My Luck Has Finally Changed – Setsubun

Today is the first day of Spring. At least according to Japan. 

Yesterday was Setsubun, or the changing of the seasons. There are a whole bunch of traditions associated with this, and last night I got dragged into two of them. 

After my last class at the school, I was cycling home when my boss rang me to summon me back. Presuming something important was going down, I turned my old clunker round and went back. She swanned in with bags of roasted soybeans, followed by her pissed-off-looking husband, son and niece. She distributed the beans to all the kids who were still hanging around, giving some to me and the other teachers too. We had to throw them out the door while shouting “Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi!”

An “oni” is either a devil/goblin/bad spirit, or the “it” when you’re playing tag. “Fuku” is luck and “uchi” is house. Basically, devils out, luck in. I accidentally hit one of my kids really hard on the corner of her glasses. Not so lucky. 

I got back on the bike and cycled off. Phone rang again. Boss asked me to come back.

Some people also eat “lucky direction sushi”, also meant to bring good luck/health for the year to come. This is what it’s supposed to look like – 

Mine looked more like this – 

I was instructed to eat it all while facing east-north-east and not talking. This roll was about 2 inches in diameter and 8 inches long. Rice, carrot, egg and some unidentifiable grey stuff. Ewwwww. 

I don’t have a compass, or even a decent sense of direction, so I made a guess, sat on the couch and got to work. It took almost an entire episode of The Wire to eat the damn thing. I still wasn’t hungry this morning. 

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Getting A Re-Entry Permit

Today I took the day off work and went to get my re-entry permit (sai nyukoku kyoka) You need this if you want to leave Japan and then re-enter during the period of your work or study visa. As I’m going home for Christmas, I need it so as not to be turned away at the airport when I get back. 

You need – 

1. Your gaijin card

2. Your actual passport (not a photocopy, they stick the permit in your passport). 

3. 3000 yen for a single re-entry permit or 6000 yen for a multiple re-entry permit. 

4. A book. It might be a long wait.

I got mine at the Immigration Bureau (nyukoku kanri kyoku) in the nearby Big City. I had to get two trains and then a taxi because I wasn’t quite sure where it was. I was pretty sure that if a foreigner got into a taxi and asked for the Immigration Bureau, they’d know where to go. 

The taxi headed off immediately, and when we were a few streets away from the train station the driver asked if it was in a certain area. Having checked the address, I confirmed. When we got there, it was deserted. Clean rectangle on the side of the wall where the sign had been. 

Taxi driver hummed to himself for a while (meter running all the time) and then took off across town. Eventually we arrived at another building. I’m pretty sure I got screwed. 

Anyway, I arrived during lunch so I filled out my form (you can download and print the form here and bring it with you) and watched some tv. Learned about cleaning products. Saw the bento lunch that was served to world leaders at the G8 summit in Hokkaido this year. 84,000 yen. That’s $840 dollars for a small box of fish, rice and veg. Nice. 

At 1pm exactly the curtains opened. I was elbowed out of the way by a middle-aged Japanese man (what he was doing at the Immigration Bureau I have no idea) but made it to second in the queue. I was told to go to another floor where I had to pay 6000 yen and was given some stamps. I returned, waited a bit for the lady I had been dealing with to be free, handed her my form, my gaijin card (Certificate of Alien Registration) and my passport. She stuck the stamps to the form. I sat down. Watched a little more tv. My name was called and I got my passport and gaijin card back. Walked out of the building. Time? 1.21pm. 

All hail Japanese efficiency. I had brought my ipod and a book to pass the time, but it wasn’t necessary. Obviously, I think it would be a different story in Tokyo or Osaka, but in a less-populated city it was a breeze. 

I walked back into the city centre. I wandered round some shops and marvelled that it’s almost Christmas (it seems to have passed my little town by). I had a coffee from St*rbucks. I got the train home. 

Easy. 

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I Am White Trash

This was the first post I wrote, way back when I first arrived. I didn’t actually post it anywhere though. It’s a little out of date, but hey, I’m not perfect.

