Given that I've started this blog a good six months (almost seven) into my arrival in Japan, I guess I should start with a summary of what happened until my first relocation.
I arrived at Narita Airport on 27th Octobre 2013 and went through customs and immigration "comme une lettre à la poste" (lit. "like a letter through the post") as my dad would say. I still had to explain the various gifts of whisky and biscuits (as opposed to weapons) to the customs guy but I was still surprised at how smoothly I went through. I had heard, with no small measure of disappointment, that the old Alien Registration Cards (外国人登録, gaikokujin touroku) were being phased out in favour of the new Residence Card (在留カード, zairyuu kaado) and I was fully prepared for a long bureaucratic process but it took less than two minutes.
Lucy (my girlfriend) was thankfully waiting for me and helped me lug my bags, one of which she could comfortably have used as a three-bedroom house, out to Koenji (高円寺) on the other side of Tokyo from the airport. I had arranged to move into a share house on the day of my arrival and had arranged to meet Koda-san (幸田さん), the house manager, at the station. Surprisingly, he had a car and drove us to the house, although it was only a 10min walk away. I had previously stayed with a share house agency called Sakura House, I decided to go with an agency called Oakhouse, primarily because they were cheaper (my room in Koenji cost Y65,000) and had a room available in a convenient location but also because I could go straight to the house whereas, had I gone with Sakura House, I would've had to visit their offices in Shinjuku to sign the contract, pay the first month's rent and collect the key before I could go to the house itself. I'm not sure if share houses are specific to Japan but I suspect similar accommodation arrangements exist elsewhere purely because the convenience for medium-length stays (too long for a hotel, not long enough to bother renting a flat). One reason they might be specific to Japan is the reluctance many Japanese landlords feel about accepting foreign tenants and the many extra fees involved (deposit, key money, thank you money to name but a few), although these trends are slowly disappearing. The share house systems involves renting a room (furnished or non-furnished) in a house and sharing facilities such as the bathroom, toilet and kitchen with the other tenants.
Numbers vary but I ended up sharing with a total of fifteen other people, eleven guys and four girls, and despite there being two toilets for the guys and one for the girls, there was still only one shower for twelve of us. Over the course of the following couple weeks, I met the rest of my housemates, the majority of whom were Japanese with a sprinkling of Koreans and one each of Taiwanese, French, German and American. The first meetings were as varied as the nationalities represented, some taking the form of long conversations while others involved silently walking past each other on the way to or from the kitchen or shower. The former all proved to be very friendly and a very welcoming bunch. Most of the Asians did not speak much English which fortunately had the effect of scratching some of the rust from my Japanese. My room itself was tiny (only 4.95m2) and I could easily touch both walls without fully extending my arms but it was big enough for my purposes.
I later found out that Koenji is regarded as a very cool and trendy place and it was easy to see why. The walk to the station consisted of a small high street lined with quite a variety of shops, bars and restaurants, from the ubiquitous convenience stores (or "konbini" as they're called here) to liquor stores with a surprisingly decent stock of spirits to ramen and sushi restaurants to the best Italian restaurant I've been to in Japan. Quite a nice walk, if you ignore the pachinko parlour, seedy stairs leading down into establishments of questionable morality and the women with too much makeup offering "massaaji". After a few months, you get very good at ignoring those less-than-pleasant parts of the street and focus on the more enjoyable bars, restaurants and cafés (including an owl cafe with live owls!).
The work I'd found (from my previous home in London) was as a one-to-one English instructor with an eikaiwa (英会話; "English conversation school") called Gaba, one of the biggest and most well-known schools in Japan. In preparation for beginning work at this new company, I had to register at the Ward Office (the Japanese equivalent of the Town Hall), procure myself a mobile phone and bank account. The first task was, again, surprisingly simple and straightforward: I just turned up, filled out the relevant forms and submitted them, all within the space of 90mins or so. It was a relief to find out that my Japanese hadn't decayed quite as much as I'd previously thought and that I was able to understand and answer the majority of questions with little resort to international sign language or desperately looking words up on an electronic dictionary.
