Author: Iris

It was dark when I came home the other day. I went straight to my office and turned on the lights. As I did so, something brown moved in the top corner opposite the door, and it terrified me for a split second (I might even have shrieked a little) and the thought flashed through my mind: My goodness, a spider – and a large one, like those in the old house… Half a second later my brain gave the all-clear: Relax, it’s just a gecko!

I like geckos, they have such intelligent faces, but I still prefer them outside. Thankfully, he panicked just as I had done and moved down to the floor. Once I got him to untangle from the cables underneath my desk, he swiftly moved on to the livingroom where he settled in a corner on the floor. Hoping he would stay there for a  moment or two, I fetched a tissue, picked him up and with an “it was nice, but please don’t call again” I finally put him out on the balcony.

It is a bit unclear how he could have come into the apartment. Although I have my windows open now, it’s just those parts that have a screen, and he could not have come in there. However, I had done some laundry that day and put it out on the balcony to dry. When I brought in the laundry again, I left the screen open for a while – I guess the little gecko slipped in then. They are very fast indeed, and I wonder when I would have noticed him had he not chosen such an obvious spot in my office as his hunting ground…

Curious what animals can make it to the 5th floor. As long as it’s geckos I don’t mind, and I like the birds perched on my balcony in the morning. Spiders would me more of an issue, and I am terrified of cockroaches finding their way into my kitchen. Since that evening, whenever I turn on the lights in a room, I carefully check the walls and ceiling for intruders of the animal kingdom. Let’s hope there will be no further surprises…

Yesterday, I have finally received my new zairyu residence card! It is valid for one year and allows me to work as “Business Manager”. I have to say, I feel extremely grown up! Now it’s time to start doing what I promised to do in exchange for the visa. 😉

Interestingly, it comes with additional paperwork. Technically, the visa I have is “multiple entry”, meaning that during its term of validity, I can go abroad as often as I like and still retain the visa. Usually, you get a stamp into your passport stating exactly that, but not in Japan. The Japanese, ever fond of yet another piece of paperwork, require you to fill in a form at every departure. The form is called “Embarkation card for Reentrant” and you need to tick a box that says “departure with special reentry permission” if you are a resident in Japan (tourists don’t need this). Apparently, this will be stapled to your passport – effectively in exchange for the “Disembarkation card” everybody gets when entering Japan. I really hope I will not forget this next time I am going abroad…

However, for now I’m not going abroad, but I will visit this year’s yoiyama tonight. It seems there’s a typhoon approaching, and tomorrow may be raining…

Last Saturday, the adult members (i.e., 3 people) of the soroban school I am visiting took a trip down to Osaka to visit a soroban museum. It is run by an old soroban teacher who is even more enthousiastic about soroban than mine, which I found hardly possible. Although the museum is very small – it is just two rooms on the second floor above his school room – the owner says that he has more than 1000 soroban, and he collects anything that is in any way soroban related, be it ever so slightly.

The first room houses the collection of soroban. There are old ones from China and Russia (which look more than the abacuses we have in Europe), and all sorts of soroban that are either made from an interesting material or have some story to them. We saw soroban made from pearls, glass, ivory, and  a very expensive one from tiger’s eye.

There was a rather beaten up soroban that survived a tsunami somewhere, was found in a rice paddy afterwards, and had its history carved into the back of it. There were beautiful soroban from China with ivory inlay in the back or in metal boxes, a brand new binary soroban. Also, two soroban with integrated pocket calculators (or is it the other way around?) made by Sharp, and three different types of soroban for blind people.On top of that, the first room houses everything that depicts a soroban in one way or the other; from paintings and noren curtains to clocks and lamps, netsuke and jewelry, and of course, toys. It was a wonderland of soroban related things, and I still think I may have missed something. The second room was more of a study with a small, traditionally Japanese work place, and a library containing exclusively books about soroban. Not just textbooks (some of which dated back to the Edo period), but even art books where at least one of the images somewhere showed a soroban. Altogether we spent about two hours in the museum, and at the risk of sounding extremely nerdy, we really enjoyed ourselves there. Afterwards the owner invited us to dinner and coffee, and of course we kept on talking about soroban all through the evening. Isn’t it nice if you have a hobby like this?

As I have mentioned in my post from last week’s Monday, the apartment building opposite my own has been prepared for renovation. Nothing much happened last week after the scaffolding was put up in the pouring rain, but this week, finally, work has begun.

On Monday and Tuesday two workers were busy doing something to the roof and the facade of the building that seemed to be sandblasting. It was very noisy, took the best of two days, and now the colour of the roof has turned from a shiny black into a dull grey. I cannot see the facade, as it is behind the scaffolding which is now covered in grey protective sheets, but I would assume that something similar happened there.

As I said, this work was extremely noisy, and the noise was almost constant. And although it is rather cool at the moment for this time of the year (only around 30 degrees), the humidity is high enough that open windows are very pleasant, no, almost a necessity. By early afternoon on Monday I’ve had enough, packed my stuff and went to a cafe that is close by but far enough as to not be affected by the noise. It was a good decision – I got quite a lot done that afternoon!

When they started again yesterday morning, I was all but packed to go out to a library for the day – when it started pouring down and I decided to stay home after all and move to the bedroom at the back of the apartment instead. I thought I could endure the noise for one more day, and indeed they seemed to finish yesterday in the early afternoon.

