Japan is different in a lot of big ways, like the language, for example, but it’s a nation with a great economy, so it’s easy to slip into a routine and not be shocked by much. Once in a while, there’s something that gets in the way of that slide—it might be the way the plastic wrap on office supplies is just hard enough so that you have to bite or cut it to get it to open, it might be the complex garbage disposal process, or it could be, like today, the seemingly metallic shelled insect I found on my porch this evening. I thought it was a toy at first, but it was the remains of some superior insect that reminded me what an alien land I’m in.
It’s almost too easy to think I’m still in America with all the Americans around and the Westernization of Japan—indeed, Japan has contributed immensely to what we now call, “Western.” That is an arrogant assumption. As I relax into place, I find I have to be careful in what I assume about this place and the people.
My apartment alone, which is much larger than I ever expected, is a place that’s foreign to me. The floor is fake wood, but a soft material with a luster that seems too perfect. The TV shows baseball games with skinny Japanese players and kid’s cartoon shows with constant flashing action. The air conditioner has a remote control with buttons labeled with characters I don’t understand. One of the buttons might be a self-destruct ignition, but that doesn’t keep me from trying them all. All except the big red one. My microwave is equally imposing, especially since it’s a combination microwave and toaster oven, no joke. So far, what I call cooking, is putting my instant ramen in the microwave and pushing the yellow button. For some reason, there’s no number pad, so I don’t know how long I’m heating the food. The ramen is really good—it comes with four packets and dehydrated onions and things with the noodles. The packets contain mysterious ingredients: some kind of yellow oil, seeds, a brown powder, and some other liquid.
My bathroom is separate from the toilet—a Japanese feature. The first time I flushed my toilet, I thought I broke it because a faucet immediately turns on above the toilet, refilling the tank with the water you wash your hands with. They sell these toilet room fresheners that fit right in the drain. It looks funny. When I bought one at a drug store run, I got my choice of a free gift. I didn’t know what any of the items were, but I chose this bottle with a cartoon duck head because I thought it was soap, and I needed soap. It took me a week to find bars of soap. It turned out that it was a toilet room freshener, where you pull up on the head to expose a sponge, and it’s head sticks up out of the bottle like an Ostrich. My sister would love it—she loves anything that looks disgustingly cute.
My teachers have been helping me way too much with moving in. One of them is giving me a fridge, a rice cooker and a washing machine. I did laundry at a friend's today, and the Japanese don’t have dryers, so my clothes have to hang outside my apartment. They sell these elaborate drying gizmos that look like mobiles—you can see them at any apartment on the weekend; it turns laundry into an art. This plays into the Japanese care for the environment. It makes sense that a society with roots in Shinto (nature-worship) would actually act on professed environmental concern—the cars are smaller, they recycle everything, they reuse tote bags instead of wasting plastic bags at the supermarket, and their transportation system is more complex than an ant colony. They bike everywhere. It’s actually faster to go by bike in the city I’m in because bikes can avoid car pile-ups at the stoplights. I was wondering why people all ride cheap bikes--grandma style with a basket, and I realized that if everyone had a racing bike, everyone would die because the roads are so narrow and crazy. For example, by my house there's an intersection with 7 different roads converging on it, and that's one of the more simple intersections. You think I'm joking, but trust me, there's nothing funny about it.
There are many things that don’t make sense to me still. The large target-esc store where I do most of my shopping has no organizational sense to me. I spent a half-hour looking for shampoo—I found cleaning goods, toothpaste, razors, etc. but the shampoo was in a different section of the store with beauty products. The odd thing is, all the other stuff was in the, “grocery” section of the store. The thing is, Japanese stores are organized with different departments, and you have to purchase things separately in each department, or it’s considered shoplifting. I read a personal account of a JET who got arrested for just such a thing.
The grocery store is disorienting on its own—I can’t read anything, and sometimes I can’t tell if a package is food or a cleaning chemical. I’m a fan of the prepared food section, and you can get great sushi or miscellaneous assortments with rice prepared four different ways.
The music in the grocery store is seemingly sarcastically happy. It’s like a children’s cartoon theme song. I heard a song about vegetables today. It’s the kind of memorable happy tune that you'd play in a torture chamber, where the victim first develops an eye twitch, and then slowly descends into insanity. So you have to be quick when buying produce.