Not Just Ninjas

We are super excited because tonight, Wallace and Gromit are playing on the TV.  Dubbed in Japanese.  I can already guess the translation: “chiizu, guromitto, CHIIZU!”

This should be fun.

Here:s all the great stuff that happened yesterday:

• I got my first official work duty. One of the English teachers I:ll be collaborating with asked me to help him edit a student:s essay for an upcoming speech contest. I love editing, so hooray for me!

• Kudo-sensei (I think he:s my boss; no one:s really explained the hierarchy to me yet) took me around Noshiro to meet some of the teachers I:ll be collaborating with. Apparently, the high school classes are so big, that there will be *3* senseis in the room at once, instead of the normal 2 person team teaching deal.

• I arrived home to find Sato-san waiting with a bike on my front lawn, which he decided to give us as a present! It:s a sweet ride and I am totally grateful and happy. Now I can postpone buying a car for a bit… I love Sato. He:s a kick in the pants. He is totally a man:s man and smokes and is gruff and speaks as little as possible with this low voice. But he:s been totally helpful and sweet whenever I am at an impass at work.

Today I:ll be taking the train home, which is surprisingly easy, beautiful, and relaxing.
Other tidbits:

• Winnie the Pooh is freakishly popular here.
• Our region:s mascot is a tree
• In the gym behind work, they:re currently holding an all-star national basketball competition consisiting only of players who are also teachers!
• Bread comes in packs of no more than 8 slices, and there:s no heels… where do these mysterious end pieces disappear to?

That is all.

Life is shaping up here in Noshiro. The first week was a combination of whirlwind activity (attending festivals, visiting city offices to set up gas, electricity, water, etc.) and stultifying boredom (sitting in a house with no car, no bikes, and no internet).

Being the house husband that I am, my day starts at about 7am. We were very lucky and didn’t have much in the way of jet lag, but part of the reason for that is simply that we only transitioned about 3/4 of the way to Japan time. We go to bed and rise about two hours earlier than we did in California.

Steph gets picked up by her boss at 7:50 sharp, and after that I am left to putter around the house. I discovered a TV channel that has “World News Hour” in the morning, where I get to watch the news in Japanese, Korean, French, American and BBCish. I’ve noticed that everyone else talks about Lebanon and Israel, while the US broadcast spends more time on Iraq.

Most days I do a load of laundry. We have a very high-tech (but low-capacity) washing machine which has about 6 operating modes and a lot of blinkenlichts and buttons on the front panel, none of which I can read. In the middle of washing the first load, it stopped and showed “U2″ on the display, refusing to continue. I finally found a list of error messages under the lid; but I had no idea what the message said. I ran for the dictionary and ultimately got the gist of the error: put the lid down, einstein. Fortunately the “default” washing mode seems to do the job, and I figured out how to put it in dryer mode. Unfortunately, it kind of sucks as a dryer, taking 3-4 hours to dry about 1/4 of a full load. So that means hitting the old clothesline, something I haven’t done in a long time.

Japan is a very “traditional” society in terms of gender roles, so staying home and doing laundry is not a manly thing to do. I try not to be seen taking the rack of clothes to dry outside. But who are we kidding? I’ve always been the laundry guy in our house anyway.

Once the laundry is hung out to dry, it’s time to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. These days that means making the 15 minute walk into town to find Internet access. The pickings have not been good. There is a hotel with free internet and a very small lobby. I can go sit there but the front desk people look uncomfortable. There is a little $3/hour internet shop, but it doesn’t open till 11am and is closed Tuesdays. Last night I discovered that the city library has a wireless network, so I’m going to try that today. Boy oh boy, can I not wait until we have internet access at home.

Home. People have been asking about the house and we are terrible friends for taking so long to tell you about it. Our house is pretty awesome. It’s way bigger than we ever expected of the famously tight Japanese living space. The house is a two-story (!) basically cube-shaped dwelling, with the bedrooms on the second floor and living room and plumbing on the first floor. It is slightly smaller overall than our San Diego house was, but it feels big because of the second floor. That means: come visit! We have prodigious guest space, so get on it. I’m sure we will have found something to do in town by the time you get here.