No, the fun came when I had to acquire a bank account and mobile phone. Now, to get a bank account with any major bank in Japan, you must have a phone number; but to get a mobile phone, you must have a bank account. It sounded like a simpler but no less impossible version of Astérix's eighth task in The Twelve Tasks of Astérix until I just made up a number that could pass for a phone number at the bank, guessing that it would be a while before they actually tried to use it to contact me and that I could always change it at a later date.
Then I had to attend the week of training before starting work in my assigned Learning Studio (LS) in Shinjuku and it was immediately clear to me that training or orientation weeks for any company are a pointless exercise in futility. It had been over seven years since my last such experience and whereas that had been very interesting and taught me all the skills I needed for the job (skills I still use to this day), we learned everything we needed to know about one-to-one teaching within the first couple of hours and the rest was just repetition. They also were presenting what they were teaching us as groundbreaking and radically new: that language learning solely through grammatical study and repetitive drills is not effective and the Path of True Language Teaching is to avoid all references to grammatical rules. While current language learning theory certainly agrees that repetition by rote and the study of linguistic syntax is not the only path to mastery of a language, there needs to be some awareness of syntax and the way words work with each other in a phrase. Furthermore, they were selling this approach not only as original but also as the sole product of the company. This entire process was repeated when I changed to an Assistant Language Teaching (ALT) joband had to undergo training for that but luckily, Korey (one of the other people I had to endure the initial Gaba training with) was there and were able to keep each other relatively sane.
Christmas Day came and went (Lucy and I both spent the day working but had a nice dinner in an English-style pub in Shibuya called The Hobgoblin) as did New Year's Day (we went to a club in Shibuya again for the count-down). A couple of days into January, we participated in a Japanese New Year's tradition: Hatsumode (初詣). The word literally means "the first visit to a temple" and that's exactly what it is. Whole families visit the family temple or shrine to pray for good fortune for the coming year. As with so many Japanese traditions, the religious dimension has been forgotten and for most people it is just a custom with little religious significance; only some people actually used the chozuya (手水舎, also called a "temizuya," this is the font where people wash hands and rinse out their mouth before making prayers). We joined Yoshimura sensei, a high graded (8dan kyoshi iaido, 7dan kyoshi jodo) budo (武道 "martial arts") teacher and his family for their Hatsumode. Lucy was lucky enough to be able to borrow a kimono from his daughter as they are roughly the same dimension but, since I am the opposite shape from Yoshimura sensei himself and both of his sons, I wore a suit. Given that we visited Meiji-jingu (明治神宮), the largest shrine in Tokyo, it was incredibly busy and we approached the shrine itself at snail's pace. It was surprising to see a police presence but then it was apparent that they were not there in any peace-keeping facility: they held signs which acted as a kind of traffic lights for humans, with one side bearing characters for "stop" in red and the other bearing those for "go" in green.
We then went to an izakaya (居酒屋, the Japanese equivalent of a pub) for dinner and I had my first taste of whale and fugu (the infamous poisonous puffer-fish). I know whale's a controversial subject but I'm just going to go with the Japanese excuse: it was research. I was researching the taste and here are my findings: it was nice enough, kind of like a very tender steak with a touch more iron. Nice, but nothing amazing. The fugu was rather similar...nice, unlike anything I had ever tasted before, but again, nothing fantastic. I'm not going to making a point of having whale or fugu again or hunting out places that sell it...
Lastly, there was my first experience of snow in Japan. January 13th, I went to bed with clear skies, although it was still absolutely freezing, even inside my room (insulation is absolutely terrible here, although this is again slowly changing). The next morning, I found the street outside absolutely covered in snow, a good couple of inches thick and within a couple of minutes of stepping outside the door, I was covered in snow that would have made any European ski resort proud! This amount of snow would have paralysed the London Tube but Japan Rail (JR) and the Tokyo Metro just shrugged it off with a few delays, Japanese style (max. 15mins)!
Wow, that post ended up being far longer than expected and while I haven't covered everything, I've mentioned and described the things that stuck most in my mind from my first five months in Tokyo...