1. I live in a tiny apartment surrounded by farmland.
2. My tiny garden is full of trash – bags of rubbish, piles of cardboard, assorted broken electronics (including a tv).
3. I mostly wear a vest and knickers.
4. I have given up religion, save the worship of the aircon unit.
5. I am illiterate.

How did this happen? I used to live in the capital city of a European country! I used to frequent wine bars! I used to work in finance! I used to commute goddamnit!

I moved to Japan. To a small rural town.

Why? Well, for the laugh. Teaching English seemed like a fun thing to do while I’m still young and child/mortgage-free, so I ditched the hated job in finance, packed some stuff, and here I am.

One piece of advice – if you are not from a hot country, do not move to Japan in summer. It’s hot. Like 35C. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so damp. It’s the humidity that’s giving me this headache, not the heat. So, that’s why I only wear clothes to go outside (oh irony – it’s hotter outside than in the apartment). Incidentally, the humidity also means that even though the temperature is in the 30s (celsius), most of my clothes have been hanging on the line for three days. And they’re still wet. As for point 4, I wasn’t religious before I came here, but now, that aircon unit is the object of all my praise.

Every single morning I wake up and thank the god of electrical appliances for the happy invention of air conditioning. I would happily work anywhere, ANYWHERE, so long as it has aircon. I know that when winter comes I’ll have abandoned my new found love in favour of some sort of heating, but for now, it’s my baby. I am so grateful to the god of electrical appliances that I can easily forget about the pile of broken items littering the garden. Anyway, it’s not his fault. It’s the Japanese.

I used to be a recycling evangelist. I used to take the plastic off my cigarette packets and put the cardboard bit in the recycling bin, and the plastic in with the trash. I dutifully rinsed out the milk cartons. I pontificated to my mother who refused to bother, about saving the planet, or money, depending on my mood. Now, I want to abandon it all. Refuse is collected every weekday, and it’s a different kind every day. There is no regular trash here. There’s burnables, non-burnables, plastic recyclables, cans, glass and PET bottles (drink bottles).

There’s no way to tell what goes in what bin. Obviously, bottles go in the bottle bin, but what about the caps? And the labels? Recyclable plastic? Burnable? There’s nothing like standing over your five bins with a bottle cap in your hand, fretting over which bin to put it in to make you feel like an outsider. Note to the Japanese – Everything is burnable! Just turn up the heat!

And it’s not like you can just chuck it and forget about it. Noooo. Trash isn’t collected from your house. You have to put it in a clear plastic bag (throwing out something embarrassing? Everyone knows….), label it, and then bring it to your trash centre. Which could be a 15 minute cycle from your house. Imagine cycling through your Japanese town with a stinking bag of rubbish clutched in one hand, sweating in the heat and humidity. You used to work in finance? Now your hair is a scrubby bush, you’re drenched in sweat, and there’s bin juice on your flip-flop clad foot. Welcome to humility.

Sometimes, your bag won’t be collected, it’ll be deposited back on your doorstep. Clearly, you’ve put something in the bag that shouldn’t be there, but there’s no explanation. You just have to figure it out. Which means going through the rubbish, because they won’t collect it until it’s fixed. Or, you can just put it in your back garden and forget about it. See point 2.

All this could probably be easily solved, if only you could speak Japanese. Or, failing that, read. In most countries, with the help of a dictionary (or the internet) you can figure out most things. But getting a leaflet about the trash and it being filled with little picture things like this 余帯? You’re sort of screwed. It’s not like you can just type it into google translate. And living in the inaka means there’s noone to ask. So, you just stumble on, hoping that some day you’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, your garden fills up with bags and all the locals know you as the white person with all the trash.

I am white trash.

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Things That Keep Me Sane

When you live in the back end of nowhere in a country where you don’t speak the language you need a few things to keep you from losing it. Without a few lifelines I’d either end up either in an institution, or rehab. Or maybe a residential locked rehab programme.