Our neighborhood is an interesting combination of nice houses and really amazingly crummy tin shacks. I think Steph has already mentioned this, but the crummy shacks are all owned by our nutso landlady. Our house forms the border between the shacks and the nice stuff. Fortunately all of our living spaces and windows are on the nice-facing side of the house.

I’ve set up my office in our bedroom (as usual) because there was already a delightful little desk there, and I like the location next to the second-floor window and balcony. Unfortunately all the windows means it’s super-hot in here most of the day, but nothing that a few fans won’t solve.

Oh, another thing about our neighborhood that is pretty great: there is a giant forest at the end of our block. Apparently this is an erosion-control forest that was planned by some famous local guy back in the day. It’s about the same size as the actual city, making for dramatic aerial photos of the area. I’ll try to find one of these photos online, or else I’ll scan in the brochure we have laying around here. The forest is full of walking and biking paths which are pretty nice. Unfortunately there is nothing of interest on the other side. We hiked through the other night, expecting a dramatic sunset over the Sea of Japan, but what we found was: a lumber mill, a cement plant, a coal-fired power plant, and a shipping channel. Yes, the lovely Noshiro coastline is completely obscured by a concrete breakwater. But at least there is a kilometer-thick forest between us and that! When we see the Sea of Japan, we will certainly let you know.

Steph’s workday ends at 4:15 and it looks like she’ll be taking the train home from now on. After that we usually wander around town, in turns shopping, eating, and exploring. Our mission these days is to duck into as many local restaurants as possible and see who is welcoming and who is just uncomfortable having us in their shop. Shopkeepers here have mostly been very friendly. My favorites are little old men who yell “HELLO” whenever they see us.

Then it’s back home and basically reading; taking a second shower to wash off the stickiness of walking all over town in hot and humid weather; writing blog entries and saving them on the computer until the next internet access opportunity; and finally bed time around 10pm.

With that, it’s about 10am Wednesday now and I’m going to hit the library and see how long I can spend there mooching their internet without getting kicked out.

Think you have a hard time remembering which week is recycling week? Take a look at this.

Japanese trash is separated into no less than nine categories which are picked up in different ways and at different times. Trash pickup is centralized. Everyone on each block takes their trash to a special cage on the morning of pickup.

From top to bottom:

• Burnable trash (red). This includes food, unrecyclable paper, and most kinds of plastic. This goes in a special red plastic bag which you have to buy at the store. Picked up every Monday and Thursday.
• Recyclable cans (sky blue). These go in special nets which magically appear next to the trash cage the night before pickup. Picked up first and third Wednesdays.
• Glass bottles (mustard). These supposedly go in special bottle cases. We have never seen these cases in the wild so we’re not sure what to expect. Picked up first and third Wednesdays with the cans.
• Recyclable plastic (royal blue). This is for bottles with a “1″ recycle sign on them. I have never seen this sign on any bottle, so that’s easy. These go in the special recycle nets. Picked up 2nd and 4th Wednesdays.
• Recyclable paper (yellow). These have to be separated into newspaper; magazines and glossy paper; cardboard; and packaging. You need to tie them up with twine in nice rectangular piles. Picked up 2nd and 4th wednesdays.
• Unburnable trash (green). Anything that doesn’t fall into the burnable or recyclable categories goes in a green plastic bag that you buy at the store. Picked up 2nd and 4th Wednesdays.
• Furniture (brown). Certain kinds of furniture will be picked up by appointment for a fee. Fortunately I don’t think we’ll ever have to do this.
• Appliances (yellow #3). Appliances are SOL. Fortunately we won’t have to get rid of any of these either.

So far we’ve survived two trash days without getting admonished by the landlady (apparently the previous tenant got a lot of lip from her about his trash sorting).  Wish us luck!

In the absence of internet access at home, I have travelled an hour by train to our prefecture’s own Big City, the capital Akita.  The best internet access I’ve found is in the lounge of the Akita View Hotel, which is comfy and close to the train station.  I probably won’t do this every day, but I had to try it once.

The lounge people seem happy to let me sit here with my laptop for hours as long as I order something.  I was considering lemonade when I noticed that beer is actually cheaper.  And that’s nothing compared to grapefruit juice which is $8.

So anyway, it looks like it’s going to be another week, and possibly two, until we have internet access at home.  Now that we’ve figured out the internet access situation in town, posts here should be a little more regular (although posting pictures to Flickr is probably going to have to wait, unfortunately).