I arrived at Narita Airport on 27th Octobre 2013 and went through customs and immigration "comme une lettre à la poste" (lit. "like a letter through the post") as my dad would say. I still had to explain the various gifts of whisky and biscuits (as opposed to weapons) to the customs guy but I was still surprised at how smoothly I went through. I had heard, with no small measure of disappointment, that the old Alien Registration Cards (外国人登録, gaikokujin touroku) were being phased out in favour of the new Residence Card (在留カード, zairyuu kaado) and I was fully prepared for a long bureaucratic process but it took less than two minutes.
Lucy (my girlfriend) was thankfully waiting for me and helped me lug my bags, one of which she could comfortably have used as a three-bedroom house, out to Koenji (高円寺) on the other side of Tokyo from the airport. I had arranged to move into a share house on the day of my arrival and had arranged to meet Koda-san (幸田さん), the house manager, at the station. Surprisingly, he had a car and drove us to the house, although it was only a 10min walk away. I had previously stayed with a share house agency called Sakura House, I decided to go with an agency called Oakhouse, primarily because they were cheaper (my room in Koenji cost Y65,000) and had a room available in a convenient location but also because I could go straight to the house whereas, had I gone with Sakura House, I would've had to visit their offices in Shinjuku to sign the contract, pay the first month's rent and collect the key before I could go to the house itself. I'm not sure if share houses are specific to Japan but I suspect similar accommodation arrangements exist elsewhere purely because the convenience for medium-length stays (too long for a hotel, not long enough to bother renting a flat). One reason they might be specific to Japan is the reluctance many Japanese landlords feel about accepting foreign tenants and the many extra fees involved (deposit, key money, thank you money to name but a few), although these trends are slowly disappearing. The share house systems involves renting a room (furnished or non-furnished) in a house and sharing facilities such as the bathroom, toilet and kitchen with the other tenants.
Numbers vary but I ended up sharing with a total of fifteen other people, eleven guys and four girls, and despite there being two toilets for the guys and one for the girls, there was still only one shower for twelve of us. Over the course of the following couple weeks, I met the rest of my housemates, the majority of whom were Japanese with a sprinkling of Koreans and one each of Taiwanese, French, German and American. The first meetings were as varied as the nationalities represented, some taking the form of long conversations while others involved silently walking past each other on the way to or from the kitchen or shower. The former all proved to be very friendly and a very welcoming bunch. Most of the Asians did not speak much English which fortunately had the effect of scratching some of the rust from my Japanese. My room itself was tiny (only 4.95m2) and I could easily touch both walls without fully extending my arms but it was big enough for my purposes.
I later found out that Koenji is regarded as a very cool and trendy place and it was easy to see why. The walk to the station consisted of a small high street lined with quite a variety of shops, bars and restaurants, from the ubiquitous convenience stores (or "konbini" as they're called here) to liquor stores with a surprisingly decent stock of spirits to ramen and sushi restaurants to the best Italian restaurant I've been to in Japan. Quite a nice walk, if you ignore the pachinko parlour, seedy stairs leading down into establishments of questionable morality and the women with too much makeup offering "massaaji". After a few months, you get very good at ignoring those less-than-pleasant parts of the street and focus on the more enjoyable bars, restaurants and cafés (including an owl cafe with live owls!).
The work I'd found (from my previous home in London) was as a one-to-one English instructor with an eikaiwa (英会話; "English conversation school") called Gaba, one of the biggest and most well-known schools in Japan. In preparation for beginning work at this new company, I had to register at the Ward Office (the Japanese equivalent of the Town Hall), procure myself a mobile phone and bank account. The first task was, again, surprisingly simple and straightforward: I just turned up, filled out the relevant forms and submitted them, all within the space of 90mins or so. It was a relief to find out that my Japanese hadn't decayed quite as much as I'd previously thought and that I was able to understand and answer the majority of questions with little resort to international sign language or desperately looking words up on an electronic dictionary.
