goinggaijin.com – Page 113 – A European's move towards Japan

Account

Today I crossed another thing off my list: opening a bank account. Once more, the experience was pleasant as everything was rather organised, except for a tiny little hiccup (which was entirely my fault), but the clerk managed it bravely (and in a rather un-Japanese fashion).

I opened an account with Shinsei bank, as I have heard that they are the most foreigner-friendly bank, and also because you can withdraw money from essentially every ATM in the country free of charge. It took me a while to find their branch on Shijo street, and when I entered, all I could see were the ATMs. I looked confused, so the security guard that was there (every branch of every bank seems to have at least one) approached me, and when I said I wanted to open an account, he pointed up the stairs to the office. Interestingly, on the ground floor, there were only three ATMs and a drugstore playing noisy music.

Anyway, once upstairs, I presented my brand new zairyu card and asked to open an account. The clerk pointed me to a computer and helped me enter all my information: Name in Katakana and roman alphabet, address, occupation,…

The little hiccup occurred when we came to the field “phone number”. I don’t have a phone, neither mobile nor landline and I tried to explain that to the clerk. She answered essentially “no phone, no account”, which I found odd (and I am seriously wondering if I could get a phone without a bank account, by the way) and tried to convince her that a phone number is not necessary, after all, they could send me an email… Nope, she insisted, no phone – no account. I relented and asked if I could give her the number of my landlady and she said if the landlady would be okay to receive my phone calls from the bank, that would be all right with them. Unfortunately, I did not bring the piece of paper where I noted down my landlady’s phone number, and I don’t know it by heart as we usually communicate per email… So, I asked whether I can just enter any number, and if it was okay to change the phone number later once I knew the correct one. And – I was already prepared to leave and start afresh on Monday – the clerk said yes to my scheme! Honestly, I did not expect that, kudos to that clerk!

After filling in the online form and checking the Katakana over and over again (I have a difficult last name, at least for Asians, and I used a way of transcribing it so that the pronunciation will be correct), I had to wait a few minutes for another clerk to take over. I had to sign the account application form, where instead of my signature I chose to use a hanko, a Japanese seal. I know that this means I’ll have to bring the hanko every time I go to the bank, but as I do most of my stuff with internet banking anyway, I hope it won’t be too much hassle as long as I’m not turning senile and keep forgetting the thing…

After that, we were almost finished. I was immediately issued with a bank card (I could choose between some 10 colours and went for the black although I have to admit the bright orange one had something too…), received a comparatively small pile of extra paperwork, and was promised that everything I’d need for internet banking would be sent to my address in a registered letter within 10 days. After asking about transfer limits, and being instructed about how to register for a credit card, we were finished and I left very happily. Interestingly, I was never asked for an initial deposit. The whole procedure (including the fight about the telephone number and answering my questions requiring two clerks) took maybe 30 minutes and I can start banking right away. Once I have any money, that is…

Residence

Ladies and Gentlemen,
it’s time to celebrate. Please sing with me:

I’m an alien…
I’m a legal alien…
I’m an Austrian in Japan…

Okay okay, I was a perfectly legal Austrian in Japan even before yesterday when I was still on my tourist visa, but now *celebrations* I have received my residence card – zairyu card – and thus I am now a resident of Japan. For one year counting from yesterday!

Getting the zairyu card was actually rather straightforward. Yesterday I went to my soroban teacher so we could fill out the final forms and put some stamps on them. We also printed out some of the paperwork we used for the certificate of eligibility, just in case. Armed with yet another stack of papers I returned to immigration yesterday afternoon, and paid 4000 YEN for my change of status of residence application. They only needed the forms this time, but it seemed that the immigration officer made some copies from my old file. Anyway, it took only 15 minutes – and then I was presented with my very own zairyu card, what a relief!

Today, early in the morning, I performed my first duties of my newly gained residenceship: I went to my ward office to register my address. Of course all the forms are in Japanese, but there was a very nice officer who spoke very good English to help me filling them out, and afterwards I even noticed a few example forms translated into English posted here and there. I had to wait maybe 10 minutes or so while the clerk processed my application, and then I was presented with a sheet of paper containing my residence card code, whatever that is, probably in case I lose the card itself? Also, my address was put – using neat little stamps – on the back of my residence card.

