Top Signs You're Living In Japan

Sorry for the break in communications - things have been busy here as lessons have now all started and work is starting to trickle in. To mark the "You've Survived A Month!" anniversary I thought I could do some sort of summary of life in Japan, mentioning the main points of difference that have struck me the hardest after staying a month here.


Sun up
The sun rises incredibly early here. On the first few mornings when I had to be up for 8am, opening my eyes to blazing sunshine streaming through the curtains had me leaping out of bed for fear of having slept in till midday, only to find my alarm hadn't yet gone off. Evening comes soon too - the sun starts setting around 5pm-ish.

Cables anyone?
I don't know if it's because they'd be easier to repair after an earthquake or maybe it's because digging up the road might be too expensive, but there are staggering amounts of cables run throughout the streets around here. This is only in the outskirts though - going to the city centre there are almost none at all.

Please take care!
There's a lot of things in Japan that simply talk at you - the most strange are ambulances, large trucks and escalators, which as far as I can make out simply repeat things along the lines of "This is an escalator. Please take care when stepping on". When vehicles start to talk at you it's hard to stop thinking of political rallies. This is especially "fun" because living very close to a hospital hearing ambulances loudly annouce their arrival in the early hours grates a bit.

Birds in Traffic Lights
Traffic lights will either beep at you when they go green, or they also sometimes chirp at you. When the little chirping speaker is high up on a pole somewhere, it's hard to distinguish it from passing birds and you suddenly feel very sorry for any blind people trying to cross the road.

Milk
There is a huge variety of milk in the supermarkets. So, being the adventurous sort I've been working my way through them all - so far I've had milkish milk, thinner milkish milk, and milk that tastes like it's had cereal floating in it for a while (slightly sugary).

Good Ideas
Japan seems to be full of these, at least, at face value. For example, the trains stop exactly at marked places, meaning you know where you'll be getting on. Shops have models of the food you'll be ordering so you know what you'll be getting. There are umbrella stands everywhere where you can leave your soaked umbrella outside without someone stealing it. I even found an open book exchange in the subway - simply put down and pick up books as you read through them on your way somewhere. Convenience stores have warm food, microwaves and boiling water available for you to feed yourself well on the go. At supermarkets you pay for your shopping, then take it yourself to a bagging area and bag it up yourself. All-you-can-eat/drink restaurants :) Mobile phones.

Bad Ideas
ATMs have opening hours. The subway stops at midnight, leaving you stranded for the night unless you want to pay an expensive taxi home. Bread and cereal come in small packets, meaning you go through them faster than Pringles. Cheese and sausages are pretty much unobtainable, as are(/were, ish) bananas since some magazine proposed an "Exclusive Banana Diet" which quiet caught the public imagintion at the time and promoted hysterical bulk buying of the things.

Enormous Insects
Enough said really. The worst thing is the noise - because they're all so staggeringly huge the buzz is about two octaves lower, giving them a much more ominous feeling. I was almost hit by a butterfly about the size of a bat the other day - big, black and flapping in your face certainly makes you jump.

Bins
There are a lot of these (when you find them - public bins are much more a rariety in Japan). This is because of Japan's harsh recycling program, through which you must divide your rubbish first into Plastic, Paper, PET, Aluminium, Glass, TetraPak and Paper Cartons, then sort the remainder into Burnable and Non-burnable. Each has its own way of being prepared, for example with PET you must remove the label and cap (which go to plastic) then wash it out and crush it. It's actually very interesting to see just how much of what I throw out is plastic.

Gaijin
Being foreign in Japan is certainly an experience. A quote I heard in my second week pretty much summarises it: "But I don't want to be a minority!" It's not so much the fact that you're different, more that Japanese people (in general) think that they 'should' treat you differently, leading to some odd situations. You don't know what to do/how to behave because it's all new, and they don't know what to do differently because you're foreign and treating you normally is discounted for some reason. This isn't helped when you don't understand what they're saying (shop attendants in Japan speak in honorific language, or Keigo, which is the equivalent of a very wordy roundabout Jeeves style of English). It's taken me up to this point to work out when the till people are asking if I want a bag or not. This will almost certainly improve, but it's certainly a defining characteristic of life here initially.


