20/05/2003 My New Apartment

I recently moved. For the last year and a half, I’ve been living in a company apartment. For those unfamiliar, the big English schools (and some of the small ones) give their teachers apartments to live in while they stay in Japan, and most even furnish them. Finding an apartment in Japan is not easy, and it’s especially not easy for non-Japanese. A friend of mine, who has a Japanese girlfriend, lived in Okayama, a semi-large city in the Western part of Japan. When they went apartment hunting she would call ahead and make the arrangements, but when they both showed up, a lot of the real estate agents would say that they couldn’t live here. Some would offer excuses why, but some did come straight out and say it was because he was a foreigner, and they didn’t want a foreigner living here.
Nagoya, where I live, is a bit more cosmopolitan and I didn’t have too much finding an apartment with my girlfriend. We moved into a government assisted apartment, which in North America would conjure images of crack slums, but in Japan it’s the opposite. Well, it’s not posh - it’s five large buildings together so it has a project feel, and the buildings are as about as ugly as most buildings in Japan, but the apartment itself is very nice. I can actually eat, sleep, and watch TV in different places. My old apartment had one room - a small kitchen (one burner and a sink), a toilet and a shower, a closet for the laundry machine, and one room, which served as dining room/bed room/living room/command centre. My new apartment has three rooms, a large kitchen, a washroom separate from the shower/sink (which is Japanese style) and a nice hallway, two balconies, one with a view of a park and the city.
The only drawback - it’s up a slight hill, so the trek home is a bit ardours. Also, we have to wait 3 months to get parking for my fiancé’s car. And we are bit further out from the city, but not that much.
But it’s still nice to eat in one room and sleep in another. I almost feel like a real person.

21/05/2003 The Psychological Condition of Japan

Spent the morning at the bank. I had to get the direct withdrawal sorted out for the rent for my new apartment. One of the problems about living in Japan is that all non-Japanese residents are issued an Alien Registration Card (commonly called a Gaijin card) that enables you to do just about anything. It’s very 1984ish - it has my picture, date of birth, where I’m from, how long my visa is until. I’ve heard that the old ones even used to have fingerprints, but they government dropped that after too many complaints. The gaijin card lets you get a bank account, but since the card is based on my passport, my full name has to be used : Gregory Michael Devine. A fine sounding name, I know, one steeped in a proud heritage. However, it’s about 2 characters too long for most Japanese computers. And, most Japanese people don’t have middle names, so when I get important documents it looks like this: Devine Michael Grego.
The problem today is that I had filled out my apartment forms in katakana, one of the Japanese alphabets (there are three) that allow non-Japanese sounds. (And my last name, Devine, is hard to fit into Japanese pronunciation. There are 5 versions, all of which don’t really sound the same as it does in English) My bank account has my name in English, so I had to add my name to the bottom of the form, but in a one character/one box style, starting with first name, so it looked really messy and confusing. Shouldn’t stop them from taking my rent out each month though.
There was a woman at the bank who, for some reason, refused to take a number. The bank wasn’t very person, just the usual collection of seniors and housewives. One thing I love about Japanese banks - they have tellers to help you use the bank machines. They stand there and direct you to an empty machine, and if you have any trouble, say pressing the key, they rush over to assist you. This woman, however, would rush up to the counter every time the number display would bing. The clerk would tell her to just wait a moment, and she would sit back down. She was wearing what could pass as the garb of the mentally unadjusted - big sneakers, a dirty sweater and a big hat, pulled down over her greasy hair. She didn’t have a bag with her or any papers, and her purpose at the bank seemed unclear, but every time the next number would roll over, she would rush the desk.
Japanese people are not good at dealing with abnormality. They have this whole philosophy, called wa, which more or less deals with not dealing with the uncomfortable. Japan ‘experts’ like to throw out this concept of wa, group harmony, when they want to explain odd fashion choices or the spiralling Japanese economy, but to me it sounds like a load of bunk.
I can just imagine what psychiatry is like in this country:
Patient: Listen, doctor, you’ve got to help. I feel sad all the time. I can’t focus on my work, or on my family.
Doctor: Do you have obsessive thoughts about death?
Patient; Yes!
Doctor: Do you often wonder about your life choices, if you had made the right ones, or about the direction that your life is going in?
Patient: Yes!
Doctor: Well, obviously, you are not working enough. I recommend putting in more hours at the office, even if it’s unpaid overtime, to free your mind about these personal doubts and redirect your energy to your job.

I first came to Japan in 1999, a fresh-faced graduate from university, with only vague ideas what to do with my life. I also had vague reasons for wanting to go to Japan -- I had grown up in a rather small town in Canada, and went to university there, and I wanted out. I had been surrounded by two types of people -- the kind who went to university and then moved to somewhere else (TO/Van/Ottawa) or those who got stuck, working at McDonalds or as security guards and who got pregnant when they were 24 yrs old. I was so afraid of getting stuck that I headed out for anywhere, and Japan seemed to be a good anywhere.
My first year here I worked for a large, English teaching company, which, to avoid lawsuits, will be called LARGE FACELESS ENGLISH SCHOOL #1. I had a good time, and I left in Jan. 2000, thinking that I would never come back again. But here I am. I came back in Oct. 2001. That story I will get to.

So, finally, a blog about Japan.
I know what you are thinking -- I don`t think this has been done, a rambling blog about Japan, told from the aspiring-writer/English lit grad/English teacher in Japan perspective, with self-referential jokes and obscure references that no one will get.
Yes, perhaps it`s been done, but there is one thing that separates mine from the rest:

Sass!