Iris – Page 82 – goinggaijin.com

US Elections

I prefer not to write about politics in general, but it’s very hard to ignore the outcome of the latest presidential elections in the USA. No matter what Trump will do, it will affect lots of people worldwide.

I’m more of a liberal myself, European liberal that is, I have no idea why this word is so vilified across the big pond. Live and let live is one of my mottos. My view on the outcome can be explained with a high school image: The Americans wanted the school bully to be the validictorian because they didn’t like the girl who had worked hard for that honour.

However, I should not indulge too much in Schadenfreude. First, because this will affect lots of people everywhere, as I said above. And second, because it is not impossible that we’ll have a similar bully as our own president in Austria within a few weeks…

*sigh*

Does anybody know whether this Mars mission is still looking for astronauts?

Open Day

Last Saturday I was woken up by loud music from a brass band. It originated from the neighbours – some sort of garbage facility. I didn’t think much about it, but when people started to give speeches, I just knew I had to take a look. And indeed, it turned out that they had an open day.

Well, it is not so much a garbage treatment facility – the place is way too small for this – but rather a garage for garbage trucks. And those were in fact the stars of that open day, which was mainly geared towards children. Kids were allowed to put on heavy gloves, throw garbage bags into the truck and push the button to make them disappear. There was also the opportunity to sit behind the wheel of a truck and have somebody take a picture of you. Yet another moment where I regret not being a small child any longer…

In any case, being the nerd I am, I found out that all over Kyoto, there are 7 such garages, with a total of 188 garbage trucks (mine only has 15), and each truck has a capacity of 2 tons. For a city like Kyoto with 1.5 million inhabitants, that does not sound like very much, but remember that those trucks are on the road almost every single day, with only very few holidays, for New Year, for example.

Back to the open day: Besides the trucks, there were little games set up for the kids where small prizes could be won, and there was a second hand clothing exchange. A few booths with small gifts and food were there as well, and a large stage with various acts. I did not stay very long, but I caught a cosplay performance by girls in brightly colored albeit a bit skimpy clothing. They did not look very enthusiastic though – probably there are better venues than a garbage truck garage?

Bunka no Hi

Today is a national holiday in Japan: Bunka no Hi or Culture Day. It is meant to promote culture in general, in particular the arts, but also includes science. Since I have written about this before, I will simply share a nice culture related image by a Japanese artist.

The painting/calligraphy is by Bankei Yotaku, a 17th century Zen master of the Rinzai sect.

Tokyo Trip

I had a great time in Tokyo the last weekend. I went up on Friday afternoon by Shinkansen and went to the embassy’s party. There is a new Austrian embassador (I don’t know how long they hold such a position), and the place was packed. Luckily, the embassador kept his predecessor’s chef (a Japanese trained in Austria) and so all my culinary dreams came true: Schwarzbrot und Liptauer, Schweinsbraten und Serviettenknödel, Sacherschnitte und Schlagobers as dessert. And cheese – a whole table full of glorious Austrian cheese…

It is always a bit difficult going to such events alone with only your introverted self, so I left once they had run out of chocolate cake and cream. There were probably some 250 people at the party, which would be half of the Austrian population in Japan. The party was nice, and I was glad not to be required to sing our national anthem – we listened to a tape recording, as well as to the recording of the Japanese anthem.

Saturday morning I went to the Imperial gardens. The palace is nearby Tokyo Main Station and it is enormous! Most of the palace is off-limits for visitors of course (except for the emperor’s birthday and New Year’s) but the East Gardens are open almost daily and can be visited for free. This part of the palace is already huge – I got lost several times – but right now, not very interesting, because it is too late for flowers and too early for the momiji. I also noticed that although the roads were asphalted and wide enough for two cars to pass each other, there were hardly any benches to sit down and enjoy the view. I wonder if it is allowed to sit on the ground and have a picnic – but since these gardens are called “the emperor’s private gardens”, I don’t think many Japanese would dare step on the lawn in any case.

