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Japanese people love food. They spend a lot of money on it and they celebrate it whether eating at home or at a fast food joint – even that stuff is really tasty. There are food stalls everywhere, from specialised market streets for delicacies from abroad and Japan, to people who drive around in their vans and sell organic produce from their farms out of the boot. Even the supermarkets at highway rest areas mostly sell local food, often pickles and other things that are non-perishable.

Because Japanese people love to give foodstuffs as presents. I like this idea because whatever you receive, you don’t waste space for eternal display; and if you fear that you won’t like the gift, you can either open it immediately and offer it back to your guests or you just pass it on (which seems to be another Japanese pastime, by the way).

Last Wednesday, when I was on the way to the cinema to watch Macondo, I had to pass through the Teramachi shopping arcade in inner city. It is always busy there, and I try to avoid it in the weekends, but every now and then it’s nice to walk through. Last Wednesday there was a group of students at Teramachi, all of them dressed in bright red Japanese Happi vests. All of them were shouting something I could not understand, some of them carried banners, and some of them proffered plastic bags (of course) to people passing by.

Just when I was wondering what this was about, a stout youth stood in my way and said something in Japanese while he handed me one of the plastic bags. It turned out that those were kids from some junior high in some prefecture in Kyushu (that’s all the way south), and they were giving away bags containing a guidebook about their hometown and – a small package of rice, also grown there.

Looking at the guidebook, the place seems to be more rural than I tend to like it after spending years successfully escaped one of those places… On the other hand, they do seem to have some extremely stunning lakes there; their almost precisely round shape makes me wonder whether those are all old volcanoes… Well, maybe it’s worth going there after all. Some time in autumn, probably. What a little bag of rice can do!

For the first time in oh too many years, I went to the cinema tonight. From today until July 12th, the EU Film Days will take place in Kyoto, after they were in Tokyo for more than a month. A number of contemporary European films are shown, from all over Europe, in many European languages. The films are subtitled, mostly in Japanese, but some also in English, so it’s possible for me to at least see some of them, if time allows, of course.

So, today I picked up my friend from Bulgaria, and together we went to see Macondo, an Austrian movie from last year.

It’s about the young, fatherless boy Ramazan who is an immigrant to Vienna from Chechnya and over time becomes friends with another Chechen man, Isa, who turns out to have been a friend of his father’s. Their relationship becomes a bit strained however, when it seems as if Isa wants to take the place of Ramazan’s father…

The film is very quiet and slow, often there is no dialogue, and you just watch the people. In a way, it is typically Austrian, but I did like it. I found it interesting that there is only a single scene where somebody speaks real Viennese Austrian; in all others the people speak more or less high German, for example the immigrant children, or Austrian officials who speak to the immigrants. When the film deals with Ramazan and his family, they speak Chechen, of course.

After the film, my friend and I walked home and when we passed by a little bar with Italian food and wine, we decided to have a glass of wine or two. All in all, it was a nice evening. I should go out more often…

Japanese people are well-known to be hard workers. Their extreme commitment to the job and the company they work for, often for 10 hours a day and more, is shocking to Westerners. Work-Life-Balance is something that does not exist in Japan. Your life is work and your work is life…

It appears that the house opposite mine – a small, three storey apartment building – will be renovated. Last Friday a number of people came to put up the scaffolding. It took them all day. Have a look at this photo, taken from my balcony. Do you notice anything?

Well, while they were happily running up and down the half-finished scaffolding and throwing the parts to each other, it was raining. Not just a light drizzle, it was pouring heavily. All day long. They all kept working regardless, a few minutes before that photo was taken, the man in the black jacket even went to the roof working there.

All this happened without any type of safety gear I could see, except for the hard hats. I don’t know what type of shoes they were wearing, but it’s probably not a good idea to run around on wet metal scaffolding or wet roofs in any case. However, they did not seem to worry about anything at all and kept working at a steady pace all day.

I think that this would not be possible in Austria. If it’s raining, construction work like this simply does not happen, you would have to wait until the rain stops before completing the scaffolding. I wonder whether this is because of different laws regarding safety at work or too tight a schedule (note: I did not notice anyone working there today, although the weather was nice). Is Japanese work ethics really so much different that people would disregard their own safety?

I have a brand-new gas metre. I have no idea why I needed one, whether the old one was defect in one way or another or whether gas metres are automatically replaced at more or less random intervals… The good thing about this was that I did not have to pay anything for it, and that it needed almost no input from my side either. Let’s recap:

About two weeks ago, I received a postcard from the gas company informing me that the metre would be replaced some time in the week between the 17th and the 24th of June. Okay, I thought, I am mostly home anyway, and when I’m not, well the metre is outside the apartment in a publicly accessible utility cabinet, so feel free to help yourselves.

Of course, the technician showed up on the one and only afternoon I had an appointment and for some reason or other he did not replace the metre but rather left a large note – in green – saying he’ll come back again. On the 23rd. Or maybe on the 24th. Some time between 9 and 5. Probably. Which left me wondering about what single people do who have employment outside their homes. Do they seriously have to take a day off or two to wait for the gas guy?

Anyway, he did come yesterday afternoon, and my communication with him was done in the grand total of 2 minutes. The first time he rang at the door he announced – slightly out of breath – that he had arrived and would proceed with his work. And that he’ll ring again when he’d be finished. Which he was after about 20 minutes, and he was happy to tell me that it would be safe now to use the gas again.

That was all he needed me for. He did not even have to enter my apartment to turn anything off or so. In the end, I received a note about the successful completion of the job which I duly filed among all the other apartment related paperwork, but that was it. Which left me wondering why I needed to be home in the first place. A friend of mine said that it was not possible to install a new gas metre without my consent, which does make some sense. On the other hand, on the postcard they did not seem to ask permission for the work, they simply stated the fact that it would be done.