No, the fun came when I had to acquire a bank account and mobile phone. Now, to get a bank account with any major bank in Japan, you must have a phone number; but to get a mobile phone, you must have a bank account. It sounded like a simpler but no less impossible version of Astérix's eighth task in The Twelve Tasks of Astérix until I just made up a number that could pass for a phone number at the bank, guessing that it would be a while before they actually tried to use it to contact me and that I could always change it at a later date.
Then I had to attend the week of training before starting work in my assigned Learning Studio (LS) in Shinjuku and it was immediately clear to me that training or orientation weeks for any company are a pointless exercise in futility. It had been over seven years since my last such experience and whereas that had been very interesting and taught me all the skills I needed for the job (skills I still use to this day), we learned everything we needed to know about one-to-one teaching within the first couple of hours and the rest was just repetition. They also were presenting what they were teaching us as groundbreaking and radically new: that language learning solely through grammatical study and repetitive drills is not effective and the Path of True Language Teaching is to avoid all references to grammatical rules. While current language learning theory certainly agrees that repetition by rote and the study of linguistic syntax is not the only path to mastery of a language, there needs to be some awareness of syntax and the way words work with each other in a phrase. Furthermore, they were selling this approach not only as original but also as the sole product of the company. This entire process was repeated when I changed to an Assistant Language Teaching (ALT) joband had to undergo training for that but luckily, Korey (one of the other people I had to endure the initial Gaba training with) was there and were able to keep each other relatively sane.
Christmas Day came and went (Lucy and I both spent the day working but had a nice dinner in an English-style pub in Shibuya called The Hobgoblin) as did New Year's Day (we went to a club in Shibuya again for the count-down). A couple of days into January, we participated in a Japanese New Year's tradition: Hatsumode (初詣). The word literally means "the first visit to a temple" and that's exactly what it is. Whole families visit the family temple or shrine to pray for good fortune for the coming year. As with so many Japanese traditions, the religious dimension has been forgotten and for most people it is just a custom with little religious significance; only some people actually used the chozuya (手水舎, also called a "temizuya," this is the font where people wash hands and rinse out their mouth before making prayers). We joined Yoshimura sensei, a high graded (8dan kyoshi iaido, 7dan kyoshi jodo) budo (武道 "martial arts") teacher and his family for their Hatsumode. Lucy was lucky enough to be able to borrow a kimono from his daughter as they are roughly the same dimension but, since I am the opposite shape from Yoshimura sensei himself and both of his sons, I wore a suit. Given that we visited Meiji-jingu (明治神宮), the largest shrine in Tokyo, it was incredibly busy and we approached the shrine itself at snail's pace. It was surprising to see a police presence but then it was apparent that they were not there in any peace-keeping facility: they held signs which acted as a kind of traffic lights for humans, with one side bearing characters for "stop" in red and the other bearing those for "go" in green.We then went to an izakaya (居酒屋, the Japanese equivalent of a pub) for dinner and I had my first taste of whale and fugu (the infamous poisonous puffer-fish). I know whale's a controversial subject but I'm just going to go with the Japanese excuse: it was research. I was researching the taste and here are my findings: it was nice enough, kind of like a very tender steak with a touch more iron. Nice, but nothing amazing. The fugu was rather similar...nice, unlike anything I had ever tasted before, but again, nothing fantastic. I'm not going to making a point of having whale or fugu again or hunting out places that sell it...
Lastly, there was my first experience of snow in Japan. January 13th, I went to bed with clear skies, although it was still absolutely freezing, even inside my room (insulation is absolutely terrible here, although this is again slowly changing). The next morning, I found the street outside absolutely covered in snow, a good couple of inches thick and within a couple of minutes of stepping outside the door, I was covered in snow that would have made any European ski resort proud! This amount of snow would have paralysed the London Tube but Japan Rail (JR) and the Tokyo Metro just shrugged it off with a few delays, Japanese style (max. 15mins)!Wow, that post ended up being far longer than expected and while I haven't covered everything, I've mentioned and described the things that stuck most in my mind from my first five months in Tokyo...
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