Afterwards, I went to the science museum nearby, but I was a bit disappointed. It was geared towards kids – not a bad thing as such – but still felt a bit sterile somehow. The fact that everything inside was labeled and explained only in Japanese did not really help my enthusiasm either. They did have a nice section on light and aurorae though.

In the afternoon I met a friend at nearby Yasukuni Shrine, and we took a stroll around its grounds. It is the shrine where Japanese war heroes are worshipped – plus some of Japan’s war criminals as well, a sensitive topic with Korea and China especially. My friend says Yasukuni shine is a popular place for hatsumode – the first shrine visit of the year – and the shrine is crowded and has almost a matsuri feeling at that time. Since we wanted to have fun, we did not visit the war museum located at the shrine grounds, but there you can see one of the planes that were used for kamikaze attacks, if you are interested.

Instead, we took a taxi to Kagurazaka, an area of Shinjuku with many little shops, small cafes and old houses. We took a walk around the small backstreets there, and I almost had the impression of being back in Kyoto. We also visited the local Zenkokuji temple and the Akagi shrine, which is now a very modern compound situated on top of a two-story parking garage for the apartment building next door. It does sound odd, but the place still has a good, almost organic feeling to it – the modernisation was well done.

I went home in the early evening. This time I did not buy a traditional ekiben, but rather two western type sandwiches from a cafe in Kagurazaka we stopped by. My omiyage are more traditional though: A pack of Tokyo bananas, a small, very soft cake filled with banana custard and shaped like a banana – a real treat if you ask me!

Party!

Yesterday was National Holiday in Austria, which means that tomorrow there will be a party at the Austrian Embassy in Tokyo. And, since apparently there is a new embassador, I am invited too this year.

My plan is to go up to Tokyo tomorrow afternoon, then attend the party in the evening. I will stay overnight in a Toyoko Inn (since I am a member there and get a discount) and on Saturday I will visit the Science Museum near Tokyo station. Afterwards I’ll go to a nearby culture festival with a friend of mine, and in the evening I will go home again.

I was thinking of trying out the night bus for my return to Kyoto, but the last few days of each month are always very busy with work, so I cannot really afford to be sleepy and tired all Sunday. So, Shinkansen it is again. There is a discount ticket shop in my shopping mall nearby, and I finally dared to go there and buy the tickets instead of doing so at the station. The tickets were marginally cheaper than the original price, and they are valid for a return trip to Tokyo on any day before January 24th next year. I did not know you can buy tickets three months in advance, but now I finally understand why there are Shinkansen that are totally packed despite many seats coming with a reservation only.

It’s a pity that I have to leave Tokyo rather early – at 20:30 at the latest so I can catch the last bus to my place – but it’s okay. I have never been one to go to bars alone anyway, and my friend is not one of those girls either. Oh well, in any case I am expecting a nice weekend trip to Tokyo with lots of excellent (Austrian) food and I will report next week!

Celebrations

Today I have reason to celebrate: I have a new job! I mean, my company has signed a contract for work that – hopefully – will be long term. The whole thing went very fast: after I had received a request on Friday 14th, we had a meeting on Tuesday 18th, and today, at the first meeting with the whole group, I already signed the contract.

This is my first official Japanese contract, all other work I have done so far was either from clients abroad, or with a simple verbal agreement. My contract is a standard, straightforward one for this type of work, but since my Japanese is still lacking, especially in legalese, I asked my lawyer about it – just to be safe I won’t sign away either my soul or my firstborn. A quick online translation revealed a rather peculiar point – something that is very specific Japanese and totally normal here, according to my lawyer:

A whole paragraph of the contract – and not one of the shorter ones – deals with organised crime. My company is not allowed any kind of relationship whatsoever to whichever kind of organised crime – or the contract is void. Bugger. And here I was, dreaming of living a glorious life as gangster bride… But: no dating a yakuza! Well, it’s hard enough to find interested men around here anyway, I don’t think any local gangster would want to be involved with a foreigner who does not quite fit the Japanese beauty ideal, to put it politely.