Oh well. I needed an excuse to do my dishes anyway…

This is a tie-in to my rant of last Friday about the ubiquitousness of plastic bags here in Japan. I am not entirely sure whether Japanese like plastic (bags) better or (writing) paper. There are lots of stationary shops in Japan: The ones that are part of a shopping centre or a book store and cater to school kids with their notebooks and folders in every colour of the rainbow and then some. The stand alone ones that sell everything related to writing and paper crafts, including ink brushes and expensive foreign fountain pens. And the tiny ones where you can buy hand-made Japanese washi paper that feels like silk when you touch it.

This love of paper spills over to other parts society of course. Every larger purchase needs to be documented with several pages of paperwork and printouts. I still have to go through the stack of paper I received when I rented this apartment to weed out the unnecessary ones – probably half of them – and don’t forget that the agent kept all of them as well, and some copies went to the landlord too. And the reams of paper I needed for my business and visa-application… I’m not sure I want to know how much more my lawyer had to provide.

Interestingly, I receive relatively few advertisements in the mail. There is the occasional one for pizza delivery or Mac Donalds or a new beauty salon. Nothing seriously obnoxious, except for one type of advertisements: real estate. On average, I get one sheet of paper per day, more in the weekends. They mostly look the same – cheap printouts in two or three colours – and they mostly come from one and the same agency that is trying to sell the same types of houses to the same type of people… Interestingly, when I was still living in the old house, there were never such advertisements. Apparently they only distribute them to people in apartments, which is strange because there are both houses and apartments on offer, in pretty much equal shares.

I don’t know what annoys me so much about these advertisements. Probably the fact that I’ll have to take them up to the fifth floor where I have to store them until the beginning of the month to haul them down again for paper collection. That’s probably it, such a waste of energy everywhere…

Every now and then I feel like I have to leave my apartment and go somewhere else for a change of scenery. I then usually pack all the things I am working on – except for the laptop, I like to work offline then – and go to my favourite cafe downtown.

Today was such a day, and I arrived at my cafe at around 3 pm, as usual. By now the staff know me; I get my hot chocolate in a porcelain cup instead a paper one, and I can always sit upstairs even if it is not that busy and the stairs are roped off. Usually I have a hot chocolate in the beginning, then I sit upstairs on my favourite spot to write and think for about two hours. When I’m tired of that, I get downstairs again to order a small ice-cream – I make a point to try all their flavours – and once that is finished too, I make my way home again.

So, when I was ready to wrap things up today, and went down for my ice-cream, there was this American woman standing at the counter trying to order coffee and to make a choice from all the sweets on display. I had not even laid eyes on her when I felt an intense dislike.

Not so much for what she said “Oh no, that’s not got enough ice-cream on it, I want two scoops”, but for how she said it – she was plain rude to the staff. She was one of those people with the attitude: “I’m an American, look what we’ve done for the planet so you owe me. I won’t bother to even try speaking your language, and if you can’t understand mine, I’ll just say the same stuff over and over again, just a bit louder each time.”

Not all Americans are like this, I hasten to add, I have met plenty of very nice Americans, and a large amount of obnoxious people from practically everywhere, including Austria. But every time I encounter somebody like this, I wonder what they are believing to achieve with being rude like this. Even if people don’t understand your words, the tone of your voice and your body language will make a difference in how they treat you in return. It even puts me off helping such rude people because I really see no point in enabling them.

What is so difficult about being nice?

Several months ago, when I visited the cafe of a friend of mine, I came to talk to a Japanese lady, and since then, we have been meeting once or twice a month. Her name is Junko-san, and she has moved to Kyoto only a few years ago, after the death of her husband. She is fun to be with and a very interesting person, and she has lots of interests and various hobbies. While we have lots of fun together and we both like to laugh, I cannot help finding a number of differences in our views and how we approach life, but our substantial age difference has nothing to do with it.

One day we were talking about travelling and I said that I enjoy to be as free as possible in my vacation. I make a rough list of things that would be nice to see and then I set out in a general direction. When I was travelling in North America, I rented a car for two weeks and essentially drove inland, without big plans, just stopping where things looked interesting. In that case, I didn’t even have hotel reservations, but as it was summer, I was prepared to sleep in the car had it been necessary.

My friend was shocked. Junko-san recently travelled for four days to an island in the Pacific Ocean with her sister, and she said she only left the resort for shopping. Usually, she would book a very expensive hotel – preferably a large, well-known chain – and then enjoy the luxury, the food, the pool, the service… According to Junko-san, many Japanese are concerned about their safety, and they do not endeavour to go out alone.

Another day we were talking about work. Junko-san said she was working as an editor and writer (probably freelance) for large companies for 18 years of her life. She said she did not like the job very much, and she had to work very hard (she only slept for 2 hours in the busy season), but she did it for the money, about 1.5 million yen per month. She said many Japanese work solely for the money, and they don’t really like their job, even if they spend all their days and nights in the office.

I was shocked, and I explained to her that in the West, we strive to work to live and not the other way around. Also I told her that I know quite a few people who would happily have a less well paid job if they would feel more fulfilled doing it. I said that we want to have a balanced life of fun and work while we’re still living – after all, if you postpone all the fun until after your retirement (as many Japanese seem to do), how can you be sure you won’t drop dead on your last day of work.

As I said, it is great fun to talk to her, she talks very openly about her life, her ideas, and Japanese society as a whole. I think I can learn a lot from her! At least, there is one thing we both love doing, regardless of our background: we both love solving sudoku…