A typical Life

Well today was just another day closer to our departure to Japan. My husband will leave in two weeks and I will leave at the end of February to meet up with him in Chiba (our home base for the next two years, at least). It has been an interesting road so far that started with a phone call in October, followed very shortly by a trip to Japan to negotiate a contract and sign a letter of intent. You’d think that we would be home free right….not! The contract still hasn’t been finalized but it’s supposed to be here by the end of the week….

We have been asking about visas almost since day one and we finally got the paperwork from Japan today (via a travel agent in Los Angeles). We sent our passport photos to Japan and the paperwork says we need more so off we went to get photos. The first place’s camera was broken so we had to go somewhere else and then the photos make us look as if we have been drinking and had no sleep for a week! Oh well, we will be off to the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu tomorrow, praying that we have the paperwork in it’s correct form as it will take them four business days to review before we can pick them back up. I don’t want to think about what will happen if there is any delay…

Next, what day should my husband leave? We were told that there was a meeting on the 30th that he needed to attend so we proposed a departure date of the 28th which would put him in Tokyo on the afternoon of the 29th. With a good night of sleep he would hopefully be awake enough for the meeting on the 30th. He would then head off to Kamogawa for a week on the 31st followed by three weeks in Kagoshima before coming back to Tokyo and meeting up with me. It all seems reasonable until he is told that he needs to be in Japan on the 28th to drop off his luggage so it can be transported to Kamogaya but that the meeting on the 30th has been canceled. So this would mean leaving on the 26th to get there on the 27th so that he can drop his bags off on the 28th. With no meeting planned this is basically a waste of 3 1/2 days until he leaves on he 31st. His interpreter is currently trying to find out if he can ship his luggage an alternate way so that he doesn’t have to arrive early simply to drop off the luggage. We are awaiting the results of his inquiries.

Where will we be living? I have asked for our address a few times to arrange for shipping some stuff over and forwarding our mail but am told that the apartment will be ready on the 22nd but that they don’t know the address yet…what??? If you know it’s going to be ready wouldn’t you know where it is? Furniture needs to be delivered, etc…

Countless emails, the New Years break, two different interpreters and levels of bureaucracy that we can’t begin to fathom are making me wonder if we will be picking up visas on the way to the airport and dragging luggage through a train station or two. This should be fun - stay tuned!