Christeph in Japan

I literally just returned from my two-week trip to Boston and Buffalo, and moments after sitting down at the computer… another earthquake! The epicenter was in the same prefecture, Iwate, as the previous big one about a month ago. Poor Iwate.

This one was a little scary because this time, Stephanie wasn’t here in Akita. She and our friend Andy took a road trip to Aomori, and were located much closer to the epicenter than Noshiro. (They are in the armpit of the large axe-shaped peninsula at the top of the island.) Not to worry though; Steph called and assured me everything is all right.

I should also mention that there was a big one in the same region, but a ways off shore, just last week! That makes three in just over a month, all about the same 7-ish magnitude. Definitely some major correction going on in the earth’s crust around eastern Tohoku.

About 20 minutes ago there was a large earthquake in our neighboring prefecture of Iwate. The epicenter was right around the “tri-state area” where Akita, Iwate, and Miyagi meet.

Amazingly, I was watching the news when the earthquake happened, and an earthquake alert popped up on the television about 10 seconds before the earthquake actually arrived. The shaking was not heavy all the way over here in Noshiro, but it went on for over a minute. It felt like being on a boat, with a kind of constant vibration accompanied by big, slow swaying back and forth. I went outside and noticed all the powerlines swinging all over the place. Our landlord’s gardener was out there and didn’t seem to be noticing anything though!

More info

• Japan Meteorological Agency
• USGS
• Google Map

Last spring, we travelled to the nearest Big City, Sendai, for a Beck concert. During that trip we skipped over to the famous sightseeing destination Matsushima. While there, Steph snapped this moving shot of a Shinto procession carrying a shrine down the street:

Imagine our surprise when a few weeks ago, out of the blue, a gentleman named Maarten Reith from the Netherlands contacted us through our Flickr account. The Dutch city of Arnhem is playing host to an international sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek 2008 in June, and the opening ceremonies for this exhibition will involve the sculptures being hand-carried throughout the city to their final destination in a public park. Sonsbeek’s procession was inspired by religious ceremonies such as this Shinto custom, and Mr. Reith was writing a newspaper article about the exhibition.

Now, not two weeks later, the article is published and Steph is famous! The photo is almost a full page and spans the center spread of De Gelderlander newspaper of January 24, 2008. Contratulations to Stephanie!

We’re told over and over as foreigners living in Japan that this is a high-context culture. On an abstract level, this means that many things are left unsaid, and it is the listener’s job to tease meaning out of innuendo and implication. Practically speaking, this may manifest itself as imperatives in the form of polite suggestion, or outright refusal disguised as the slightest hesitation.

This quality of Japanese communication can be described by a delicious little phrase: 空気を読む(Kuuki o yomu). The literal translation is “read the air”, and it describes how you have to feel out not just what’s being said, but also what’s left unsaid. Just like “reading between the lines”, 空気を読む describes in a nutshell the necessity of ascertaining intent from the barest framework of spoken words.

I thought this was a clever and elegant expression, until it came up at work, when one of my Japanese co-workers decided to explain some slang to me. If someone can’t grasp the nuance of what you’re saying, if your friend just isn’t getting it, you say “Kuuki o yomanai”, or “You’re not reading the air”. This has been abbreviated, perhaps unfortunately, to K.Y. To illustrate his point, my fellow teacher pointed to a student across the room, and in a loud enthusiastic voice, declared “He is K.Y.! He is K.Y.!”.

Needless to say, this proclamation brought up other, somewhat distracting connotations. When asked about the funny look I had on my face, all I could do was explain was that KY was a certain… um, medicine?… in America. I really didn’t need to go into details with my male co-worker. Let’s hope he can read the air, notice my amused expression and the uncomfortable silence, and limit his use of this particular phrase to Japan.

A pitch-perfect article in the Japan Times about the curse that is a foreigner’s relation with any Japanese government office:

 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fl20…

The curse of the middle name

By THOMAS DILLON

…

As I have done many times for the past several years – ever since my older son decided to become a professional student – I walked to my local post office to wire him finances. As a veteran, I came prepared: I had my personal stamp. I had copies of the last many times I had wired money. I had my postal savings passbook. I had my alien registration, my passport, and my driver’s license. All this because I always feared something would go wrong.

