Iris – Page 86 – goinggaijin.com

Prayers

The other day, after I went out to buy chocolate at my favourite store, I stopped by Shimogamo shrine on the way home. I hadn’t been there in a while, and as the shrine is within a very old forest with huge trees, it is always pleasant to go there.

It was rather late in the afternoon and there were hardly any people, so I took my time and went to the main hall to pray – as usual a very simple “Let me stay in Japan” prayer. Probably many people would have more elaborate wishes – money, fame, whatnot, but for me this is the most important thing.

I have always wondered what the Japanese would pray for at a shinto shrine, and I finally asked some friends about that. It seems that most people ask for two very simple things: kanai anzen (家内安全) which can be translated as household or family safety, as well as hi no yojin (火の用心) which means protection from fire. One of my friends claims she is not superstitious. However, these are the only two things she would ever dare pray for. She says that if one were praying for money for example, you never know where it would come from, and whether you might not have to suffer for it in the last consequence…

Upgrade

Last week I received a letter from national health insurance with my fees for this year. In Japan, health insurance fees are calculated from your income of last year, not the current one. In the last two years I always paid the minimum since I did not have any income, but now that I have to pay myself, I promptly got an upgrade on my health insurance fees.

I now have to pay almost double what I paid last year! Compared to what I would have to pay in Europe it is nothing, but still… At least I don’t have to do anything since I allowed automatic deduction from my bank account; the insurance company will adjust the deduction themselves. That’s a bonus, always.

I wonder what happens if people retire for example, and have much less income from one year to the next. Will they still have to pay full insurance fees on whatever they made the year before? I remember that one of my housemates in the old house constantly struggled with health insurance and tried to convince them that he really didn’t make as much money as they thought. Obviously I have no intentions of retiring any time soon, but it would be interesting to find out…

Old Houses

Last weekend, I indulged myself – once again… There was an open house near Kyoto University, and since the house was a semi-traditional Japanese one built some 80 years ago, I just had to see it.

In fact, it was not just one house, but three buildings on the same plot of land. There was one very large main house with 10 rather large rooms on two floors. Then there was a much smaller house with three rooms in total, and some sort of shed in the back of the garden. Here are some pictures from the agent’s leaflet:

It turned out the house was built for a professor of Kyoto University by a quite famous architect of that time, Koji Fujii. Fujii was one of the pioneers of ecological building in Japan, and he certainly had a keen eye for details. The ceilings are restrained but beautifully decorated with differently colored wood; There are tiny windows at the right spots, and there is even a reading room/office with built-in desks right at the windows, still original.

It is not a truly traditional Japanese house, but it is not one of the westernised homes with European exterior that were so popular in the Taisho era and among the university professors either. It is a very well designed Japanese house with modern influences, and this fusion is so well done you don’t even notice them. For example, on the ground floor are rooms with normal wooden floors as well as rooms with tatami. The latter are raised significantly higher as usual than the former, so that if you are sitting in seiza on the floor, you are at eye level with somebody sitting on a chair outside.

The state of the house is not good, unfortunately, but not quite as bad as the last one I visited. On the other hand, since it is more traditional, the interior is rather dark with the small windows and the paper covered shoji, and the wood which is mostly painted dark does not help much to be honest.

Still, I hope there is somebody who buys the house and renovates it properly instead of simply tearing it down and building another bloody mansion on top… I wish I could save this house from certain destruction, but I don’t quite have the money for it. Anybody who has a spare million Euros for me?

Visa

You may not have noticed, but it is indeed time to renew my visa again! Once again I had to do paperwork – although comparatively less than last year – and once again I had to relinquish both my passport and my zairyu card to my lawyer. Even though I know they will take good care of my ids, it still feels like giving away the essence of who I am… It’s hard to describe, really.

Last Friday my lawyer has submitted all the documents to the immigration office, and now we’ll have to wait. Apparently, a visa renewal takes two to four weeks at most (as opposed to the two months it took last year), so this should be over relatively quickly. Keep your fingers crossed!

Wealth

It is universally known that rice is very important in Japan and all over Asia, and 87% of the world’s total rice production is harvested in Asia. Rice was first domesticated in China around 10.000 years ago but has since become the staple food for millions of people.