I am so far out in the boonies technology-wise, I think I have gone back in time. My laptop is running on Windows 98, and it has a floppy disk drive. On my work station in the board of education, internet explorer doesn’t work for me while Netscape does. I feel like I:m trapped in 1999. Dude, what happened to Japan being 5 years ahead of the curve? I guess that only applies to Tokyo, and it:s up to the rest of the country to catch up.

I:m writing this from work, and as you can tell, I:m having a little trouble with this Japanese keyboard. I’ve totally given up on quotes and left handed capital letters.

Apparently, until I begin my school visits, I am required to put in a 7 hour appearance at the board of education (BOE) every day. Let me stress that there is no work yet for me to do. Yesterday, I asked what was on the agenda for today. I was told to write my self-introduction, which I will share with my classes. I asked what I should do for the other 6 hours and he was basically like “sit there”. Just to be clear, I explained that I had a computer at home, and that I could write my self introduction there, and then be productive for the rest of the day. “so you would rather that I come in and sit with nothing to do rather than work at home?”, to which my boss answers, “well, you can always take a personal day if you wish”. Dude! I had heard that attendance was important in the Japanese workplace, perhaps even more important than efficiency or utility. So, yes, I had been warned in advance of situations like this. But it still pissed me off. Why should I have to take vacation because my boss doesn’t have anything for me to do? AARRRRGGH.

I guess I shouldn’t complain about getting paid to do nothing. I just hate feeling like I have no choice in the matter. At least I discovered today that I have access to the internet as long as I stay away from flickr or any email provider. I do have access to the email that our department uses, but it is a group account, and anyone can see what you send or receive. Very Big Brother to my American sensibilities. Privacy does not seem to be a big concern here among officemates.

There are about 10 people in my department of the boe, and we sit in little desk clusters. All the men have the same manner of dress about them; short sleeved white button up shirt, tucked into dark suit pants of some sort. Very little variation. I happened to wear this on the first day of work, and I commented to my boss how we were wearing the same thing,and he thought that was very funny.

At work, I sit right next to my boss. He picks me up from home every day and we drive the 30 minute commute together. Another nice man named Sato-san drives me home. I bet they are totally itching for me to get a car. Next Monday and Tuesday my boss is on holiday, which means I am automatically on holiday too unless I can figure out how to get here on public transportation.

The house, I’ve gotta say, is pretty groovy. It’s a little two story number with two bedrooms, so plenty of room for guests, if you’re not picky about bedding. There’s also a kitchen, and a small cozy living room, complete with kerosene heater and tatami mats. Hygiene spaces are creatively distributed throughout the house. We have a mysterious machine that both washes and dries clothes; this is right next to the room where you shower/bathe. Apparently the entire family shares the bathwater in Japan (not all at once, I’m guessing), so you’re supposed to clean yourself in the shower before you get into the tub. Then in the rear of the house, there is a little urinal room (!) which you step through to get to the toilet.

Man, Noshiro is like a ghost town on sundays… possibly other days too, not sure yet. If I lived in a town where it was snowy 5 months out of the year, I would definitely be out on a gorgeous (if hot and humid) sunny day like today. It makes me wonder… where my peeps at?

Chris and I spent the morning familiarizing ourselves with the neighborhood. We wandered into shops in the neighborhood, shopped at the local discount store, and found internet access. The local department store has some tasty restaurants on its top floor, where Chris and I shared the bowl of Udon he’s been so desperately craving. Thank god for those little plastic displays of food out front or we would be lost.

Since there was no one out on the streets, I had to take initiative. It was time to meet the neighbors. I looked out my upstairs window (which is like 3 feet from my neighbor’s window) and saw a little boy watching television. When the commercials come on, I play it all cool and yell out (in japanese)… “Hey, excuse me, can you tell me what time it is?”. Said boy (7ish in age?) runs off and comes back, and I introduce myself. My conversational Japanese is quite limited right now, but we made it work. I made him go and fetch his sister so I could meet her too. I dug out a few omiyage I had brought and tossed over a little racecar, a little hula girl, and a lucky penny keychain (for an absent brother), hopefully endearing myself to them forever.