But I had had no difficulties whatsoever in numerous tries. Which meant the post office was due.
…

Clothes shopping can be a hit-and-miss affair in Japan, a country where most people are the size and shape of popsicle sticks. And, of course, Japanese fashion is famously strange at the best of times. Enter UNIQLO. UNIQLO is Japan’s version of The Gap, and Steph and I have had pretty good luck finding clothes there.

Japan is a madly seasonal country, and clothing stores are no exception. If you see a shirt or a flavor of ice cream you like, you’d better buy it now because they might not have it next week. The upside of this is that it’s always fun just to drop in and see what fun novelty T-shirts they’ve got today. American baseball team shirts are popular, and there are always a lot of random campy print T-shirts in styles from old-west to 1970s.

The funny thing about random events is that they inevitably make occasional uncanny patterns and you never expect it. Thus I was surprised when, while waiting for Steph to try on some clothes, I stumbled upon a whole series of shirts about… fonts. The first one that caught my said (backwards) “Character Set Calligraphy Bitmap”. I looked below it and saw another: “METAFONT”. I kept looking and the typographical joy kept flowing: “OPENTYPE” “sans-serif” “ASCENDER”. These shirts are all produced by T-26, a font foundry whose fonts we sell at MyFonts and, in fact, whose shirts Steph has bought for me before.

Steph prevented my from buying the whole set, but I did walk out with two.

But the story does not end there. No more than a couple weeks later, we walked into another UNIQLO store, and there in the window was a Seattle landmark from my youth. Unable to believe the coincidences with my own life that UNIQLO was throwing at me, I walked out the proud owner of a new Pink Elephant Car Wash shirt.

For those of you who are curious, here is a picture of the whole rack of T-26 shirts:

Normally I would start with some kind of clever lead-in, but frankly I’m not in the mood today. I’ll just say it: today Steph and I both failed the driver’s license test. For the third time.

This is an unholy tradition for Americans spending more than one year in Japan. International driver’s permits are only good for one year, after which you’re required to convert your home driver’s license into a Japanese license. Most civilized countries have agreements in place with the Japanese government so that all they have to do is fill out some forms, take the easy eye test, and go on their way. Apparently this isn’t sufficient for Americans until all 50 states fill out some questionnaire and submit a bunch of statistics so that the Japanese govt can verify that they meet all the guidelines, etc, etc. At the end of the day, these governmental relationship “irreconcilable differences” mean that normal people like us have to go through this extremely annoying ritual at least once.

The first annoyance of the whole thing is that foreigners can only conduct this process at the prefectural capital’s licensing office, which is more than an hour’s drive from Noshiro. At least we don’t have it as bad as some other places in the ken that have to drive 2-3 hours for the privilege.

Once you get there, the Japanese bureaucracy is a wonder to behold. First of all, the licensing process stretches over two days. The first day you have to show up and be interviewed to determine if your driving history is good enough to even be considered for a license. Our wonderful and long-suffering friend Yumeko accompanied us on this trip as a translator. Of course, before you can start your interview you need to fill out all the forms. And they need to photocopy your home driver’s license. And the blank back of it. And again at a larger size. And all the stamps in your passport. Somehow this photocopying process always takes more than an hour. (We had been warned by friends to bring something to read.) Finally it came time for the interview, which wasn’t all that bad. The only particularly absurd question was “Do you have confidence in your driving?” I suppose an incredibly honest and timid person might say no, but I can’t imagine why they think it’s necessary to ask that.

So that’s the first day. But then the fun really begins. Your next visit gets to the meat of things. You show up at 8:30 in the morning, fill out some more forms, then wait around for an hour until the written test. That test consists of ten of the easiest true-false questions I have ever seen. Of course it takes them over an hour to tell you whether you passed, even though we were the only people taking the English test that day and we finished it in three minutes. Then it’s time for the eye test, which is done in a minute and a half and takes some more time for them to think about. Then you get some time for lunch, but you spend that memorizing the course.

Oh, the course. No real-world driving test here. Instead you have a maze of loopy streets on a course behind the license office, complete with stop lights, railroad crossings, and unworldly S and L curves that are a bit wider than the chunky taxi-like car that they provide you. Each day they post a different route through the course, which you have an hour to memorize before driving it at your appointed time.

