Weeding with Neighbors on a Sunday Morning

I had to weed the area around my apartment this morning with the other residents. My supervisor (Ishida) recommended that I go, and then he showed up at my apartment that morning to make sure I did. It was at 7 - on a Sunday. Ugh. The neighbors seemed nice. They kept trying to talk to me, but to no avail. All they could communicate was “what’s your name,” “how old are you,” and “go rake that stuff over there” (they did that with gestures). I think they were making fun of me right in front of my face, but I have no way of knowing.

My Apartment

My apartment is off of Rt 52. Its kind of Japanese style – with tatame mats in three of the rooms. There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a large bathroom. Its probably almost twice the size of our apartment in Evanston. The space is great, but the tatame mats create a strange smell that is distinctly Japanese. There’s no hot-water heater in the apartment. If I want hot water, I have to turn on the gas and heat the water as needed. Its different, but I’ve gotten used to it. The one problem appliance is the clothes washer (there’s no dishwasher). I have what must be the first washer in Japan. Calling it automatic is a stretch. I turn on the hose to fill the wash chamber, put clothes and soap in, and set the timer. Once it gets going, it just sort of swishes the clothes around – kind of slowly. If I stuck my arms into the washer during its cycle, I would be in absolutely no danger. Once its done swishing, the clothes just sit there in the soapy water. I then have to move them over to the rinse chamber. I haven’t quite figured this part out. Basically the idea is to rinse and spin at the same time, but I’m not sure if I should keep the water going as it spins or fill it up with water and let it drain as it spins or some combination of the two. I think I need to sabotage it so the Board of Education will get me a new one. I mean, I would gladly pay for it, but I don’t think they would go to the trouble of helping to get me a new washer unless the old one was broken beyond repair. So the sabotage will have to be bad enough to make it not worth repairing, but not so bad that they suspect foul play…

My New Neighborhood

Minobu is beautiful. It is in the southwestern part of Yamanashi. The “town” is in a valley, so a river runs down the middle of it and there are mountains on either side. Minobu is really a collection of towns that were condensed into one (probably to increase paperwork). There’s not a whole lot of room between the river and the slope of the mountains, so all the towns are small. Rt. 52 runs along the west side of the river and it connects all the little towns. By driving along 52, you pretty much see everything there is to see in Minobu (the east side has a comparable road). It’s pretty rural. Many houses have little farms (think 50 ft by 30 ft). At the same time, though, there are chain restaurants, and big supermarkets. But no movie theater. The nearest movie theater is in Kofu, the capital of Yamanashi. Kofu is about an hour away by car or train (the nearest train station is a ten minute’s drive from my apartment). Downtown Kofu reminds me a little of Evanston, but as soon as you leave the downtown area, it becomes suburban sprawl – like Rt. 70 or Dempster. From Kofu, you can take a train or a bus to Tokyo (there’s even a bus that leaves three times a day from Minobu to Tokyo). It takes about two hours. So, overall, I’m about three hours from Tokyo.

Going to, and Arrival in Yamanashi

On Wednesday morning (after a long night of karaoke) we checked out of the Keio and boarded a bus to Kofu (the capital of Yamanashe). The ride took two hours. We stopped at a convenient store (konbini) along the way. It was like an American convenient store… but different. Like, they had an instant green-tea maker and little things of sushi and fried noodles to go. Oh, and all the product lables are in Japanese (though many of them are in katakana, which means they are actually English if you can decode the Japanese).

Some of the JETs who’ve been around for a couple of years came to Tokyo for the Yamanshi night out and then took the bus back with us in the morning. It turns out that two of them work for the same school district that I do, and we even have the same supervisor. When we got dropped off at the international center, I met my JTE (Japanese teacher of English), my supervisor, the principal of my school, and the head of the Board of Education. Then we all went out for sushi (the two other JET’s too, which was good). I had the best unagi I’ve ever had – great stuff – and I got my first chopsticks compliment (apparently the first of many – the Japanese like to compliment foreigners on their chopstick prowess – either because they are just trying to be friendly, or they are legitimately surprised when foreigners are able to use them).

