japan – Page 5 – w00kie's ramblings

New year woes

In Japan, the new year is a big thing. Unlike in western countries, it’s a family holiday when all come, eat traditional food (new year soba) and go to the temple for a blessing and good luck in the coming year. It’s also a rare time when all all shops, banks, etc. can close for a few days straight.

Do not get caught without cash on new year. Most banks will close all operations between January 1st and 4th, and that means everything, even ATMs. It’s advised to pack your pockets with cash, at least 100.000¥ for the duration of the black-out. Countless foreigners have been found sleeping under the bridge after not taking heed of this warning.

Anyways, back to my story, another service that shuts down during the first week of the year is trash collection. Just a week isn’t that bad you’ll say, but:

Bring together the Japanese love of over-packaging, presents for the kids, family reunions… all in a 15 storeys building (that’s 60 apartments), and you get a wall of detritus filling up from floor to ceiling the trash room.

This photo was taken on January 2nd, I can’t wait to see what happens by the end of the week.

Ricoh GR Digital II – Best Seller

Still haven’t decided if I’m going to get me a new GRD or not, my finances look bleak so it’s probably going to be a no-no. But according to the sales ranking of cameras in Japan for the month of November, many people don’t have the same qualms as me:

Ricoh GR Digital II

It shot straight to 1st rank right out of the drawing board. Impressive for such a special camera, definitely not aimed at the basic consumer. But as a friend of mine always tells me: “Don’t under-estimate the power of the Japanese otaku…”

80cm of fresh snow

I was in Kagura Saturday for a my second day snowboard of the season. We left at 5:30AM to get there by 7AM, get dressed and catch the first ropeway car up the mountain. I was snowing big flakes the whole day, no wind. Deep powder everywhere, leg-deep out in the forest where we spent the whole day, almost Hokkaido-good.

The station reported 80cm of fresh snowfall over the weekend. It really looks like the start of a great season!

FON Anniversary Campaign in Japan

If you’re in Japan and you want a free (or almost free) WiFi router, here’s your chance.

One year after its introduction in Japan, the FON network gives away their Fonera routers for free this weekend only: Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th December. These cool little boxes let you share your connection safely with the public, and if you do you’ll be granted free internet access through all the other boxes in the network: 208.000 access points around the world, 25.000 in Japan only.

I got one for free 1 year ago when they did the same campaign for the launch, it’s a nice initiative.

Surf or Study

Sunday December 2nd is for many of us in Japan the dreaded day of 日本語能力試験 – also known as JLPT or Japanese Language Proficiency Test. But this weekend is also the start of what looks like the best ski season I’ve seen since I’ve come to Japan.

Trying out my new snowboard gear on 130cm of snow in Kagura or studying for the ２級. It’s a tough call…

Year-end tax adjustment

I was just handed by my service’s executive assistant a 2 page “Year-end tax adjustment declaration for 2007” with a little not saying the deadline is in 5 days. The forms are accompanied by an English leaflet full of statements like this one:

Special exemption for spouses
Due to the change of income low (sic.), special exemption for spouses for the spouse qualifying for exemption for spouse is abolished from 2004.

Great info, as long as you can decypher it, and no indications as to what any of the boxes’ labels might mean. I’m going to have a fun time this week…

Dating guide TV show

Yesterday I was watching TV pretty late as I was backing up my laptop to prepare for installing Leopard, and I found a pretty cool program called 恋愛百景 on TV Asahi. The name translates to “The 100 views of Love” referring to the famous series of artist Hokusai.

The concept of the show is to give dating advice to guys, mostly where to bring the girl and what to say to her to maximize your chances of success, the whole thing being acted out by some random actor and a cute ドラマアイドル.

Morita Ayaka - the cute idol on the show last night So last night’s episode was about how to bring out your 先輩 from university on a date and impress her without killing your budget. A full-day plan is given good cheap restaurants (in this case Matsuzaka beef lunch for 1000￥) and cool places where you can entertain your date for free: the TEPCO building in Shibuya and the SONY showroom in Odaiba. Some specific tactics were also given, like calling her ‘Senpai’ (a rather formal thing to do) so she doesn’t view it as a desperate attempt to get in her pants until you build up romantic momentum with photo posing with the cool camera you rented for free at the SONY place and printing out (still for free) a nice portrait of both of you. Then you are supposed to bring her to the Tokyo Tower, call her finally by her first name and ask her what she feels about you in the climax of the sunset over Tokyo bay.

I think it’s a cool way to get those geeks watching TV at 1:30AM to find a girl and maybe rise the abysmal birthrate of the country…

Japanese Credit Card

Sunday as I was going to the old apartment to give back the keys, I had the nice surprise to find both my JLPT convocation and my Flying Blue VISA credit card. Nice surprise since I was rejected twice by the Japanese VISA company and I was starting to lose hope. The situation was getting critical as I am now paid exclusively in Yen on my Japanese bank account and all my French credit cards will turn up dry soon.