In old Japan, farmers were considered so important that in the hierarchical feudal class system of the Edo period, peasants held the second rank – right below the samurai, but above the third rank artisans and the merchants, who made up the fourth and lowest rank. And during that time, rice was used as a measure of somebody’s wealth.

For example, the income of the daimyo – feudal lords – and samurai was counted in koku – bales of rice. Originally, one koku was about 150 kg, and the idea behind it is that one bowl of rice holds 150 grams of rice, and that 1 koku – which would be 1000 bowls of rice – would be needed to feed a single person for one whole year.

If you do the math, this makes about 2.7 bowls of rice that a person could eat per day, which is only okay if you are on a severe diet; but of course, rice was not the only thing people were eating. In fact, there is a story that Ieyasu – the first Shogun of the Edo period – preferred to eat other grains because they were cheaper…

Back to wealth: In the Edo period, each feudal domain was assessed by their potential rice income, called kokudaka. This was done by bestowing fiefs that had been won in the war on allies or loyal retainers. Later, the kokudaka also determined the order of precedence at the court of the Shogun.

Only if a fief had an income of at least 10.000 koku, its fief-holder could be called a daimyo. The largest income of any daimyo was the Kaga or Kanazawa domain in Honshu, with 1.025.000 koku per year. This was the only fief with more than one million koku, and to this day, there is a million-koku festival in Kanazawa town to celebrate the return of their lord as a millionaire. Only 20 daimyo had a kokudaka of more than 200.000 koku, including the Shogun, whose income was some 4 million koku per year. To put this in perspective: altogether, Japan produced some 30 million koku annually.

After the Meiji restoration, in 1891, the koku was redefined to be 180 litres of rice, but soon enough, income was measured in money rather than in rice. Today, koku are still in use in the lumber industry as a cubic measure, but beyond that, they have been relegated to old stories and museums.

Bedroom

I am getting somewhere with furnishing my apartment – and that barely 16 months after I moved in… This week I have finally bought a reading lamp to match the lamp on the ceiling in my bedroom. It is not bright enough to read in bed though, so I will have to change the lightbulb to something stronger, but still, I have arrived at this:

The chest is from China, and if the dealer I bought it from is to be believed, it is an antique from the 1920s. I am not sure if this is true, it was relatively cheap, so… This is the only piece of furniture in my bedroom because I sleep on a futon on the tatami. To the right of the picture is the small balcony on the north side of the building and to the left the large oshiie where I store my clothes.

As you can see, so far, I have no pictures on the walls, but I am thinking of buying a nice woodblock print from a friend of mine. We’ll see, I have had my eye on a very specific one for quite a while. By now, only the livingroom is still lacking furniture, but there is an antique market this month again where I wanted to go and maybe finally find the type of table I have been looking for so long. You will see a picture the moment my livingroom is finished as well.

Multiplicity

I had a small surgical procedure last week. Nothing serious; I had been watching a mole that was growing an extra tail for a while, and I wanted to be rid of it, just to be sure. It’s routine, and although I had to wait almost three hours, the surgery itself took maybe 10 minutes. Very early today I was back in the hospital to get the stitches removed and to pick up the lab results. As expected, the lab tests came back clean, and the scar appeared nice as well. I am not very vain, but since the scar will be visible, it is a bonus. Everything seemed fine.

Until I came home in the early afternoon. There it turned out that the wound had completely opened again and was even bleeding! I have had small surgery before, but an outcome like this was certainly unexpected. Half frightened and half upset I called the hospital and asked to talk to a doctor – because those are the only ones who can speak English there. After some 10 minutes of holding the line, the receptionist at the dermatology department told me that neither of the two doctors who had treated me for this was available anymore. And then she apologised for that. And then she hung up on me.

Bad move.

30 minutes later – and still fuming – I was back in hospital – again – standing in front of the very same receptionist – probably – and told her about my problem – again. Since she did still not speak any English and I still had not acquired the Japanese vocabulary for surgery, sutures, and open wound, I resorted to drawing pictures – including blood – and letting “it really hurts” drop a few times (I might have exaggerated a bit there, possibly). And then I said that I wanted to see a doctor, please, any doctor would do, thank you, as long as I could see him RIGHT NOW.