My JTE is really cool. She speaks perfect English and is really laid back. And she has a sense of humor (yes, someone I can talk to so I don’t lose my sanity in the stuffy Japanese teacher’s room). The veteran ALT’s think that she’s the coolest JTE in the prefecture. Ishida, my supervisor, is a Buddist priest who speaks no English, but listens to jambands. Driving me around Minobu, our conversation consisted of me naming bands and him either not recognizing them, or recognizing them and naming a similar band. It turns out he likes String Cheese, John Scofield, Leftover Salmon, Yonder Mountain String Band, The Grateful Dead, Soulive, Government Mule, Jazz is Dead (when I mentioned it, he said “Jimmy Herring!”, and also named the drummer whose name I can’t remember at the moment). We listened to Mediski, Martin, and Wood as well as Phish while driving around.

Getting a cell phone and a bank account were a lot of fun. Ishida certainly knows the best places to go. (By “best” I mean the ones that will take the longest but require the least amount of work on his part.) Everything takes a really long time here. I had to open my bank account in one branch (that took at least an hour – probably more), and then had to go to a different branch to deposit my travelers’ checks into the account. That took another hour. An hour just to deposit some travelers’ checks. Another JET brought a check that she wanted to deposit into her account, but when she gave it to the people at the bank, they just looked at it and said, “nan desu ka?” – what is it? She then had to explain the concept of the check to the people working at the bank. Lucky, I didn’t have it that bad.

The cell phone place was great. I had to fill out a bunch of forms (pretty standard), and then the guy faxed them somewhere, and we waited ten minutes. Then the guy talked on the phone with someone for a while (probably the person he faxed the forms to). Turns out, I didn’t put my middle name on the form (they make a big deal about my middle name for some reason. I think because its on my passport, they think it needs to go on everything. Its really stupid.) so we had to start a new form (if you mess up one form, you need to start a new one). The new form also needed to be faxed to the mystery man, and then I waited another ten minutes (but it was more like twenty). All this needed to be done with my honko. A honko is a personal seal with one’s name on it. Its used on all official documents. My supervisor had mine ready for me when I arrived. It says, “Sesu” (in Japanese). It even comes in a little case.

Power Rangershttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

So, it seems the Power Rangers (while only a short lived fad in America) have reached mythological importance here in Japan. They've been around since the 70's, and there have been new iterations of them every year. On of my roomates in Tokyo (who has spent time studying abroad here and speaks Japanese) showed me this SNL-type Power Rangers spoof that is the funniest Japanese comedy I've seen thus far.

Check it out on YouTube


There are a bunch of episodes. This is the first. They follow one another, so I recommend watching them in sequential order.

Tokyo Orientation

For some reason, the airport for Tokyo (Narita) is not in Tokyo. It’s in Narita. So, after this 14-hour plane ride (that I couldn’t sleep during because I kept being interrupted with additional food), we collected our bags and get on a bus for Tokyo. It takes at least two hours to get to the hotel (depending on the insane Tokyo traffic). I didn’t take any pictures of it, but (if you can imagine) the hotel was really nice. It was pretty cool – JETs from all over the world were coming in for this orientation. The number of English accents was staggering.

Before going to our rooms, they give us about a dozen tote bags full of stuff we should read. Just to give you an idea, one of the packets was from the US embassy, and it contained (among other things) a book on US geography, a book on US history, a book on the US economy, and a book on the US government. So, after unloading all our bags (including the ones we came with), one of my roommates, a guy I met in NY, and I decide to go explore the area around the hotel. The Keio (hotel) is in an area of Tokyo called Shinjuku, which I think translates to freakin’ crazy. I don’t know if I was delirious from lack of sleep or jet-lagged or what, but as soon as we got about a block from the Keio, it seemed like we had entered crazy-town. Every shop/restaurant/business establishment pays someone to stand outside of it and scream in a high-pitched voice, and every other shop is a pachinko parlor (which must be legally required to have neon flashing lights and big-eyed anime characters outside of them). There was a truck driving around with a giant Pikachyu-like character painted on its side blaring some shrill music. And another truck with The Masked Avenger on the side of it (The Masked Avenger’s mask makes him look like a gigantic red-eyed insect). Its really disconcerting when, after leaving an insane pachinko parlor, the street outside of it is just as (if not more) crazy. After wandering around for a while, we finally got up the courage to get some dinner (in a place that was disappointingly normal). If you’ve ever watched any anime, Shinjuku is pretty much exactly what you expect Japan to be like.

