Category: experiences

Going for lunch is a great thing. Besides satisfying your hunger, you have a break in your day in which you have time to relax a little and to chat with your friends or colleagues about anything – hopefully distinctly unrelated to work. In short, lunch break is fun.

Unless you have to do it on your own. Then there is always a bit of awkwardness involved starting with the basic decision: do you eat on your desk or do you go out after all? If you choose the latter, you may end up in a crowded restaurant where you may be asked to share your table with another stranger, equally left alone during mealtime. And we all know what that will lead to: awkwardly forced conversations about awkwardly irrelevant topics – mostly weather related – until one or both are saved by the arrival of the food. A usually relaxing lunch break has turned into an awkwardly quick exercise in food intake.

It has long been overdue that somebody came up with a solution for all that awkwardness, and the people who designed (one of) the cafeterias at Kyoto University did an excellent job. Check this out: Those tables are for six people each, but the board, conveniently placed at eye level, will prevent anyone sitting there from seeing the person opposite. And, as many people like to look at the person to whom they talk (unless when talking on the phone, but there it is often about who sees you while you are loudly yelling for attention into your mobile), this board relieves everybody from making awkward conversations. What an ingenious little contraption!

Next thing you know, they will install little screens right there, so you can surf the internet while you’re eating… But then, you could probably just eat at your computer anyway.

Disclaimer: Those are the only few tables in the whole cafeteria thus equipped. All other tables are of the usual, inviting social awkwardness interaction, types.

I am meeting several people at the moment, partly to teach, and partly to be taught myself.

First, there are my German – Japanese exchange classes with a young man who seems very Japanese on the surface, but who is everything but, once you look a bit deeper. Besides his mother tongue he speaks three European languages: English, Italian, and French, all of them very well indeed, and now he is endeavouring to study German. His German is already so much better than my Japanese I have to admit, so I am always a bit worried I may take too much advantage of his time, and most of all, of his patience. So far, we are each writing a very short story, just a few sentences, which the other one then corrects, and then we’ll talk a little afterwards. I still have the feeling I cannot talk, so I have to force myself not to switch to German, or English. I have had some very interesting conversations with him already, and he is teaching me lots of interesting pieces of Japanese culture I may have heard of, but never understood.

Then there is a lovely woman who wants me to teach her German, well, actually she was asking me to teach her Austrian. How do you teach a language that is only spoken? We have agreed that I’ll teach her “proper” German for now, because otherwise the Germans will not understand her at all if she starts speaking Austrian dialect. She has been to Austria before, so she knows some of the words that are only used in Austria. However, I think she only spoke to educated people either in English or to those who were able to speak “proper” German, because when I tried to teach her how to say a few common phrases in dialect, she could hardly believe it was indeed so far from the written word. I guess it may be a good compromise at this point to see that she can understand dialect, rather than speak it herself. As she is doing research on tourism and agriculture, we are reading and translating some of the papers she is using for her work, and in turn, I also learn a lot about Austria I have not known before. She is putting in a lot of energy, and in a sense we have a similar type of studying: We both hate making mistakes…

Finally, my youngest student is a 17 year old boy, the son of a friend of mine. He is what the Japanese call a “half”, half Japanese, half Canadian, and he is lovely albeit a bit shy. He grew up in Kyoto, and although his spoken English is just fine, his mother is a bit worried about his English reading and writing skills, as he had little exposure to the language here in Japan. He is mostly interested in computer games and sports, so I will try to find some reading material that touches those interests and is also age appropriate. As a return I have requested that he’ll teach me how to write nice Kanji. I can write the Hiragana and Katakana, but I scrawl like a five year old (no offense to five year old Japanese kids here!) and there must be a way to learn those properly. The goal is not to become a master calligrapher, but to be able to write like an adult.

I’ve always enjoyed learning something new. Doing this is not always easy, but it’s nice to have something you know that you can trade for something you don’t know…

Remember the job interview I had two weeks ago? Well, I finally got a response today.

They love me.

Okay okay, accounting for my friend being overly nice, let’s state that they like my background, they like my potential, they like what I can do (I’ve made suggestions as to solve two of their current problems), and they even like me as a person (I know, nerds are easily charmed). That’s great, isn’t it? Well, almost.

I still don’t have a job.
They cannot afford me.

The problem is not that my demands are so high, the problem is immigration. Immigration law in Japan gives a certain threshold any foreign worker has to earn to get a work visa. As you have to be a university graduate to get a work visa in Japan, this threshold is quite high (at the moment it’s 250.000 YEN per month, although I’m not sure if this is before or after taxes) so they can protect their own work force. Unfortunately, the company is a tiny startup and already during our interview the CEO told me that they are cutting costs wherever they can (for example, they don’t have an office, but all of them telework from home). Essentially they could hire me and risk losing the company, so, they did the only smart thing…

Almost.

Right now I’m feeling very old and rejected and desperate. I have a glass of wine and a bar of chocolate next to me – and I guess I’ll need more than that…

I need a hug.