The main tool of survival is food. I guess this is the same anywhere, but when you can’t read the names of foods in the supermarket or the instructions on the backs of packets, you need a little help.

As soon as I arrived I discovered the joy of my local convenience store. In Japan they’re called konbinis, and they sell almost everything. Frozen food, readymade food, drinks, cigarettes (most of them anyway), magazines, newspapers, porn, makeup, shampoo, cleaning products, underwear, socks, and lots of other stuff. Did I say porn? Yes, magazines. Real life and cartoons. Yes, manga porn. It’s right there beside the teen, house, food and baby magazines. My junior high school boys take great joy in telling me who has been caught reading “nasty magazines”.

But anyway. It also sells food. At home the convenience stores sell greasy artery-clogging crud. Plus junk food and the occasional bag of pasta. Here my 7-11 sells fried chicken, noodles, rice dishes, onigiri (rice balls), sandwiches and sushi. The sushi from the konbini is as good as any I’ve had at a restaurant at home. Given, I wasn’t going to the nicest sushi bars in the world, but still, it’s great to be able to buy good sushi at 4am for a few dollars. Konbini food is cheap. Maybe not US standards cheap, but certainly Europe-cheap. If you buy a noodle dish they’ll microwave it for you right there, give you a wet wipe for your hands and chopsticks. Excellent.

The next thing on my sanity list is the local library. Here’s a picture of it – just because I love it so much.

It’s actually a great building, three stories high, all glass and pitched roof and light. It has reading rooms, study rooms, giant widescreen tvs and headphones for watching movies, a conference room and really squishy couches. Obviously I can’t read the books (apart from the baby ones, which I borrow for practice in using a Japanese dictionary), but they have DVDs!! Hundreds of them! Which you can borrow for up to 15 days! All for freeeee! You can get 3 at a time, and most of them are Hollywood movies with an English language track as well as a Japanese dub track. Given, they’re not exactly new releases, but still. Freee! Getting a library card was a bit intimidating, but all I needed was my gaijin card. I go there about once a week and get 3 DVDs and a few kids’ books. I usually neglect to watch at least one of the DVDs, but whatever. If they had wanted people to watch Troy, they wouldn’t have made it 3 hours long.

The final thing that keeps me from drinking all the time is the Foreign Buyer’s Club. It’s a website run by some Americans out of Kobe and it imports food and other stuff from America and other places. It provides me with things that are impossible to get out here, like wholewheat crackers, proper brown bread, wholewheat pasta and cheese.

I am a cheese fiend. Soft, hard, white, red, blue, edam, cheddar, stilton, brie, gorgonzola – I love it all. I could happily sit down with a block of cheese and a knife and eat til it’s gone. Japan is not good for cheese. Most Japanese don’t like it. I hate to tell them that it’s probably because their cheese is rubbish. Greasy, tasteless, rubbery and boring. You might wander into a shop here and see camembert – don’t be fooled. It’s just processed crap.

So, I did some research and found FBC. I bought the stuff I mention above, and a kilo of sharp white cheddar. It wasn’t cheap, but I needed it. Like a Japanese person needs rice. FBC charges for delivery, and then extra if you buy cold items (like cheese) and extra again if you want frozen items (I bought frozen bread), and more still to become a member (1000 yen a year membership) but I just wrote it off as a sanity expense. I got through that kilo of cheese in two weeks. Alone. It was awesome.

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Becoming Official In Japan – Part Three – Getting A Bank Account

A bank account is not as essential as you might think. Most bills can be paid at your local convenience store and many employers will pay you in cash.

I opened a bank account because my employer wanted to pay me by bank transfer as I get paid monthly and it was hassle for her to pay cash, or something.

Really, it was easy peasy. I looked up “new account” in the dictionary. I told the woman behind the counter. I filled in a form with some help – name, address, date of birth (in Japanese! I needed help with the Japanese date…), employer and so on. The lovely counter-woman and I figured the forms out between us with the help of a dictionary and some hand gestures.