More later...

Nagoya Festival

This last weekend happened to not only be a long one (Monday was a national holiday) but also hosted Nagoya's Annual City Festival, an opportunity to put up dozens of food stalls, erect the occasional stage and to put on quite a show through a city-wide parade. Being an annual event (although not very famous as I was told by my Japanese friends) and never having been to a Japanese festival before I was keen to attend and see what sort of things might be on offer.

Arriving at the opening, I was surprised that even though Nagoya was a big and bustling city there weren't crowds and crowds of people. The festival was a two-day 8-hours/day affair, so perhaps more people attended the second day, but I had imagined it would be a lot busier. Nevertheless, it was certainly more bustly and a noticable increase in police and "traffic-light keepers" when I arrived at the city centre and found the festival spread out around the base of the TV Tower.

Browsing around the stalls, and being close enough to lunchtime, I picked up some takoyaki (balls of cooked batter with octopus and other fillings) and perched myself in the greener bit of the Sakae to eat. Compared to the takoyaki I'd eaten in the UK, these were certainly more undercooked and gooey, but I'm not dead yet so it must have been ok.

There were two main stages - one that hosted various entertainers and band acts, and the other that was similar but had a slightly more traditional bend, hosting also traditional costumes and martial art demonstrations. These were all fun to watch, though the large majority of the language-based entertainment passed me by.

Next of course was the parade, the highlight of the festival. For this the streets were closed off, and the rush of small children and grandmas was a mini stampede to try and get a good position in the crowd. Being tall is a definite plus in these situations, however a definite disadvantage is that most of my pictures feature someone's hair.

With all of these pictures and descriptions, if I have missed something or have made a mistake and you know better, please let me know ;) The commentary was from a far away loudspeaker and was vaguely incomprehensible.

First up was Mr Toyota himself, presumably the sponsor, with either daughters, escorts or competition winners in the boot.


Plenty of marching bands and dancers in between various bits, playing various bits and bobs of music to try and keep the crowd happy. Interestingly a few were approached by a Festival Organiser-looking person and told presumably to take a hike, cutting short whatever symphony they had going and shooing them away for the next lot.

It wouldn't be a festival without floats, and there were plenty to choose from here, many holding celebrities such as the Koala here (mascot of the local baseball team) or some giant duck of sorts (???).

Towards the end there were plenty of medieval reenactment teams, some going as far as setting fire to the street and charging at each other with sharp things. Nothing like traditional slaughter in the name of a Festival.

At the end, before heading home, there was enough time to watch the Tossing of the Heavy Thing, this year's entry being big, shoulder-mounted and golden, and this year's team is Team Blue.

More soon!

PS. If anyone anywhere could tell me the significance or indeed history of these two, it would be much appreciated. The first is a bird-like creature who proceeded to touch all the kids in the audience with its feather fan thing, while the other seems like a sacred dog (of Nagoya?). Any and all suggestions welcome.

PPS. There was another result of the festival ^_^ One has already popped its clogs, but the others are living happily on in a murky plastic 100 yen breadbin.

The Room

Just some more pictures to show you what the room is like. It's worked out pretty well so far, there's enough space for everything, even though I do tend to get home and throw things wherever there's space then go out again. The rice cooker is a hand-me-down from an old student, which came to me in a slight state of neglect. I decided to clean it, which filled it with enough water and elbow grease to break it somehow. Stripping it, laying it out to dry on the balcony and then reassembling it seemed to have done the trick and now I can have rice in 30 minutes.

The balcony is only small but a good area for things (like washing in this case). I'm hoping to get some plants and things for it or maybe the room but that depends on the winter.

The bed I can actually fit into, and there's cupboards underneath it as well. The red pillow and the bowl are also hand-me-downs, while little thing next to my bag is the magical all-powerful mobile phone, which I'll probably write about later.

