Category: experiences

I admit it – I broke down. After five weeks of being in Japan and eating the local fare (some slight cheating with the bread from a “German” bakery which tastes like the real thing), I caved in and bought foreign food – imported from Italy. It does come with a nice Japanese label though – does that count?

This must be the smallest jar of Nutella ever produced, not counting those spoonful packages sometimes seen at hotel breakfast buffets. It is tiny, plastic, and contains only 220 grams. I cannot be the only one to call this a homeopathic dose, and already I am wondering “What do I eat tomorrow”? The price is fitting for the drug status Nutella obviously has in this country – 399 YEN per jar, which, even at the current exchange rate, is outrageous and makes every spoonful a real treat.

So far though, the jar is still unopened. I’m so proud! It’s not the price that’s putting me off or the fact that I’ll probably have the thing empty in two minutes anyway… It’s more that I’m facing a logistic problem as to one other necessary ingredient of the perfect “good morning” toast. Nah, the bread is easy to get, and we even have a toaster at Ebisu’s. The question is much more profane: Where the heck do I get unsalted butter?

Being an obvious foreigner in Japan has its pros and cons.

The pro is that you are neither assumed to speak the language properly, nor expected to know all the little intricacies of correct Japanese behaviour. If you are friendly, people will often go out of their way to help you, up and beyond standard customer service (which is very good in Japan to begin with). I recall an instance a few years ago where we – a group of about 10 foreigners unable to communicate in Japanese – descended on a nice restaurant in Sendai and demanded dinner. After some back and forth with the waitress, in which it became clear that we could not really get together, she finally pulled out her mobile phone and had the phrase translated “How much would you like to spend?” We agreed on a price – and had one of the best dinners I ever had in  Japan. Talk about service…

The con of being a Caucasian in Japan is – school kids. When alone, they are too timid to be a threat, but most often unfortunately, they come in groups and then there is always one who is plucky enough to yell the first “hello” in the direction of the unsuspecting foreigner. From there you are subjected to all sorts of well studied phrases: “Where are you from?” – “Do you like it here?” – “I love America!”, or just a general giggling of the girls. A friend of mine who lives in Korea and speaks Korean very well has learnt to counter these verbal advances with a smart “Do you want to marry me?”, which usually leaves the girls speechless and him time to escape.

Hence, my slight annoyance when, on an errand near Kyoto station, I passed a group of junior high kids starting to go “Hello!” just to be stopped by two slightly older girls with notepads in their hands a few meters later. I expected the worst, when the girls explained that they were students and wanted to ask a few questions for their homework. Not being able to retreat, I agreed. Imagine my surprise when the first question was: “What do you think about the death penalty?” The girls studied International Communications at the local university and had a few more questions in that vein: “Does your country have it?”, “What if it happened to your family?”. They wrote down my answers and opinions without further comment. For a moment I was tempted to ask what they think about it – Japan does have the death penalty – but I didn’t want to put them on the spot after all. What an interesting encounter!

It is funny how much those tiny little things that you never really consciously notice can make you go “huh?” when they are out of place somehow. For me, one of those tiny and irrelevant things are expiration dates every time I go shopping: “What, the 13th still?”

It appears that dates here are written in Year – Month – Day order, reversed to what is normal in Europe. It is weird: I have been here so often and never really noticed that! Thinking about it however, it’s logical: Japanese is traditionally written from right to left, in top-down columns rather than in rows. Although some modern publications are written in Western style lines from left to right, plenty of books and also manga are written in the traditional way still, and you start reading at the “wrong end” of those books which does feel weird somehow. At least it seems to be easy to figure out which way a Japanese text is written, as the columns are usually well spaced, and the hiragana and katakana entries are a giveaway..