By the way, no proof of address was needed, and no other ID than my gaijin card (which I also didn’t need proof of address for). I thought that I would need my passport, but I didn’t. Woman behind the counter took my gaijin card and my hanko and disappeared for ten minutes while I waited on a plastic chair and looked at the pictures in a magazine. Then I was shown a sheet with various ATM card designs on it, picked one, was returned my ID and hanko and left with a box of tissues as a gift and my passbook.

The passbook is sort of like the oldschool books you used at banks before they had ATMs, and are still used in my home country for post office savings accounts. You can use either your ATM card and PIN or card and passbook at your bank’s own ATMs. No, I don’t see the point of them either.

My actual ATM card was delivered to the house by courier a few days later. I had to hanko for it.

Note – do not forget your PIN. It’s not like at home where you get 3 tries. One bad entry and your card is kaput. Although, of course, the message that tells you that is in Japanese. So, you have to go back to the bank and be irked that your card is broken, only to be told “bad number” and hang your head in shame. Then you need to pay 1000 yen to get a new card, and wait for that to be delivered. Not that I would ever do something like that. Nooooo.

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Becoming Official In Japan – Part Two – Getting A Hanko

The next step to becoming official was to get a hanko. A hanko is a stamp that is used instead of a signature for most things in Japan. They are used in banking, for signing contracts, accepting packages, pretty much anything you’d use a signature for in the west.

Most Japanese have at least two – one for really official things like marriage contracts, buying a house or car, and an everyday one for accepting packages, signing a memo in work etc. Some people will have a third mid-range one for banking too. The more official ones (called inkan) are registered at the local ward office and are locked away in a safe or hidden at home, the less-official ones (called hanko) are just kept anywhere – in a handbag or by the door at home.

Most inkan are handmade by a professional. Almost every small town will have a shop, even mine. For an everyday hanko, you can buy them off the shelf if you have a common Japanese name. Obviously, as a foreigner I had to have mine made. You can pay anything from ten dollars up to thousands depending on what you want yours made of, from plastic or wood up to ivory or semi-precious stones. I went with wood and paid 50 dollars. It turns out that this was really expensive, but I went to my local little old lady shop and it was the cheapest one on display. I didn’t really have the Japanese to haggle. I wrote out my name in katakana, pointed at the one I wanted, then came back 5 days later to pick it up.

You can choose almost anything you want for your hanko – I chose my full name in katakana to match my gaijin card just to make things easier. If your name is James Smith you could have that, or J Smith, or Jim S, or JS, or whatever. You could go all out and have someone convert your name to kanji and get that.

I got a pink case with my hanko, with a little ink pad and everything. I didn’t choose it, but when I opened the box there it was. I suspect that a lot of the 50 dollars I paid went for the case.

I had to use my hanko to open a bank account and get a cellphone, though I suspect that a signature would have been fine for the cellphone, the woman was surprised when I whipped it out of my bag.

A word of warning though. Make absolutely sure that you spell your name correctly for the person in the shop. Have them read it out to you. Do not realise three weeks later that actually your hanko says Jum Smath. You’ll feel like a fool going back to the shop and getting them to change it. Belieeeeeeeve meeeee.

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Becoming Official In Japan – Part One – Getting A Gaijin Card

I’m not talking about becoming an official, like trading in your English teacher’s license to sit behind a desk and wear a short-sleeved shirt and tie and ruin ordinary citizens’ lives with bureaucracy. I’m not even talking about learning to march about purposefully with files under your arm so that you look official. I’m talking about becoming a real person in Japan.

You see, until you have burdened yourself with paperwork and bureaucracy to the point that you want to just leave Japan and come back another time when there’s less of a queue, you are not a real person. You are a tourist.

For those of you who are already real people, or are never planning to become a real person, you can just skip this post. In fact, I feel jealous of you unreal people. I imagine you spend your days frolicking in zen temple gardens, eating green tea icecream and mooning over the efficiency of Japan. Oh, the transport system! Ha. I used to be like you too.

