Category: experiences

Yesterday I read a short article in an Austrian newspaper about the upcoming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. To cope with the expected influx of foreign visitors to the country, it is planned to have a number of robot models greet and assist passengers on the airport in Tokyo. The robots are supposedly able to perform easy tasks (like carrying bags), doing instant translations, or answering simple questions. The goal is to show off how modern and cool Japan is.

My first reaction to that one: I laughed out loud. I’m not sure, maybe it’s Kyoto, but somehow the “modern Japan” has still not permeated the whole of my city here… Let me illustrate this:

Recently, I have started contacting companies in Kyoto about the What’s up in Kyoto event calendar (actually, a friend is helping with this one). First contact is per phone, we tell them about the event calendar and what we want and then, at some point comes the “more information” part of the call. When this happens, we inevitably get an “oh, just send us a fax with the details, okay?”

A FAX??

Have you heard of emails? 21st century and such? To be fair, those are not IT companies, but still, all of the places we are contacting have websites, often quite beautiful and elaborate ones. Still, no emails, they want a fax. And finally, they want you to show up in person and do the whole sales pitch again, of course.

This is the fascinating thing about Japan: On the one hand, they have robots in all shapes, sizes and intelligences. And on the other hand, they are holding on to technology from the 1980s because that’s just what they do. This country will never cease to amaze me.

I’m going back to soroban school! My soroban teacher is all excited about me passing the test next time in January, so he said he wants me to come back to get the final polish.

With the last test I passed all but two of the exam types (okay, except anzan – mental math, but that’s no surprise). So, for the next test in January, I only need to focus on divisions and additions; if I get at least 100 points (i.e., 10 correct exercises), I will have passed the shodan exam, just as I had planned. For both divisions and additions, I am hovering around 80 – 90 points, which is a good starting point. However, I make too many avoidable mistakes, so I have to put in extra effort here, both to increase accuracy, and to increase speed.

I went to class today, and my sensei said something very interesting: When I do the math, I speak the equations in my mind, for example “6 times 3 is 18” (in German, of course), and afterwards I set the appropriate numbers on the soroban. My sensei watched me and said that I seem to stop between two such equations, which means I’m stopping on the soroban as well. This interruption of the smooth flow of the hand movement may introduce extra mistakes, he said.

Solution: I should slow down, just enough to speak the equation and set the beads on the soroban at the same time. This will lead to a smooth, almost continuous flow of the movements of the hand – which in turn will increase speed, and maybe even accuracy. It does sound a bit weird at first, but if you think about it, it makes sense. I will try to do this for a couple of weeks and see where this is going.

Besides that, it seems that by now I know the book by heart – I make very few mistakes when doing the basic exercises that can be done in the seven minutes’ time frame, but beyond that I make more mistakes. According to my sensei, this is not just because the numbers are getting longer, so to get a better training experience, I should now start with exercise number 11 instead of the beginning.

I’m sure he has a point there – in both respects. I am really eager to finally pass the shodan exam, so I’ll do as he suggests. Wish me luck!

 

Let me say it as it is: I’m terribly jealous!

Yesterday evening I went to the German Christmas Market at the Umeda Sky Building with a friend of mine. And there he came clean: they had adopted a baby! Not a human one, but this adorable kitten here! She’s 6 months old and a Scottish Fold, even though the ears are not folding at all. For some reason, Japanese love high breed cats; my friend bought her from a shop for 100.000 yen. Personally I would never do that, there are enough cats in shelters everywhere looking for a good home, but since he has the money…

Anyway, isn’t she cute? I sooo wish I could have my own cat, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. However, I have already told my friend that I’ll be happy to come catsitting at any time they need it. I’m very excited to meet her at Christmas!

After all these years of living “the easy life” at least financially, I can finally understand what it means to be a “working poor”. Right now, I have never worked so hard while seeing so little money for it. It’s a bit complicated, because it is connected to how the Japanese tax system is working, so bear with me.

Essentially, in Japan, you pay taxes according to the amount of money you earned the year before. This is very nice if your salary increases quickly – one extra year of low taxes – but not so nice if you retire or become unemployed. Since my company only makes a small profit, I have been paying myself the same salary since the beginning, just enough to satisfy the Japanese Immigration Office. And this year, for the first time, I am being hit with the full amount of taxes. I didn’t pay anything in the first year, and only 5000 yen/month in the second. But this year, my taxes have tripled, although they are  still at the lower end of the general national tax scale.