Personal anecdote, vaguely related: You can do the top-down writing in Chinese as well of course, and there, as each character occupies the same space, it’s not so obvious as to whether something is written horizontally or vertically. I once stood in front of a large reproduction of some old Chinese text and asked a Chinese colleague of mine who was with me at the time: “But, how do you know?” to which he smartly replied: “Well, it either makes sense or it doesn’t.”
Okay, at least I can be sure that my departure from academia has not created an Einstein-shaped hole in science…

In any case and back to the dates, I have not yet made the mental switch to look for the important part of them at the end instead of in the beginning. I guess I’ll be going “huh?” for quite a while still…

The other day I went grocery shopping to a nearby supermarket. I had a description of where to go from my housemate: “Two roads further from the convenience store, turn right; it’s between the first and second road then.” Sounds easy enough?

It took me two and a half hours…

Apparently I didn’t walk far enough the first time, and I have learnt now: A “road” only counts as such if it has a name and admits two way traffic. The roads – at least around here it appears – are on a rectangular grid. In between, what is probably the equivalent of an American city block, there are narrow alleys, without names, where at most a single car can pass, and often not even that.

This probably explains the difficulties even Japanese have in finding an address. An address here rarely has a street name, they zoom into the city block of the building, and the number of the house is arbitrary – by building sequence rather than by proximity. When invited somewhere, you usually get the name of a street corner, and a small map (often on the back of the name card) which, using carefully selected landmarks like convenience stores, show the location of the house.

In theory, I knew all that before… But being faced with the practice of it is very much different.

In any case, on my wanderings I have found a German bakery. I cannot say whether they are owned by a German, as the staff are Japanese, but the taste of their bread is authentic, just as it should be. A dangerous shop! Unfortunately it is very expensive, so I should go there only on special occasions. Oh well, I have survived without before…

The place I am staying in until I’ll get a job and a decent apartment is called a “gaijin house”, a sort of student’s dormitory for foreigners with private rooms and shared facilities. It is a way to stay for a longer time without resorting to expensive hotels or couch surfing. My tandem partner Tomoko even once stayed in a gaijin house – she said she wanted to brush up her English at that time.

I stay in Ebisu’s, an 80 year old traditional Japanese house near Kyoto University. Here is my new room:

It’s a beautiful traditional Japanese room with straw mats (tatami) on the floor; one tatami is about 1×2 metres large, so my room with six tatami has about 12 square metres. The left door you can see above is the door to the wardrobe, this is about one square metre extra. Tatami, despite looking very robust, are rather delicate, so you’re only allowed to enter with socks. Also, as they can bear no heavy furniture, those rooms are usually empty, but this has the advantage that they can be used in any manner imaginable. In the photo you can see the futon I have put in the middle of the room, since then I have added a small low table to one corner at which I’m sitting right now. Usually, you do everything in these rooms kneeling on the floor. I don’t mind that at all, in fact I have liked to do this since I was a child. Sleeping on the futon on top of the tatami is great also, and as you should remove the futon every day as way of making your bed (although I may be too lazy to do this…), it means that you are not squandering precious space on a bed you don’t need during the day.

The best thing about this room, however is the view. You can see the hospital in the center and the university to the right:

I think it’s spectacular. Why? Because views as a whole are not easy to come by in Japanese houses. Look at the small houses above – most of them are built on a lot that’s not much bigger than the house itself, with a bit of luck there’s maybe half a metre space around the house. This of course means that in the best case your window (especially downstairs) looks onto the next house’s wall, in the worst case it’s the window of your neighbor… Space is precious in Japan, and I am sure even those houses are very expensive. So, I’m very happy to live in a place with a sunny room that actually has a gorgeous view as well.

Anyway, I have already found out a few quirks about this house:
– The wardrobe is…odd. It’s a solid, one square metre thing – but there is no space to hang clothing – there is a board halfway up. Well, kimonos are folded and laid flat of course, and so are my tshirts, but other stuff…
– The walls are thin. Very thin. Although my flatmate is very quiet, I can still hear him moving about.
– The staircase is very steep, on the verge of being dangerous.
– The house is draughty. It’s still rather cold in the night (less than 10 degrees), and the windows don’t close properly. Sitting on the desk after sundown gets chilly very soon. Of course this is an old house, but I have heard this is true even for modern buildings. Single glazing is standard, and as central heating is uncommon – Japanese only heat the room they are in – proper insulation is not really a big issue here. Japanese houses are built for the hot, humid summers, and not for the cold winters, it seems.