So, in order to stop being a tourist and start being official, you need to get a few things in order.
You need a gaijin card, a bank account, an internet connection, a driver’s license and a cellphone. Unless you have these things, you are pretty much a lesser being. Well, I guess that if you live in a city you won’t need a driver’s licence. But just wait until your hot new Japanese girlfriend wants to go “for a drive”. And if there are internet cafes around, you probably won’t need an internet connection. Unless of course you never get a Japanese girlfriend, in which case, well, let’s hope your local dvd shop is liberal.

Anyway.

1) Gaijin card.
The official name for this is the Certificate of Alien Registration, which is stupid, because it’s a card, not a certificate. And you’re not from Mars, you’re just another gaijin. Japanese people will always use the official name though.

In Japan, it’s the law that you have to carry ID. Everyone does, even the locals. Possibly even the kids. If you’re a tourist, you’re supposed to carry around your passport, but if you actually live here, you need to get a gaijin card within 90 days. Since 90 days is the limit on even the most liberal tourist visa, you can’t get one unless you have a proper visa.

You’ll need this card for everything. Opening a bank account, getting a cellphone, renting a car, opening a library account and so on. If you’re stopped by the police for anything (like walking along minding your own business) you’ll need to show them your card. If you don’t, you could be hauled downtown for a chat. Even if you’re just popping to the 7-11 for milk wearing your PJs, bring your card. There’s been a lot of chat on the internet about how racist it is that they always want to see your gaijin card – but hey, it’s the law to carry ID.

Anyway. Getting a gaijin card isn’t all that much hassle. In fact, the simplicity of it lulled me into a false sense of security about how easy things are in Japan. I asked my employer where to go get one. Answer – my local ward office. I asked how to get there – get the local train a few stops up, then go into the giant building across from the station. I went in, the receptionist immediately knew what I was after and herded me over to the Alien Registration Desk. I was shown to a row of plastic chairs while I waited.

I waited, I looked around. I looked at some posters and tried to remember my hiragana. I looked around some more. Then, I made a startling realisation. I was the only customer in the entire room. The full first floor of this enormous government building was one open-plan office. And I was the only person there who didn’t work there! Now, when was the last time you went to a government office for something, anything, and there wasn’t a huge queue. Or at least one of those ticket machines where you take a number and wait to be called. Nope. Nothing.

I still had to wait though. God knows what the 50-odd workers were doing, but it took about 20 minutes for one of them to help me. (Actually, they were probably playing janken, the Japanese version of rock paper scissors to decide who would have to help me. It’s the cornerstone of Japanese society after all). Eventually I was brought up to the desk and the dude whipped out a rake of forms and looked at me expectantly. I told him in my shoddy Japanese that my Japanese is, well, shoddy. Fear passed over his face. He scampered off and came back with a giant book which he heaved up onto the desk and started leafing through, giving me terrified glances every few pages.

This book was genius. It had all the instructions, rules and regulations pertaining to foreigners in it, with Japanese on one page and then English and Portuguese on the facing page, all the sentences nicely numbered. The guy found the relevant sentence in Japanese, and then pointed to the corresponding English sentence. Brilliant. I had to fill out the expected details, name, address, employer (you can leave this blank if you don’t have a job yet), telephone number (also can be left blank), home address, place of birth etc. I gave him a passport photo of myself. Then I waited on a plastic chair again for about ten minutes.

The guy then gave me a receipt and told me I could pick up my card in 3 weeks. Apparently that receipt can be used to open a bank account and get a cellphone, but as I was in no real rush to get either, I waited til I had the actual card. I just showed up on the appointed day with my receipt and was handed my card.

I was partly official.

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Living In The Inaka – Part Three

Apart from the staring, the other two factors to consider if you are moving to the inaka are 1) the lack of anonymity and 2) the almost total lack of English.

I’ve only lived in my town for a few months and already everyone knows who I am. They know my name, where I’m from, my age, marital status, how many brothers and sisters I have, where I live, what my cellphone provider is, whether I have the internet, what Japanese food I like and don’t like, my favourite colour and whether I can speak Japanese.

