My Trip

There really isn’t any place like home

2004-09-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

Not that I’m particularly defining home as a place. I’ve lived in too many places to be that attached to any one of them. Home is where your stuff, your pets, and your people are. Where you can speak and be spoken to and actually understand the *entire* conversation. Where not every minute of every day is an adventure, so you can relax. Where you’re not an ambassador of sorts, so you’re allowed to have a bad day.

And it’s good to be home.

Sumo up close and personal

2004-09-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t leave Japan without seeing a sumo tournament in person. Luckily, I have friends who felt the same way so, after disposing of the last of the junk from the apartment and saying a final good-bye to the little silver dirtball on wheels, I headed to Tokyo. We got to the arena around 2, only to realize that we were still pretty early and had plenty of time to take in the sights (the tournament actually runs 9am – 6pm, but the matches are scheduled in reverse order of rank, so no one but relatives show up until the late afternoon).

For starters, let me just say that sumo is very much more impressive in person than on tv (just like figure skating or ice hockey). Tv gets you all the close ups and replays that you’ll never get in person. But the tv doesn’t even come close to adequately conveying the size or speed or energy of these events. Sumo wrestlers are LARGE people. And they crash together HARD. And the normally very reserved Japanese populace apparently feels that this is one of the places where decorum is not required (or desired). No streakers like in a European soccer match, but would you have guessed that the Japanese were capable of tossing seat cushions like we throw graduation hats? (We were later told that’s a “boo”, not a cheer – which just makes it all that much more impressive.)

The arena itself is an octagon around the center “shrine.” The first rows of seats immediately around the pit are for the batters up, judges, and high paying patrons. The first tier is all “box seats”. And the second tier is more of those red velvet movie theater seats designed for little Asian people. We’d decided to splurge and get the box seats, without really knowing what we were in for. For the record, a “box seat” is a space about 6 feet by 6 feet, ringed with a metal railing about a foot off the ground, and furnished with 4 pillows. Yes, they really do expect 4 adults to fold themselves into this space for 9 hours. Apparently Japanese origami skills extend beyond paper. Luckily the people in the box in front of us didn’t show up until really late so we could stretch our legs forward. We got up a lot too – how else would we have seen the myriad of trinkets for sale in the booths?

We also had a couple of “sumo for dummies” type books. A few tidbits we found particularly striking:

* The reason I could never figure out the “go” signal from the ref is that there isn’t one. The two wrestlers stare at each other until they both decide to go. That’s in part why there are so many false starts (and is a large part of the strategy to winning).

* The arena management does, in fact, take out extra insurance on the people sitting in the first couple of rows.

* The loin cloth (at least at the higher levels) is made of silk and it’s considered bad to wash it. So it’s merely “aired out” until it’s replaced (typically once a year).

The coup de grace, though, came during the second to last match. Advertisers can put prize money on certain matches, which gets them a small banner parade before the match. I don’t know who paid what, but yes, Hello Kitty made it to the sumo tournament.

So long and thanks for all the fish

2004-09-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

We’re done here for this contract! It’s been fun, but it’s definitely time to turn out the lights and go home. Now, how to empty the apartment back to its “furnished” state and pack all the acquired junk into the 4 bags the airline will let me have ... I think we’re going to introduce the Japanese (who generally value brand new things) to several concepts: a yard sale, “free to a good home”, and a pre-packed camping box. :-)

And no, I never thought that that quote would ever be appropriate in my life. But it’s oddly apropos right now.

Why you don’t ask

2004-09-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

So we were happily eating our tekadon (sp?) at lunch today (big bowls of rice with a thick layer of tuna sashimi on top), when the sushi chef started chopping up this really weird looking stuff for the next customer. It looked kind of like a really pretty, frilly, spiral streamer except it was all white and obviously soft. Our curiosity did not go unnoticed, and the daughter came over and started talking (she spoke pretty good English). It’s apparently very difficult to get because it has to be served super fresh. But when it is, it’s really good and “creamy” (her word, not mine). Well one thing led to another and we ended up trying it. It was pretty good, although a little on the squishy side for me.

Now, the rule I’ve lived by over here is that you never ask what you’re eating. Instead, just shut up, smile, and enjoy – life is better that way. If I’d followed my own rule, I would still be proud of myself for being brave enough to try fish intestines (which is what we assumed it was) and I would be a much happier camper. Instead, I’m sitting on the knowledge that I’ve just eaten raw cod testicles. “Creamy” indeed.

It’s time to go home

2004-09-22T07:09:00.000-07:00

How do I know this? Because the only place within an hour’s driving distance of here that sold decent American pizza has sold out to some Japanese pizzeria chain. We drove all the way over there for lunch only to realize we could have gotten better pizza 2 km from work (and that’s not particularly good pizza either). Shrimp and raw tuna and corn just do NOT belong on my pizza.

And to top it all off, the little grocery store here stopped carrying my dark chocolate fudgesicles.

Kabuki

2004-09-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

Finally, something cultural besides food! Ray-san and I drove down to Tokyo to watch Kabuki (ok, Ray-san drove while I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to – I just had to navigate, which isn’t particularly a walk in the park either). Now, the full Kabuki experience is a 6 hour long performance shown in three sections. You have dinner during the intermissions. And if you’ve actually splurged and gotten box seats, you dress the part. I think I saw more adults in kimono in one night than I’ve seen the entire time I was here.

For us less cultured slobs though, you can buy a ticket to just one of the 2 hour long segments for really cheap. And you can get earphones with English commentary for even less. You sit in the nosebleed seats, so bring binoculars. But that also means your entertainment includes all the dressed up people in the box seats.

I don’t know how old the national theater really is, but it looks like late 1800s – all red velvet and mahogany and great acoustics and those really uncomfortable seats. Cameras weren’t allowed though and they watched us gaijin like hawks so I couldn’t even sneak a couple without flash. I think that’s seriously the worst treatment I’ve gotten out here. Do we really look that disreputable? (ok, maybe I don’t want that answered)

The segment we saw was a morality play about old sins coming back to haunt you (with an element of fate thrown in –the first sin was predestined, his only crime was trying to fight it). But it’s the acting you go to see. The fight scenes in particular are really stylized. There’s not even a pretension that it’s natural. At intervals, the drums will beat once and the actors will suddenly hold their dramatic poses for a minute as the echoes die away. Cheesy as all get out, but arresting nonetheless. It’s also apparent that the poses have some meaning that adds to the scene and we’re just missing it. The death scenes went a little overboard though – talk about the embodiment of “just die already!”

And to top it off, we made it home without getting lost. At least, we don’t think going 270 degrees left around the beltway to go 90 degrees right counts as being lost because we knew we were doing it. We just couldn’t find the entrance going the other way. Maybe it’s like the bay area with exits that only work in one direction.

Festival

2004-09-20T03:23:00.000-07:00

Today is a national holiday here (when I asked what the holiday was, I was told “in respect for aged persons”). Of course, this means there have been festivals in various cities all weekend. The one I went to was a little different than the last one here in Omiya. Instead of people carrying around a portable temple, this was a large covered float on wheels. The musicians and little kids rode inside, while the older boys provided propulsion and girls did some sort of fan dance alongside. The cool part was that the float and the first half dozen pullers were all draped in the same piece of fabric that all led to the lion’s head “mask” that was leading the whole thing.

The carts are on wheels and have a motor of sorts. So all the helpers really have to do on a flat street is guide it along. But their turning radius is pathetic, and apparently brakes are completely optional. It took at least a dozen guys throwing all their weight against the cart before it stopped on a relatively shallow downhill.

But dancing lion heads and oodles of people in yellow spider-man jammies still don’t beat naked butt-cheeks.

Castles

2004-09-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

For something a little different, I saw two castles today. They’re both reconstructions built in the last century, but I’m assured they’re faithful copies (although it does explain why the one is in the center of town, next to the train station, instead of in some defensible location).

The first, “Turtle Castle” only has a couple of towers restored. But they have a small museum with detailed pictures of the construction materials used. I’m amused to note that the thick white walls you see all over are apparently just a beefy version of lath and plaster made with large bamboo sticks. And it was apparently easier to use tree trunks whole as support beams than mill them into a more manageable size.

The second (Toyoda Castle) is a complete restoration (outside at least), and is impressive given that I’ve never seen an old building here more than three stories high and those are rare. This is seven stories (and you can tell it’s Japanese instead of Chinese because it doesn’t taper at the top – isn’t it amazing what completely useless information they choose to translate?). They’ve filled it with a really nice museum. Part of it is devoted to some poet I’m too uncouth to have heard of, but the displays of agricultural tools were really well done. I just can’t figure out why a culture that had a really advanced foot-powered portable water wheel to keep rice paddies wet had a hand-cranked spinning wheel. But they did have a display of snow-shoe looking things that I assume are used to walk across wet rice paddies. They also had a samurai display, complete with several katana blades. Those are really quite pretty (if anything that deadly can be called pretty).

And if you count the torii I walked through to get to the farm stand as a church, I actually managed to get in two castles and one church today.

Waterfalls

2004-09-18T03:04:00.000-07:00

One of the tourist maps I’d managed to collect over the summer has a cluster of waterfalls marked on it, only about 30 minutes from here. It’s in an area at the start of the mountain range where the regular atlas I have doesn’t show any streets at all, so I’ve been vacillating all summer as to whether it’s worth going and most likely getting lost or not. But waterfalls tend to be more interesting than temples and I figured I’d always feel like a wimp if I didn’t go. So I headed off this morning (after carefully stocking the car with snacks and drinks, just in case).

It didn’t take long before I was off the roads on the GPS map too (it’s an unnerving experience to be driving around on blank space on the map when you’re used to following red, green, yellow, and gray roads all the time). There were signs though. Nothing at all in English, but the blue signs sure looked like the “you are entering Mt Nantai State Park” signs we have at home. And the little brown signs pointed to all the attractions on the map very nicely – all I had to do was pattern match the squiggles. There were also lots of hiking trails scattered around and along the way I found several picturesque tunnels, a farming valley straight out of a fairy tale, and a cemetery with an unbeatable view. I’m really rather upset with myself that I didn’t go earlier and therefore more often.

Of the three waterfalls that were the day’s goal, one I never found (I think I know what I did wrong, but I’m not sure), one was completely dry at this time of year, and one was spectacular even if there wasn’t much water running over it. It’s in a little dell, and the path in goes through a simple torii. A statue of the angry Buddha guards the place (I’ve finally figured out that there’s a hybrid religion of Shinto and Buddhism – the old Shinto gods get Buddhist faces and names). He’s supposed to look mad to scare the evil spirits away. But the waterfall itself seems to be nature’s attempt to make the Buddha laugh in spite of himself.

Bad ideas

2004-09-17T04:24:00.000-07:00

The Japanese have some pretty neat gadgets. The latest one I’ve noticed is the little sensor at the toll booths that notices the height of your car/bus/truck and spits out the ticket at the right place for the driver to take it easily. I think my favorite though is still the parking structures. Think of a dry cleaner’s rack – you drive your car into a slot and park. Then the attendant dials up the next slot and your car gets stored vertically instead of taking of valuable real estate on the ground. It’s like a giant oval Ferris Wheel for cars.

But they also have things that don’t work quite as well. Like roasted chestnuts without an “X” carved into them – just how are you supposed to peel them? Or jelly sold in little paper cups. It seems like a good idea until you leave one in the fridge for a couple of weeks and then try to spread it on bread. You don’t have jelly anymore, you have a jello wriggler. And really, who first decided to pickle plums in pure salt? And then feed them to an unsuspecting gaijin as a regional delicacy?

Sushi

2004-09-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

In general, if it doesn’t swim fast enough, a Japanese person will chop it up, slap it on rice, and call it sushi. The most common things you see here are the same as at home: tuna, yellow tail, cooked shrimp (oddly enough, not as much salmon). But you do get some odder ones. Unagi, the fresh water eel almost always served in a special sweet sauce. The little translucent orange eggs that pop on your tongue. Raw scallops that look disgustingly squishy but aren't. Raw shrimp that taste unbelievably sweet and unbelievably slimy. Sea urchin which doesn’t taste bad but is beyond slimy (the association the mind makes when eating it is too gross to even bring up here). Some variant of tuna that is so tender it melts in your mouth. Egg cakes that look like yellow duplo. The list goes one and on.

The ideal ratio of fish to rice also differs, depending on the region you’re in. Some places favor an almost one to one ratio, others weight it heavily towards the fish. I had a new one last night though. Instead of the usual log shape, the rice was in the form of a sphere with a flat bottom. And there was barely enough fish to cover the top. But interestingly enough, the rice wasn’t just regular sushi rice – it had things in it. The rice balls with no fish at all had bits of seaweed and pickles. The ones with pickled mackerel on top had a little purple pickle in the middle. The salmon ones had roe mixed in the rice. All very carefully chosen so that it was appealing to both the taste buds and the eye. No idea what it was called or how to order it again, but it was good.

Happy Anniversary

2004-09-15T17:42:00.000-07:00

This year (Nov 1 to be precise) is apparently the 30th anniversary of Hello Kitty. Since she’s the unofficial mascot of Japan, they are doing it up big here. The Tokyo subways are lined with posters commemorating the round white fuzz-ball with ears. There are postcards with the well-known profile photo-shopped into all the famous scenes. Any gift shop worth its salt carries a familiar pink and white section. There are several Hello Kitty exhibitions around the country. And I’ve even seen a book commemorating the art commemorating the anniversary. I would say that this could only happen in Japan, but there was apparently a 30th birthday party for the cat at Rockefeller Center earlier this year.

Did you know that the slogan on her website is “30 years of cute”? I think I’m going to be ill now. I know! They ought to have a celebrity death match between the cat and Snoopy!

Heaven is a chocolate fudge brownie sundae

2004-09-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

Complete with whipped cream and chocolate crunchies. Need I say more?

Chopsticks

2004-09-13T03:57:00.000-07:00

Growing up, I thought that chopsticks were all alike – 1 foot long light beige sticks of wood with a square profile which were designed expressly to torment hungry children whose parents believed in “cultural education”. Living in California taught me that they also come as disposables and as overly ornate craft store items. It wasn’t until Japan that I realized that they really come in a complete array of sizes and shapes and colors: carved wooden ones, pointy lacquered ones, elaborately gold-leaved ones, ones in solid colors, ones with cartoon characters ... Martha Stewart even has her own brand.

They also come in different sizes. The ones I’m used to are the ones you eat with, but there are also cooking chopsticks that come in big, bigger, and special big. For some reason, I’m fascinated by these oversized ones and couldn’t resist a pair at the 100 yen store (ok, so I buy a lot of ill-advised things at the 100 yen store – at least it’s a cheap addiction). Most of the cooking I do here poses no challenge for any utensil of any kind. But tonight I actually tried to fry eggplant slices and a little voice in my head whispered that it would be fun to try cooking with the chopsticks. You really would think that I would have learned not to listen to that voice after three decades.

First of all, eggplant is rather slippery. And, when cut in slices, adheres to a flat surface really well. This doesn’t bother me too much on a plate, but in a deep pan coated with sizzling oil and a live flame underneath, it’s a little more challenging. As far as I can tell, you have three options. You can try to squeeze the slice hard enough that friction keeps it glued to the chopsticks, but then you run the risk of accidentally shooting it across the kitchen. You can scoop the slice toward the side and try to use gravity to flip it, but then you run the risk of dumping it over the side of the pan into the flame or onto your foot. Or you can just spear the slice and hope to lift it just enough to twist it, but then you run the risk of vivisecting it. And your only hope at that point is to continue cooking it long enough that it will pour out of the pan.

I’m pretty proud of myself though. I didn’t start a grease fire and only one slice ended up on the floor. But prudence might win out in the end - the special big chopsticks might get left behind accidentally.

“Beware of falling rocks”

2004-09-12T03:39:00.000-07:00

Today was a sightseeing trip out to a few places in the prefecture that I’d missed on my last trip – a tea plantation, and a mountain you can actually drive to the top of because there’s an observatory up there (I’m still abiding by my vow to never climb another mountain again – XDirtPushr, on the other hand, already has plans to climb another volcano). A co-worker who apparently hadn’t been warned about my sightseeing trips volunteered to come along (she’s fluent in Chinese, so she can read the kanji which often carry the same meaning in Japanese – it’s AMAZING what being able to read even only half the street signs will do for your navigation skills!).

It was the usual back-country trip through really pretty countryside. All the rice is now yellow and the farmers are out tying up sheaves to dry, pumpkins and apples are for sale everywhere, and the weather is distinctly cooler. The trees are all still green though, so it’s not quite fall yet.

It turns out that 5 weeks at home was just long enough to completely ruin my patience with Japanese speed limits without ruining my ability to drive on the wrong side of the road. Besides, if the road is narrow enough, you just drive down the middle anyway. The only trouble is if there’s an oncoming car. I pass on a little piece of information in case it’s useful to anyone - there’s usually a deep ditch on the uphill side of Japanese mountain roads, even if there are so many leaves on the ground that it doesn’t look like it. To her credit, if C squeaked, it wasn’t audible. She merely suggested (in a rather calm voice) that we move more towards the center of the road.

