city has hung pink lanterns on telephone lines, pink paper flowers decorate store entrances, and there are even special graphics for signs leading into gambling parlors and strip clubs.

I also got the low down on the law and what my rights are here as a foreigner. Not to sound insensitive, but being white here is about the same as being a minority in a white area of some American cities. People tend to assume you are going to cause trouble and if a white person commits a crime in a neighborhood they’ll arrest any white guy they find and drag him to the station. This happened to Michael, a third year from Minnesota, who told me he was surrounded by about four cops so short in stature and build he could have easily beaten all their asses without effort, but that would have been really bad. Everyone here has been questioned at least once, asked for their Alien ID, and a few have been sent to a station. All bikes here are registered, so they can stop you at random and check your registration. If a cop asks to see your ID, you do have the right to ask him for his, but they have the right to arrest you and hold you for 21 days for no reason, so it’s best to just be polite and cooperate whenever a situation arises.

Next week: Cell phones, spas, and really bad Japanese food eaten