They like to tell me where they’ve seen me – on my bike, in the bank, at the store, on the train. They look in my basket at the supermarket and comment on the contents – “EEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHH?!?!?!?!?! You like rice?!?!”

I should point out that none of this is in any way nasty. They’re just trying to make conversation. Also, it seems that asking inane questions is the way to make friends here. It’s sort of expected to be asked what your favourite Japanese food or place in Japan is, but your favourite colour? Animal? Number? Weird.

The English thing is a bit more difficult. Now, I know that coming to Japan with little to no Japanese is a bit foolhardy, but I came here to learn. I try my best. I study. I try to practice. But all of a sudden basic things like shopping become exhausting trials, never mind anything more complicated like posting something, or opening a bank account or buying a cellphone. Standing in the condiment aisle for over ten minutes trying to figure out which is salt and which is sugar, giving up and buying both gets tiring, as does carrying around a large dictionary.

There is one person in the area who speaks good English – my boss. While she’s very helpful for some things, I can’t really be calling her up for every little salt/sugar emergency. Mostly I don’t want her to think I’m an idiot, and partly because it’s all part of the fun (?)

Without a good grasp of Japanese it’s hard to make friends in the inaka. There are no other foreigners around. There is however another gaijin girl who lives on the same local train line who is lovely, and I can get a local train and then a Japan Rail train into the Big City. If I time the connection right it takes about an hour, so probably not something I’ll be doing that often. I’m imagining that I’ll be spending a lot of time just pootling around the countryside, at least until the snowboarding/skiing season starts!

The town has everything you need for daily life – it has a supermarket, 3 convenience stores (in Japan their food is unreal, nice, healthy and cheap), a giant pharmacy, a gas station, a liquor store and a LOAD of craft shops/paper shops/traditional Japanese stuff shops. Also, you can buy rice almost anywhere (like in the place where you pay your gas bill). For western food or books in English, I’ll have to go into the city.

The one thing that keeps me sane though, is the library. Opening an account was the usual ordeal of dictionaries and bowing, but I got my card and now have access to any of the materials in any of the 20-odd Big City and surroundings libraries (some day I will figure out the computer system). As well as thousands and thousands of books, there are a few hundred dvds. Most of them have and English language track! The selection isn’t amazing – they have more back seasons of ER than Disney movies, but it’s still sweet. The old man in the library knows me well by now, I go there weekly, and he’s always super helpful and never fines me when my stuff is back late. Actually, I think he’s just terrified of having to try to explain “fine” in English, another joy of being a gaijin.

Of course, there are a lot of things that are really good about living in the sticks. The celebrity aspect can be great – people are always willing to help you out if then can. They want to make you feel welcome and show you the best side of Japan. If you make the effort to learn Japanese and talk to people you’ll slowly become part of the community. People will be happily surprised with your efforts and do their best to understand you. The countryside is beautiful – clean air, wonderful scenery, lots of greenery. There’s never any traffic to speak of. The pace of life is slower. There are no crowds. People are nicer. Everything’s cheaper. You can see the stars at night and hear crickets and frogs calling out into the silence. The dirt and noise and crowds and expense of Tokyo seems like another country.

So, with my dvds, bike, coffee shop and year’s supply of salt, I’m pretty happy to be living in the inaka.

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Living In The Inaka – Part Two

I don’t start work until 3 or 4, so I used to spend the mornings pottering around the house. When the flat got too claustrophobic I would make my way down to the local coffee shop. It’s run by a husband and wife team, and they sell coffee, tea, slices of toast an inch thick, cut into three and spread with some sort of bean paste, ice cream and curry. This fine establishment is usually filled with elderly people.

Now, at home, “elderly” means 70 or so. Not in Japan. What with their diet of fish and whatnot, coupled with cycling around the place and working in the fields, the Japanese get old. 80, 90, 100. The oldest man and the oldest woman in the world are Japanese. These old people aren’t sitting at home either, they’re congregating around the entrance to the supermarket, pushing bikes up hills, hanging out at the bank in noisy huddles and going out for ice cream and coffee. This is where I usually run into them.