On the way up the mountain, we missed the first turn and ended up taking the windier way up. On the way down, it was harder to miss the turn (after all, there are only two roads at the top), so we headed down the luxurious two lane road. Oddly enough, at the top of the road was a partial road barrier with a sign that C translated as “beware falling gravel”. We promptly noticed that the uphill bank was fairly steep and held by a retaining wall for as far as the eye could see, but figured that as long as the road wasn’t completely barred, it must be safe enough. So, like the moron I am, I headed on through. There were some patches where you could see there had been rock slides despite the retaining wall, but it wasn’t until a couple of miles further down that we came to the pile of boulders in the road (C swears the sign at the top says beware of SMALL rocks, but these were large, pumpkin-sized chunks of mountain). But there were tire tracks through the maze, so we took the poor little rental car on through (see the previous moron comment). Only to find out that the road was completely closed by an old rockfall a little bit further down, so now we had to haul the car back through the mine field. I can only hope the rental agency doesn’t look at the car too closely when I return it.

It’s a guy thing

2004-09-11T02:26:00.000-07:00

All summer long, I’d been buying myself flowers every week in an attempt to make the apartment a little nicer to come back to. So when I left, there was a large bunch of cut flowers in a vase sitting by the kitchen sink. (I also considered it partial apology to the Redhead for leaving sand all over the bathroom floor after the last beach trip.)

Now, I wasn’t naive enough to think that there would be new flowers waiting for me when I got back here (if there had been, I probably would have keeled over in shock). But I also didn’t expect the *same* flowers to still be there, all brown and brittle and covered with weird white fuzz! The Redhead claims he didn’t notice them until all the water had evaporated and then it was too much trouble to throw them away. Note that the vase is 2 inches from the sink where you do dishes (there are only 2 forks, so I know he had to do dishes at least a few times in the last 6 weeks) – even if you didn’t see the flowers because you were blind, how could you not notice that smell??? And the garbage is only a foot further, well within arm’s reach (although it does require some coordination to not touch the fuzzy parts)! And to top it all off, when I offered to take out the garbage, he said not to bother because there wasn’t anything worth taking.

He did leave the freezer well stocked with fudgesicles though, and one can argue that that’s more important.

Cooler is a relative term

2004-09-10T02:51:00.000-07:00

I’m back in Japan - same bat cave, same bat routine. And oddly enough, not much has changed. Yes, it’s cooler than in July. But that doesn’t mean cool, or less humid, or even comfortable. At least I didn’t waste suitcase space on sweaters and long sleeved shirts this time.

btw, I’ve realized that I forgot to bring the card reader for the camera, so there won’t be any new pictures until XDirtPushr sends me a quick care package. But the last entry of our Japan vacation is finally up – page backwards a couple of entries

“It’s just not our day folks”

2004-09-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

This is really not something you want to hear your pilot say, especially if your flight is already 40 minutes late because the plane has been back to the gate to offload luggage for some people who never showed up for the flight (we all imagined some elderly couple desperately hobbling around, trying to find the right gate, and stubbornly refusing to ask for help, but there’s always that slight chance that someone wanted to ship something they shouldn’t have, so on the whole we all approved of that decision). This time, though, it was a broken hydraulic pump (apparently we’d done too much taxi-ing on a hot day) and to add to the fun, we had to wait for a tug to come pull us back to the gate. It was going to take an unspecified amount of time to fix the problem, but we should all stay seated like good little sheep. Thank the powers that be that I didn’t decide to be cheap and turn in my business class ticket for a coach class one and the $500 incentive! (In the end, we actually got off the ground only 2.5 hours late.)

Celebrating a life

2004-08-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

In Memoriam

Charles J. Szoke

1919 - 2004

Shopping

2004-08-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

No trip to Tokyo would be complete without a visit to Akihabara (electric town). Unfortunately, I’m not sure words can adequately describe this experience. Think Chinatown in either SF or NY – several blocks of stores with people everywhere, all talking at once, selling, buying, bargaining. Now combine that with Fry’s – everything being sold or traded is electronics related (and yes, adult toys are apparently considered small electronics). And as a final touch, add the Japanese love of neon. It’s a simultaneous assault on all 5 senses. Well worth doing for a little while just for the experience, but have a quick exit strategy handy to avoid overdose.

Since we were also on a mission to find a set of Japanese chisels (talk to XDirtPushr, not me), we ended up at a place called Tokyu Hands. It’s billed as Japan’s original do-it-yourself store, but it’s geared more for crafts than projects around the house like our Home Despot. It’s 9 floors in a tall, thin city building of the most amazing collection of stuff (conveniently, they have an English version of the store directory). The first floor is seasonal goods and is currently stocked with umbrellas, galoshes, and raincoats. The second floor is coat hangers, build-it-yourself furniture, and suitcases. The next floor is raw materials – sheets of copper and aluminum, blocks of plastic and foam, wire and chain, fiberoptic tubing (no, I am not making this up). Then come tools for all variety of crafts and sports. Wood and metal working tools, bikes and bike parts, jewelry making supplies, quilting fabric and sewing supplies, party goods, models of Anime figures and things with engines ... the list goes on and on. And in case you’re starting to feel like you’re trapped in a desert with no hope of escape or sustenance, there’s a restaurant at the top (and they do serve ice cream).

As an antidote to the shopping and people, we also explored one of Tokyo’s older formal gardens (Rikugien). Nothing in particular was in bloom, but the green was a welcome relief after all the concrete (although it wasn’t that much cooler and the mosquitoes were vicious). The pond was stocked with the requisite Koi (who are well trained to follow humans around, waiting for handouts), but also turtles. The turtles might be slower, but they’re meaner when it comes to fighting their way to the top of the teeming pile.

Museums

2004-08-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

After watching and reading up on Sumo, we figured we had to at least go see the Sumo museum (besides, it’s free). I had expected it to be pretty cheesy, but it turned out to be rather cool. You start by walking through the omnipresent gift shop (I couldn’t resist so one of you lucky people is getting a box of tiny chocolate sumo wrestlers as your next present!) and into a seating area to watch a tape of past sumo highlights. When you’re finally done being amazed by large men charging into each other and landing outside the ring (front row seats at this sport are only for people who are already flat or who have titanium reinforced bones), you walk around the corner into the museum itself. The entire museum is housed in one not-huge room, so they rotate the exhibits fairly regularly. Right now, it’s an exhibit of clothes of past wrestlers. There is nothing like a pair of shoes or set of footprints to convince you these guys are LARGE. XDirtPushr had trouble all week with the slippers and robes the hotels expect you to wear. He needed the “special big” robe (is that XL or XXL?) and the slippers were just hopeless. But these shoes made his size 12s look like little kid feet. (Afterwards we happened to pass by a store that sells clothes to the wrestlers – I think they’re “extra special big”)

The size chart they had on the wall went up to 180kg and 2.5m. That’s one big man!

The last museum on our list (can you tell we’re not big museum fans?) was the Fireworks Museum. It’s even smaller and harder to find (and horror of horror, has no gift shop!) but it’s equally cool in a nerdly sort of way. All Japanese fireworks are still made by hand, because no one’s figured out how to pack them robotically. Instead of long cylinders packed with one color of powder, these are spheres packed in concentric layers of different colors. All layers are separated by paper, with more paper wrapping the entire thing up like a giant Christmas present. If you want a white snoopy head on a blue background, you pack little spheres that will burn white in the shape of a snoopy head into the big paper sphere and fill all the blank spaced with little spheres that will burn blue. And there’s no need to bother with safety equipment and precautions, because if one of those spheres goes off in the factory, the whole place is gone anyway. So you might as well work without those annoying gloves and respirator.

But look at the results of all that hand labor! I think the butterfly is my favorite.

Sightseeing around Fuji

2004-08-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

As much as I thought climbing Fuji-san was a waste of time and energy, the Fuji 5 Lakes area and Hakone are very worthy of much more time than the 2 days we spent on them (we had to pass on the monkey preserve and the Porsche museum!). It looks and feels a lot like the Tahoe area – mountains, water, lots of people but obviously a vacation place so there’s a peacefulness about it. The only caveat is that it’s really a Japanese tourist place. It’s really hard to find information about the area before you get there (at least, information not in Japanese), and once you get there, there is surprisingly little English. But then again, that’s pretty much par for the course on this trip.

The whole area is built up on layers of lava from Fuji and surrounding volcanoes. On the base of Fuji itself is a forest (Aokigahara Sea of Trees) that grows entirely in a few inches of soil on top of lava rock. The rock is magnetic and messes up compasses, so it’s fairly easy to get lost if you stray off the trail (assuming you don’t have a GPS gadget with you). For this reason, it’s become a favorite spot for people to commit suicide. We saw no ghosts, but it is a very odd feeling forest!

The lava also lends itself to caves. From the literature we managed to collect, we had three options: the bat cave (the biggest cave with “countless bats”), the wind cave (used to store silkworm eggs), and the ice cave (used for pre-refrigerator summer ice storage). Since it was a hot day, we opted for the ice cave. It’s very non-OSHA approved, but they obligingly had this very clear drawing of the dangers you’re likely to face. The steps do have railings, but then you have to crouch through the tiny areas, trying not to slip on the ice or touch the wall to catch your balance. The one thing the sign doesn’t say is to bring your sweatshirt because it’s cold. I know, it seems rather obvious that it would be cold in an ice cave, but you don’t think of that when it’s 90+ degrees in the sun. I think that’s the coldest I’ve ever been in Japan.

Hakone is in the basin of another, much older and larger volcano. The only way you can even tell you’re in a volcano basin is by the ring of “mountains” around you, and the steaming sulfur pits. The pits are fascinating, if repelling. The Japanese also seem to think that eating eggs cooked in the steam is good for your health, but XDirtPushr is convinced that they bring their kids to eat blackened eggs to retard their growth and keep the population short.

In the center of Hakone is another lake, complete with what is possibly the most famous torii in Japan. If the day had been clearer, you would see Fuji off in the distance to the left in the picture.

An hour on the toll road (and a little bit of speeding) brought us back to the traffic and smog and heat that is Tokyo. Why do people live here again?

Japanese Hotels

2004-08-24T23:06:00.000-07:00

Work normally puts people into “western” hotels, partly because they seem to think we’d like that better and partly because these are the only places that are guaranteed to have a concierge who speaks some English. However, I had been told that a Japanese hotel was an entirely different ballgame, so while on vacation, we avoided all Holiday Inns. And I have to agree - this is an experience not to be missed.

The hotels themselves weren’t anything particularly special – just a nice hotel lobby with pleasant receptionists who try very hard (but not entirely successfully) to remember their English. And the room itself is a typical Japanese room – tatami mats on the floor and the only pieces of furniture are the coffee table and tv. It only has a bathroom attached if you pay extra, and even then a shower (or bath) isn’t always guaranteed. Instead, you go to the public bath (onsen). And this is one thing the Japanese seriously do well.

It is a tad odd. First off, you have to find the right room. Most hotels seem to have two onsens – one for the men, and one for the women (apparently it used to be co-ed, but isn’t very often anymore). And since the two are generally not identical, they swap back and forth every night at midnight. So you have to carefully check which one is which that day (we’re assuming the squiggles on the door-way curtains say something useful, but we found that generally the women’s curtains were red/orange, while black/blue meant men). No, we don’t know what happens if you’re in the tub when the clock strikes midnight.

As you duck through the appropriate color curtain, you enter into a changing room/lounge – baskets to put stuff in, massage chairs, a vanity complete with an assortment of scented bottles, cotton balls, and hair dryers, etc. You dump all your stuff into the baskets (yes, *all* - this is where XDirtPushr started desperately hanging on to his swim trunks and protesting “I was mis-informed!” rather wild-eyed) and walk into the next room.

Here you find a large sunken hot tub of some kind in the center, and a row of munchkin-high cubicles along the wall, each with a 6 inch tall stool, round bucket, water tap, and a mirror. You’re expected to take a “shower” sitting on the little stool, using the bucket to pour water over yourself. Luckily for us gaigin, all the places we went also had hand-held shower heads (and hot water). But it’s still weird to be able to wash the bottom of your foot without having to hop around on the other foot.

Once you are completely squeaky clean, you get to step into the hot tub (apparently the biggest faux pas you can make is to get dirt or soap suds into the tub). The tubs themselves vary a lot. They’re usually large enough for a small crowd (10-15 people), have some kind of a view, and are hot enough to pop blisters. The best ones are pools of water from natural hot springs, but there are lots of man-made ones done up in blue pool tile or natural concrete rock. They can be inside or outside – sometimes the main tub is inside, while the secondary tub is outside. Once place had a whirlpool tub and sauna. Another also had a smaller tub up on the roof with a fantastic view of Fuji and the lake. The trick is to use your gaigin license to explore your options before your shower (while you still have your robe on). Then shower and enjoy.

Once you’re completely relaxed, you head back to your room for dinner. You can either go down to the restaurant, or be a total hedonist and have dinner served in your room (although the advantage of the restaurant is that it usually has a real table and chairs). Either way, dinner consists of more little, brightly-colored dishes than you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Don’t ask what they are – just eat and enjoy. And pass your husband the nasty raw shrimp while he passes you the clear gelatinous blobs.

Then you get to roll over all of 4 feet onto the futons they spread out on the floor for you and fall into a food coma. And if you’re experiencing this the day after you climbed Fuji … well, it’s just a little slice of heaven after a long night in purgatory.

Inch by inch

2004-08-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

The Japanese call Fuji-san “shy” because of the clouds that hide the peak from view most of the time (the mountain is tall enough that it generates its own weather, mostly clouds). But every once in a while, the clouds part for a minute and allow a view of the well-known profile. This particular view came from the toll highway that we weren’t supposed to be on. (The driver didn’t listen to the navigator’s directions and took a left turn against his advice and cost us $5 in tolls - but wasn't the view worth it?)

The proper way to climb Fuji-san is to start at the bottom, and climb all the way to the top through the 10 “stations” along the way (most stations aren’t much more than mile markers, but they’re absolutely necessary to break the monotony). You buy a wooden walking stick (complete with jingle bells to scare off the evil spirits) when you start, and have it branded at every station along the way to prove you hiked the entire thing.

You can, however, drive as far as Station 5. Since we weren’t Shinto pilgrims (or total idiots), we started from this halfway point (after removing the jingle bells, like all the other non-Asian climbers). Yes, our walking stick is missing the first 4 brands. But since Station 6 was closed when we got there, we’d be missing one through no fault of our own anyway. So we refuse to feel inadequate.

As we set off, it was so very romantic. There was a full moon, the path was a nice wide stroll (albeit uphill), jingle bells chimed in the distance, and the lights of the surrounding towns (including a small fireworks display) were spread out beneath our feet. We also noticed that we were hiking way ahead of schedule (there’s no real place to wait until sunrise at the top, so you don’t want to get there early), so we were deliberately ambling (putting on speed only when the jingle bells got too close and loud). In addition, there were a ton of foreign tourists on the mountain, most of whom spoke English, so we could exchange Japanese horror stories with people at the rest stops. All in all, very pleasant.

After about Station 7, it stopped being a steep hiking path and became more of a scramble over knee-high chunks of old lava – much slower and more painful. But before it got really tiresome, there was a hut with a really cool monkey brand for the walking stick. It’s the adult version of giving a kid a Looney Toons band aid, and was just as effective.

Unfortunately, even the thrill of a monkey brand only lasted so long. Somewhere after the 8th station, the climb just started to hurt. The refrain “inch by inch” started running through my mind over and over and over again as I scrambled on and on, but the lights at the top didn’t seem to get any closer. Dejection started to set in. Food and bathroom became more and more expensive (and smellier, at least for the latter). It got colder and windier. And you’re not allowed into the huts for even the length of time it takes them to brand your stick (you hand the stick in through the crack in the door and wait outside with your nose pressed up against the glass until they’re done – if you want to rest in the warmth, it’ll cost you $10 an hour).

The final straw came several hundred meters from the top – the human traffic jam. The climbers with a cigarette in one hand and an oxygen bottle in the other need to stop and take a rest, which they do in the middle of the road. If you try to go around them, the guides start screaming at you in incomprehensible Japanese (I can only assume they’re yelling at people to stay on the marked trails), so your only option is to trip the stationary people with your walking stick and climb over their limp bodies. To top it off, the sky was getting rather light, so there was a real sense of urgency to get to the top.

Sunrise at long last, viewed from the highest point in the land of the rising sun. And it was magnificent.

After many pictures, another set of brands, and some very expensive soup, we headed down (down the wrong trail due to navigator error – 45 minutes later we were again headed down, this time on the right trail). Only to find out that up was the easy part. The ascending trail travels up a spine of rock, but the descending trail follows the rock fall. It’s all covered with lava chunks buried in loose sand (ball bearings in grease), especially designed to twist ankles and blow out knees. And now it was light out so we could see how far we still had to go (and how ugly the mountain really is up close). The only amusing part was watching the 3 Americans bound down the trail with a half dead looking Japanese girl between them. They kept telling her how well she was doing as they dragged her along, but we never saw her actually move on her own.