Today was a rather busy day: It started at 11 with a language exchange (German – Japanese) that took some two hours. Then I went to the post office and afterwards I decided, because it was so nice and warm, to buy some decent sushi and go and have a very belated hanami (some cherry trees still have blossoms) at one of the temples nearby, and do some work there. It was a very pleasant day, and although I did not spend that much time outside, I returned home with a face quite fitting the red Tshirt I wore…

Anyway, on the way from the post office to the sushi shop there is a primary school. I pass by it regularly, the building is on one side of a small road and the sporting grounds (essentially a large dirt field) on the other. During the week the road is usually closed for traffic and there are always kids darting across.

Today, although the road was closed, there was nobody to be seen, even the school house itself – many windows stood open – was unusually quiet. Suddenly, loud music was played, somebody had turned on the speakers all over the school grounds. I was startled by the abruptness of the music, but nothing else happened, nobody else paid any attention, there were no kids running to school after lunch break, no teachers assembling outside for a picture underneath the cherry tree… I sat down and listened for a while, but, equally sudden as it started, it stopped mid bar. I am still wondering why the music was played to begin with – and who would play, at 1:30 pm, “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” …

I went to my favourite cafe in town the other day. I like going there, the staff are very friendly, they have delicious icecream and hot chocolate, and although the cafe is very centrally located on Teramachi, it is surprisingly quiet. So, I don’t feel bad if I stay there for a couple of hours and write, sipping on a hot chocolate or the free water that is provided. I avoid going there in the weekends though, they are very busy then and I don’t want to take up space without bringing them good business – after all, I prefer them to remain open…

Anyway, when I’m not totallly absorbed in my writing, I like to watch the other customers. It’s mostly a young crowd, often groups of girls, but also couples, all of them hip and well styled and equipped with the latest in fashion and gadgetry. What I noticed is that often, the girls – and sometimes even the couples – while sitting next to each other, don’t talk to each other but stare into their smartphones instead. Sometimes they laugh and then show each other what’s going on on their screen, but mainly it is a solitary activity.

Honestly, if I went out to see a friend, staring at my mobile phone would be the last thing I would want to do. If we were to meet someplace and he whipped out his phone and tuned out, I’d be deadly offended and would probably leave. Of course, I don’t even have a mobile phone, so that’s easy for me to say, but it can’t just be me who is finding this type of behaviour at least somewhat irritating. Or am I simply getting old?

In Japan, the new year starts on April 1st. New year meaning in this case: the new year at school and universities, the new year when new university graduates start working their first job, and the new fiscal year. The latter brought a big change for the Japanese: Higher sales taxes.

Since April 1st 2014, you have to pay 8% of sales tax on purchases in Japan, instead of the 5% it was before. This is still a totally ridiculous amount compared to the 20% you have to pay in Austria for example, so I am not complaining about this at all, although the prices in Japan are high enough already, especially for groceries.

What does irritate me is the following: I have just found out that the supermarket I usually go to has changed their price labelling. They have switched from stating the gross prices to putting the net prices onto their labels, which means that you’ll find out the final price only at the cashier’s. This annoys me greatly. As I said, it’s not the amount of taxes at all, when buying groceries it’s not a big deal anyway, but I prefer to know exactly how much I have to pay for anything before I choose to buy it, without doing mental math of how much I’ll have to spend in reality.

I really hope this is just a temporary measure…

It was a wonderful day today, the warmest so far, with a peak of 20 degrees. It seems there is a little heatwave this week, that’s fine with me – it will make the spring come a bit faster, so far there is not much to see about it… As I had to pick up something in the city, I went out and along the river, and there were many people enjoying the sun, even though it was a normal working day.

But, when I was walking along the river and enjoying the sun I suddenly realized that my feelings had changed. Nothing to do with spring though 😉 but more with the fact that now I’m approaching the whole Japan thing more seriously. I have a plan now, and things to do to put it in action. I have regular appointments, not just casual ones with friends who won’t mind if I show up later. I have places I need to go to, people I need to see, not just days where I walk around aimlessly to see what awaits me or sit at Yoshida shrine reading for hours. It feels very different from last year, but it also feels good to have a purpose and a goal again. I do not regret spending all the time last year on and with myself, it was necessary to find out what I wanted, and I think I should have done it much earlier.

But now, honeymoon is over. The realities of marriage can begin.

On the train to Osaka last week, I sat opposite a young woman. She was casually dressed and carried a large shoulder bag that she had placed on her lap. As such, it was nothing out of the ordinary, and I did not pay much attention to her at first.

When I put down my book, however, I noticed the writing on her bag – it appeared to be from the front page of an old French newspaper – and I felt oddly offended. The article said something about von Ribbentrop signing the non-aggression pact with Russia and I went “HUH?”. It’s history of WWII, or rather its beginnings, August 24th, 1939 to be precise, and it felt very odd seeing any such reference being used to spruce up an accessory. I realize that the young woman probably did not know the meaning of the French and the historical significance behind the headline, and probably neither did the bag’s designer. Hence, I would assume that there was no offense intended by either of them.

For myself, I cannot explain what exactly caused the uneasy feeling about the bag: Is it that talking about WWII is still somewhat taboo in Austria and always comes with mixed feelings? That my grandparents lived through it and the few tales they did tell about it were no pretty ones? Or was it simply the thoughtlessness behind the act? I thought about that for a while and I still have no answer…