After getting some sleep, they put us through two days of non-stop orientations – and in each one, they gave us another tote bag full of stuff to read. Despite their length, and the emphasis placed on their being mandatory, the orientations were surprisingly useless. The Japanese, it turns out, like to make a big stink of things with formal speeches that end up saying very little. It seemed like, every hour or so, there would be a new Japanese official giving us a fifteen-minute welcome speech (at night, though, these speeches had food waiting for us at the end – but don’t even touch the food until the speech has come to a complete stop). While the whole experience was new and exciting to everyone coming in (about a thousand of us), the Tokyo orientation is apparently exactly the same from year to year, with the only change being in the sentence “the JET program is in its Xth year” (this year it was 20). At each orientation/seminar, they would present a wide range of possibilities of what your life would be like in Japan, and say that they couldn’t be more specific because every situation was different (depending on what prefecture, town, board of education, etc).

So, during the prefectural orientation, I expected my questions to actually be answered – no, no, no…. The whole thing was big catch twenty-two. They gave us a Yamanashi train schedule (a huge fold-out schedule) written entirely in Japanese. This, they said, would help us get around. I could read the times all right, but if you don’t know where the train is leaving from, where its going, what the stops are along the way, and what train station is closest to your house (or how to get there), how are you supposed to get around? To top it off, I had thought that we would be going from Tokyo to Kofu, the capital of Yamanashi, for a more specific orientation, but it turns out we don’t have local orientation for another two weeks. At the local orientation, they are going to tell us about how to travel around Yamanashi (and other places), how to maintain our apartments, and how to get internet. That’s all well and good, but if you can’t read the train schedule, how are you supposed to get to the orientation? And once (if) you figure that out, what’s the point of telling you had to travel around? And if you’ve been living in your apartment for two weeks, you’ve probably had to figure out how to use the appliances, right? Why tell you two weeks later? And of course you could figure all these things out if you had internet (train schedules for all of Japan are written in English on the internet), but they don’t tell you how to get that until local orientation.

On the first full day, they packed us into a large multipurpose room and sat us according to prefecture. Its weird, I had already made friends at Tokyo orientation (mostly people that came in with me from New York), so I hadn’t quite accepted that these new people I was sitting with would be the ones that I would almost exclusively be hanging out with (my other friends would be far, far away – scattered across the country). It’s a good thing that they’re a cool bunch. I met someone from UPenn (its nice to be able to commiserate with someone over not being able to get a cheesestake), and there was even someone from Northwestern (who I had never met, of course). She introduced me to a bunch of other Northwestern people who were at the Tokyo orientation (but not going to Yamanashi). Apparently there are NU people scattered all over Japan. Go fig.

On Tuesday night, all the Yamanashi people went out to a restaurant in Tokyo. There were even some second and third years who came to greet and hang out with us. After dinner, we went to karaoke. I figured I’d give it another try – “when in Rome” right? It still sucks.

Halfway Around the World

Wow, so sorry about that. I just got internet (see the previous post). I'll try to update as fast as I can. Here goes -



When flying to the other side of the world, I highly recommend getting the Kosher meal. I forgot why I chose it when signing up for the flight back in early July, but it really paid off. They give you, like, twice as much food as everyone else. When everyone gets their little tray of food, they give you (the equivalent of) two. That’s two entrees per meal. When the other 200 passengers are getting some crackers for a snack, they give you a sandwich, pudding, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus they hand you two bottles of wine – red and white (yeah, its Kedem, but they just give it too you). Of course it was a little humiliating when the Japanese flight attendants repeated showed up with these giant trays of food that would barely fit on the seatback table, but the attention it drew made me some traveling buddies.