All in all, Fuji-san just hurt. The view from the top was amazing, but did not justify the 14 hour hike over treeless, wind-swept lava. Unless it’s a religious experience, I highly recommend finding another, less popular, prettier, 12,000 ft peak to watch the sunrise from. Or even better - a hot tub with a nice view instead.

Bazilsmom: “No more mountains ever!”
XDirtPushr: “No more volcanoes ever, but do you want to climb half dome next year?”

Happy Birthday to the Redhead!

2004-08-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

None of us know how to say "Happy Birthday" in Japanese, but we hope you're having a good one anyway!

Anatomy of a vacation

2004-08-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

Rather than write entries for every day of the vacation, itinerary style, we thought it would be more interesting (and easier to write) if an entry only covered a single destination. But to give you a sense of the overall trip, here’s the short version of the itinerary (the actual one, not the planned one – as usual, a lot of items got dropped as the realities of hot, humid weather and sore muscles set in).

Saturday – Pack up 2 months of junk, see the best of Ibaraki in a whopping 5 hours
Sunday – Train trip to Tokyo, immediate shopping trip to get the long-awaited chisel set
Monday – Drive to Fuji, start climbing after a not particularly successful attempt at a nap in the car
Tuesday – Continue climbing, stare blearily at a beautiful sunrise, scramble down for a very long time, sleep for even longer
Wednesday – Sightsee around Fuji and Hakone, return to Tokyo’s traffic, heat, humidity, and smog
Thursday – Tour of (very) select museums and the visual and audio cacophony that is Akihabara (electric town)
Friday – Fish market (although not for sunrise), Rikugien garden, and a bird’s eye view of Tokyo from the top of the government buildings
Saturday – Return home at very long last

There’s no place like home

2004-08-07T14:41:00.000-07:00

We’re still unpacking and sorting out pictures and souvenirs and other assorted items, but I wanted to let everyone know that we both made it back in one piece (there was a rough patch at the top of Fuji when XDirtPushr remarked the view was fantastic, what night did we want to climb Half Dome – but the god of the mountain helped me control my fist of death and he lived to tell the tale). We do plan to post at least the Fuji pictures, but now that I have a house to take care of again, it’ll take me a little while.

In the meantime, the Redhead is keeping busy back in Omiya. He’s decided to continue the blog while he’s there. So Volume II can be found at www.almightygozar.blogspot.com.

I’m free!

2004-07-30T18:13:00.000-07:00

And so, at long last, my exile here comes to an end. I leave the Redhead the keys to the apartment and the car (both a little more sandy than when he last saw them - I have NO idea what the Japanese word for "vacuum cleaner" is). XDirtPushr and I are heading off for a week of sightseeing, out of range of the internet (ok, you’re never truly out of range in Japan. I’m just not going to be updating this blog daily). If I get very ambitious, I will update this with the highlights of our week once we get back to the land of peanut butter and Kraft macaroni and cheese.

I’m very happy to be going home, but sad that it happens just as I’m getting to really know my way around here. Why are endings, even endings of something you didn’t like, always sad? Although, if the gods do not find it in their hearts to take pity on me, I will be back for another 3 weeks in September and will see everything again (this time hopefully not through a hot shimmer of humid air).

Climbing Fuji-san

2004-07-29T18:08:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake of showing XDirtPushr this fantastic time-lapse photo of people climbing Fuji-san at night – it’s a white snake of light all the way up the outline of the dark mountain. And then a picture of sunrise on the summit. You would really think I would know better, but apparently not. So I’ll give you three guesses what I “get” to do next week.

Fuji-san happens to be the highest mountain in Japan, but more spectacularly it sits all by itself in the middle of the largest flat plain in Japan. It’s an almost perfect volcanic cone that appeals to everything in the Japanese psyche. Climbing Fuji-san is a religious experience for them - ideally you climb at night (or late afternoon and camp overnight) so that you’re on the summit to watch the rising sun from the highest point in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Oddly enough, it’s also something that most people only ever do once in their lives. The fact that Fuji-san is 3776m (12,388 ft) above sea level and you can only drive half way might have something to do with that.

I’ve been reading up on the climb itself – depressingly enough it comes with way too many warnings (hypothermia, dehydration, exhaustion, getting lost, falling off a cliff, and paying far too much money for a cup of soup and a bug-ridden sleeping bag to name a few). On the plus side are the view from the top, the walking stick that you get marked at each station along the way (the top is station 10), and the ability to send a postcard from the top. To me, this isn’t really a good trade, but when I asked why we’re apparently going to climb this mountain anyway, the only answer I got back was “because it’s there.” MEN.

Little snail
inch by inch, climb
Mt. Fuji

Red

2004-07-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

As in most Asian cultures, red in Japan is the color of luck and good fortune. So shrines and temples very often have something red in them. Sometimes the entire thing is painted red, sometimes it’s just a statue or a torii. If nothing else, a plain gray statue will get a red cape, sometimes with rather amusing results.

However, not all shrines rank groundskeepers and tourists. There are many smaller, more personal shrines scattered around, particularly next to the larger houses. And some of them suffer from the best intentions in the world. Yes, this poor guy is actually wearing a red shower cap and curtain (sorry, I mean cape).

The Redhead and XDirtpushr arrived tonight! They both pretty much look like the walking dead, but they're here!

Typical Japanese

2004-07-27T17:09:00.000-07:00

There are some things (words, gestures, phrases) that I have come to associate with the Japanese. Some of them I was told about before I got here - like taking off your shoes before entering a house, bowing instead of shaking hands, or slurping your noodles. Others have been discovered gradually.

Silence is not golden here - people pretty much talk non-stop outside the office. Like the checkout girl in the grocery store who will recite the price of every purchase in a sing-song voice (which lulls you to sleep so when she gets to the total at the end, you look like a complete fool because you’re not ready). If someone’s telling you something, you’re supposed to complete the rhythm by acknowledging just about every sentence verbally. Note that if someone does this to you, it does not mean that they agree or even understand what you’re saying. Just that they heard something they acknowledge to be language.

“No” is indicated by fluttering your hand in front of your face, much the way we would pantomime a bad smell. Sucking in air through your teeth indicates disapproval (not sure if it’s polite or not, but the guys at work do it a lot with me). Crossing your forearms in an X means something along the lines of “absolutely not” or “forbidden” – it’s a sign you’ll get if you’ve pushed your gaijin license too far.

The epitome of polite is to anticipate the other’s every need (for instance, order your companion’s favorite brand of beer and pour for him – btw, you never pour your own drink here). Perhaps because of this, people do expect a routine. Particularly, once something is agreed on, it might as well be written in stone (for instance, don’t ever give someone a “tentative” schedule – the concept doesn’t translate). As a co-worker put it, the Japanese find change “difficult.”

A woman’s demeanor. This one is hard to explain. Think of it as spending your entire life cringing in fear of getting hit. And now teach that to your daughter and her daughter and her daughter. It’s not like there’s any need for it now, it’s just the way things are. Duck your head down and to the side so you never look anyone straight in the eye. Cover the lower half of your face with your hand when you laugh or smile. And there are no large motions– whether step size, arm gesture, or laugh - it’s all dainty and graceful (except for dragging the heels of your slipper/shoes when you walk - that’s just plain annoying).

Oddly enough, in a regular mix of people, I’m not that tall here. True, the grandparent generation is short – they rarely reach my shoulder. And most of them really do walk bent at the waist until the torso is parallel to the ground (I don’t know whether they all did hard manual labor when they were younger and the bent over posture is just more comfortable, or if the lack of dairy has resulted in an entire population with osteoporosis). The parent generation is a little taller – maybe to my shoulder or chin. But my generation is about my height. The women are certainly shorter, but the men are usually as tall if not taller. But while Japan has its share of overweight people (particularly the young kids), I outweigh most people. They all look like a stiff breeze would blow them away.

All this makes me feel like the giant barbarian I’m perceived to be. I’m used to not having any verbal tact, but I’m not used to physically feeling like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

GPS gadget

2004-07-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

In true Japanese gadget fashion, every rental car here seems to come with a GPS map system. The higher end cars in the States do too, but here even the cheaper cars have them. At first I wasn’t sure it would be all that useful. After all, the map is all in Japanese (no romanji at all), as is the voice stuff. And even if you learn the basics (“right”, “left”, and “straight”), you’re always left with accidents like one of the guys who was here before me – he managed to program his to tell him how to get to work, but he couldn’t figure out how to have it get him back to the hotel.

After two months of living by it, I have to admit I’m sold. It’s true that you do need another map – not only is figuring out your ultimate destination a little easier on a bilingual map, but the screen is really too small to plan out a long route on. So you figure out the general idea of where you’re going and set off. It completely takes away the need to be able to read the street signs because the little arrow tells you where you are (although most of the major intersections have signs with Arabic numbers at least).

We figure it has to be hooked up to the car’s electronics (odometer etc) and have some kind of dead reckoning system. That’s the only way to explain how it updates itself while you’re driving through long tunnels (unless there are repeaters inside the tunnels, which seems too expensive). And if you drive in reverse, the arrow still points forward – it knows something about the car.

But it is not perfect. My personal gripe is that the icon for park or garden is very similar to that for a golf course and these posh country clubs get very upset when a very dirty, cheap little rental car comes trundling in. It’s also always amusing to be driving in blank space on the map. And it’s got some kind of snap to function – if you drive along a road that is not on the map but you’re close to one that is, it will tell you you’re on the road it knows (this has caused several inadvertent detours). It also takes a little practice to be able to both look at the road and the display (and the mirrors along the road showing you what’s coming at you around the next blind corner). There’s always the danger that you’ll get too used to watching your progress on the map. While you can generally stay on the road that way, the map doesn’t really tell you about oncoming traffic turning in front of you or the monkey crossing the road.

Flea market

2004-07-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

I’m in love! My only regret is that I didn’t figure this out much sooner (and that XDirtPushr is going to have a fit when he sees what I just did to the bank account).

I wanted to go to at least one flea market here before I left, just to see what kinds of things people here considered junk. But there are no local regular weekly markets, so I’ve had a really hard time finding one (that not being able to read signs thing again). I finally gave up and asked the secretary, who came back about 30 minutes later with a stack of candidates, maps attached (have I mentioned that the secretary here is a marvel?).

I opted for an antiques market located on the grounds of a nearby temple. I was a little worried about finding it, but I needn’t have been. All I had to do is park where everyone else did and follow the stream of people leaving back to its source (I was apparently late this morning).

The market was a dream. Lots of little independent stalls selling everything from produce to textiles to tools to pottery to unidentifiable objects. Some stuff is dirt cheap, other stuff is actually quality and priced to match. People are laughing and yelling and arguing over prices while music is blaring from about 5 different sources. I have no idea what Buddha thought of all this spread out at his feet – after all, this is exactly the kind of market Jesus threw out of the temple in a fit. But since someone had left Buddha an offering of stuffed snoopy dolls, I’m guessing he’s a little more tolerant of such things.

I even found a couple of katana, but they wanted real money for those and I don’t know enough about them to know what I’m paying for. Anyway, let’s just say I had a fun time shopping until it got too hot and I couldn’t carry anything else in one hand (needed the other to eat my shaved ice).

Nikko Revisited

2004-07-24T04:04:00.000-07:00

A fellow SS/L employee who’s been here multiple times was complaining about Japan (this is about his 6th 2 week long trip). We started talking and I realized that he’s never been sightseeing outside Mito. Now, Mito is not exactly a hub of culture or nightlife or anything else. In fact, pretty much the *only* advantages it has are that it’s easy to get to from the airport and that it has a Holiday Inn where the staff speaks English. So I offered to go back to Nikko this weekend – I’ve been meaning to see that waterfall for real anyway. Faced with the choice of a hotel room wall to stare at or the chance of seeing a live monkey, he chose the monkey.

We skipped the whole temple area this time, and went straight to the waterfall. While it wasn’t exactly a clear day, the sun did poke through the clouds a little and we could actually see the falls.

Here’s the repeat picture, minus the rain and the Redhead.

We also paid the 530 yen to ride the elevator to the bottom (there is no trail), so we got a view of the entire spectacle. Wow! Unfortunately, I don’t think my pictures do it justice. You really need a wide angle lens to get all the little waterfalls at the bottom.

The next stated goal was a hike to the top of the local volcano – Nantai-san. We managed to locate the trail, and started up the steps. About then is when we figured out why there were so many dragonflies all over – they eat the masses of little black biting flies that swarm around you any time you stand still long enough to catch your breath. Since we had no bug spray and it was really too late to be starting on such a hike anyway, we chickened out and turned around after only about 100 steps. Besides, the lake had duck boats for rent! (They had helicopter boats too, but the rotor didn’t turn as you pedaled so we agreed that was too lame)

Sadly, there were no monkey sightings. But I think it was still deemed a better view than the hotel wallpaper.

Festival

2004-07-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

The plan for tonight was to drop a co-worker off at the train station, get groceries, and then spend a quiet evening catching up on things and listening to Lance kick some more butt. There’s also usually an English movie on Friday nights (don’t laugh – it’s a highlight if you’ve spent all week trying not to watch Japanese TV). The plan started to go awry almost immediately.

Coming into town, we noticed that there was at least one police officer at every street corner, which seemed a little odd. And the main road through town was barricaded, with lots of kimono-clad girls walking in the now car-free zone. Light began to dawn – it’s some kind of summer festival. I was actually able to get to the train station ok, but getting to the apartment involved driving all the way around to my side of town, finding a sympathetic police officer, and pleading in pantomime to be let through the barrier. I think they gave in just because I was holding up traffic.

Just as I was getting ready to go see the sights, the phone rang. It was Mrs. Portland, calling to tell me there was a festival tonight. No, really?

Since she was standing outside my apartment when she called, I couldn’t escape and we ended up walking around together. Which was actually rather amusing. She’s teaching English in the local elementary schools, so most of the little kids know her. They come running up to show off their kimono and inflatable toys and shyly say hi. A lot of the parents also speak enough English to say hello as well, given the proper incentive.

The concept of a street festival is also apparently universal. Everyone comes out to socialize, there are popcorn and cotton candy machines, illicit fireworks get set off ... The only real differences I saw were the complete lack of any games, and the booths selling deep fried squid and herring on a stick. Sorry, I wasn’t brave enough to try either. I did try the shaved ice though (flavor was “blue hawaii”) – he actually had a block of ice on a vertical lathe with an attached scraper!

I wasn’t really paying attention, but most of the kids walking around were girls. The boys were all off with their dads, getting ready for the main event – the parade. The grandfathers walk before and after, carrying lit lanterns. The boys (with dads’ help) carry a miniature temple around town on poles, yelling and stomping as they shake it around. The kicker though, is the costumes. To a man, the carriers are dressed in white ankle-length booties, a white sumo-like loincloth, and a white apron. Nothing else. Yes, it was an entire parade of naked butt checks!

Gaijin license

2004-07-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

Shortly after I first got here, I asked Ray-san for some etiquette advice since I was sure I’d offended the lady in the grocery store somehow. His response was that unless I’d been downright rude, I shouldn’t worry since I had “gaijin license.” I’ve come to realize that this is absolutely true.

“Gaijin license” is the slack the Japanese cut you because you’re obviously a foreigner. We figure it’s akin to dealing with a small child or a not very bright chimpanzee. We barbarians *obviously* can’t be expected to grasp the intricacies of polite society, so we’re allowed to bend the rules a bit. Even break them in some situations. After all, there’s no point in scolding a poor dumb creature who just doesn’t know any better.

As annoying as this attitude can be, there are fringe benefits. If I can’t quite manage to slurp my noodles (early conditioning to not play with your food is really hard to overcome – I keep expecting my grandmother’s hand to connect painfully with my ear), the cook doesn’t take offense. If I don’t realize that you’re supposed to take a number at the bank (deli style) instead of just standing in line, I get one free question answered before I’m politely given a number. The lady in the post office sighs when I hand her a stack of postcards that could all just get a postcard stamp but that she now has to weigh individually (I don’t know how to ask for 6 postcard stamps), but she does it meticulously. Etc. The best one I’ve found yet is that as long as I don’t block anyone in, I can pretty much park where ever the car fits. Even in the hotel valet-only parking lot.

I am, however, told that if you’re a foreigner of Japanese decent, gaijin license is not an option. In fact, you *are* expected to know better. And have impeccable manners because you’re a Japanese representative in foreign countries. That just takes the fun out of it!

Things I don’t recommend

2004-07-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

Deciding to go for a hike at lunchtime on a day when the weather at 7:20am was listed as 71deg and 99% humidity (instead of a sun or clouds, the weather report had a completely white block with the word “mist”). It only gets hotter during the day, not less humid.

Eating German food in Japan. To be fair, Asian food in Germany is equally bad. Stay away from both.

Leaving the car windows open after lunch to let the cool bug with the super long neck escape, on a day when thunderstorms are possible.

