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.