The course really isn’t that bad. Yes, the S and L curves are annoying and arbitrary (and certainly unlike anything you’ll actually encounter on the road) and caused us both to fail once. But the real pisser is the arbitrary nature of the final judgment. Unlike American DMVs, there is no point system for keeping track of what you passed and failed; the ultimate decision is based on the whims of the instructor. Each instructor has his own (sometimes contradictory) hangups and obsessions, and you never know which instructor you’re going to get. Fortunately the instructor at least tells you what you did wrong so that you can fix it next time. But sometimes even this won’t help you. Last week there was another American guy taking the test with us, and he told us that he had failed his first time because he went too fast through an intersection, and then failed the second time (with a different instructor) for going too slow through the same intersection.

So that brings us to today. We were both feeling good coming out, agreeing that we couldn’t have done any better. Our previous screwups were nowhere to be seen. The instructor had criticized each of us for a rather silly lane-change technicality that we had never heard of in our studying of the drivers’ handbook. But we weren’t particularly worried about that, because we had heard from friends that even if you do it perfectly, they will find something to nag you about just for good measure. We had also studied many former JETs’ experiences on their reasons for failing and we had never heard of this one.

Well, too bad. To our amazement and humiliation, we failed once again. To add insult to injury, we watched another guy walk away with a license after not even looking at the course and making a couple of wrong turns along the way. Just to be sure and properly righteous, I looked at the handbook when we got home, and lo and behold, the “rule” that we we had been failed on was nowhere to be seen.

The absurdity of the whole system is that thanks to the international permit, each time we fail the test, we climb into our car and drive, legally but obviously unsafely, the hour and a half back to Noshiro.

I just stumbled upon this wonderful article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post Magazine of April 8, 2007.  In January, the paper organized a “stunt” with Joshua Bell, the world-famous violinist, to play for an hour at a D.C. subway station during morning rush hour. The results are heartbreaking (in a good way) and I think you will enjoy this article, especially if you are a musician of any sort.

“It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . .”

The word doesn’t come easily.

“. . . ignoring me.”

Bell is laughing. It’s at himself.

“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Read more…

We met this absolutely priceless lady on the train in Sendai. She spoke a bit of English and likes rap.

Sendai Rapper

Some of you may have noticed that the frequency of posts has been slowing of late. We’ve been living here for 7+ months now, and there’s only got so many quirky foreigner moments you can have before this formerly foreign place starts to seem normal. Allow me to catalogue for you a few of the smaller Japan Moments that have come our way:

The Steam Truck
For the longest time, Chris and I could hear this eerie off kilter whine in the distance. And it would creep closer. And very occasionally, we would catch up with this truck on its way through town… steam whistling out the top, with some kind of machinery in the back, like a huge kettle on wheels. But why? Was this person delivering hot water for busted winter pipes? Or maybe making deliveries to more rural areas with an inconsistent water supply? (::cough:: Futatsui ::cough::) Mystery solved as soon as my Japanese skills caught up with my curiosity. I just went out and asked the dude behind the wheel last week… it’s a yam truck. Like, quick, go out and get your piping hot yams. Even though this technically answers my question, I still can’t quite believe that the high demand for yams requires a roving truck.

The Shocker
There’s usually a variety of pools in an onsen: indoor and out, hot and cold, sauna, waterfall, jets, different minerals in different pools, you name it. But I had a new kind of onsen experience last weekend. I noticed the kanji for electricity by this pool, but didn’t think much of it; maybe it meant something different when it’s next to that other thing I can’t read, whatever. We get in, and notice little holes on the side of the wall. When you get close enough to the holes, BAM!, electric shock. I don’t know what this is and why it doesn’t kill you or how it’s supposed to be good for you. All I can tell you is it was uncomfortable and creepy. We got out right away.

Further research indicates that this is a “denkiburo” or “electric bath”. It’s reportedly popular with older folk who have rheumatism.

Illegal Buns
We ran into an ex-pat in a pizza parlour. We discussed how, in Japan, you can have hot dogs on sticks or spaghetti in a bun, but under no circumstances do you see a hot dog actually in a bun. This guy further explained that he had tried to start up his own business to fill this gaping hole in the Japanese economy, and when filing his papers, he discovered to his chagrin that hot dogs in buns are not allowed. He’s can’t even sell hot dogs and buns separately, because what if the customer combined them? What if the officials noticed? Someone would have to be held responsible. His papers were denied. “You really should have known better than to open up a store selling hot dogs and buns. Together. I mean, really.” This story borders on urban legend for me, it sounds so ridiculous. I asked my Japanese teachers about it, who also thought it was silly, but also were unable to explain the dearth of dog+bun. I don’t know if it’s a phallic issue or what. Hello out there, if you know what’s up with this, please fill the rest of us in.