From there, I moved on a few metres further to another counter and asked to buy health insurance. I had to fill in another form, put my signature on a tiny little spot maybe 15×15 mm (Japanese people use hanko), and then I waited again for another 10 minutes or so. Then I was presented with a printout detailing the payments I’ll have to make and I already received my health insurance card and I’m allowed to see a doctor immediately. Health insurance for the first year (i.e., until March next year) is 2000 YEN per month because I did not have any income the last year. On presenting the card I will have to pay only 30% of the costs, the rest will be paid by the insurance automatically, as long as I see a doctor who is using the system.

So, the biggest things are accomplished! There are now a few smaller things I’ll have to do, but those only feel like a bonus. The next few things on my list are opening a bank account, getting a library card, a bicycle, and a haircut. Not necessarily in this order. Now that I have a residence card, I can also get a mobile phone, but at this moment, I don’t really need one, so…. I’ll keep you posted in any case.

One year. I have one year in Japan.
Anything can happen in one year…

Gotcha!

It’s here! My Certificate of Eligibility has arrived Saturday morning. It is a single sheet of heavy A5 paper, in nice colours with all my details and the details of the soroban school. And with my photo – also in colour. It’s the first photo I have submitted, not the one I had to resubmit – WHAT?

Anyway, this certificate of eligibility is not the same as a visa, in fact, it’s just a prerequisite for obtaining a proper visa to stay in Japan.Thankfully, I can change my current temporary visa to my visa for cultural activities right here in Kyoto, without leaving the country. That is certainly a plus and makes things easier – or so one could think… Below follows the fourth episode of our drama “Fun With Immigration”.

I went down to the immigration office this morning, with my passport and the certificate of eligibility in my backpack and a huge smile on my face, as you can imagine. I thought I’d show them the papers, they’d say “Great!” and issue the visa without further ado. So, I showed them the passport and the certificate, and I had even brought a new photo just in case, and they said “Great! Now please fill out all these forms!”

It turned out that those are the exact same forms I filled out so painstakingly three weeks ago. No, actually not exactly the same – three weeks ago the header of the form said on the right “Application for Certificate of Eligibility”, this time it says there “For Extension or Change of Status”. Everything else is completely the same. I would only be slightly annoyed by that, I mean, I do have time, but… they also required a form with details about the soroban school and teacher, exactly the same (except for the minor detail mentioned above) that we have given them three weeks ago; and of course it has to include my teacher’s signature…

So much for “without further ado”. It was my teacher’s day off today, so I will spend tomorrow to go see him – again – so we can do some paperwork – again – and then go back to immigration – again – to hand them a stack of papers – again – and hopefully they will process the whole thing as quickly as possible. Again. And I hope that I’ll get my foreigner’s ID as quickly as possible. And the real fun thing about this is, that with said foreigner’s ID in my hands I’ll have to go and register at the ward office responsible for me – which is around the corner of my soroban school, about 45 minutes north from here…

I have come to the conclusion that the whole immigration procedure is part of a sophisticated selection process, in best Darwinian style: Entrance to Japan is permitted only for the most stubborn…

Insides

We are having a serious attack of builders in the house. Well, actually, it’s only one elderly guy, but he’s everywhere and nowhere, making lots of noise or none at all, all the time, or not at all… and it has been going on for the whole of last week, and he is not yet finished. I have no idea what the general plan is (we are usually not told anything unless we specifically ask), but one of the bigger things he has been doing was to replace the ceiling in one of the upstairs rooms.

The ceiling is a very simple construction of very thin wood planks (I guess less than 5 mm thick) nailed to a frame, so replacing it is very simple. It took him two days: One to remove the old ceiling, and a second one to put up the new one. I know this does not sound very fascinating, but these 5 mm of wood are the only thing between the upstairs rooms and the roof. As the house is around 100 years old, the construction of the roof is very interesting indeed – have a look:

The main beams are just trunks of more or less straight trees, and it does not seem as if much has been done to make them more fit for the purpose, like nowadays, when you cut them into long rectangular poles. Also, look at the roof: No insulation, only wooden shingles (and I bet they are not very thick either), and on top of that the roof tiles.

An interesting feature on both ends of the house are two large triangular pieces filled with small stones. I wonder what that is good for – maybe to keep the roof on the house during typhoons? Before you ask, yes even in Kyoto we can have very heavy storms, although the winds are not as strong as on the shore.

Do you see the cables winding so leisurely along the roof? Hello electricity! It does seem scary somehow, don’t you think? My housemate’s assertion that this is how it was done everywhere else as well only that it was usually better covered up, may be correct, but does not really make me feel better.

