Post move...

Part II of my first 8 months here.

I'll start this post with our move down to our current flat in Kawasaki. Since our moving experiences in London had all been painstakingly lengthy searching process, we started looking for a flat in Kawasaki about a month before our planned move but as it turned out, we found a perfect flat almost immediately and then had to negotiate to delay the move itself. Given that Lucy's Japanese is near-fluent, she did most of the negotiating and dealing with the paperwork. It all happened very quickly and we arranged to move in mid-March (16th). Located in Oshima-itchoume, only a twenty minute walk away from both Kawasaki station and Ishido sensei's dojo (道場, "training hall") and with numerous konbinis and a decent supermarket within easy walking distance, the location is perfect. Inside, it's what's known as a "one room apartment," meaning that bedroom and living room are all one room with only a thin partition separating it from the kitchen.

Part of Via Cittadella, a street of cafés and restaurants

We'd already decided to rent a van to move everything and I investigated a couple of rental companies. One of the advantages of having passed my driving test in the UK is that I was able to obtain a Japanese driving licence without having to take the test (other than a short eye test) but even though I presented a Japanese driving licence, the first company I looked into (Nippon Rent-a-car) threw a bit of a wobbly and were reluctant to give me any straight answers; Toyota Rent-a-car, on the other hand, was incredibly easy and straightforward. We initially planned to move everything and raid Ikea for furniture before taking the van back in the evening but things didn't quite go as planned. As it stood, we had to take it back the following morning and we were both so knackered that we could barely be bothered to put the bed togetther before conking out on it. After the first three days of living there, we'd finally put everything together and registered at the Kawasaki Ward Office as residents of Kawasaki Ward, the central part of Kawasaki City.


Shortly before moving, I'd also managed to find a new job working as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in a junior high school, teaching kids aged 12-15. Working for an eikaiwa had its good sides: I could choose my working schedule; I could take a day off whenever I felt like it; I met some fantastic people, both coworkers and students; the atmosphere was relatively relaxed. The main issue was with the salary, as is sadly so often the case: I was being paid Y1,500/lesson (while the "clients" were paying around Y7,000) but if I didn't get any students, I wouldn't get paid, even if I spent the whole day there. There were some days when I started work at 10am and didn't get any students until about 5pm. Of course, I could work evenings but the whole reason I left event catering was that I wanted my evenings back so I started looking around and found a job with a company that provides ALTs to schools from elementary school to high school. I was lucky enough to be sent to schools in Kawasaki, only 50mins' commute away but, while both schools are public junior high schools, they are quite distinct.

The school I started in is slightly further away from home than the other and I started at the same time as three other new teachers (PE; Japanese; home economics) and we each had to introduce ourselves at Monday's assembly in front of some 500 kids; I was told, however, to speak only English, which made the whole thing much easier. We were also introduced by the headmaster to the rest of the teaching staff so I didn't have to speak a word of Japanese. The second school I went to was a rather interesting experience. I walked in the gate (the main school building was on my right with the playground on my left), while groups of half a dozen or so kids were practicing their baseball skills but I didn't really pay them any mind. After a few seconds, I noticed that there were repeated shouts of "Ohayou gozaimasu" (おはようございます, "good morning") and as I looked, I realised that, as I was walking past, each group would stop, face me, take their baseball caps off and bow as they greeted me. Unsure of the correct response, I nodded and replied with the same greeting. I then met the headmaster, had a chat with him and introduced myself (in Japanese) to the other teachers. The main difference in these schools, I felt, was that the latter was much more friendly than the latter: we had a nomikai (飲み会, lit. "drinking party"), at which all the new teachers had to give a short speech and I got to know everyone very well; all the staff are much more likely to stop and have a chat than in the first school; I was invited to the sports day.

As for teaching itself, I always knew working with kids is immensely challenging and I have a huge amount of respect for those who make it their career. The first-grade kids are fantastic and a pleasure to teach; I guess they're also closer to that stage of childhood where they'll be entertained with a cardboard box which, if you add it to their energy and friendliness, makes for a very entertaining experience. The second- and third-graders are more of a challenge as some of them are getting illusions that they're "too cool for school" but at least the second-graders are warming to me. We'll see how long the third-graders take...

"After using the toilet, let's be sure to flush."

Over the past coupld of months of teaching, one of the reactions I get almost daily from the kids is an expression of surprise that I have blue eyes (they don't seem so interested in my height as some of the kids are taller than me). At the moment, this still amuses me but I'm sure there will come a point when it'll be as annoying as being complimented on my use of chopsticks or the assumption that I can't write kanji (漢字; lit. "Chinese characters" used in Japanese and adopted in the 5th century of Han-dynasty China).

Life since then has consisted mostly of tackling my new job and getting to know the are we now live in. We visited Kawasaki Daishi (川崎大師), a large temple officially known as Heiken-ji (平間寺) serving as the headquarters for the Chizan sect (智山派) of Shingon Buddhism (真言宗) and had a proper nosey around the station for good, cheap restaurants and bars. We also made good use of the Kawasaki branch of Genki Sushi, a kaitenzushi (回転寿司, conveyor-belt sushi restaurant) place. The weather has also got much warmer and the temperature stays nicely in the mid-twenties. Roll on the summer!

Five months in...

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...

Opening Disclaimer

As I am incredibly lazy and terrible at keeping in touch, I decided to start this blog to keep friends and family up to date with what's happening in my life. Since I have moved away from my long term friend base and the pub drinks usually sufficient for catching up are no longer practical, this will have to serve as a web-based pub. As most of my friends include English in their linguistic repertoire, I will write the vast majority of my posts in English with a light smattering of a variety of languages where appropriate. The second purpose of this blog is to work things through in my head (although I will try to avoid any personal psychoanalytical tangents).

Martial arts are a big part of my life so some posts will focus on those martial arts I practice (kendo, iaido and jodo) and will make little to no sense to those not not interested. For this I can only apologise. If you just stumbled on this page as you waded through the quagmire of information that is the internet, feel free to poke around and have a read as I'll be leaving all the personal stuff out.

Lastly, I will touch briefly on the wording of the web address. It comes from a work entitled Oku-no-Hosomichi (おくのほそ道) by Matsuo Basho, arguably the most famous Japanese poet who also spent most of his life on the road. The title is translated as either The Narrow Road to the Deep North or The Narrow Road to the Interior and is one of the major works of classical Japanese literature. The full sentence is:

"舟の上に生涯をうかべ馬の口とらえて老をむかふる物は、日々旅にして、旅を栖とす。"

"Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them." (Translation by Donald Keene)

"The journey itself is my home" is one translation of the last five characters (amazing how much meaning you can fit into under half a dozen characters!) which I chose to use (there was also a measure of desperation as my chosen title was not available). Of course, I am nowhere near as much of a nomad as Basho was but given the chance, I would kill to have that kind of lifestyle!