Anyway, let’s talk about the job: Writing short articles (including photos) for foreigners about living in Kyoto. Well, since this is essentially what I have been doing here for free for the last three years, I guess I can just as well do it for money! Honestly, I am slightly worried that I will be repeating myself with respect to the blog here, but I hope this will not be too big of an issue. In any case, the articles will be much shorter than here, so if there’s a duplicate post, there will be much more detail here in the blog. And posts about shrines, temples, and matsuri will keep appearing here exclusively because work has a different focus.

This is describing daily life in Kyoto (especially the typical Japanese things) for a crowd of American Millennials (18 – 34 years old) in more or less short sound (text?) bites of 50 to 100 words each. I will write 5 articles per week, and they will be published on the brand new facebook page Kyotogram. Yes, I know: facebook… For all of you who know my views on facebook: Feel free to laugh! For all of you who don’t know my views on facebook: Well, they are at least as strong as my views on mobile/smartphones…

Anyway, I am very much looking forward to doing this! The page is brand new and in the beginning the writers (we are three people) are pretty much free to do what we like. The page will be constantly evaluated to see how it is going, and to find a good direction where to take it. The first big review is planned for mid December and the goal is to have 10.000 followers until then. So, if you do care how I pay for my chocolate in the future and want to keep me employed beyond December, please visit the link above, and like and follow away!

More House Guests…

Tuesday was a very hot day – beyond 25 degrees, lots of sun and blue sky – in short, it was wonderful! Unfortunately, it did have some effect on those house guests of mine as well…

It seems that at least one of the three cockroaches I killed a few weeks ago has laid at least one egg somewhere in my office, and it seems that even though I had cleaned the room thoroughly (or I thought I had), I did not find and remove the egg(s) after all. The hot weather on Tuesday apparently brought the egg(s) to hatch, and I have since killed just under 10 baby cockroaches.

They are maybe 5 mm long, and from a distance they resemble ants. Only when you come closer will you notice that there’s a light stripe across their black back, and then you see that it’s indeed a bug and not an ant. At this point, they are still small enough so you can simply squish them with a kleenex or so, but since they mostly move at night when I am not around, I decided to try something else.

I am still not a big fan of dusting my apartment with poison, but I did buy a box of “cockroach houses”. (I always wanted to be a landlady…) Those are little cardboard boxes with a very sticky “floor” (even for humans the glue is very strong); you put some very stinky bait in the middle of that floor, and then you put the box together and place it wherever you suspect a cockroach nest to be. I have put one underneath the fridge where it is warm, and one into that corner of my office where I have seen and killed most of the cockroaches in the last two days.

The idea is that the insects smell the bait, literally walk up to it, and then stick to the floor where they die. I am now cleaning my kitchen even more thoroughly, so that the cockroaches will find the bait more enticing. So far, no catch, but who knows how many of those insects are still around in my apartment. To be honest, I am now carefully scanning my office floor every now and then, and I shudder whenever I detect something that looks like a black speck anywhere. I still like to think they don’t make it into my bedroom (which is not true of course); remember that I am sleeping on the floor…

The bad news is that it is getting colder now, and the cockroaches will start to hibernate. It is very likely that I won’t catch any more now, but that they will simply wake up again when it gets warmer again in spring. Well, as long as they don’t grow while sleeping…

Sensei

When I returned from Austria, I picked up my language studies again. I mean, I did study Japanese on and off throughout the three years I have been here now, with varying success. This time I hope it will go much better: I found a teacher!

We met in the Kyoto International House, where I approached him after I saw him teaching Japanese to somebody else. He is a retired teacher of English (how cool’s that) who is now teaching Japanese to foreigners. I am glad that we have the same approach to language through grammar, so it seems like a match made in heaven.

