One Year And Then Some: A Retrospective

It seems fitting that I’m writing a retrospective of our first year in Japan while sitting in a karaoke box listening to kzi croon “Eyes Without a Face”. After all, Japan popped my karaoke cherry late one summer night after skinny-dipping in the moonlit ocean. Subsequently, karaoke has seen us through the ups and downs of adjusting to life in Japan, a reliable standby no matter what the occasion (or lack thereof). It’s a daunting task to sort through (and make sense of) the first year in a new country, so I’ve tentatively divided the year into three parts: Holy Shit We Are in Japan, The OMG OMG OMG Months, and A Continuing Conclusion.

Holy Shit We Are In Japan [ February 28, 2005 - March 25, 2005 ]

Never mind the wacky vending machines and robots… simple everyday tasks take on new dimensions in the Land of the Rising Sun. Moving to Japan is like being in kindergarten all over again (bonus difficulty: language acquisition). Kindergarten is about learning the basics of a human being’s social existence; learning to share and what’s fair (“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”), how to socialize, when to take naps, and what happens when you step on a baby chicken (years of trauma). Simultaneously, while you are learning the most crucial fundamentals about functioning in the world, nurturing a sense of accomplishment and independence (okay, maybe I’m glorifying kindergarten a bit), you *can’t do anything for yourself*. Adults are incomprehensible but they make the rules, and you need them to reach the high shelves so you can have a bowl for your Cheerios.

The holy-shit-we’re-in-Japan factor far outweighed the fact that we couldn’t figure out how to turn the hot water on or open the door to the ramen shop, and the first month was spent in a haze of blinking lights, squid jerky, and beer. We made pretty pictures with sparklers, joined puri-kura, and discovered the happiness of a warm washlet on a cold winter morning.

The OMG OMG OMG Months [ March 26, 2005 - August 12 2005 ]

There is one crucial difference between Japan and kindergarten. The intrusion of pressing residency issues. And the lack of regularly scheduled naps. Apartment woes, visa woes, and money woes are all defining characteristics of the OMG OMG OMG period.

Renting an apartment in the United States and renting an apartment in Japan are two diametrically different experiences. And how! Not only do you need approximately $4500.00 (first month’s rent + key money + deposit money + agency fee) just to walk through the door to your amazingly unfurnished apartment (no fridge, no stove), you also need a Japanese guarantor to stamp your contract as well. No guarantor, no apartment. Talk about cereal bowls that are hard to reach…

By the first week in April we had secured our apartment using boxes for furniture, a crate with a yoga mat as a chair, and pirated a wireless connection in the neighborhood. The sun entered our apartment increasingly earlier (by the time summer rolled around it was just plain rude) as the days progressed. By mid-April, small groups of people wielding identical horns, began wandering around the neighborhoods playing the same tune over-and-over again to varying degrees of success. Cherry blossoms opened late and the hanami parties began.

May ushered in a week-long national holiday, aka Golden Week, aka Hamamatsu Matsuri, aka Swim in a River of Sake Week, aka Shave Your Head Week. During this time four national holidays are celebrated: April 29th – the birthday of Emporer Showa (now an environmental/nature awareness day), May 3rd – Constitution Day, May 4th – holiday-by-virtue-of-falling-between-two-holidays Day, and May 5th – Boy’s Day (Girls Day is on March 3rd). Gigantic kites battle for three consecutive days by the ocean shore, trying to knock each other out of the sky. Drums reverberate through the field, and pods of the trumpet-eers, the very same that had been practicing throughout the neighborhoods weeks before, filled the air with the matsuri song. In the evenings, intricate, hand-carved, wooden floats emerged from the storehouses and were paraded through the town. The trumpet-eers, ever present, provided a constant reminder of the festivities with the inescapable matsuri song. As if on cue, slightly after midnight as the final festivities were winding down, it began to rain, cleansing the streets of festival remnants and brining the revelers back to reality.