The evening festival was cool, if straightforward. There was a little parade down the streets with these huge “fighting fish” floats made of paper and lit from within. The tops were hinged so that they could bow beneath electrical wires. I think there were more people in the parade than watching from the sidelines. :) Everyone not pulling the floats were either going crazy jumping around and hitting drums or playing this little flute ditty over and over again. I finally tried one of the hot dogs and some very exciting looking pink and yellow ice cream that tasted like bubblegum. Tomorrow the tops of the floats (Stephen Colbert voice: the fightin’ fish!) will be floated down the river and set on fire.

Quick update: we don’t have internet access at home yet, but hopefully that will be remedied in the next couple of days. So until then, not much activity on the old blog.

It is festival season here like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t think you could avoid attending a festival if you tried in Japan in August. On Saturday, we took the one hour train ride to the closest big city, Akita, to witness the famous Kanto festival. On the train ride on the way over, we happened to run into fellow JETs Nick and Nou, also commuting to the event. How fun to run into people you vaguely know when you’re out and about in Japan!

Most of the day Chris and I spent trying to complete errands. The two bank ATMs we tried rejected our Washington Mutual cards. Subsequently, we discovered the Post Office ATM works just fine for converting dollars to yen. Weird.

Then began the cell phone saga. (Chris takes over writing.) I’ve been itching to get fancy Japanese cell phones for both of us ever since Steph got accepted by JET. I had all the bells and whistles and plans and models picked out in May. So now that we had our hanko (official signature stamps) and our alien registration card proof-of-application papers, we thought we were all set. So we walked into a phone shop in Akita and started the process with a very nice woman who knew about 10 words of English. Pick out the phones, easy. Choose the plan, not quite so easy, but simple enough. At this point Steph had leave so as not to be late for meeting our friends at Starbucks as we had earlier agreed. Figuring it would only take another 20 minutes or something for the phone stuff, I would come over when I was done. Little did I know. Filling out the forms went quickly enough (Japan is apparently known for its labyrinthine forms), and then the clerk told me it would take “about 14 minutes” for some process to complete, and then I would be on my way. About half an hour later, she called me over and apologetically told me that without my Alien Registration Card (ID that every long-stay foreigner in Japan has to get) we couldn’t get some specific part of the plan we had wanted. This started a long back-and-forth process about what changes we want to make, etc, etc, etc. Great, everything is okay now, please wait another few minutes. Here, please talk to this English-speaking representative on the phone.

To make a very long story shorter, each time I thought I was done, there was one more thing that couldn’t be done without the Alien Registration Card. I talked to the English speaker on the phone about four more times (she asked pretty much the same questions every time). In the end we weren’t able to get phones at all without the card. The entire process took (wait for it) THREE AND A HALF HOURS. Surely this national mobile phone company has had to deal with this situation before and could have told me right up front that my attempt was futile. Fortunately Steph and the other folks gave up waiting for me at Starbucks and came back to the shop after I didn’t show up for an hour and a half. At least we got two Disney table clocks out of the deal, which the phone shop gave to us for our trouble.

(Steph returns.) The cell phone ordeal wasn’t all bad, since we had all afternoon to kill anyway waiting until the evening festival. We grabbed a seat for the evening parade. The premise of this festival is that men go by with like 50 lit paper lanterns stung up on a huge bamboo pole balanced on various parts of their bodies. Cool, right? Also part of the parade are tons of drummers who go by on little mini floats… almost all of which were female. Rock on!

We ditched out of the parade pretty quickly… after 20 minutes, we felt the law of diminishing returns kick in. So we retreated a bit to the tasty food area, where we scored some okonomiyaki (this crazy everything and the kitchen sink noodle dish) and some kind of fried shrimp/green vegetable balls, both of which were pretty tasty. From this venue, we could easily see the lantern matrices ebb and flow up and down the street. What really surprised me was the abundance of hot dogs. I can’t believe how many hot dogs I’ve seen since I’ve been in Japan. The best manifestation I saw was a dog wrapped in a wonton like wrapper and then deep fried. How hard core! Lots of the street food is deep fried, and I’m trying to use moderation, so, I promise, I’ll try the deep fried dog next time.

Tomorrow is Noshiro’s day to shine, festival wise. May my town revel in it’s fantastic float pulling glory.

(We’ll be posting pictures on Flickr when our internet access situation gets settled.)