Finally, look at the top of the wall here: This looks like thin bamboo sticking out, doesn’t it? The house is old enough to essentially only consist of a wooden frame between which are earthen walls – and this bamboo wattling is used to hold the mud together better, I presume. (I think the correct architectural term for this type of house is “frame house” and the inner workings of the walls are called “wattle and daub” but I’m happy to be corrected on this.)

It is interesting to see, that the basics of construction have not changed much in the last 100 years or so. Think about it: nowadays, instead of wood and bamboo we are using steel, and the mud has been replaced by concrete, but besides that… In any case, I did not expect the house to be that flimsy, to be honest. At least I now understand in detail why it is so unbelievably cold in here during the winter…

Sleep

I don’t know why, but for the last week or so I have been terribly tired. The only thing I really want to do is to sleep – and when I wake up, I want to sleep some more. One of my housemates says he suffers the same, and blames it on the change of seasons. It is not too hot yet, mostly it’s one sunny day followed by an overcast one; also I don’t mind the heat. It does get light very early though, somewhere around 4 am, and there is one curtain missing in my room. My housemate says I may be waking up too early and not getting enough (REM) sleep, but just looking at my schedule, it does not appear to be the case; beside, I was always able to sleep at any time and any place. Anyway, I’ll have my routine blood test next week, so if there’s something physically wrong with me, I guess they’ll find out then.

South

Yesterday, I was up and out early because I wanted to check out another location where aikido training is held, near Kyoto station. The training started at 9 am, but because the bus did not go quite as far as I had expected, I had to walk farther than planned, and thus came a bit too late, which I found embarrassing… It was lovely watching the training though, and I think I will join this group; they all seem very nice (I have hardly ever met unpleasant people on the mat) and what I can judge from only watching, they are quite good as well. Interestingly, the whole atmosphere seems very relaxed, something I have never encountered in any of the Japanese dojo I visited before.

Anyway, after watching the training I walked around in the area. Toji temple is close by, a famous Buddhist temple sporting a large and famous pagoda, a bit south-west of Kyoto station. It is a large temple complex, with several large halls, the pagoda, an additional museum… One of the halls had an exhibition of large cloths painted (or dyed?) in dark blue – I think it was indigo, but I am not entirely sure. They were beautiful, and probably very expensive – there were some rather exquisite kimono to be seen, but none of them with a price tag. Other things were for sale, small fans and purses, for example, but I did not buy anything. Afterwards, I went to the station and, because I was looking for a Muji store in the nearby Aeon mall (which I did not find anyway), I had a belated lunch there – in a Korean restaurant. I enjoyed it very much; unfortunately the custom of serving unlimited side-dishes is observed in Korea only, which, given that my body cannot tolerate kimchi very well, was probably a good thing after all.

I then took a bus to City Hall, went to the Muji store there, did my shopping, and then walked home. After more than six hours on my feet, I was rather tired, but… we had a builder over to fix one of the rooms, which he did all afternoon yesterday, and all day today as well – and he did it rather noisily… I took some amazing pictures of the interior workings of the house and its roof by the way – I’ll share them with you in a few days, promised!

Excursion

Yesterday I went to Kobe to visit some friends of mine – fellow Austrians. We did not do anything exciting, just strolling along the harbour a bit, dropping in to an exhibition of photographs taken by sailors all over the world (there was a stunning picture of a crescent sun rising over the ocean – we guessed it was taken during a solar eclipse, but we were not sure), and we looked at the city from the viewing platform of Kobe city hall, which is located on 24th floor.

I did not find the city very exciting, it’s rather typical modern Japanese. Kobe is a very old city, and its biggest attraction are some very old houses built in Western style, that form a small neighborhood close to the mountains. My friends said, however, that it would be interesting only for Japanese – apparently the whole city has a somewhat “Western” feeling to it, and the Japanese come here when they want to feel a bit exotic. As I said, to me it seems like an average Japanese city though…

We had dinner together – chili con carne – and we drank and talked and enjoyed the view from their 10th floor apartment… it was nice to speak in Austrian again. I left with the train shortly after 11 (one of the last ones) and when I arrived in Kyoto more than an hour later, I found out to my horror that the last buses in my direction also leave shortly after 11… By that time, the drizzle to which I had left Kyoto had stopped, so I walked home. I arrived around 1:30 – and consequently spent half of today in bed.