This tax increase didn’t come as a big surprise, but what really hit me was the enormous hike in health insurance, a system that works like taxes: you pay according to what you earned the year before. Last year, I paid about 5000 yen/month and I expected insurance to double, maybe. I wasn’t that lucky: I am now paying 25.000 yen each month, which is quite a blow.

So, at this point, after I have paid all my taxes, insurances, utilities, rent, etc. I am left with 50.000 yen spending money for the whole month. This is tough! I have tried to reduce some of my expenses for daily life (meaning: food), but there’s only so far you can go. While it should be possible to eat for 1000 yen/day, I have not managed that, probably because I am so addicted to the comparatively expensive bread. Most of the times I drink water anyway, so that’s not a big deal, but cutting chocolate – which I see as necessary “fuel” is very difficult. I might take this opportunity to lose some weight, which will cut down food costs automatically though.

Other expenses are relatively low in general: I have no expensive hobbies, plenty of clothing that will go for a while still (and I never liked shopping for clothes anyway), hardly ever go anywhere, and I even stopped buying books since the library is that close. Unexpected things do come up though – the brakes on my bicycle needed fixing last month for example, but even that was just a small amount. I hope that there won’t be any major things happening, because I want to avoid touching my savings (aka: my future house with garden) at all costs.

Altogether I think I can get by until I can raise my own salary, but I am worried a little about the coming winter because the heating will drive up my electricity bills. If anyone wants to help me over the cold here by sending me a food parcel, just let me know! 😉

My goodness, what is it these days? I’m running from one appointment to the next and have so many things to do that at the end of the day I’m exhausted – and still have the feeling I didn’t accomplish anything… There are so many small things I have to attend to at the moment, I am getting bogged down by them and I don’t really have time to do the big and important stuff that would actually get me somewhere. And that’s just work I need to do anyway.

On top of all that, I’m getting emails about things that should be working smoothly without my interference – but of course, there are unexpected hiccups that I have to attend to… Just last week, I received an email from my bank in Austria informing me that they have made a wrong withdrawal, and could I please let them know what to do now, preferably using these forms including a signature. And today, I received a cheque from one of my steady clients in the US, where we usually deal via paypal. And because they don’t want to cancel the cheque, I have to go to my bank (in person!) and ask how much fees it would incur if I cash it here in Japan and then we’ll find out what to do about the fees and…

Sure, there’s nothing else I have to do right now, bring it on! It’s those little things that are wearing me out at the moment, and there’s nothing really I can do about it, except for delegating, which obviously is not an option at this point. And it’s almost December where even more of those little things are waiting for me, like Oseibo and Nengajo… I just hope things will get better soon, it’s very exhausting at the moment.

 

Just as I had predicted, it’s getting cold here much earlier this year than usual. Already, we can have as little as 5 degrees in the nights, which is pretty low for this time of the year. So, I have already consolidated my home into a single room, more than a month earlier than last year. Over the last weekend, I moved the main parts of my office equipment, as well as my futon into my livingroom, where I will spend the rest of the winter, hoping it will not get too cold after all. Wish me luck!

Sorry for the short post today, I had a full day, came home very late, and now I’m cold and tired… off to bed!

As some of you – especially those who stalk whatsupinkyoto on facebook – may have guessed from my weekend post, I went to a rakugo performance on Sunday! An English one, just to be sure, but it didn’t make much difference in the performance, I think.

It was definitely not what I had expected! I thought it would be something like stand-up comedy, with the jokes and punch lines coming fast and furious. They weren’t. Although all of the stories were funny, some of them were pretty long, and for my taste, a bit drawn out too much. Especially when you got the idea the first time around, there is not much point in telling a variant 10 seconds later…

Anyway, I loved the rakugoka, some of them were really good with their posture changes and facial expressions, which are the main points to make rakugo entertaining. Altogether, I spent an enjoyable afternoon, even though my expectations were not met. Oh well, I just learned something new, that’s always worth it!

By the way, the group “Laugh-Laugh-Tei” that did the performance, consists of a number of people from Kyoto who use rakugo as a way of improving their English, which in itself I find funny. One of them, Kimochi, cites this as the only reason why he started to perform English rakugo. He appears to be quite ambitious, actually, and is actively trying to bring rakugo to a Western audience. And, if today you are at or nearby Michigan State University, you can watch Kimochi giving an English rakugo performance tonight, November 14, from 18:30 in the RCAH Auditorium.

And if you’re not, just watch him here: