Category: experiences

Ladies and Gents: Time for celebrations!

This morning I received my visa extension – I can stay another year in Japan!

To be honest, I had gotten a bit nervous already, but this time there was no need for extra paperwork. Obviously my lawyer knows exactly what to do, she’s worth every yen I spend on her!

I have celebrated the occasion with a truly Austrian meal: Brettljausn with Austrian rye bread, cheese and Leberkaese (huge thanks to the friend who brought it for me from Australia of all places), and gherkins and a boiled eggs and tomatoes… It was delicious!

So, I have another year in Japan, another year to get the company going and to prove worthy of the trust people put in me here. This one goes out to all my friends, whether here in Japan or overseas: Thank you for your support! You mean a lot to me!

It’s this time of the year again: The EU Film Days are in town! Films from all over Europe are shown, often in their original languages with English and Japanese subtitles. Many films have won prizes at some film festival or other and are a couple of years old though.

I have not heard of any of the films for this year, except the Austrian one: The Wall. However, I went to the Bulgarian “Victoria” today with friends from Bulgaria. It was a very, very slow film with hardly any dialogue, and even though films from Eastern Europe are usually a bit hard to digest, this one about the relations between women of three generations made me (and my friends) even uncomfortable at the end.

Anyway, If you are around in Kyoto or Tokyo and into something completely different and un-Japanese, do have a look at the films. The official homepage is here: http://eufilmdays.jp/en/schedule/

It is June 30th today, the day of the Nagoshi No Harae summer purification. With two of my Japanese friends I went to Kifune, a tiny little village north of Kyoto, to watch the ceremony.I have written about the ceremony before; it was a bit different this time around, I guess every shrine has their own peculiarities. I went through the chinowa wreath myself the prescribed three times – twice, actually – and bought a tiny little chinowa wreath to take home.

Kifune village is gorgeously sitated in the middle of the mountains with not much space next to the river and the road. The trees are enormous and cover most of the sky above the road the further you travel up the river. Kifune is famous for its many exquisite and expensive restaurants on the river – and I mean ON the river: platforms are built over the most shallow parts where people can sit and enjoy their meal with natural air condition. We did not spend that much money though, we only had coffee and cake before we left. I will share some pictures of Kifune and its wonderful trees in my post on the weekend.

We’re in the middle of tsuyu again – Japan’s rainy season. For now, it is still quite pleasant and cool and not humid at all, at least it does not feel this way. I had to calm a friend of mine who is coming to Kyoto for a couple of weeks and is worried about the heat and humidity, but there’s nothing to worry about – yet. Also the rain is rather well-behaved this year: the really heavy rains happen mostly during the night, and although the days are grey and cloudy, it is not too bad. Let’s hope I didn’t jinx it now – I have plans to go out on Thursday…

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…

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…

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!

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.

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…