Stuffing your face with real pepperoni pizza after eating mostly fish and rice for the last 6 weeks. The body just doesn’t know what to do with the sudden onslaught of grease.

Eating pastries with lime green topping. I haven’t commented on dud food choices lately for fear of becoming redundant, but this deserves mention. It looked like a yellow cheddar cheese filled pastry, with white cheese on top (albeit with a slight green tint). It turned out to be a cantaloupe-goo filled pastry with honeydew icing.

I’d feel better if now knowing these things would allow me call others “grasshopper”. But I can’t help this sneaking suspicion that it just means I don’t have the common sense of a grasshopper myself.

Earthquake

2004-07-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

Ever since the family who lives above me got back from vacation, there have been occasional thuds that shake the walls. The first time it happened, I panicked, thinking it was an earthquake. But since it was almost immediately followed by the sound of a scolding parent and a child crying, I stopped being worried (at least about earthquakes – I’m still wondering how large this child is to create that much noise).

Last night, although there was no thud, the bed shook. And I mean really shook, for several seconds. And it wasn’t followed by any scolding noises.

What’s interesting is that I can’t seem to find any mention of the event in any of the English news sources. Everyone at work nods and agrees it was an earthquake, but for them it’s also a non-event. I had to go to the USGS website to find out that it was a baby quake (4.5 magnitude). It felt stronger because it was centered a mere 50 miles from here. (They actually list the locations in latitude and longitude, but one of the “perks” of this job is that I know work’s location to within GPS accuracy – how nerdly is that?)

There was another earthquake Saturday that I didn’t notice (a 5.6 but centered about 200 miles away) – the news wires picked up on that one. They also mention that Tokyo is considered by many to be overdue for a major quake. And that a lot of little quakes is often a precursor for a large one. Joy.

I'm back

2004-07-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

yay! Blogger got its act together and I can post again. Updates coming as I get my act together.

Child proof OJ

2004-07-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have kept silent for as long as I can, but this morning I cannot stand it any more. That line from the movie who’s name I can never remember keeps coming back to me - “Because Caucasians are just too damn tall!”

Orange juice here comes in 1 liter containers that look like miniature versions of our ½ gallon containers. Most of them have the little round plastic pour spouts that are becoming popular at home, with the same pull tab opening (the little round plastic ring that you put your finger in to pull off to unseal the container the first time). But think about it – if the container is smaller, then the pour spout and the tab also have to be smaller. But the pour spout on the larger container barely fits my finger, especially in the morning before I’ve really woken up. You see the issue here?

So I’m standing in the kitchen early this morning, tired and grumpy with a trace of a dehydration headache from yesterday’s sun. And I can’t get my pinkie finger through the stupid little plastic ring no matter how hard I try. Utensils don’t work because they don’t bend enough. Cutting the stupid thing off will just result in a puddle on the floor. And because they have the pour spout, they seal the top (the old fashioned opening) really well so I can’t get that open either.

All I want is a glass of orange juice – is that really too much to ask?

Tour guides

2004-07-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

The long awaited day had arrived and, despite several emails assuring them that they were not required to give in to the arm twisting of Helpful Meddler, both girls assured me they were more than happy to spend the day practicing their English. So we set off for two amusement parks – one with the “longest slide in Japan” and the other complete with roller coasters and a petting zoo.

Tomomi and Madoka

I had said I was willing to drive if they navigated and read street signs, so they both came prepared with maps and guidebooks. What I found fascinating was how they used these aids. I’ve noticed that all maps have convenience stores and gas stations listed by name (the shell station is marked with a little yellow shell symbol, the Seven-Eleven has a “7-11”, etc). I figured it was some weird advertising deal with all the map publishers. Be that as it may, what I didn’t realize was that people actually use these as landmarks in lieu of more normal things like street names. We seriously found the first park by passing 2 Hot Spars, going over a bridge, and turning right at the 7-11. I kid you not!

When we got to the first park, I had to bite my lip not to laugh in disbelief and turn the car around immediately. The park name is officially “Twinkle Heart, Twinkle World.” Fearing that I’d made a horrible mistake, I paid the entrance fee and we drove through the 48 hectares of parkland looking for the slide (it is very pretty – it’s set up as a resort for families with children who want to escape the city and commune with nature). What the park doesn’t advertise is that although you paid the entrance fee, you also have to pay another $5 to ride on the slide! Despite the egregious price gouging (and serious doubts that it’s actually the longest in Japan), the slide was cool. It’s a long, snaking aluminum half-pipe that you ride down on in a plastic sled, luge style. You have a brake (if you’re wuss enough to use it) but not a whole lot of control. Apparently I weigh a little more than the girls, because I kept running into them on the way down.

We then got the girls their very first ever pony rides – once around the ring on a pony that was obviously happier eating grass in the shade than toting around unbalanced sacks of potatoes. When they asked why I wasn’t going to ride, I just looked at them in disbelief. I think my feet would have dragged on the ground if I’d tried! (not to mention that if I want to walk once around the field on a lead rope, I could probably get Little Mig to oblige just for the amusement value)

The next park was a little less successful. It’s set up as a typical summer carnival – the same type of rides, paid for with some number of tickets each. I promptly led them up to the roller coaster section, when they piped up with “oh, I couldn’t ride that! It’s too scary!” Then why did you agree to come to (and pay for) a park who’s only real attraction is two roller coasters??? I mean, I’m the first to admit that I’m a coaster wimp, and think twice about getting slung around upside down. But if I agree to go to an amusement park, I do expect to ride just about everything they have at least once. Not these girls. Even the tea cups were deemed too scary. We rode the disneyland train (complete with a scratchy “choo choo” sound track and statues of the 7 dwarves at the railroad crossing) and the Dumbo flying cars instead.

Then we had to check out the zoo (about then is when I realized that I’d become very used to sight seeing on my own – there is a certain luxury to leaving when you feel like it). Modern zoos tend to have habitats approximating the animals’ natural homes, lots of room for them to roam, and places for the animals to go when they don’t feel like being stared at any more. This zoo was the old fashioned kind – lots of concrete poured in bumpy ground patterns, little tiny enclosures, and really hot, unhappy animals. I’m not sure if the penguins or the big cats were sadder (it was easily over 90deg out). I very much hope that the zoo has an annex somewhere outside the city so that the animals only do short stints in those conditions. And I’m very sorry that any money of mine is contributing to it.

Hot and tired and depressed (at least, I was), we headed for home. To do the girls justice, they didn’t giggle once all day. But the typical Japanese woman’s laugh is this high-pitched titter that’s almost as annoying, as is the habit of clapping to applaud any clever statement or act. And one more squealed chorus of “kawaii“ (pronounced "kah - why - e - e" and translates to “oh, how CUUUUUUUUTE”) was going to get them dumped on the side of the road.

Directions please

2004-07-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

Most of my local sightseeing destinations come from the Japan National Tourist Organization, which does a great job of listing all places of any possible interest. However, they don’t really give many of the useful details – like how interesting the sight is, or even what we would consider real directions. Instead you get things like “this joyous park is 40 min from the X exit on the Y expressway.” So, assuming you feel like going to a joyous park, you have no direction, no road names, no nothing – all you know is that it’s within a 40 minute radius around the exit. If you remember that you can’t really ask for directions, it can be a little daunting. I generally do ok with a combination of their little stylized maps, the road atlas, and the GPS map, but it can make for some interesting detours along the way.

Tsukuba Science City itself is easy to find since it’s actually a city. It’s one of the largest concentrations of high tech in Japan, with a large university and enough foreigners to justify a very nice English-language website. So we had assumed that getting around would be fairly easy. Sadly, we were wrong. Very few of the museums had any more than a large welcome sign at their entrance (which is really only visible if you happen to be driving by the entrance and simultaneously looking in that direction). And once you get into the museums you realize the dreadful truth – this is a city that decided it ought to have museums, not a city that had anything to put into the museums. Like the “extensive collection of maps and geographical survey instruments” that turned out to be about what any decent university collection would have. Even the NASDA gift shop sold more NASA paraphernalia than anything else.

The local volcano (second only to Fuji-san) was deemed a better afternoon destination (we also figured that it had to be cooler at altitude because it couldn’t possibly be any hotter). As an added bonus, you can drive almost all the way to the top, and then take a ropeway the rest of the way. This is the kind of mountain climbing I can handle.

Unfortunately, the road to Tsukuba-san isn’t really well marked. There’s a sign where you get off the main highway, but we saw nothing at the base of the mountain. Well, this is what the GPS map is good for – according to it, the right turn we were at was the only way up for miles. So off we went into the wild blue yonder. And noticed that the road was getting really steep (had to turn off the AC to get the required engine power out of the little rental car, which was most unfortunate). And really narrow. And really deserted (the one person we saw was out walking his dog and looked shocked to see a car). And then the pavement gave way to base rock. And then the base rock stopped being well groomed. At this point, we finally figured out we had done something wrong. We’re dense, but not total idiots. I mean, can you honestly see a Japanese tourist voluntarily driving his car over roads like this? No way. But there was no way to turn around and the road was too rough to back out, so we continued forward (“always going forward because we cannot find reverse”). Only to eventually come out onto a large, paved highway (with lots of signs for Tsukuba-san) that just doesn’t happen to be on the GPS map. sigh.

At the top of the road is the promised temple complex (several of the buildings are older and more ornate than usual too) and a rather steep ropeway to the summit. The car itself is built with a 30deg slope in the floor and there are signs along the way whenever the slope changes – the lowest was 23% while the highest was 38.5%. But we didn’t have to hike, the view from the top was pretty despite the haze, and, best of all, it WAS cooler up there. We stayed until the last car back down.

Sumo

2004-07-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

For the last week or so, I’ve been watching Sumo wrestling on TV (it’s on before the baseball game starts). The basic rules seem simple – the two *large* combatants dressed only in hair grease and fancy g-strings get into the ring to stare and grunt at each other. At some unseen signal from the fantastically garbed referee (you think black and white stripes look funny!), they start trying to heave each other out of the ring. The first one out loses. Arguably, I’m missing some of the finer details, but that’s the gist.

Today I finally got motivated enough to try to get educated. It turns out that Sumo started as a more free form “beat the stuffing out of the other guy to please the gods” activity that was codified to something like today’s rules about 300 years ago. It’s still considered a Shinto ceremony, so a lot of the costumes and bowing and slapping and stomping is in the nature of pleasing the gods and scaring away the evil spirits.

The rules are simple. The two opponents have up to 4 minutes to stare each other down, and then however long it takes for either something other than the bottom of a foot to touch the mat, or any body part touch the ground outside the ring boundary. No punching, hair-pulling, eye-gouging, choking, or kicking of sensitive areas is allowed (no wedgies either), but everything else is legal. Interestingly enough, there are no weight classifications. And the unwritten rule is that a wrestler should never show emotion of any kind, even when a man twice his size is sitting on him.

The lifestyle is unbelievable. The wrestlers apprentice as teenagers and spend the next 5-10 years fetching and carrying for their elders while learning the ropes (and incidentally graduating from school – this is considered a gentleman’s sport and gentlemen need an education). Then, as long as they continue winning more than half their tournament matches, they are pampered and feted (much like our show horses).

There are 6 grand tournaments a year, lasting 15 days each. A wrestler will participate in up to 15 matches (one a day). The tournament winner is the one with the best win/loss record at the end. A wrestler only attains the highest level title if he wins consistently and is “a man of character worthy to hold such an exalted position.” Only 62 men have managed this feat in the last 3 centuries.

Sumo wrestling is considered the only truly native Japanese sport. The national association's website also claims it’s just as popular as baseball, but given which one gets prime time TV coverage, I think we know the truth. It is, however, a lot more fun to watch. If nothing else, the large white man with a very hairy chest and back trying to suppress all facial expression while dressed in nothing but a baby blue g-string is easily a match for yellow condom man (the Japanese wrestlers look odd, but this man just looks silly).

Auditions

2004-07-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

A small digression from the subject at hand, if I may. As all of us, I am the recipient of email junk mail, otherwise known as spam. Most of it is pretty normal, but every once in a while a truly unique piece floats to the top. So unique that it’s worth perpetuating. This message that came today is one such piece. I really don’t even want to think about what mailing list I’m on that would convince Maya I’d be both a good candidate for and interested in tryouts for a carnival.

I also find it interesting that she thinks it’s important to explicitly state that the position is paid.

-------------------------

Subject: Zeppelin Beach Auditions
From: Maya Sedgwick
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 04:04:59 –0700

Hi,

Zeppelin Beach is holding an audition for improvisors, singers, clowns, cirque, magic and dance. Paid. If you'd like to audition or know some who would like to audition, let us know

Audition: Thursday Aug 22. 7:30pm - 10pm
Belladonna Ballroom
2436 Sacramento Street (Sacramento Street at Dwight Way)
Berkeley, CA 94702

Thank You,
Maya Sedgwick

Japanese sports

2004-07-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

The only conclusion I can come to is that the Japanese are obsessed with baseball. There is at least one game on regular TV every night. And I do mean every night. Japanese ESPN usually has another game on (at least, if it’s not a different game, the players are changing clothes awfully quickly). Every once in a while they’ll show volleyball or soccer, but even the national Sumo wrestling tournament doesn’t get prime time billing. It’s non-stop baseball. I don’t think that even football season at home matches this.

It’s not all a spectator sport either. There’s a baseball diamond in every little town, complete with full stadium lighting and seating. And if you happen to be trying to drive through the town right before or right after the game, you might as well just pull over to the side and wait. It’ll be less aggravating.

I’ve seen tennis courts and swimming pools and soccer fields as well, but never with cars overflowing the parking lot. The only thing that might have a larger participant base is golf. But given how often I see a country club parking lot full and no one out on the green, I’m not sure they’re actually technically participants.

This comes up now because I’ve been looking in vain for any mention of the Tour de France. I’ve seen nothing anywhere, no one at work discusses the standings, and I’m reduced to the internet for updates (hearing about a crash just isn’t the same as watching it). Being a cyclist’s wife, I have to be appalled at this state of affairs. And it’s not just that the race is half the world away - cycling just doesn’t seem to be big here. Although there are lots of people out on commuter bikes, I’ve only seen one cyclist out on the road with a brightly colored Lycra jersey and roadbike in my entire time here. But I figure it’s hopeless to try and convert them. Just think – the *average* downhill speed of the Tour peleton is faster than the typical Japanese speed limit.

Wasted morning

2004-07-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

There was a cool breeze this morning! It didn’t last past 10am, but it was enough to prompt me to a spate of laundry and house cleaning. What a waste of a perfectly good morning. Sigh. At least I have clean underwear and a bubblegum-fresh bathroom (the can of what looked like cleanser was indeed cleanser – just bubblegum scented for some reason).

I realized that today I have officially been in this apartment longer than I have lived in the new house at home. How depressing.

Details

2004-07-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

After a little over a month here, I’m finally getting comfortable driving around – at least places I’ve been before (the moment of panic as I turn into a street muttering “right hand to right hand” to myself and see headlights coming at me on the right is getting shorter). But this also means that I’ve stopped looking at each and every sight in wonder. While it’s a lot less stressful in general, it also makes the day a lot less amusing. So lately I’ve been deliberately looking around a little more.

The school bus. If the garbage truck here is cute, only think how cute the school bus is. It’s a little longer than one of our short busses and is painted with flowers and kids playing. All the little kids on a given bus (I’ve only ever seen a school bus here for really little kids) all wear the same color sailor’s caps. I guess it makes the scary job of finding the right bus line on the way home a lot easier. In addition, there’s also a greeter lady who stands in the bus door and says hi to the moms and helps the kids into the bus. They probably even have assigned seats. Talk about pampering! I always had to fight for my own seat on an unmarked, un-policed yellow bus.

I passed a sign for “Earthquake Observation” this weekend. I assume it’s an institute for earthquake studies, but think of the possibilities in the literal title! I can see the billboard now – “Come experience a real live earthquake! Fun for the whole family!” You’d watch from a plexi-glass shark tank thing suspended from a large crane. And the more money you spent, the higher the earthquake on the Richter scale.

Around lunchtime, I see a lot of mopeds zooming around town with weird little boxes attached to the back. It’s usually a square metal case suspended by a spring from a metal arm coming from the seat. So as the moped leans over around tight corners, the box stays upright. You wouldn’t want to spill the soup in the lunch delivery!

The latest grocery store purchase was a little cup of what looked like peanut butter. If anyone wants a tub of Reeses Peanut Butter Cup filling, let me know. I’ll be happy to send you one.

Rokkakudo

2004-07-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Today didn’t look like it was going to get quite as sweltering hot as yesterday, but after yesterday’s teasing thunderstorms (thunder and lightning, but only about 5 fat rain drops), I wasn’t about to try inland sightseeing again. Instead I headed for the coast (I don’t think I was subconsciously spiting Helpful Meddler, but I guess you never know). The intended goal was a rocky peninsula that some artist (hailed the father of Japanese modern art – I can dig up his name if you care) had claimed for his retreat house.