Five minutes later a nurse arrived with a doctor in tow, and ten minutes after that my wound was dressed again with some ointment that is supposed to speed up the healing process. The doctor said these things happen at times, that another set of stitches would be possible (the first ones had probably been too shallow) but I declined since the one solution will take a week and the other seven days, so it does not matter. After that I grumbled a bit about having to pay again for fixing what they couldn’t do right the first time, and I also promised to be back if the wound was not closed within the ten days maximum the doctor promised me.

Now I have a hole in my neck that is covered with a huge wad of gauze making it look as if somebody tried to cut my head off… And I have a tube of ointment in my fridge which makes the wound burn quite unpleasantly, and which I have to put on once a day. Let’s hope this is doing the trick. I don’t think Dermatology is quite up to seeing me again any time soon…

The Waiting Years

The Waiting Years
Fumiko Enchi

Tomo is the wife of Yukitomo Shirakawa, a public servant in Fukushima, who is rapidly climbing the political ladder. Their two children do not keep Yukitomo from being a womanizer, and at some point he even orders his wife to find him a suitable mistress. Unwilling, but unable to stand her ground against her despotic husband, Tomo goes to Tokyo and after painful deliberations decides on Suga.
With the young girl’s arrival Yukitomo adds a new luxurious wing to the house and Tomo more and more finds herself in the role of household accountant. Both women soon arrange themselves with the new conditions forced upon them, but they change again when Yumi takes up service in their house and Yukitomo cannot keep his hands off her.

This is a very quiet novel, focusing on the women of the household. Though there are no open power struggles between them, and Tomo retains her elevated status of “wife” at all times, the common suffering of the women under Yukitomo’s reign is ever present. I enjoyed reading it, as it gives an almost psychological diagnosis of all persons involved, but if you are looking for action, this novel is not for you.

Fumiko Enchi (1905 – 1986) was born in Tokyo. Since she was a sickly child, she was home-schooled and was taught English, French, and Chinese literature; through her grandmother she got to know the classics of Japanese literature. With 21, her first play was published, and from 1930, she began to write fiction, to not much acclaim. After a hiatus in and after WWII, she started to write again in the early 1950s, and finally received recognition as one of the most prominent Japanese writers of the Showa period.

The book is available on amazon – enjoy!

Handling

I recently bought another futon in a shop nearby. Futons are not really heavy, but quite bulky, even though they are usually transported folded into thirds. For some reason, the package did not have a handle, which makes carrying a futon, even over a short distance, a bit cumbersome.

However, the Japanese have a solution for this: plastic strap-on handles (for want of a better word). Essentially you wrap some string around your package and then hook in the handles. It’s harder to describe than it actually is, just have a look at the picture.

This makes carrying a large bundle like my futon comparatively easy. I have also seen those handles used with normal cartons, as long as they are not too heavy. Isn’t this a very neat, simple and practical solution – quite Japanese in fact!

Brightness

Finally! After four months and a week, renovations are practically over. There are still some smaller things to be done in and outside of the building, but the main work is finished. Today, the last parts of the scaffolding were removed from the northern part of my apartment, which means that I have my view back! The first thing I did was to open up all the curtains and windows to again let in fresh air and, more importantly: light.

I’m glad it is over even though I found the experience interesting. As I suspected, nothing really important has been done, my water pipes are still as rusty as before for example. Also, I noticed that the rusty lamps on the parking lots were simply painted over without taking care of the rusty parts beforehand. I know that there is paint that allows that, but still… Then again, both my balconies received a water-proof coating, and I suspect that something similar has been done on the roof as well.

At least, everything went very smoothly and I felt well-informed about the procedures. All workers were very polite and courteous, from the two guys in charge of the whole renovations who took time out to personally repair my screen door, to the youngsters who were painting the hallway and had to get off their ladders every time I passed by.

I guess, for the next 10 years, I will have my peace and quiet in the mornings back again. Of course, not that I’m planning to stay quite as long in this place, but still, it’s good to know.