However, it never rains but it pours… Yesterday around noon, another company has started to tear down a wall on the other end of the parking lot that lies just underneath my balcony… And as this is a very old (and beautiful too, let me state that) brick wall, more than three metres high and maybe eight or more metres long, this will take quite a while for people yelling at each other, jack-hammering, throwing bricks onto lorries… (*)

It seems there will be noise going on for quite a while, and there is not much I can do about it other than fleeing to some cafe or library, if I want to get some work done. I hope they are finished soon…

(*) Fun fact: The parking lot underneath my balcony is a private one, only people who live in our houses (and their guests) are allowed to park here, which means there is a chain at the entrance. It is mostly empty, many people don’t seem to drive their cars on a daily basis. Also, the parking lot exits onto a very quiet, straight, one-way road that is mostly used by cyclists. However, one of the about 10 people tearing down the wall is standing there with a signalling stick to make sure all cars get in and out safely. Talk about job-creating measures…

Japanese people love food. They spend a lot of money on it and they celebrate it whether eating at home or at a fast food joint – even that stuff is really tasty. There are food stalls everywhere, from specialised market streets for delicacies from abroad and Japan, to people who drive around in their vans and sell organic produce from their farms out of the boot. Even the supermarkets at highway rest areas mostly sell local food, often pickles and other things that are non-perishable.

Because Japanese people love to give foodstuffs as presents. I like this idea because whatever you receive, you don’t waste space for eternal display; and if you fear that you won’t like the gift, you can either open it immediately and offer it back to your guests or you just pass it on (which seems to be another Japanese pastime, by the way).

Last Wednesday, when I was on the way to the cinema to watch Macondo, I had to pass through the Teramachi shopping arcade in inner city. It is always busy there, and I try to avoid it in the weekends, but every now and then it’s nice to walk through. Last Wednesday there was a group of students at Teramachi, all of them dressed in bright red Japanese Happi vests. All of them were shouting something I could not understand, some of them carried banners, and some of them proffered plastic bags (of course) to people passing by.

Just when I was wondering what this was about, a stout youth stood in my way and said something in Japanese while he handed me one of the plastic bags. It turned out that those were kids from some junior high in some prefecture in Kyushu (that’s all the way south), and they were giving away bags containing a guidebook about their hometown and – a small package of rice, also grown there.

Looking at the guidebook, the place seems to be more rural than I tend to like it after spending years successfully escaped one of those places… On the other hand, they do seem to have some extremely stunning lakes there; their almost precisely round shape makes me wonder whether those are all old volcanoes… Well, maybe it’s worth going there after all. Some time in autumn, probably. What a little bag of rice can do!

For the first time in oh too many years, I went to the cinema tonight. From today until July 12th, the EU Film Days will take place in Kyoto, after they were in Tokyo for more than a month. A number of contemporary European films are shown, from all over Europe, in many European languages. The films are subtitled, mostly in Japanese, but some also in English, so it’s possible for me to at least see some of them, if time allows, of course.

So, today I picked up my friend from Bulgaria, and together we went to see Macondo, an Austrian movie from last year.

It’s about the young, fatherless boy Ramazan who is an immigrant to Vienna from Chechnya and over time becomes friends with another Chechen man, Isa, who turns out to have been a friend of his father’s. Their relationship becomes a bit strained however, when it seems as if Isa wants to take the place of Ramazan’s father…

The film is very quiet and slow, often there is no dialogue, and you just watch the people. In a way, it is typically Austrian, but I did like it. I found it interesting that there is only a single scene where somebody speaks real Viennese Austrian; in all others the people speak more or less high German, for example the immigrant children, or Austrian officials who speak to the immigrants. When the film deals with Ramazan and his family, they speak Chechen, of course.

After the film, my friend and I walked home and when we passed by a little bar with Italian food and wine, we decided to have a glass of wine or two. All in all, it was a nice evening. I should go out more often…

Japanese people are well-known to be hard workers. Their extreme commitment to the job and the company they work for, often for 10 hours a day and more, is shocking to Westerners. Work-Life-Balance is something that does not exist in Japan. Your life is work and your work is life…

It appears that the house opposite mine – a small, three storey apartment building – will be renovated. Last Friday a number of people came to put up the scaffolding. It took them all day. Have a look at this photo, taken from my balcony. Do you notice anything?

Well, while they were happily running up and down the half-finished scaffolding and throwing the parts to each other, it was raining. Not just a light drizzle, it was pouring heavily. All day long. They all kept working regardless, a few minutes before that photo was taken, the man in the black jacket even went to the roof working there.

All this happened without any type of safety gear I could see, except for the hard hats. I don’t know what type of shoes they were wearing, but it’s probably not a good idea to run around on wet metal scaffolding or wet roofs in any case. However, they did not seem to worry about anything at all and kept working at a steady pace all day.

I think that this would not be possible in Austria. If it’s raining, construction work like this simply does not happen, you would have to wait until the rain stops before completing the scaffolding. I wonder whether this is because of different laws regarding safety at work or too tight a schedule (note: I did not notice anyone working there today, although the weather was nice). Is Japanese work ethics really so much different that people would disregard their own safety?