To spite me, today’s thunderstorm came full spate just as I was driving over the mountains. What was weird was that the pavement was so hot, the rain would boil off as soon as the drops hit. The mist rising while it was raining was a really neat effect, but it didn’t really help visibility any. I also got to take the rental car off-roading a bit (it’s not my fault that they’d ripped up all the pavement over the pass right before it rained enough to create monster puddles). But as luck would have it, the storm was passing southwest and I was going northeast. So it had settled into a mere light rain by the time I reached the coast.

I never did find the retreat house, but the entire bluff there is really pretty. If it would get me a piece of property like that, I’d claim the muse came to me there too!

Somehow magic occurred while I was in the museum (yes, I paid to go into a museum of modern art – don’t ask, I don’t know what possessed me either), and it was sunny when I came out again. And even a little cooler. So when I noticed a beach up the coast a bit further, I grabbed a snack and headed north. From the number of people that were out fishing or crabbing, I’m guessing there’s not a whole lot else to do in the little fishing village on a Sunday afternoon. It’s probably worse than Omiya for entertainment. But then again, I guess live beach critter trumps dead worm in the remains of a puddle any day.

What scared me was that there was NO one in the water (and it was warm too – the water current must have followed the hot air current). The fishermen were all standing on shore in hipwaders and none of the kids had more than a hand in the water. I don’t know if it was sharks or toxic waste, but I had no desire to put more than my feet in. And I took a shower as soon as I got home, just to be safe.

Seven counts of aggravated meddling

2004-07-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

After a thoroughly useless morning of sightseeing (the ceramic history museum doesn’t have a single piece of clay that’s older than I am, the “Forest of Magician’s Clay” is a path around some amorphous marble blobs in between some trees, and the azalea park probably looks a lot better when the azaleas are actually in bloom), I stopped by the International Institute to return the books I’d borrowed and get some new ones. On my way out, I got sucked into a “Saturday Salon” (groups of people that meet to drink tea and discuss other cultures – apparently they don’t often get a non-Japanese participant so I was the zoo animal for the day). But since they were willing to talk in English, I wasn’t really complaining.

It turns out that Mito has several “sister cities” around the world, one of which is Anaheim, CA. On hearing that I’m from California, the first question out of all of their mouths is if I’ve ever been there. I try to convey to them how big California really is, and that if I spent the next year traveling non-stop, I still couldn’t see it all. But it doesn’t sink in. They just all assume that *of course* I’ve been to Disneyworld (or land – I can never remember which is in Ca and which is in Fl). Not having any desire to go to such a Mecca is apparently inconceivable.

Anyway, the conversation gradually veered around to what I thought of Japan, what sites I’d already seen, etc. Then they figured out that I was doing all this sightseeing on my own. Now, until this point, Helpful Meddler had managed to blend into the crowd and look like just one more middle aged Japanese man. But now he just couldn’t contain himself anymore. His disguise was stripped away and his true from revealed as he went into a long lecture on how I shouldn’t be out on my own. As if he was my dad. Just how old does he think I am anyway? Now, annoyance aside, it’s a very nice sentiment and it has occurred to me that when I traipse off after some random thing in the guidebook, I should perhaps at least leave a note telling someone where my body is likely to be. But as for not going out by myself – what am I supposed to do? Wait patiently in the apartment until someone decides to come by, knock on my door, and take me somewhere? I seem to remember Mom warning me not to get in cars with strangers...

He wound down after a while and we continued talking. I happened to ask if people are allowed to swim in the large lake downtown (allowed to, yes; want to, no. I never did quite catch exactly why, but the implication was clear - if I didn’t grow a second head, I’d turn purple with green stripes). But they asked if I’d been to the ocean, and when I admitted I’d already gone to most of the local beaches, Helpful Meddler started in again. And this time he was really excited about the whole thing. He got so worked up that he found two university freshmen studying English to be my tour guides next weekend. I have no idea what they had planned for the day, or if they even have any interest in the longest slide in Japan, but I don’t mind the company if they want to come along. So I’m meeting them at the train station at 10 and if they giggle too much, I’m dropping them on Helpful Meddler’s doorstep and going by myself after all.

(For those of you likely to worry, rest assured that I haven’t been out swimming by myself. Wave jumping, yes, but not swimming. Partly because the ex-lifeguard in me knows how stupid it is and partly because I didn’t think to bring the key floatie and I’m not about to chance having to dive for my car keys in a country where I can’t even ask where the American consulate is. But it’s the same result either way.)

Campaigning

2004-07-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

Local elections are this coming Sunday and the politicians have definitely stepped up their campaigning. Mostly it’s the usual flyers and ads and news coverage (although most of the people handing out flyers do realize that handing me one isn’t a particularly effective use of their paper). One of the candidates even had either a long press conference or paid advertising on tv for 30 minutes one night (he actually looked a lot like the scary pointy-haired guy on morning tv, but there wasn't any mist of any color). But the one uniquely Japanese form of campaigning is the election van. It’s a regular white van outfitted with as many loud speakers as they can fit on the roof (it almost looks like a tv van if you're not paying close attention). They drive up and down the streets very slowly, loudly blaring the campaign speeches. And I do mean loudly.

They’ve been doing this occasionally since I got here, but this last week has gotten worse. This morning, a van came down my street at about 8am. All I can say is that’s a great thing to do to your rival – blare his campaign speeches at odd hours. I certainly wouldn’t vote for someone rude enough to break the morning’s peace like that!

. . .

Mom sent tootsie roll pops in her latest care package (thank you!). Since it would take one person (even a sugar junkie like myself) a while to go through that many tootsie roll pops, I brought them to work to share. Picture, if you will, a roomful of Japanese business men with tootsie roll pops in their mouths. I SO wish I’d had a camera!

Korean in Japan

2004-07-08T17:03:00.000-07:00

The program I’m working on is actually a joint venture between a Japanese company and a Korean company. I knew that the two countries weren’t exactly best buddies (a little matter of a couple wars and an occupation or two), but I didn’t really realize how close to enemies they really are. Let’s just say that I’d rather be an American here than a Korean. At least the stares I get are curious and friendly.

So a representative from the Korean company has been here for the past month and his time in exile is up today. To celebrate, he took us all to dinner last night at his favorite Korean restaurant in the city. Sadly enough, to an uncultured gaijin, the food wasn’t that different. It was marked only by it’s lack of fish and generous sprinkling of habanero peppers over almost everything.

What was rather interesting was that the Korean section of town is apparently the red light district. Walking back to the car was an educational experience. I didn’t realize you could make a skirt out of that little material. And women in kimono in the pictures always seem very prim and proper. However, it is possible to look anything but prim and proper in a kimono. I don’t know how she did it, but she did.

The funniest part was that one of the Americans had told his wife he would call at 10pm. We were late getting out of the restaurant, so 10pm came and went while he was strolling down the street. I’m not sure what excuse was given for the late phone call, or what (if any) resemblance it bore to the truth. I offered to call his wife and vouch for him (“all he did was look, honest! He couldn’t do more because I was hanging on his arm the entire time to protect him”), but he declined the offer for some reason.

Adventures in guessing

2004-07-07T16:35:00.000-07:00

Every time I go shopping, I’ve been buying one new thing (like a new pastry, a drink, etc). In general, this has been working extremely well. I don’t always know what I’m getting, but it’s usually pretty good. Like the bun that I thought was filled with black bean paste, which turned out to actually be chocolate (you can tell I was crying over that one). The “chocolate chips” that turned out to be raisin were more disappointing, but livable.

Until this week, that is. I have had the most amazing string of bad luck this week.

First was the cheese danish that turned out to filled with chicken salad. Not bad, just somewhat unexpected. Probably makes a better lunch than dessert (trust me, it’s a disappointing dessert).

Then was my pudding. I’d bought a container of milk about a week ago, only to discover that milk here is ... different. Not bad exactly, but extremely full-fat with a weird flavor. So I found a box of pudding mix - I couldn’t read the instructions, but there were little pictures on the back of the box – a pitcher with “200 ml” written on it, a pot on a stove, and 4 little cups being put into the refrigerator. I made the leap of faith that pudding was made the same way here and, lo and behold, ended up with one large (instead of 4 small) bowl of something like creme caramel. I was so proud of myself that I got up the courage to get a box of “strawberry pudding” sitting on the same shelf on the next trip – this time, a brand without picture instructions. BAD move. Instead of the familiar packet of powder, this box contained only a foil packet of liquid strawberry goo. Mixing that with 200ml milk was going to get me red milk, not pudding. And by now I was too scared to try cooking it. I gave in and asked the secretary to translate – you are, in fact, supposed to add 200 ml of heavy cream and make strawberry whipped cream with it. Why you would eat a dish full of strawberry whipped cream ... I don’t know.

Not being willing to try a drink called “Pocari Sweat”, I tried something called “Misuya Cider” instead. I’m not sure what I expected – something carbonated and vaguely apple I guess. My first clue should have been the sickly sweet smell that filled the room as soon as I opened the bottle. But no, I had to go and actually taste this stuff that I’d spent 97 whole yen on. Ray-san describes it as a cross between 7-Up and Fresca. I’m leaning more towards “liquid bubblegum”. Either way, the stuff is NASTY. Sugary and saccharine at the same time without any real taste. Amazing.

Cleaning supplies are an even scarier concept. I’ve been seriously trying to convince myself that the apartment could go the entire 3 months without being cleaned, but it’s getting pretty gross. So off to the store to stand in front of the cleaning supplies aisle, where there are (among LOTS of other bottles and cans and baggies) three almost identical looking bottles of blue liquid with different little cartoons on them: one with a stove and tile background, one with a toilet, and one with a window and curtains. I guessed that the last was Windex, but now that I own a bottle, I’ve realized that it doesn’t actually clean the mirror particularly well. It doesn’t leave streaks either, so I’m not sure what to think. Maybe it’s streak-free curtain cleaner. And now I’m scared of the can of something that looks exactly like a can of Comet except for the characters in the label.

The walls in both the apartment and the office at work are all almost entirely bare, so I’ve been looking for posters to hang (like a picture of Mt. Fuji or Tokyo at night). Oddly enough, I’ve seen none. Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places, but there’s been nothing. Someone mentioned that the 100yen store had posters of the Japanese alphabet and I thought that could be good - colorful AND educational. Sure enough, I found the alphabet posters and even better, I found maps. Unfortunately, they were all rolled up so you could only see the last 5 inches of them and the labels were all in Japanese with no pictures. There were 3 different colors of label. One I could tell was a map of the world. Another had a bunch of islands – I’m assuming it was a map of Japan. The other one only showed green with a lake without enough outline to tell what it was. I made the assumption that it was the local area (since there’s a mountain range and a lake) and bought one. I get it to work and proudly start unwrapping our first piece of wall art. When Ray-san saw it, he started laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall off his chair. Hanging on our wall is now a Japanese-language map of Europe.

Japanese tv

2004-07-06T16:29:00.000-07:00

I have found a whole new genre of tv to be horrified by – Japanese children’s tv. I usually have the news on for background noise in the mornings (and every once in a while they’ll do an interview with some dignitary in English). But today I got bored and started channel surfing. I found horrifying things!

Ok, first was a grown man running around in a bright yellow skin suit with pink accents. Given that he had a tall pointed hood on, he looked, well, like a condom. Sorry, there’s no other way to describe him. He jumped around the screen singing very loudly with his pink fuzzball companion for 15 minutes while I watched in horror. At one point he was fighting with a lady with blue hair dressed in a toga. I was IMing with the Redhead at the time, and he accused me of being on some really good drugs but he later found their website. He’s called “Stretch Man” – see for yourself: http://www.nhk.or.jp/sman/ja/frame.html

After Stretch Man came a very tan gentleman entirely dressed in a white Japanese robe. He had an afro that was parted on the side that made him look like he had horns (a la Wolverine). He was orating very sternly from a background of white dry ice clouds. Then he got louder and the clouds turned red. Then he got even more emotional and the music swelled and the clouds swirled and changed around him until he was solemnly talking from blue clouds. Then he calmed down and we were back to white.

After that was a nature show with close ups of just how grasshoppers actually fertilize and lay eggs.

Luckily I had to turn off the tv and go to work after that, so I didn’t get to see why R2D2 was talking about Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper.

I’m melting

2004-07-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

Ugh. It’s not actually that hot here (maybe 80 deg), but it’s got to be about 95% humidity. It’s like living inside a warm cloud or cool-ish sauna. The sun didn’t even come out today, just hid behind the clouds and mist like it was too hot to bother shining. The weather report said “scattered thunderstorms” - I wish they’d hurry up and get here. Ray-san (the other company rep here) just smiles and says it’ll get worse before the summer is over. I forgive him only because he showed me where to get real pizza here. With pepperoni instead of tuna and corn.

The only thing that looks remotely happy with the weather is the rice fields. From a distance, they look like fields of spring-green chia pet hair gently waving in the breeze (most are 1-2 feet high at this point). Your brain knows that it’s not grass, but your feet still itch to see what it would feel like to run through it barefoot.

Oddly enough, there is very little grass here. Someone explained that there are very strict agricultural laws (at least in Ibaraki – I don’t know if it’s Japan-wide). Among other things, if you own x amount of land, you have to grow food. So everyone has a rice paddy for a front lawn and usually a really nice looking vegetable plot as a side yard. Maybe some flowers along the driveway. The amazing thing is how straight the rows are in these tiny little plots. I mean, I know most farmers take pride in plowing straight, parallel furrows, but these look like the Japanese farmers were out there with surveying equipment! And you apparently never deadend more than two rows into the side of your field (it’s probably bad luck).

I got here early enough in the spring to see some newly planted rice fields. It’s really something magical. Because of the perfectly straight rows and perfectly spaced plants, if you look at a field of baby rice just right, it looks entirely green. Yet if you look at it at an angle, it’s a still pool of green water reflecting the nearby houses and trees and even clouds. Like fabric that changes color with motion, or a hologram that shifts images as you move around it. I tried to take a picture, but I’m not a good enough photographer - all I got was green.

ps - the actual weather forecast says current conditions in Omiya are 79 deg and 89% humidity

A small spot of pampering

2004-07-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

As I was getting ready to come to Japan, I realized that I hadn’t cut my hair in a very long time and that it had reached that stage where I was sick of it and it just needed to be shorter. I was going to do the usual supercuts routine, but people convinced me to wait and experience a Japanese haircut. I didn’t really see how it could be that much different, but it was an outing, so why not.

The secretary at work very kindly set me up with her hairdresser – called ahead to tell them to expect a random gaijin, gave me directions, and wrote me a note in Japanese saying I wanted a haircut. So I walked in, said hi, and handed over my permission slip. The proprietor looked puzzled but read the note, then smiled, took my purse, and whisked me over to the shampoo station.

I don’t think I’ve had anyone wash my hair since I was little (and let’s face it, Mom was always more concerned with getting all of us clean but not drowned and in bed before midnight than with selecting the correct combination of scents for your mood that day). This was more along the lines of a massage masquerading as a shampoo. Fluffy towels to cushion and protect from splashing (now we know where all the good towels go here!), massaging water spray, scalp rub ... the works.

Ok, time to wake up from the nap and get ushered over to the cutting station. While the stylist blow dried my hair, I was scanning through picture books looking for something that wouldn’t make me look like a poodle. Here’s where I wished for the nth time that day that I spoke some Japanese (the total for the trip is well on it’s way to infinity). I pointed to a picture that was close to the hair style I had had before it got too long to tell, and stylist (oh so very politely) turned a couple of pages and pointed to something similar but not quite. I had to agree that I thought it would look better, nodded, and (with a small prayer to the poodle god) gave myself up to her scissors.

Now, admittedly the entire reason I was here was because my hair was so long it was getting in my way. But it’s still nerve wracking to see that much hair end up on the floor. Especially when you can’t ask what she thinks she’s doing. Or if she realizes that hair that is straight when long can be rather curly when short. But she continued merrily snipping away while her assistant brought me iced coffee. And since I hadn’t seen any coloring materials come out (my biggest fear was ending up with orange hair), I just shut up and sat still.

It turned out to be a very Japanese style - cut the top 2/3 to frame the skull, let the bottom 1/3 curl around to the front (not for nothing do I watch all those talk shows on Japanese tv!). Perhaps not what I would have chosen, but it’ll work. And she did, by some miracle of telepathy, get my bangs to exactly the length I wanted.

This is about where a salon in the US says “thank you very much for letting us charge you oodles of money, when should I schedule your next appointment”. But not here. Now came the real neck and shoulder massage. Wow. Just wow.

Then when I was a puddle of goo, the styling gel came out and she spent another long time adding volume and putting every hair into place just so. In the end, I did look rather like a fluffy poodle, but she was so proud, I just smiled and said thank you a lot before I went home and washed it all out.

2 hours of pampering for the price of a 45 minute hair cut by a regular salon at home – I could see how people get addicted to this (everyone here, even the guys, have fairly regular appointments. And while I’m assuming discount places a la supercuts exist, I haven’t seen them yet). Epicurux says his wife goes all the way to Japantown in SF to get her haircut – I might have to get the name of her stylist!