Anyway, they seem to have worked out some sort of schedule for the local coffee shop (the only one in town). There’s only ever loads of old ladies OR loads of old men. God help the one that gets the day wrong, they’ll be sitting alone forlornly trying to finish their ice cream as quickly as possible so they can go find their friends. Whichever group it is, when I walk in with my basic Japanese textbook they all turn around in unison and stare. The women usually start in with the “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHH?!?!?!?!?!” and then screech with laughter and giggles. Sometimes I can catch a word here and there – “gaijin“, “kawaii“. The men just give me the “EEEEHHH?!?!?!?!” and then exchange surprised looks. (Bear in mind I’ve been going there at least twice a week for nearly three months.) I sit down, order my coffee and break out the textbook. The women take it in turns to come over, look at what I’m doing, marvel as I struggle through the most basic hiragana sentence while reporting back to her cronies. The men slide into the chair opposite me and ask me where I’m from, why I’m here, have I been to Kyoto and so on. (All in Japanese. I can pick out bits and pieces by now, because I get the same questions over and over.)

All this was quite sweet at the start. I thought they were friendly and interested. Now, it’s a bit exhausting. It’s every single time I go in there. I just want coffee! I never thought I’d yearn for the anonymity of St*rbucks, but I do now.

Japan! What have you done to me?

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Living In The Inaka – Part One

In Japanese, the inaka is the countryside. Of course, as everywhere, the term “countryside” is relative. To someone who lives in Shibuya in Tokyo, Nagoya is almost the inaka. To someone from Nagoya, my local “big city” is the inaka. To someone from the Big City, I live in the inaka. I think that if you can get to 3 convenience stores in 10 minutes, it’s not quite the wilderness. But anyway.

Living in the inaka is very different to living in Tokyo or Osaka, or even a big city. You are usually the only white person in the area, possibly even the only non-Japanese. This automatically makes you something of a celebrity, but not the good kind of famous where people want to talk to you, more the kind that just attracts staring.

The Japanese have a word to describe you – gaijin. Gai means outside, jin means person. Together it means outsider. “Gaijin” can be considered a little bit rude and pejorative, but get used to it, that’s what you are. Even if you learn Japanese to perfect fluency, marry a local, take on citizenship, have 5 kids and 25 grandkids and spend your life growing rice you will never be Japanese. You will always be a gaijin. A more polite word is gaikokujin (outside country person), a person from a foreign country, but noone really uses this. Best to just get over it and accept your gaijin status. Or rather, you can revel in it. You see, not being Japanese frees you of many of the obligations and responsibilities that the Japanese have. You can get away with a lot. Also, you’ll always have a free seat next to you on the train, even if the train is totally packed and people are standing face-to-armpit in the aisles.

Anyway, not only am I white, but I’m the kind of white that’s almost blue. I don’t tan, even after I burn. You can see my veins. I have blue eyes and freckles, and (dyed) blonde hair. The only things that would make me more stare-worthy are 1) if I had naturally red hair, or 2) if I was black. (Both these things are rarer than pale blonde white people in Japan.)

This staring happens everywhere – on the street, in the bank, on the train, in the supermarket, everywhere. Most people will look away if you notice them staring, but children who don’t know that it’s rude to stare and old people who don’t care will just carry on. If you are really out in the sticks, many children will never have seen a white person in real life. When they first clap eyes on you, one of two things will happen. Either they’ll rush over and natter away in their baby Japanese, trying to paw your face and claw at your hair, or a look of total shock and fear takes them over and they’ll be locked into staring. My favourite is when they can’t stop looking at you, but their little hand reaches out to find the reassuring leg of their mother. Sometimes they even run away, crashing into the nearest pair of Japanese legs they can find and clinging on for dear life. Sometimes, it’s not even their mother. While traumatising small children is undoubtedly a fun pastime, eventually all the attention does get a bit wearing. I need other things to fill my time.

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