As with a lot of things here, VISA and Mastercard credit cards are not handled by their global mother companies. They are a separate entities that barely have ties with the rest of the world. A good example is trying to use your overseas Mastercard in a Japanese ATM, even though it has the Mastercard logo which should indicate compatibility, it will not give you any money unless you use give it a real Japanese Mastercard. A subtlety that has left countless tourist sleeping under a Tokyo bridge…

In the same way, foreigner have a great deal of problems obtaining a credit card in Japan. I’ve seen many a story of people with very good situations getting rejected dozens of times by these companies while the average Japanese has 6-7 cards in his wallet. They fall victim to this apparent fear that the gaijin is always here for fun, temporarily, and will definitely accumulate mounds of debts and leave the country without word in 6 months.

Anyways, now I’m safe, I can give in to Japanese consumerism and buy tons of gadgets, all the while accumulating Air France mileage to fly away from this godforsaken country, leaving all my debts behind me like the white-faced barbarian that I am…

A tip about teeth

In exactly 4 days I will officially become a fully local employee in my company. My salary will be in Japanese Yens, I will pay Japanese taxes, be under a Japanese pension plan (although I still retain an extra pension plan in France as a bonus) and be protected by a Japanese health insurance.

Although this will only start from Thursday 1st, I already began receiving the Health Insurance’s newsletter which has an English version for us foreigners. This is where I found this little gem:

A tip about teeth
We are now in the autumn.
You see, I would like something nice to eat.
Is everything fine in your mouth?
If plaque or tartar has formed on your teeth, let’s use this opportunity to remove them.

Remove what? Plaque or teeth? Poor grammar or barbaric oral surgery practices? I let you be the judge… Anyways, this does nothing for my fear of Japanese dentists…

Moving Preparations

Today, I took 2 hours out of my not so busy schedule and called all the utility companies to cancel and/or open the gas/electricity/water/internet contracts for my moving next week.

To help with the process, I found this cool webservice by TEPCO, Tokyo’s main electricity provider. You enter your old and new address and it will find the utility companies that serve the area codes in question. You chose the ones you use and it will give you a checklist of all the phone numbers you have to call. Moreover, if an electronic application form is available, it will give you the link and fill out all the information you already give it, radically speeding up the process.

Matsuri Food

This weekend I went to the Kawagoe Matsuri, one of the biggest in this part of Saitama, and I ate 鮎塩焼き.

They are little fresh-water fish, stuck on a skewer, dipped in salt and fried around a fire. You eat the whole thing, except the head, bones and scales included.

Cameo French license plates

Could someone explain me why I see so many cars in Japan with French or German license plates under the official Japanese plates?

I might understand that car maniacs who import the cars from Europe might keep the plates for style, but this is a Mazda Premacy with the wheel on the right!

How to print without a printer in Japan?

Living in Japan, we are often faced with tough quandaries, for example: in a typical closet sized Tokyo apartment, having a printer at home can take up a valuable portion of your living space. But then without a printer, you’re often stuck in problematic situations, like last weekend when my girlfriend had some last minute changes to do to her resume and I wasn’t at work to print it for her.

But no worries! In the land of the combini on every city block, 7eleven is here to save the day. After registering on the Netprint website from Fuji Xerox, you can upload any document (an Apple Word document will fail so save it as a PDF first) to the web application that will give you an 8-digit code that you can write down or send directly to your keitai. You can then walk-in any 7eleven in Japan, go to the printer machine, select ネットプリント and type that code. 20円 for a black&white A4 print, 60円 for a color A4 print.

S-Air summer ski jump

What to do when you really want to snowboard in summer and you like stupid crazy activities? You find a place where they built a big-air jump on a hill with a pool under it.

The place is called S-Air and is located in 所沢 in southern Saitama. You can get there from Tokyo in around 45min by train and the full day pass + rental of everything will cost you 8,300¥ (or 7,000¥ for 2 1/2 hours).

This was really really scary and even though I probably never cleared 3m, it felt really high. I had never taken a real jump on a snowboard before, and I will probably never do it on snow now that I know how it feels: I had so many potentially-fatal-crashes in that pool, I’m scared for life now…

Bed town

This Saturday, my girlfriend arrived in Tokyo to look for a job, pass some interviews, etc. She’ll be staying at my place for 2 weeks or so, hopefully enough to get a good feel of the current job market.

So this Sunday, we went to Kawagoe to scout out the place and see what kind of apartments we can find over there. It’s a big town, 300K inhabitants, very lively and only 30min from Tokyo. I’d be happy to live there. But after talking with a real estate agency, we were told it will be hard to find a newish apartment close to the station there and we’d better check out Fujimino for this.

Fujimino is one station down the line, 5min closer to Tokyo on the express train. I had never stopped there before, but always saw the tall apartment buildings, 20+ floors, all around the station. We came out and walked a little bit around, and apart from a couple of conbinis, a McDonald and a little 24/7 mini-market around the station, the town barely has a dozen shops.

The town is so dead and empty that, as I came out of the station in the village I live in, I thought it was really lively (something that would never have crossed my mind the day before). The real estate agent said it well: Fujimino is これから, the question is “will I be there to see it?”.

Next weekend, I’m going back to Kawagoe to really see some apartments. I’m hoping I’ll find an older mansion that had a renewal not so long ago.