experiences – Page 35 – goinggaijin.com

Famous!

Around this time last year, I told you that a friend of mine and I had been engaged as extras for a Japanese movie. Well, I can now officially talk about it since I just found out that it was released last Saturday! The movie is called Koto in Japanese (in English: The Old Capital) and it is a sequel to the novel of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata. Now the two sisters of Kawabata’s novel are grown and have children of their own who have their own struggles with Japanese society. Part of the movie is set in France, while the novel takes place entirely in Kyoto and its northern outskirts.

I have not seen the result yet, but another friend went to the cinema on Saturday, and he said that both my friend and I are featuring very prominently in a scene that is set in an old house in Kyoto. If you take a look at the poster to the right, we were in a scene with the actor in the blue kimono to the far right. Apparently he is very famous in Japan – does that mean I’m now officially famous too? 😉 We should be in at least two more scenes in the movie, somewhere in the background, but I cannot tell for sure until I have seen it – and this will take a while. My Japanese is not good enough to watch movies or TV yet (and fully understand what’s going on), so I will have to wait until there are English subtitles. The movie has already won a prize in the Kyoto Historical Film Festival (I think), and it may be sent to international Film Festivals as well – and that’s usually where the subtitles are made. I will see it eventually though, I’m sure.

Dedication

Japanese work ethic is legendary. And although I keep telling people that in many offices a “warm body” on a chair is more important than a “working body”, there is still this extra mile only the Japanese seem willing to go.

Point in case: At 9:00 pm today, I received a phone call. Okay, there have been spam calls before at such late an hour, and I usually deflect them by telling the caller that I can’t speak Japanese and he has to talk to me in English. I still have troubles with Japanese phone calls, so I’m not telling a huge lie, at least.

Anyway, the phone call today was from my local post office. The officer even spoke English (how come I never met him in person?) and he wanted to know my exact address. Apparently I have received a parcel – probably from abroad – and the last bit of the address was missing, so he wanted to make sure the parcel can be delivered tomorrow. (In case this sounds funny: On the form that comes with the parcel, there is a space for the recipient’s phone number. Today I finally understood what that’s good for 😉 )

I am not expecting any parcels, so I am very curious as to what I’ll get – and from whom it is of course. It’s too early for Christmas presents as well, so…?

Gaps

Lately, I have been going to town more often than usual because of my new job. It has been raining several times now, so I need to take the bus instead of riding my bike through the back lanes and along the river.

And I noticed to my great dismay, that for some reason or other, lots of beautiful old buildings have been torn down lately. Where before there were lovely old wooden houses with high fences that allowed only a glimpse at the top of a pine tree, or even a kura store house standing at the back of the garden, there is now – nothing. Nothing but a gap in the rows of houses.

Since I have always loved old buildings, the lack of appreciation the Japanese seem to show to those old houses greatly upsets me. Even more so because those buildings are a big part of what “Japan” means to me, and why it is so nice to walk around Kyoto. I’m not interested in going from one temple to the next shrine when in between there is nothing but a random assembly of apartment buildings, parking lots, and convenience stores, with the occasional ugly private home in between.

I want to walk along those little lanes with the old houses where you can see shoji through the wooden windows on the first floor. That’s what Kyoto means to me. I wish I were really, really rich – then I would buy all those old houses and renovate them and make people live in them again. But it seems to me that only foreigners value those houses, the Japanese don’t care. Until they are all gone, I guess?

Novelties

Last week, a friend visited Kyoto and we spent some time together. We went to Kurama and Kibune in the north of Kyoto and we went to Nara in the south. I had never been there before (and I will write a weekend post about it).

The nicest part about his visit was that I got to try a few things that I did not dare on my own. For example, we went to a Korean-style grill restaurant where we ate cow’s stomach, among other (less exotic) things. And we went to a pachinko parlour together… A pachinko place was something I always wanted to try, but the whole idea was rather daunting: The large halls with loud music, the flashy atmosphere, the unknown everything… But now I know that playing pachinko is not that big a deal, in any respect.

When you enter, you choose a machine and you feed it with money; bills from 1.000 – 10.000 YEN are accepted. For each yen you enter, you receive a small steel ball. You then shoot each ball into the machine where it should enter one (or more) openings at the bottom of the display. Every time you hit one of those openings, a game is played automatically, where 3 numbers should match – like at a one-armed bandit, but with the difference that you don’t have any way of influencing this part of the game. When the three numbers match, you have won a jackpot, meaning that you get more balls to play with.

Of course, this only scratches the surface of the whole pachinko idea, I am sure there is much more to it. Since we did not win any jackpot, I cannot tell you about the game in more depth; and since I don’t have the money to spend – or the need to be addicted to yet another silly game – you will need to find more information elsewhere.

What was interesting to me was the lack of control you have. Other than regulating the speed with which you shoot the little balls into the machine, there is nothing else you can do, it is indeed a game of luck. It was also interesting to see the people around us. We went on a Friday night, and there were lots of people, even those that looked very distinguished and well dressed. A friend of mine told me that many people play pachinko as a way of stress release.

We did not stay very long, only spending 1000 YEN each. But when we left, we were half deaf. The noise is incredible! Each machine has noisy programs and all of them run on full blast, regardless of whether somebody is playing or not. This is unlikely to become one of my preferred pastimes.

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!

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!

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!

Expelled

I have stopped playing Contract Bridge. The reason is a bit complicated, so bear with me…

There is this woman in the Bridge Club who comes every now and then, and I didn’t like her very much from the beginning. However, she seemed to have taken quite some fancy to me for some reason or other… It turned out that she was very controlling and pushy towards me (to the point of stalking me) and she apparently saw me as some sort of new project of hers that required improvement. I tried to restrict contact and block her advances as much as possible, but things are not always running as smoothly. Since she had backed off in the end, however, I thought the problem was solved.

Unfortunately, I was wrong… The moment I left the Bridge Club, that woman started talking badly about me, even telling blatant lies about me to the other members, especially to the lady who runs the club, who appears to be a special friend of hers. In the end, she caused quite a stir, to the point where my closest friend from the club wanted to talk to me. I explained my view of the whole story to her and at least she believed me.

However, my friend advised me – since the damage was already done and there’s virtually nothing I can do about it – that it would be better if I would not return to the Bridge club, and that I should look elsewhere if I want to continue playing. This is a rather typical Japanese reaction in order to keep the peace for the rest of the members: expel the troublemaker (and from their point of view that’s me), stop talking about the subject matter, and pretend that nothing has happened.

The interesting thing about this is that I had expected something like this to happen. The very first time I had met that woman I had a very bad feeling about her – a feeling that I have had only a handful of times in my life, and I had never been wrong. I knew that this woman would start badmouthing me the moment I turned my back upon her and the club, and I knew that it was unlikely that I would be able to return once she had finished her dirty deed.

Oh well, let’s chalk this up to experience with respect to human nature; funny that I seem to get better at it the older I become. I’ll get over it; besides, there are many other places where to play Contract Bridge, I’ll just have to go looking for them.