Wednesday was kind of a freaky day, as I prepared to say goodbye to my little Tokyo safety bubble. The stark reality of JET started sinking in, as we started splitting off into smaller and smaller travel groups.

At least I got to spend a little quality time meeting my fellow Akitans… the night before, the new JETs from our prefecture went out for a night of kareoke/all-you-can-drink madness. But I thought it was much more fun to fall asleep at 9:30, so I was meeting everyone for the first time today. We went to a little regional airport instead of Narita, and had like 4 hours to kill until our puddle jumper took off.

There’s plenty to peruse at the airport, because there’s this huge souvenir (omiyage) industry here. Whenever you go on a trip, you are required by Japanese etiquette to bring back stuff for your family, people you work with, etc. Ideally the omiyage will be a specialty of whatever region you have just visited.

Also, on the top floor of the airport, was an open rooftop spot for congregating, where you could watch the planes take off. This spot was right next to an “American Diner”, which tickled me pinkish.

I’ve been lugging my cane from Ghana around with me (just in case I need it here later… also good for educating about Ghana :) ). I was very impressed… I took it through airport security, and they had to x-ray it. Imagine my surprise when I was offered a replacement cane to cross the x-ray threshold! How terribly thoughtful! Maybe they do that in the states too, I don’t know… cane users out there, let me know.

The other surprise was onboard our flight. When the flight attendant came through the cabin, I was offered orange juice, green tea, coffee, or *beef bouillon* as a refreshing drink. Awesome. I am told by my seat-mate that it was surprisingly refreshing.

Once we landed, I was met by two Japanese men from my district, who drove me the 40 min. or so back to Noshiro. Chris was a big surprise for them… apparently they had planed a welcome dinner at a hotel, where they had booked me a room for the night, while Chris meanwhile had successfully taken the bullet train (Shinkansen) to Noshiro and was waiting for me at our new house with my predecessor Nate. My hosts had to scramble a bit, but recovered beautifully. Chris joined us for the welcome feast, and they got us a hotel room for two.

The hotel, i have to say, was pretty ghetto, Motel 6 style. Perhaps they were trying to make us feel at ease by booking us in a Western style hotel, but all I felt was depressed. If I fly halfway around the world to be booked in a ghetto hotel, at least make it Japanese-style, yo! At least we were provided yukatas, the cotton lightweight answer to kimonos. See video: Noshiro Dance

The next morning, we partook in the complimentary hotel breakfast, where we found, lo and behold, the infamous natto. This is the dish that all westerners are required by law to try when they come to Japan. Natto consists of fermented soybeans, which appeared in this case, to have a fine film of rubber cement on them. This stuff is gooey and sticky like you wouldn’t believe, which makes for difficult eating in polite company. We both decided to have a small bite of natto in the safe confines of the hotel eatery, where we would offend no one with our reactions. Chris was a more enthusiastic experimenter than I; I simply put two beans in my mouth and washed them down as quickly as possible with coffee. But the end result was the same for us both: dame (no good, forbidden). Now we could, in good conscience, refuse natto for the rest of our sojourn here.

The rest of the day we spent running efficient errands. We were accompanied by Sakura-san (english speaking female) and Sato-san (non-english speaking male). First we picked up some passport photos in an automatic vending machine (awesome), then stopped by city hall to file for our alien registration card. Also visited were the water department, the gas department, and the electric department. We also stopped to get our personal seals made for signing official documents (called a hanko). I guess most Westerners will approximate the sound of their name with kanji, and get these for their stamp. Chris loosely translates to “meringue learner”… so he broke with tradition and just picked the kanji for “learning person”. I ripped off my AIM screen name of nomadicsiren, and got the kanji for “traveller” and “singer”.

And then the landlady. Here are the stats, I kid you not. She lives 3 doors down amidst a little hooverville made of blue corrugated tin, is missing her front teeth, has a mentally challenged son who handles the money, and has 2 blind cats that ooze stuff from various body parts. Totally disgusting and creepy. For some reason, cats here don’t seem very happy or healthy…. not sure why, as I have yet to see any free roaming animal other than crows… anyhow, I hope the landlady doesn’t play too large a role in our time here. On the way out of her place, Sakura-san leans over and says, “Yeah… watch out for her.”

Then we returned to the office to do… nothing for 2 hours. Well, everyone else worked but I didn’t have anything else to do (hence this blog).