The reality being a very pressing need to get working visas. We entered the country on a 90-day tourist permit, and that deadline was quickly approaching. While we had been promised sponsorship for working visas, it was slow in coming, slow enough to put us over the deadline. It’s possible to get a visa extension if you have a visa to begin with, but as we only had permits our only option was to leave the country and get another 90-day permit on re-entry. Japan doesn’t like it when you do this. We didn’t have enough cash for two plane tickets, so kzi flew to Korea for a night (the day before the permit expired), and I quietly became illegal.

Then came the day I might have been deported.

And it’s resolution.

By the time our temporary visa status was worked out, August had rolled around and it was hot as hell. Having no air conditioner, we combated the heat with fans, mini-ice packs and lots of whining. We bought tickets to South Korea to conclude the last leg of our visa-quest, and were invited to spend a day at the river (with the rest of the Japanese population). River excursions require the presence of close friends, so I called up my friend Jack Daniels to come along for the ride. By the end of the day he had fucked my face up, causing much concern with the ‘rents.

A few days later me, kzi, and my scabby face headed off to Seoul to visit the Japanese Embassy and switch our visa status from temporary to working. I drifted through the erratic Korean Airlines flight on a layer of xanax and sake, and soon found myself in Anguk Dong, looking for a hostel that I had found on the web. One hour and ten direction requests later, we located the hostel in the center of a labyrinth of alleyways only to find it closed for the season. Our stomachs soon overpowered the need to find shelter, and we stumbled into a well-lit and slightly dingy restaurant for a kimchi fueled dinner. I opted for a kimchi chigae dish and kzi boldly ordered the beef, which he cooked himself on the grill in the middle of the table. Just how well he accomplished this task would come back to haunt him 24 hours later. The manager of the restaurant seemed to take a liking to us (or the big tip we left) and offered to drive us to an area nearby with several hostels. Rather seedy, but hostels nonetheless. We took a room in the first one we wandered into, dirt, roaches, and all, and bunkered down for the night.

We only had one day to get the papers processed for our working visa and, par for the course, everything went horribly wrong. It was a day filled with lots of stress and not enough beer, but in the end the working visas came through. As the embassy closed we caught a bus back to the airport where we planned to spend the night, and where kzi’s food poisoning set in. Food Poisoning, with capital letters. By the wee hours of the morning kzi was doubled over in pain and visiting the bathroom frequently. I purchased some medicine that the pharmacist said would help his stomach and he threw up. He continued to get worse to the point where he couldn’t walk, and had to be wheeled onto the plane (where he spent the entire flight in the bathroom). Back in Japan he was wheeled off the plane and straight into quarantine, where I spent the time sleeping, and kzi spent the time with a cute nurse doing not-so-cute things involving suppositories.

But at least we were legal.

A Continuing Conclusion [ Late August - Present Day, Present Time ]

As August drew to a close I was finally able to begin settling down to life in Japan. Standing on tip-toe I was almost able to reach the elusive cereal bowl. We visited the Kacho-en and pet penguins, got a table for our apartment, and finally set up our own internet connection.

The fall went by in a blur, and so did the winter, come to think of it. Life began to feel more familiar as the days passed, singing karaoke and playing Vampire (we have since switched to The Masquerade). The acute homesickness that I experienced during the first months became, over time, an appreciation of places and experiences that I miss but do not currently want to return to (I will always be homesick for friends and family).

Winter heralded my first Christmas away from home, and kzi buffered the creeping depression with a ridiculous amount of gifts, including a video ipod and Mario DDR. New Year’s Eve was uneventful, so we celebrated with the West on New Year’s Day, and then went to a Shinto shrine in Fukuroi to pray for a fruitful 2006. February brought a new job and warmer weather, and our life in Japan began to really take root. No longer surprised by convenience stores selling ipods or talking vending machines, Japan has begun to feel like a home away from home.

Let’s see what year two brings…