Already he has bombarded me with exercises for joshi – Japanese particles. Those are little, mostly one-syllable words without meaning in itself; but they are very precise indicators of grammatical structure. There is no direct equivalent in English (particles like to, from, of, by, etc. have some of the meaning of joshi) or in German (our four cases come close, but are not exhaustive), so learning them is very difficult.

Part of the problem is that when they are exchanged, the meaning of the sentence can change completely. I keep joking that Western languages like to add words, where Japanese likes to change them:

Watashi WA nihongo o shabemas. – I speak Japanese.
Watashi MO nihongo o shabemas. – I also speak Japanese.

Or that some verbs require a particular joshi in a particular context – and the difference is not really translatable into any of the languages I speak… Anyway, my teacher says that joshi are the most important part of Japanese, and he claims that when you get them right, you can speak Japanese perfectly. Well, I am willing to try…

He does not want me to call him teacher though, instead he says “we are both studying Japanese together” which is a very nice way to put it. He says he has to carefully think about the grammar when he wants to teach it, which is exactly the way I feel about teaching German: I know how it is correct, but I really have to think about the why.

This really seems like a match made in heaven – and I’m not even religious!

Table

I have become very picky with respect to the things that enter my home. Some things you need, and others you want, but I try to buy the best in any case. However, for me the best does not necessarily mean the most expensive, but rather the ones I find perfect. Sometimes this means that I will not rather not buy anything that is merely nice, even if I have to wait much longer for the perfect thing.

As you know, my apartment has three washitsu – Japanese style rooms – with tatami flooring. And my plan was to furnish two of them – my bedroom and my living room – in Japanese style. I already showed you my bedroom, but my living room is still not finished – and I have been living here for more than one and a half year now (wow!).

Yesterday, I got one step closer to the perfect living room: I finally bought a low table for it. It is an antique about 100 years old, with nice legs, and although it is rather simple in style, the grain on the top is exquisite. I wanted something like this because I wanted the colours in the room to blend nicely into each other. Japanese people don’t find this so important apparently, but for me it is.

One step closer, but I am still not finished. Like in my bedroom, the lamps are not good in the living room (actually, there are no lamps at all right now), and I will need to buy zabuton floor cushions to make sitting at the table more comfortable. This sounds like an easy thing, but who knows how long this is going to take…

Storage

My bathroom consists of three consecutive rooms. You enter though the middle one; to one side there’s the toilet and to the other there’s the actual shower/bathroom. The middle room is rather small, I’d guess about 3 square metres max. And it is almost filled with my washing machine and the wash basin. The latter is contained in a shelving unit that also has a mirror, but altogether storage space is scarce in my bathroom.

Since I still consider myself a nerd, I don’t have many bathroom utensils and different types of shampoo etc. for each day or a variety of cremes and soaps or so. My routine in the morning takes 20 minutes including showering, any longer and I would consider it as a problem. Anyway, ever since I got my things from Germany, my bathroom utensils have been stored in a large box on top of my washing machine. Until last Saturday, when I finally got fed up about that.

I decided to install one more shelf underneath the wash basin, and I was hoping that this would give me enough space to finally put all my stuff away. I measured the space underneath the wash basin very carefully – there were pipes at the back I needed to take into account – and with the resulting piece of carton I went to my nearest D2 home depot store to have a piece of mdf cut to size.

Well, no such luck. This particular D2 does not do any cutting, neither of wood nor of other things. And the other D2 stores around town who actually do the cutting, can only cut straight lines, which is not really useful in my case. Okay, so I finally decided to buy the piece of 5 mm thick mdf and a coping saw and do the sawing myself.

You can see the result here. Yes, admittedly, the cuts are a bit wobbly, but it was my first time with such a saw, and overall I did well I think. I did not bother sanding the cuts since there are no splinters. Also, nobody will ever see this (except for you, of course), and I take a lot of pride in the fact that when this extra shelf was finally put in place, it fit perfectly.

My bathroom utensils also fit perfectly; ever single piece is now stored underneath the sink in the bathroom. It may sound a bit odd, but without the box on top of my washing machine, the room looks much bigger now!