Happy Fourth of July! And yes, they have hot dogs and corn and even watermelon (the last served with a little salt package for some reason) so I’m all set.

Oarai

2004-07-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in my travels, I picked up a packet of postcards showing all the best local sights. I’d heard of most of them, and even been to a couple already. But there was one that no one had mentioned (and when asked, the locals couldn’t identify it) – a fantastic picture of a torii sitting out on a rock in the surf.

Some background – a “torii” is a freestanding gate. In it’s simplest form, it has a pillar on each side and two parallel lintels on top. They can be made out of almost anything (wood, metal, concrete, etc), come in various sizes (almost always taller than a person), and can be quite complex (complete with roof and flanking guardian statues). They generally stand as the “entrance” to a shrine or temple although it’s not uncommon to see one standing in the middle of apparently nowhere (like this one).

So today was an expedition to find the mysterious torii. The postcard claimed it was in Oarai (pronounced "or I"), which also happens to have (among other things) an aquarium, a “marine tower”, a large temple complex, and the beach I was originally directed to (see entry for 6/19). So I figured there was enough to do even if the postcard turned out to be a photo-shop job.

The aquarium was an afterthought since I didn’t really think it belonged in a sightseeing tour of Japanese things. But it was easily one of the best aquariums I’ve seen, with a really nice deep sea display. I don’t know if that crab really was almost my size or if the thick glass distorted it, but it was impressive. Up on the surface, the seals were unfortunately napping, but the sea otters were cheerfully demonstrating that summersaults were an international otter past time (the otters we see in Monterey do the same). They also had a really spectacular jungle gym, but there were no big people on it. And since I’m a big big person here, I regretfully passed. What I found truly sad though, was that Aquaworld had much better English signs and guides than the world heritage site Nikko.

The marine tower turned out to be a random tower sitting in the middle of the town. 330yen gets you a 60m ride up in a glass elevator and a view for however long you can stand the other tourists. It did have a view of Sun Park Beach (remember, this is another “beach not very nice”). Close up, the beach was windy, but even nicer than the other. All kinds of sea shells to collect too – just make sure their previous owners have left (there were a lot of people out collecting dinner).

I almost had to give up on the expedition’s goal when I found a map of the town with partial romanji characters. Turns out that it’s hidden behind a row of the ugliest waterfront hotels you’ve ever seen. It’s only a km or so north from the sand beach, but the beach here is all pebbles and rocks. The torii sits out on the last large rock in the surf (it actually stands 4th in a widely-spaced line of torii from the temple complex on the hill). I don’t know what its builders thought it was a gate to or from, but it’s easy to imagine stepping through it into some completely different world.

Lunch Set-o A

2004-07-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

Omiya being rather small and out of the way, there’s not really much call for English menus and the like around town. Nor do people feel comfortable enough with their English to admit they speak any (although you can sometimes get them to admit they speak “sukoshi” English). So ordering meals in a restaurant is a little more complicated than you might otherwise think.

The larger places have plastic replicas of their food outside. No, I am not making this up. If they serve ramen with pork and corn and bamboo shoots, there is a plastic bowl full of “soup”, “noodles”, “pork slices”, “corn kernels”, and “bamboo shoots” in the display window (apparently there’s a factory that makes most of the plastic food and they give tours – I haven’t found it yet though).

The smaller places though ... if no one in the family owns a color printer so there are no pictures on the menu, you’re out of luck. But here’s a useful piece of information - almost every restaurant has lunch specials, variously called “Obento” and “lunch set-o”. The generally consist of a main dish, rice, soup, pickles, and sometimes a small piece of tofu (the Japanese seriously believe in *lots* of small dishes for each meal – they’re not courses per say since you eat them all together, just lots of items artistically placed on different plates and bowls in front of you).

Knowing these lunch specials exist means you can walk into a restaurant and order “lunch set-o A” and be reasonably confident that you’re going to get fed. Now, you have no idea WHAT you’re going to be fed, but sometimes that’s best anyway.

Oddly enough, this strategy got me gyoza (Japanese potstickers) three days in a row at three different restaurants. Today it was a Korean bbq bowl though.

And just when I think I’m getting the hang of things here, something happens to convince me I’m really a stranger in a strange land. I was coming back from a foray to the prefecture botanical gardens this morning and had to brake hard and swerve to avoid hitting a monkey. Yes, you read that correctly, a monkey taking himself for a walk across the freeway. No, I didn’t get a picture – I was too busy trying to remember which side of the road I was supposed to end up on (I was later told that he’s an escaped pet who hangs around town and while I can expect to see him occasionally, I shouldn’t feed him).

Things I will never understand

2004-07-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

And no, this isn’t an attempt to stick in more toilet pictures. Totally unrelated subjects (although I will also never understand why you’d want to risk electrocution like that).

I wandered into the local gift shop today and was amazed. I don’t fully understand the present etiquette here, but it’s obviously much more refined than dumping a bunch of gaudily wrapped items next to a birthday cake once a year. So they have a store devoted entirely to suitable gift items and the wrapping thereof. Some are your standard knickknacks and dust collectors – picture frames, vases, figurines and the like. Others are kitchen items like nice pots or small appliances. And then there are the gift boxes – think of these as our gift baskets but with completely random stuff in them. I saw some standards, like a collection of coffees or teas. Odder things like assorted exotic juices or canned fruit still looked pretty good. The lifetime supply of soy sauce or deep-frying oil ... that definitely falls into the “gee grandma, you really shouldn’t have” category. But the one that defies ALL bounds was the beautifully wrapped box of 24 tiny cans of spam (for only $25 too!). I mean, just what do you say after unwrapping that?

Pickles. Now, in the US, the term “pickle” generally refers to a cucumber that’s been soaked in vinegar and salt for a while. There are different spices and recipes, but in general it’s green and looks vaguely cucumber-like. You can have pickled other things too (like the pickled garlic that comes in the bottom of a jar of dill pickles), but it’s rare and generally also looks a lot like the original vegetable. The Japanese, on the other hand, will pickle anything and everything that doesn’t run through the kitchen fast enough. And the pickling process almost always involves more Easter egg dye than the average American kid uses in a lifetime. So the end result is this fantastically colored food that bears absolutely no resemblance to what it started out life as. They come as cubes, rectangles, rounds, half-rounds, and squiggles. They come in bright yellow, neon orange, emerald green, fuchsia, and I even got a plain old boring white one today. The flavors are also varied, although most are very salty. My personal favorite are the fuchsia-colored squiggles that taste every so slightly of salty tea leaves.

Japanese tv. You think our tv programming is bad, you have seen nothing yet. Granted I don’t understand what they’re saying, but near as I can figure out, all shows are either game shows, daytime talk shows, news, or sappy movies. Oh – and anime. And some of it defies description. Like today – there was a man dressed in a black pants suit and heels showing two women (also in heels) how to walk in a straight line. Don’t ask, I don’t know.

It’s a non-uncommon sight to watch a dog who has been peacefully slumbering in a heap somewhere suddenly perk up his ears, get up, and trot off down the street. The ones I’ve seen generally come back a little while later and resume the heap state without there being any evidence of any motion ever. Are the Japanese dogs trained to take themselves for walks? Where do they hide the pooper scooper then? Or is there a doggie toilet with paw-sized buttons somewhere?

I’ve seen about a dozen cats here now. All but 2 have only had ½ a tail. Why?

What could possibly convince a grown man, out of sight and earshot and reach of his wife/girl friend, to walk around with a little “hello kitty” stuffed toy attached to his cell phone?

Can anyone translate this for real? I find it hard to believe that they’re really breeding the next godzilla right here in sleepy little Omiya.

Contrasts

2004-06-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

In many ways, Japan is a study in contrasts. I had a long discussion the other day about whether the culture was schizophrenic or just severely repressed. We never did reach a conclusion. I offer some examples for your review:

The same culture that produced a toilet with more buttons than Captain Kirk’s bridge chair also has this one. I guess it has the benefit of being simple. Note that I’ve seen nothing in between here – there’s no missing link in toilet evolution.

In general, the people here are some of the nicest people I’ve met. Perfect strangers will go several blocks out of their way to take you to where you want to go when they realize you can’t understand their directions. But the businessmen are some of the rudest people I’ve ever met (luckily the “I don’t understand Japanese” routine works well – it’s FAR too much trouble for them to try to make themselves understood).

You sleep on a thin mattress on either a wooden frame or the floor (ie, a hard surface) with a rock pillow. Yet you get the fluffiest down comforter.

Spaces that are owned in some way (yards, restaurants, etc) are spotless. I even saw a man on his hands and knees scrubbing the subway station floor in Tokyo. Yet public spaces that no one feels responsible for, like playgrounds and little local parks, have litter scattered all over. Apparently most beaches are like this too, which is why people kept telling me they weren’t very nice.

The typical engineer is expected to work 12+ hours a day, 5-6 days a week in an environment where talking to people unnecessarily is frowned upon. They have no pictures on their walls and very few (if any) personal effects on their desks (makes me wonder what they’d do if I played the hamster dance song really loudly at 3 in the afternoon). Yet get these people out at a restaurant with some sake or beer, and they’re behaving exactly like that really obnoxious guy in American Pie (and the two arenas never cross - as far as I can tell, even obliquely referring to the night before at work is a serious faux pas).

The traditional values and way of life are extolled (at least out here in the styx). I actually saw two older women strolling down the street complete with matronly outfits, sun parasols, and white gloves. And yet this same culture is completely in love with neon and electronic gadgets and all things modern.

Here’s a typical view of Omiya (the town I’m staying in), front street.

And here’s Omiya, back street (what I find amazing is how much this looks like backroads Europe).

And here’s what happens when the two meet. Let’s just say it’s not a graceful pairing and leave it at that.

Size 92

2004-06-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

So a new store opened in town this week (clothing and household goods – like a Marshall’s or Ross I think) and from all I can tell, it’s the grand event of the month (if not the year). I didn’t think Omiya had enough cars to fill that parking lot, but maybe they’re importing them. I figured if everyone else is there, it must be good (besides, I’ve noticed that I get a LOT more stares than usual every time I walk around town in shorts – and now that I'm paying attention, I've seen no other adult wearing shorts. Since I’m not willing to roast in jeans, I’m guessing I need to get a couple of skirts).

Shopping for women’s clothes during a sale is something of a competition sport all of its own (another culturally independent concept apparently). Most people are pleasant and smile and nod and move over a little bit so you can get by. Kind of like jockeying for position during a bike race. You acknowledge someone coming up behind you with whatever breath you have to spare, and move over a little bit in case they want to pass. But you’d never give up your line to move over enough for them to ACTUALLY pass without interference. So you cruise around, looking for things that you might like (or, if you’re really feeling spiteful, for one of a kind things that you think the person behind you might like). When you find something, you grab your size and move on. The pro-shopper jumps in, grabs the item, and is gone before you can complain they cut you off and took the item you were looking at.

Now here’s where I got into trouble. I know my size in American, English, and European sizes. Apparently Japan uses NONE of those standards. Rather than seeing sizes from 6 – 18 on the racks, I was seeing anything from 56 to 96. How non-flattering! Bad enough to have to admit you’ve gone to a size 16. Now imagine you have to fess up to an 88!

The good news is that anything in the 90s is a tent. So finding things that are wide enough isn’t a problem. However, finding things that are tall enough ... that’s a different story entirely. And while you would think it wouldn’t matter in a skirt, it somehow does. The skirt that falls just below my knee looks silly cause it’s obvious it was meant to be ankle-length. And the shorter skirts are indecent even by Japanese schoolgirl standards.

Shoes ... that was just too depressing for words. There were no sizes per say. Just S, M, L, and LL. And finding out that LL shoes are too small for you takes you back to the days when your little sister used to call you bigfoot.

In the end, I bought a larger purse to carry around all the electronic gadgets I’m accumulating and left in defeat.

Miscellaneous

2004-06-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

We got a thunderstorm tonight. A real, honest-to-goodness, soak you through to the underwear in 2 seconds flat, light up the night sky like daytime, make the electricity on the block flicker, summer thunderstorm. Since I was already home (and had pulled the mostly dry laundry inside already) when it really got started, I can sit back and appreciate it. But I will go buy a flashlight tomorrow.

Since my gushing artery of writing (see Little Mig’s blog entry for 6/22/04) has temporarily stopped, here are some pictures to fill the space. Some sights around town:

We finally got the picture off the phone – here’s proof the Redhead ate the fish head. With chopsticks no less.

The bridge to nowhere

2004-06-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

It’s a bright, clear day and yesterday’s cooler weather is still hanging around so I forced myself to get out even though I’d stupidly stayed up until 3am reading. The first order of business was the “Ryujin Great Suspension Bridge” (yes, that’s the actual name on the sign). It looks really pretty in the pictures, but it’s back in the woods a ways so I wasn’t sure how many times I was going to get lost. But apparently this is another great local tourist attraction, because as soon as you’re on the right road, you start seeing signs for it too. Not quite every 5 km, but enough.

It is very pretty – a thin blue bridge soaring high above a steep green valley complete with a dam and lake. But what’s really odd is that it’s (as far as I can tell) a purely ornamental bridge. It’s not wide enough to support a regular car, and there are no roads to it on the other side. I have no idea why they built it except to charge people 300 yen a piece to walk over it (and they really didn’t need to put the plexiglass panels in the road surface every 100m – I don’t want to know just how far I’ll fall if something happens). I was, however, very relieved to see that the footpath from the dam to the bridge was closed. There was no chance of the idiot in me deciding it would be fun to walk up yet more steps.

On the way out, I noticed a billboard for other attractions in the area. One of them puzzled me for the longest time – “Soba Load”. Now, I knew there was an area famous for its soba noodles, but it still took me a while to figure out that this was really “soba road.” You’d think that with 3 alphabets the Japanese could afford a “r”, but apparently not.

Since it was still pretty early (not getting lost helps a lot), I stopped at Seizan-so on the way back. It’s a retirement garden for some local lord built around 1690 – not big on the radar screen, but close to home and free so I wanted to see it. And it hands down beats everything else I have seen here to date. Very cultivated and contrived (exactly what you think of when you think of a Japanese garden) but somehow, even with tons of other tourists, there’s an incredible sense of peace. The irises are in bloom right now, but the hydrangeas are coming along too (don’t know if it’s a blue garden year round, or if it’s just coincidence). The irises are planted in amazingly straight rows, but from a distance, they look like a blue river flowing into the koi pond. Very neat effect. The back 40 is more forest-like and only looks like they sweep every week, not every day.

And one more of life’s mysteries has been solved. I’ve been seeing more high end Mercedes and Porsches here than I really would have expected in a country where the top speed limit is 55 mph. I mean, what’s the point? But take a weekend drive into the mountain back roads and you’ll see the point. Just remember to pull your underpowered little car off to the side to let them all pass. Otherwise they try to pass anyway and that’s just really scary.

O Happy Day

2004-06-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

I found a library here that has books in English! It’s not the world’s largest or most organized collection, but it’s enough to keep me busy for the next little while. It’s free and there is a certain amount of amusement to browsing through titles like “The Vampire Lestat” right next to Fodor’s Japan from 1982 right next to “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.

Unfortunately the free Japanese lessons turned out to be a one-on-one disorganized jumble. It’s hard to describe – there were almost as many teachers as students, but while they had all these teaching aids, it’s as if there was no lesson plan. No coherent flow to the class to make sense to the student and my teacher would break off into mumbling to herself rather often. Somehow you were expected to know the difference between that mumble and the mumble that is a Japanese sentence that you were supposed to repeat. Difficult when what you’re trying to learn is Japanese. And last time I checked, 500yen was not free. Cheap, yes. But not free.

The museum of Japanese history was likewise a mixed bag. Some of the exhibits were incredibly interesting – like the portable 4’ reverse water wheel used to flood the rice paddies (you put human power in to pump water uphill). But there was no English guide of any kind, so if there weren’t pictures with a particular exhibit, you were sunk.

On the way back, I stopped in the tourism office to see if they had a map in English by any chance. The lady told me to wait, and rushed off to the back room. She came back some 5 minutes later, blowing the dust off a map that had words in our alphabet on it! I didn’t have to heart to tell her that it was in Spanish. And truthfully, “playa” and “museo” are a lot more useful than “squiggle” and “squiggle with a dot”.

Even the weather cooperated – I was cold tonight for the first time in 3 weeks (when I wasn’t at work). And the first set of care packages got here yesterday - Thank you! (The postman drives a moped with a bright red/orange padded container on the back – it looks almost exactly like a dominos delivery.)

All in all, a very good day for my 5th entire day off work since Easter. I might actually need to stop counting them individually now since my other hand is busy holding the world’s smallest violin.