Looking towards the door, you can see the cupboards and some shoes, nothing particularly special. Hope to get some sort of posters or something just to spice the walls up a bit eventually.

The last picture is of the little bathroom-ette. The bath is surprisingly deep, it sinks into the floor quite a bit so feels pretty good. The little white box on the wall is a thermometer of sorts which allows precise control of the hot water - 36 for a shower and 40 for a bath suits me fine.

More later...

First Thoughts

Having never been to Japan before, it was hard to work out what to expect. There were many stories and sharing of experiences, but because no two experiences are alike I was very keen to keep an open mind and go out and make my own adventure through living in an entirely different country and attending one of its universities. As such I found myself at Nagoya, one of Japan's major cities and a hub of transportation and industry. Most people I asked before coming told me that it was very nice but nothing exciting, so I was curious as to how far this opinion could stretch after I'd actually lived there. It's been a week - a hectic, manic week of rushing around with forms, fees and general franticness - but I've survived a week. Only 46 more to go then.

So, for a while I'll be posting some descriptions/observations/general things worth noting:

The Room
My room is on the 6th floor of one of Nagoya University's residences, the Ohmeikan (名古屋大学国際嚶鳴館 for all you kanji lovers). It's an ensuite with a bath/shower combo whatsit, with a balcony with laundry line, a large desk, a bed I can fit in, and a spacious wardrobe. The bed deserves special mention as it came fit with a Japanese-style pillow, which is essentially a small bean-bag. At first I scoffed at it, but it's actually really comfortable.
The room shares a smallish kitchen (couple of hobs, fridge/freezer, sinks, microwave, no oven) with around 16 people on the same floor, which is okay, except mostly things don't get cleaned. Every Wednesday at 10pm we have the Block Meeting, where so far (with my limited language) the other students babble for a bit then we clean up a bit of kitchen, so it's slowly getting back to some reasonable state. There are two other foreign students on the floor, so there's always someone to shrug at when things fly a bit too far over my head.
In total there are around 20 foreign students living here, so it's always easy to get together a group of people to head out and explore the city.

The University

Nagoya University is divided over three campuses, the main one being a short 10-minute walk from the Ohmeikan. I've yet to explore the majority, but so far within the campus I've discovered a Post Office, a subway station, various cafeterias, the occasional shop, and a Student Co-op. The building I'll be spending most of my time in will be the Education Centre for International Students (留学生センター) which has classrooms, a free computer room and a lobby for sitting around and chatting to anyone who happens to drop by. There's also a gym and a library, but library orientation isn't for a while yet.
In terms of study program, I'm taking part in the NUPACE (Nagoya University Program for ACadamic Exchange), with around 50 other students. According to Dr. Wikipedia, it's a fairly prestigious university, so it looks like I'm going to be worked hard. Good job lessons haven't really started yet - when they do I have to be up every morning to attend language classes from 8:45am to 12.

The Food
Ohmeikan is self-catered, but still it is fairly cheap to eat out if you're not so sure what the weird tentacle things in the supermarket are. There are literally loads of restaurants in Nagoya, and they are mostly all a very good deal, with a main meal costing around 800 Yen, or £4. For that you'd likely get a bowl of rice, some miso soup, as much green tea and water as you can manage, and whatever you ordered. Some dishes ("don" or　丼) are already served with rice. Nagoya is famous for its thick, dark miso, and it's therefore served with pretty much everything, so it's lucky its quite tasty. There're many variations with the miso, and as such there's always plenty of choice of Japanese food, espcially at lunchtime at one of the many cafeterias on campus. There are plenty of foreign style restaurants as well if that's not really your thing though, although these might be more expensive.
In terms of cooking for myself, the supermarkets of course stock different foods, so not everything is available/as cheap. Hopefully I'll be able to pick up one or two useful recipes as I go through the year, if not there isn't a huge difference in overall cost between eating out all the time and actually buying ingredients. There is news in the pipeline of some of the foreign students cooking together at some point, so I'll try and bring something tally-ho spit-spot British to the table. Any suggestions welcome...

More in a bit!