Handwriting

Yesterday, I had another German – Japanese language exchange. My partner is much smarter than I am, and I am only slowly becoming confident to speak in Japanese, so mostly we are still speaking in German or English. When we do speak Japanese, my partner makes me write down everything. He teaches Italian and he believes that writing is an important way of learning a language; and he does it himself as well. Although I have practised writing Hiragana and Katakana – and I do use them exclusively when I am studying Japanese – I sometimes have to think about how a syllable looks, especially some Katakana that are not often used. Also, my partner does not like my handwriting very much, he says it looks like characters used in printed matter, and also, especially the Hiragana for U and TSU are not distinguishable enough (and he’s right).

Apparently he finally got fed up with it – and so, he bought me a very cute present yesterday. It’s apparently called “aquadraw” and is meant for children three years and older. Mine consists of four sheets, two each for Hiragana and Katakana, and each character is printed nicely on coloured ground. It comes with a pen that you have to fill with water, and when you trace the characters, they change colors. Once the water dries, the color disappears again, and you can start over. I think this is a brilliant system, and it’s very colorful and cute, I love it. I had to promise to train my handwriting regularly, and I do, partly because it is so terribly cute (my goodness, I’m turning into a Japanese…) and partly because I know my handwriting looks like that of a five-year old and I want to improve it anyway.

Photograph

Welcome to the latest episode of our beloved drama “Fun With Immigration”. You know that I finished my paperwork last Wednesday, and I did not expect anything to happen within at least a week, if not two.

But, lo and behold: This morning I found a letter from the Immigration Office on my doorstep. I was excited and nervous – but also a bit suspicious, as it was not my self-addressed envelope I had to give them together with all the other papers.

The letter – all in Japanese, of course – asked me to bring a single photograph, 3×4 cm, not more than three months old to replace the photograph that was on my application form, which was older than three months (about 2.5 years, actually) and thus could not be used. How on earth they found that out? Well, the first time I was there I was asked if they could make a copy of my passport and the photo in the passport and on the application form are identical. Note that the passport copy was NOT on the list of required documents, hence I thought I could get away with it… (This incident reminds me of a similar one in another country where I was asked to provide a new birth certificate because my original one was “too old”…)

So, once again, I went to the Immigration Office this morning, used their photo booth which is conveniently located in front of the entrance and handed them a brand new photograph, less than ten minutes old. I just hope this will do the trick…In any case, the day was not entirely wasted, as I have found out the following things:

They are actually working on my visa!
The government says “jump” you ask “how high?”
In Japan, people (at least foreign ones) age beyond recognition within three months.
Whenever I have photos taken, I’ll better start making the effort and wear makeup…

Stereotypes

When I visited my soroban teacher the other day to finish the paperwork for my visa, a woman passed by and wanted information about the school because she was planning to enroll her children. She discussed matters with sensei, and after she had her questions answered to her satisfaction, she left – and we went back to our papers.

Before I left however, sensei told me that he was a bit annoyed with the woman. The very first thing she had said was – upon seeing me: “Oh, I thought this was a soroban school and not an English conversation class…” Sensei didn’t respond to that, but he told me that it seems that he was not allowed to have foreign friends, according to that woman.

There are lots of stereotypes around in Asia when it comes to Western foreigners:

You are a tourist who can’t speak the language. Mostly this is indeed the case, so I can’t blame them – as long as they don’t try to cheat you because of that (which has happened to me once or twice…) If they understand that you live here, then
You have to be (a really rich) American. Admittedly, I am exploiting this particular one to some extent, whenever I have a bad day and I’m not as polite as I could be – I claim to be American… Anyway, the one and only thing you can possibly do in Asia is
You are working as an English teacher. Once when I was walking down the street in Korea, a man cycling towards me stopped, quickly jumped down from his bike and almost yelled at me: “You’re English teacher?” “No”, I replied simply, moved further on my way – and left him seriously baffled.

A similar encounter went thus: “You’re a tourist?” – “NO.” – “Ah, you’re an English teacher?!” – “NO.” – “Ah, you are here with your husband!?” – “NO.” At which point the poor woman did not have any imagination left and chose to give up entirely.

I fully understand that stereotypes and prejudices can be useful, and that they are often correct: Most foreigners here are indeed American, most women my age indeed have a husband and children. But, if you keep on hearing the same silly questions and comments over and over again, and if people place a label on you without even trying otherwise, it does start to grate on your nerves sooner or later…