Garbage day

2004-06-25T17:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, so garbage is an even stranger topic than toilets. But just as important if you think about it. And considering today was the first time I managed to get rid of mine since I moved into the apartment, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Like many things here, this is no simple process. For starters, you go to the grocery store and buy special garbage bags. Not like the giant black ones at home that you buy simply because they’re large and near-indestructible. No, these are smaller and colored highlighter green (yes, I checked - it’s an exact color match) and you buy them because if you put your garbage out in anything else, they won’t take it. Note that there are also highlighter yellow bags on the same shelf at the store – those are for recycled cans and bottles.

Ok, so far so good. I have my bright green baggie of garbage, now what do I do with it? I’ve never lived in an apartment complex without a dumpster, but unless the Japanese have dumpster cozies that look like
motorcycles, there’s nothing here. When I asked, I was told that there are collection points along the street (not at every house like at home), and that I was to put the bag in front of the fish market on Tuesdays and Fridays. Ok. But I really couldn’t see running across the street, dumping my fluorescent green bag on the sidewalk in front of a perfectly respectable shop, and then running away. They already think I’m weird enough here.

So I went out last Thursday night looking for piles of bright green. I mean, how hard can this be to find? But nothing. At this point, I’d only been in the apartment for 2 days – I wasn’t too worried. So Monday night I go out again. Nothing. I get the bright idea to try Tuesday morning early – maybe people don’t put their garbage out the night before. Still nothing. At this point, I’m getting worried, but I figure I can make it till Friday. So I give up and ask again. And get the same answer.

Repeat the exercise again Thursday night. With the same depressing results. At this point, the importance of garbage collection is starting to make itself very clear. This morning, I happened to wake up late and ran out in a panic, convinced that the garbage men came at some wee hour in the morning and I missed them again. I need not have bothered. I was actually late enough that people were awake and cheerfully piling up green baggies on the sidewalk. I keep forgetting that 8am is REALLY early for most people over here.

So the garbage is finally gone. Picked up by a baby garbage truck driven by two grandmas in aprons and straw hats. I might go out next Tuesday to try to get a picture of that.

Four Springs

2004-06-24T16:54:00.000-07:00

Most of the reason the Redhead and I set off on the marathon tour to visit Nikko was the promise of one of the three great waterfalls in Japan. What we didn’t realize was that although the 2nd waterfall is too far south for a day trip, the 3rd (Fukuroda-no-Taki ) is 30 km from here. A mere 45 minutes it turns out, and that was stuck behind grandma for most of the way there.

Since I’d worked plenty of hours on the weekend, I played hookey this afternoon and headed out. I felt like a kid with a snow day – except it’s never been 90deg and sunny for any snow day I’ve ever gotten. Part of the attraction, in fact, was that going north into the mountains HAD to be chasing cooler weather.

I’d never gone north from here, and didn’t really expect anything much different. But the people at work who raved about the countryside were actually right. It’s still rice paddies and country towns – don’t suppose differently. But it gets less populated and even greener if that’s possible. And once you get into the hills and start crossing streams, it’s just really pretty. I REALLY wish I had the kayak!

Fukuroda is apparently a rather popular attraction – there are signs every 5 km (in romanji even – roman alphabet). Once you get within 5km, they’re every 1km. And the final two signs aren’t just words, they’re full color picture billboards. So if you can’t find this one, I just don’t know what to say.

Once you get there and figure out where to park, you pay the lady 300yen for the privilege of walking through the tunnel to the falls. I never thought I’d see anything to top Muir Woods’ paved trees, but the paved, ramped, tunneled path to Fukuroda takes the cake. The falls themselves though ... extremely pretty. It’s named “Four Springs” because there are 4 separate falls, three of which are visible from the lookout point. Apparently it’s also a play on “four seasons” because the waterfall changes appearance so much throughout the year. In the winter, it even completely freezes over and they use it for ice climbing.

The lookout point is at the bottom of the falls and there’s a path across (a miniature suspension bridge that wobbles way too much for comfort) and up the side. Assuming that this would bring me out to the top of the falls, I stupidly started climbing. And kept climbing. And climbing. I did get a glimpse of the 4th waterfall through the trees and when the path started snaking around, I got all excited about the spectacular view I was going to get. That was the only thought that kept me going considering that it was, if possible, even hotter and more humid than it had been at home. So much for the “it’ll be cooler in the mountains” theory.

Eventually it became clear that this path was never going to get me my spectacular view of the falls. Why, then, did I continue? Because I’ve been married to XDirtPusher too long? Related to too many Germans? I’m an idiot? I don’t know. I think I’ll claim heatstroke - I was just convinced that the view from the top had to be worth the pain I’d already suffered. After about an hour of climbing concrete steps (I’ve never seen so much concrete out in the middle of nowhere!), I got to the top. Now, in the US, this would have gotten me a windswept view for miles because they had chopped down all the trees at the summit. In Europe, this would have gotten the view and a coffee shop. Possibly even an ice cream. In Japan? I got a bench facing a tree. No, I am NOT kidding – see for yourself!

They really expect people to climb 1km of concrete (more often than not at a 30+ degree slope) to sit in front of a tree. The only view you get is hanging out on one of the tree branches to see the valley below. There really are no words to voice my disappointment.

My advice? The falls and the ice cream cone at the bottom were both definitely worth the price of admission. Skip the steps up Mt. Tsukiore though.

The color of purple

2004-06-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Today has been one of those days. I’m trying to solve a couple of problems at work that just don’t make sense. My credit card got rejected by the local gas station – and this is after I called Visa to complain that their theft protection is a little overkill. And I learned the hard way at lunch that there are times when you should not take your shoes off in a restaurant (apparently you’re supposed to wear socks even in 90 degree weather).

The bright spot in the day was finding a bakery that had a real, honest-to-goodness loaf of bread. Not just wonderbread either, but a round loaf of browned, baked goodness. I splurged and got cheese (dairy is hard to come by here) and orange juice (yes, I read the label carefully this time) to go with it and was all set for dinner. But as I sliced the bread, I noticed something odd. The bread was purple inside. Darker than lavender, but not quite eggplant – kind of dark lilac. The color of blueberry yogurt after you stir it. I have no idea what it was - taro flour maybe?

I ate it anyway – tasted like bread, if a little sweet. But certain things, like bread and construction equipment, should just not come in purple.

Jinx

2004-06-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve seen more signs and heard more warnings about bugs! There’s a sign at work asking us to please leave the windows closed because there are many insects outside. The guidebooks all warn about them for summer travel. Almost every “all you need to know about Japan” website mentions them. This is my favorite so far (it's also the most detailed). “The high heat, humidity, and abundant food supplies in summer are heaven for insects and bugs, and as a consequence, they breed prolifically during this season. Here are a few to watch out for:” The list includes: Cockroaches (gokiburi), Tatami bugs (dani), Mosquitos and sandflies, Centipedes (mukade), Spiders, and Snakes (hebi). Presumably the Japanese names are added so you can scream the appropriate thing as you stand on your chair ... oh wait, coffee table (since there are no chairs).

The odd part is, I’ve seen remarkably few bugs since I got here. And as most of you know, if there’s a mosquito within 50 miles, I know about it. I was just commenting at work about this today and we were all being amazed. I obviously should have kept my mouth shut. I get home tonight and promptly get 3 of the largest mosquito bites I’ve ever had. ARGH! Luckily I had ice already made.

And yes, the little sucker died an ignominious death under the sole of a shoe.

But not all bugs necessarily require instantaneous squishing.
Check this guy out – he just sat there and let me get closer and closer.

I swear he was posing!

It’s a small world

2004-06-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

The more I travel, the more I’m amazed at how little things actually change between peoples and cultures. I mean, look at me. I speak 6 words of Japanese, and yet I’ve lived here quite comfortably for almost 2 weeks now. I might miss someone to talk to, but I’m not hungry, can navigate around fairly well, and haven’t blown myself up with any kitchen appliances (yep, I finally bought a stove). I can even (usually) figure out how to flush the toilets.

Also note the ground station here. The current theory is that all ground stations the world over were built by the same crew of people in the same decade. They’re all low, long, ugly, gray or brown concrete buildings that look (interior and exterior) like they came straight out of the 50s. The office furniture is all battleship gray and just as comfortable. They’re always air conditioned to within an inch of your life. And the lighting is always the worst you can possibly get while still being technically bright enough to read by. This one’s special only in that the control room actually has windows. Imagine that!

I bring this subject up because I was walking around town today, peering into shop windows to try to figure out what each store sells. The stationary store smelled like paper and ink, just like at home (they even sell UhHuh [sp?] although a different brand). The produce store lady shows you how to cook the odd-looking green things (in pantomime so I’m not sure I really got it all). And the craft store is jam-packed with all kinds of amazingly useless things (including the thread that I need to complete the project I brought along) and comes complete with a cat in the yarn bin. Who promptly demanded the attention that was only her due as queen of the shop (and although it’s hard to be regal with only ½ a tail, she managed quite nicely).

The tea shop though ... that’s a uniquely Asian experience. I’ll have to find a tea ceremony before I leave.

But it’s a dry heat ...

2004-06-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

NOT! I’ve officially been in California too long and gotten way too used to a near-desert climate. It’s really hot and humid here today (there’s a typhoon sitting off the southeast coast) and I’m about ready to melt into a puddle of my own sweat. Even the stiff breeze isn’t really helping the situation much. It just teases your brain into thinking you should feel cooler. Then when you don’t, it’s all that much worse.

Church wasn’t air conditioned either. But as promised, it was in English – mostly. The priest spoke with a heavy Japanese accent (for a very long time – you’d think he would have been hotter than the rest of us in all of his robes, but apparently he’s part African jungle rat). All the ministers spoke with heavy Filipino accents. And the songs were in some language I don’t recognize (presumably one of the two). So to answer my own question of last week, if you speak Tagalog, you want a mass in English because your only choices are Japanese and English.

In general, mass was much the same as at home, except that at the sign of peace, everyone bows to each other instead of shaking hands. If you could have seen it from above, it must have looked like one of those town square clocks with figurines that come out every hour and perform jerky little dances before they go back inside.

And after mass, everyone went out to the mini-van in the parking lot, packed FULL with bananas and mangos and cakes and presumably all kinds of other Filipino delicacies. I’m not sure what the currency of choice was – I did see a couple of kids change hands.

I stopped at “Just One” on the way home (curiosity finally got the better of me) – it’s an artist’s studio. Presumably named that because there’s only room in this world for just one copy of each of the items he had there.

Today’s tip: if you’re down to your last $100 and frantically looking for an ATM that will accept your card, much less one that will talk to you in English (for all I knew, they weren’t giving me money because XDirtPusher had emptied the account to buy car parts), try the post office. It’s also a bank here, is open on the weekends, and the ATM has an English menu option. You can only take out $100 at a time, but there’s nothing stopping you from standing in line multiple times in a row.

Beach not very nice

2004-06-19T05:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve now spent the last week a mere 30 miles from the ocean, and haven’t gone to play yet. I figured it was high time to remedy the situation so I dragged out the increasingly tattered-looking map. There are 3 areas marked for swimming within easy driving distance. So I took the map into work and asked people which they thought was best. Disappointingly, I got multiple comments of “beach not very nice” about all three. I got pointed to the one furthest away because it’s the most popular (and I think has some kind of boardwalk a la Coney Island or Santa Cruz).

Despite the depressing commentary, I set off this afternoon – since I started late due to a work emergency, I decided to just hit up the closest one. Afterall, even I have to admit that an over-crowded beach is really not very nice. I managed not to get hopelessly lost and ended up parked on a green, windswept bluff complete with a lighthouse about 45 minutes later. The trick was to figure out how to get down to the beach below. There were people there – there had to be a way down.

Yes, there are steps down the cliff. Elf steps that are too low to take one at a time, but too wide to take two at a time. But there’s also an access road in from the side that didn’t show on my map. Sigh. I’ll console myself with the thought that my first view of the beach from above was nicer than if I’d just driven in.

As for the beach itself - all I have to say is that if a ½ mile of sandy beach surrounded by tree-studded cliffs is “beach not very nice”, I REALLY want to see what they consider nice! The waves were too little to surf, but just right to jump in. No undertow. Granted there was seaweed to step around, but no broken glass, needles, or passed out junkies. The water’s clear but colder even than at home and there’s a distinct lack of eye candy (most of the people were parents with kids), but it’s still a really nice beach. I think the Japanese are just not a beach culture. Either that or they’ve spent too much time in Hawaii or Australia. I can only imagine their faces if you dumped them on Revere Beach!

By the way, I have now stepped foot in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in both the sunrise and sunset directions. I know that’s a totally irrelevant fact, but it amuses me greatly.

English spoken here

2004-06-18T17:34:00.000-07:00

As I was walking to the grocery store tonight, I noticed another non-Asian woman getting into her car. Now, you have to understand that in the city this isn’t that odd of an occurrence, but out here it’s a different story. I would have sworn that there were only 3 of us (there’s another guy at work who lives in town with his wife). So I have to plead guilty to staring and hoping against hope that she spoke some language I speak. Turns out she’s American – from Portland – and we promptly exchanged phone numbers. Visions of cozy little dinners and exploring trips started dancing through my head!

Then I made the mistake of asking her if she knew where I could get Japanese language lessons. She looked at me like I have a hole in my head and launched into a rant worthy of the Rantmaster himself. Turns out she hates the Japanese (men in particular – although to be fair, it could have been all men regardless of race), can’t stand living here, and loathes Japanese food. Why, you may ask, is she here then? I don’t know. The only answer I was offered is that her son came over here so she did too. Me, I’m guessing the son ran half-way around the world to escape mom and is vastly disappointed that mom followed. But that’s just my personal opinion.

So I’ll probably end up having dinner with her at some point (note that we exchanged phone numbers BEFORE the rant started), but on the whole I’ll stick with the grandma who runs the produce stand down the street – she at least smiles and bows at me with great cheerfulness.

Laundry night

2004-06-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

It was that time already – I either had to figure out how to run the washing machine, or buy more underwear. Although the latter thought was appealing, I had to acknowledge that it’s not really a long term solution. So this morning I very carefully copied out all the squiggles on the washing machine and presented it to the secretary like a kindergartener with her first homework assignment. I’m not sure whether to be proud or insulted that she was amazed that it was legible.

After some discussion, we managed to get it translated to something I recognized as washing machine controls. Turns out that the option of “6” or “9” wasn’t wash cycle time at all, but a timer for how many hours in the future to start your laundry. The little pictures of the half full and full buckets did correspond to water level though, so there is some sanity in my world.

When I got home, I dumped in all my new towels and started her up (European washing machines look similar and essentially boil the laundry - since American clothes don’t necessarily take too well to the experience, I figured this was a safe first load). Turns out I needn’t have bothered - Japanese washing machines (or at least this one) wash clothes in cold water. And take 2+ hours to do a medium sized load, regular cycle (unless we mis-translated after all). It’s a pretty big bucket and not much water ran in though, so maybe the electricity costs are made up for in water savings.

By 11pm, I was the proud possessor of a washing machine full of clean, wet towels ... but now what? The drying rack in the bathroom is big enough for maybe 1 towel. And as I’ve already pointed out, there is no other furniture. Standing by the back door, eating a consolation fudgesicle, I made the somewhat belated observation that all the neighbors have drying rods stuck though what I thought were plant hangers outside their back doors. Apparently I need to go back to the home center tomorrow. Until then, I’m draping the towels over all the doors and going to bed, thanking my lucky stars that I didn’t wait until my emergency pair of underwear were gone.

Home sweet home

2004-06-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

Today was the big day – checked out of the hotel with my suitcases this morning and drove to the apartment after work. First things first – dinner. The grocery store is only 2 blocks away, so I walked over thinking about what I wanted for dinner. Not rice was the priority. Only, what can you make with a microwave, 2 bowls, and shelves full of food in packages you can’t read? Eggs and edemame seemed safe enough. Throw in some orange juice and a box of what looks like fudgesicles and you’ve got yourself a meal. I even splurged and bought the “soft” toilet paper - still only 1 ply, but at least it’s more pliable than a sheet of cash-register tape (oddly enough, although you buy food here in VERY small portions, the smallest package of toilet paper you can buy is 12 rolls).

Now, I knew that eggs can explode in the microwave. So I very carefully poked a hole in each end, put it in a covered bowl, and monitored the situation very carefully. Lo and behold, although there were some spitting noises, the end result was one hard boiled egg. So I stuck in the next one too, this time forgetting to put the cover back on. The way I figure it, that first egg must have been a calcium-rich mutant, because not 30 seconds later there was a huge “POP” and when I gingerly opened the microwave door, there were strands of semi-done egg goo hanging from EVERYWHERE (mental note – buy kitchen sponge).

Well, I still had the one egg and the edemame, and I was hungry. So, since the egg cobwebs were unlikely to hurt the microwave further if I didn’t clean them up immediately, I sat down in front of “Supercop II” dubbed into Japanese with my meal. Only to find out that my “orange juice” was in fact grapefruit juice. What is it with the Japanese and grapefruit???? And then to notice that the egg had a dark spot in it that tasted like chicken. I really don’t even want to think about that.

Ok, time to unpack and make the bed. The contents of 2 suitcases don’t really fill a small apartment, but at least they make it feel more like home. The bed though ... ok, think about a bed frame with a 6 inch slatted headboard, slats under the mattress, and 6 inch tall legs. Now put a 3 inch thick futon mattress over it and cover that with what we would consider a top sheet. Next comes a down comforter with a fitted sheet over it (rather than totally enclosing the comforter like you’d see in Europe, the Japanese leave a hole in the middle top so you can see the design – it looks rather like your quilt is wearing a hospital bootie). Top the confection off with the pillow made of rocks and you’re good to go.

The shower is even odder. The “bathroom” is actually divided into three little rooms. You step up into the main area first, which contains the washing machine and the vanity. Think of a 5 foot square and divide it in half – this first area is that size and shape. The other half of the square is hidden behind two doors. One door leads to a 3x2 foot room containing a toilet with a water fountain on top of the tank (I have NO idea what that’s for, but I’m not drinking out of it! – there are no extraneous buttons though, for which I am grateful). The second door leads to a 3x3 foot room completely encased in shower paneling. Half of this room is taken up by a very short, very deep tub. The other half has a drain in the floor, a mirror set to reflect your kneecaps, two holders for the shower hose (waist and head high), and a light fixture about 12 inches from the highest shower holder. Apparently the Japanese take a cold shower sitting on a stool (sold separately), and then hop into the steaming tub. I don’t know why the top shower holder is there then – maybe so unsuspecting gaijin can have the hot lightbulb explode over their heads when it gets wet. That way the death will be ruled as a Darwin award candidate rather than genocide. Plenty of hot water and water pressure though, so there are no real complaints.

And the fudgesicle was, in fact, a fudgesicle. Dark chocolate even. :-)

Redefining “furnished”

2004-06-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

So I got the apartment key today and went at lunch to go find this shoebox I’ll be living in for a while. No mean feat in a country where there are no street names, just block numbers. People give directions by landmark (“go past the Wonder Goo”, and “turn right at the town hall”) – which probably works much better if you know where (or what) the Wonder Goo or town hall are.

The apartment is actually bigger than I’d feared – not huge, but comfortable for one person (I’m sure there’s normally a family of 3 living in this much space). It has a kitchen, bathroom, living/dining room, and bedroom – maybe 500 sq ft in all. The amazing part is what comes in a “furnished” apartment here. The catalog includes:

· Curtains
· A/C
· TV, stand, and cable internet box
· Coffee table
· Bed complete with futon mattress, down comforter, pillow made of rocks (buckwheat hulls I think), and sheet set
· Stand-alone bedroom closet
· Bathroom vanity, shower, toilet, washing machine, drying rack, vent, and light
· Kitchen sink, vent, cabinet, the smallest “full sized” refrigerator I’ve ever seen, microwave, light
· Carpet in living room and bedroom

Note that I didn’t mention a stove, living room or bedroom lights, or any piece of furniture that could be considered a seat. I also didn’t mention that there was anything inside the kitchen cabinet. There’s a reason for the omission.

By the end of the day, the apartment had two more lights, a real pillow, and enough kitchen ware to allow one to make a microwaved meal. Oh – and a garbage can. Turns out that there’s a 100 yen store in town! Who would have thought that of all the concepts to transcend cultures, a dollar store would have been it? They also have a “home center”, which is like a Walmart with a small Home Depot attached. On the weekends, it even has baby goats in a pen outside. I honestly don’t know if that’s a typical Japanese thing to sell livestock outside of regular stores, or if it’s just a statement on how far in the boonies this place really is.

Bottom line is that if you can’t find what you’re looking for in either of those places, you’re out of luck. Which means my search for non-paper thin bath towels probably isn’t going to go very well.

Driving in Japan

2004-06-14T02:59:00.000-07:00

Since we’re going to be here for so long, we decided to rent an apartment closer to work (the hour-long commute at 6:30 in the morning is killing me!). The secretary at work set it all up (since the rental office wouldn’t let us sign anything without a qualified Japanese person to play parent) and “all” I had to do was find my way to Hitachi before 7pm to pay the bill. I left at 3 and although I was assured it was a 50 minute drive, I didn’t get there for 2 hours. This seems like the perfect time to comment on driving in Japan (yes, rant alert).

First, there’s driving on the left side of the road. It’s rather interesting – like playing Bomberman with reverse controller disease, only more life threatening if you mess up. Getting over the lifelong compulsion to “stay to the right” is incredibly hard – subconsciously you keep expecting to be hit because you’re in the wrong lane. And then there are the habitual screwups. What I’ve noticed is that stories about it are only funny to people who’ve actually tried it. Some deserve mention nonetheless:

· Yes, I turn on the windshield wipers when I want the turn signal. But it’s even more ironic to spend all day turning on the windshield wipers by accident, and then get the turn signal by accident once it starts raining.

· The shift lever is on the left, so the instinct for both passenger and driver is for the passenger to shift. Never mind trying to figure out which car door to get in at.

· Look over your LEFT shoulder to back up. And look up to the LEFT for the rearview mirror. The right in either case leaves you staring into the support columns of the car, which aren’t particularly see-through.

For all the Japanese call themselves a fast-paced society, their speed limits do NOT reflect it. We took the toll road part way back from Nikko (the only roads in Japan without stop lights are these toll roads – essentially they’re what we consider highways) and the speed limit was 80. And they’re not talking miles per hour here. The fastest highway in this country has a speed limit of 50 mph!!!! EGAD! (the road to work is mostly 40 or 50 kph, with occasional stints of 30) Luckily for my sanity, standard speed seems to be 20 kph faster than the posted limit.

We think a stop sign is a red upside-down triangle. I say “we think” because although that’s what the guide book tells us, we’ve never actually seen a Japanese driver stop at one. The only times you see them stop is for railroad crossings. I’m guessing that means the train also runs stop signs.

Red lights are similarly optional. I’ve seen people run lights that were so red a Bostonian wouldn’t even try it. Not to mention that it’s perfectly acceptable to go through a red if you know it’s going to turn green in the next 30 seconds.

If the oncoming car is more than 3 car lengths behind the one in front, you have more than enough time to make the right turn. That car will wait for you. Especially if it’s an American driver seeing her life flash before her eyes.

What passes for a pickup truck here looks like a little VW mini-bus with the back chopped in half to get a truck bed. If you see one of those coming, give them right of way. Maybe it’s just me, but all the near accidents I’ve been in (and all the cursing I’ve heard) has involved one of those things. Maybe it’s like sailing – right of way goes to the working boats like tug boats and these things are the tug boats of Japanese streets. I don’t know. All I know they’ve been trying to kill me all week. (I did see a crew cab version of the thing – if I hadn’t been so afraid of it, I would have taken a picture)

Ironically, if you take the Japanese out of their cars and make them pedestrians, these same people will now wait patiently by the side of the road in the pouring rain to get a walk sign. Even if it’s clear the street light is out of order (ok, it wasn’t raining that day, but she did wait a really long time – she only crossed once I got to the intersection and crossed myself).

Alone

2004-06-13T02:55:00.000-07:00

The Redhead left today and I’m alone in a country where I can’t even ask for a glass of water without pantomime. Lovely. Luckily I’m halfway decent at charades and the Japanese are, on the whole, exceedingly helpful. And I did establish several rather interesting things today:

· I don’t care how cool it looks to have multiple buttons with neat little graphics on your toilet, that’s just wrong. A toilet should have one button and one button only – flush. Not 2 different spray types with adjustable water temperature and pressure (I saw one in a restaurant bathroom that had a 3rd spray type with a picture of a woman sitting there – I’m not sure I’ll ever be adventurous enough to try that one).

· There is a catholic church in Mito. It even has mass in English every other weekend (“for the Filipino population” she assured me – I’m not sure if I understood that correctly or not since I can’t figure out why you’d want to have mass in English if you spoke Tagalog [sp?])

· Mister Donut in Japan tastes almost the same as Mister Donut at home. Just ignore the grapefruit donuts (sorry – I wasn’t adventurous enough to try one so I don’t know what they taste like).

· People will do a double take when they see me at the counter or walking down the street. The kids will even try a “hi” and then laugh and giggle and run away when I say “hi” back. But the stares and pointing and whispers we’d been getting all week were for the Redhead. Interesting in a culture where dying your hair all shades of orange is the current fashion.

Today’s tip: If you are stuck in Japan with no other language skills, the word “sumimasen” is absolutely invaluable. It seems to mean a combination of “excuse me” and “sorry” and “help please” and “thank you for taking your valuable time to help this worthless human being”. Pronounce it with an American accent and doors verily fly open. You even get pulled into the community center by little old ladies who can’t possibly be that strong, sat down on the sofa, given green tea and cracker snacks, and smiled at until you bow and say “samimasen” again and take your leave.

Sightseeing – Nikko National Park

2004-06-12T04:20:00.000-07:00

We decided to go a little farther afield today (in the past we’d stuck close to the hotel and work) to see some authentic Japanese countryside. The guide book assured us that Nikko is not only the home of some of Japan’s “greatest historic sites”, but is also “an alpine wonderland for hikers in the summer and skiers in the winter, abounding with lakes, waterfalls, and onsen (hot springs).” Since it was also sunny for the first time since I’d gotten here, how could we pass this up?

So we stopped at one of the countless convenience stores for snacks and set off cross country with map in hand. The strange thing with countryside is though, that after the first rice paddy and cute little old farm house, they pretty much all look alike. The snacks kept us amused for a while though. How can something that looks so innocuous in the picture be so deceiving? The potato chips turned out to be soy sauce and vinegar flavored – it was a potato chip, but it left you in no doubt at all as to which side of the Pacific it was bought on! (oddly enough, I actually like them better than the salt and vinegar ones at home) And the little chocolate cookies ... well, they turned out to be little round edible styrofoam peanuts coated in chocolate glaze. Strangely addictive once you start eating them, and then you look at the empty bag and wonder why you ate them all. ugh.

Then we got into the mountains – it’s amazing how lush the landscape is. I mean, I ought to have expected it after a week of rain, but coming from the California coast, it was still a shock. Almost tropical in how green everything is. And with a really neat mist curling around the tops of all the mountains.

Nikko is enough of a destination that we had no trouble following the signs. Since it houses so many historically important temples, we figured we’d do the tourist thing first. All I have to say is that for a “world heritage site”, you would really expect them to be a little better prepared for non-Japanese speaking tourists. The extent of their English was the English/Japanese picture guide book (“perfect English!” the sign assured us). So we dutifully followed everyone else around, looking at whatever they were oohing and aahing about with almost total incomprehension. There were about 5 major temples in the complex, all extremely old and ornate. At least one is a tomb for someone’s grandfather (who had, incidentally, told his grandson he didn’t want a large monument when he died). There was a lantern with a “mysterious legend” (that’s all the guide book said – no details). The “roaring dragon” was cool – if you stand in just the right spot under his head (he’s painted on the ceiling) and clap, the room echoes.

Once our feet got tired, I bought the requisite fortune and we sat on the temple steps while the Redhead tried to decipher fortune-cookie style Japanese. We finally concluded that I’d just purchased a wish, and to make it come true, I had to tie it to the string in front of the temple. As I tied it on, it tore – I’m hoping that it’s good luck since it obviously meant I really wanted what I wished for.

After lunch we went in search of the waterfall we’d really come to see. Unfortunately, it started to rain, but we decided that it would just be more picturesque that way and continued up the mountain. Now, remember that “neat mist” I mentioned earlier? Yeah, you see where this is going. By the time we got to the top, it was so rainy and misty that we could barely see the waterfall (we did see enough to know it’s worth coming back on a sunny day though – it’s got to be spectacular). There was another group of insane tourists standing on the rain soaked platform too, so we all smiled and took each other’s pictures and then ran back for the relative warmth of the car.

The highlight of the day was watching a dog walk down the sidewalk and realizing that it wasn’t a dog at all, but a monkey with a baby hanging on to her back! Apparently they’re native here and it’s not uncommon to see them in rural towns.

The least said about the trip back, the better. Suffice it to say that when there’s an accident on the only through road for miles and said road is only 1 lane in each direction, it takes a LONG time to get through.

Driving to work

2004-06-11T19:43:00.000-07:00

Driving on the wrong side of the road in a country where you can’t read street signs is NOT what I’d call relaxing. In general, I’m doing ok (haven’t hit anything yet). But the Redhead gasps in horror every time I get just a little too close to the curb. My feeling is that I’d rather scrub the curb (or even the guard rail) than the oncoming semi-truck (did I mention that the roads are rather narrow?), but apparently the person sitting in the passenger seat doesn’t see it that way.

The real issue now is that the Redhead is leaving (the company actually requires a presence here for 4 months, so the Redhead and I are switching on and off) and he’s the one who can read the street signs. So I have to memorize the way to work and back. It goes something like this:

* Take a left out of the parking lot, remembering to look RIGHT for oncoming traffic

* Stay right at the next intersection and take the upper deck (no idea where the lower deck goes – I was lost the one time I was on it)

* Inside lane on the way out of town takes you through the tunnel (outside on the way in)

* Take a left at the second light after the cantilevered suspension bridge

* Go ~2 km (no idea what’s on this road because it’s really narrow and I’m always too busy watching the guard rail on the left and the on coming trucks on the right)

* Take a right turn at the corner with the Pachinko Parlor and the McDonald’s

* Follow this for about 25 km, past:
...6 Pachinko Parlors (is this the national past time?)
...13 convenience stores (I can’t even imagine what keeps that many in business! It’s worse than starbucks at home)
...Uncountable rice paddies
...20 foot high mustard brown sign that literate people tell me is upside down
...1 story high stack of tires sitting in someone’s front yard (rednecks apparently transcend cultures)
...A store called “Just One” (one day I’ll stop in to see just one what)
...The “Toyota Toyopet” sign
...Wonder Goo (apparently a book store – how mundane after such a name!)
...Hard Off (don’t even want to know)

* This trip is sponsored by the letter “K” – find the 20 foot high neon one and take a left

* Follow for about 5 km, past:
...2 more Pachinko Parlors, one with a LARGE pink sign that lights up neon at night
...3 more convenience stores
...The cement truck hotel (it’s really cute – they have about 15 lined up in 3 different sizes)

* Turn left at the next light

* Go down the hill, past the REALLY long slide (it’s made of rollers since it’s not steep enough for friction alone. I highly recommend a cafeteria tray)

* Left at the next light

* Immediate right into the company driveway and speak to the very nice, but very insane guard who acts like a Japanese television show host

Reverse the directions for the way home. And add a note to watch out for the gaggles of brightly colored children coming home from school (the elementary school uniform seems to be a sweatsuit - the kids in Omiya wear bright aqua, but I’ve seen other colors now too. My favorite is the navy blue with the bright yellow rain hats).

Baiting the newbie

2004-06-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

On my first day at work, the locals decided to take us out to dinner. To be hospitable and all that. And to see what colors the Americans turn when given random things to eat.

We ended up at a fish restaurant. Now, it’s funny from the get go because the Redhead is a self-proclaimed fish bigot. Normally he won’t touch the stuff with a 10 foot pole. Won’t even come along to a fish restaurant if they have a hamburger on the menu because it smells too much like fish. So just getting in the door requires an effort of will on his part (meanwhile I’m mentally trying to think which McDonald’s on the way home is on the left side of the road so I won’t have to cut across traffic in the dark). But give him credit – he went. And when he saw that they served literally nothing but fish, he even ate. We have a great picture of him eating an entire fish (head, tail, and all), but it’s on a phone camera and we can’t figure out how to get it to the computer (the Japanese and their phones is a whole other discussion). I’ll keep working on it.

Personally, I like fish in almost any shape or form. However, I do not like eating recognizable body parts, especially heads. It’s nothing to do with fish, and everything to do with eyeballs staring up at me accusingly from the plate. Unfortunately, the Japanese think that leaving the heads on is a sign of how fresh the food is (after all, the head is one of the first parts to become inedible). So there were a lot of heads I needed to cut off and hide under a lettuce leaf. Since my chopstick skills don’t really extend to cutting up things, this wasn’t exactly a subtle procedure and it was noticed. The verbal jokes were one thing, but at the very end of the meal, they said there was one more “very special dish” coming. There were lots of smiles and laughter and Japanese comments that made no sense until the “very special dish” arrived – little soft shelled crabs complete with legs, pinchers, eyes, and antennae. The look on my face must have been priceless because everyone burst out laughing. I did manage to eat one – and it tasted really good (the Redhead commented that the legs were nice and crunchy and salty). But talk about an effort of will!

So now we’re out for revenge. Something that would taste equally good to the Japanese, but be equally hard to eat. Stinky cheese maybe? A burrito with all kinds of greasy things mixed up together? We’ll take any and all ideas.

And no, we did not stop at McDonald’s on the way home.

First impressions

2004-06-09T01:34:00.000-07:00

Japan is a giant kaleidoscope of color and sound. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so it takes a long time for all the color and neon and flashing lights to resolve themselves into streetlights and advertising. I only hope 2 months is long enough for me to learn to ignore the neon and actually see the people.