A typical Life

It is a widely held belief that living in Japan is very expensive and I was a little intimidated by that when told I was headed to Japan the first time. I claim to be cheap but my husband is kind and says that I am frugal. Merriam Webster defines cheap as obtaining something at a low price or at minimum expense and frugal as characterized by or reflecting economy in the use of resources. I like to economize our funds by getting things at low prices so I guess we are both right!

What I found was the cost of living wasn’t as crazy as I had expected (but then I expected the worst and was coming from Hawaii and Vancouver, Canada which are both expensive in their own rights) I still was a bit shocked to see 3,000 yen mangoes as Thomas at Nihon Hacks describes in his post on how to find 300 yen steaks in Japan. I wish he had been blogging 10 years ago!

Anyway, after I began to feel comfortable with daily life and had the basics down I wanted to expand beyond the trips to the local grocery store and back. While walking around I noticed that one store in particluar seemed very popular so I went in. Well, it turned out to be a 100 Yen store (there were actually two in our neighborhood but one was better than the other).

What is a 100 Yen store? It is a store where anything in it costs you 100 Yen (about $.92)! What can you get there? Pretty much everything. I would buy my household cleaning supplies, re-usable plastic containers, kitchen gadgets and stationery there on a regular basis. Check out the product selection at Japan-Guide and Daiso (90,000 different products). It was my idea of bliss and anytime I had a craving to go shopping that was the first place that I went being the cheap, I mean frugal, gal that I am.

You might think that the quality of good was poor but that was not the case. I am still using a can opener, 10+ years later, that was purchase at a 100 Yen store in Japan! I can’t wait to go back - I might even go there before the grocery store if I pass it first!

To visit a garden in Japan is to take a step away from reality for a moment and step back in time. Many of these gardens are an oasis in the center of a very vibrant and bustling country. Once you step foot within their walls it’s really hard to imagine all of that action going on outside.

The earliest known gardens in Japan date back to the Asuka period (593-710AD) and were created in what is now know as Nara prefecture. The three main elements of the Japanese garden are the use of rocks, trees and water. Ancient Japanese believed that a place surrounded by rocks was inhabited by gods and named it amatsu iwasaka (heavenly barrier) or amatsu iwakura (heavenly seat). A dense cluster of trees is known as himorogi (divine hedge) and moats and streams were thought to enclose sacred ground and were referred to mizuguchi (water fences). Japan-Guide lists a few of the gardens in Japan on their site and describes three different categories of gardens as follows:

Tsukiyama Gardens - Ponds, streams, hills, stones, trees, flowers, bridges and paths are used to create a miniature reproduction of natural scenery which is often a famous landscape in China or Japan. The name Tsukiyama refers to the creation of artificial hills.

Karesansui Gardens - Karesansui gardens reproduce natural landscapes in a more abstract way by using stones, gravel, sand and sometimes a few patches of moss for representing mountains, islands, boats, seas and rivers. Karesansui gardens are strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism and used for meditation.

Chaniwa Gardens - Chaniwa gardens are built for the tea ceremony. They contain a tea house where the actual ceremony is held and are designed in aesthetic simplicity according to the concepts of sado (tea ceremony). Chaniwa gardens typically feature stepping stones that lead towards the tea house, stone lanterns and a stone basin (tsukubai), where guests purify themselves before participating in the ceremony.

Tsukiyama and Karesansuin gardens were prevalent until the introduction of the tea ceremony and Chaniwa gardens in 1522AD. Large scale spaces and extensive laws did not start appearing until the Meiji period (1868-1912) with the influence of the west starting to show itself in the design. Web-Japan has created a fact sheet on Japanese gardens that contains a lot of historical information and elaborates on the different types of gardens listed above.

I have a special affinity for the Meiji Jingu iris garden (pictured above). This garden is located in the heart of Tokyo and is on the grounds of a Shinto shrine of the same name. The flowers seem to meander for miles and are at their peak in June of each year. The sight impressed me so that I made an annual trek there and am eager to visit back again.

Almost every prefecture or city in Japan has its own garden. JGarden has a search engine that will help you find a garden close to where you live, in Japan, or elsewhere in the world. I had the pleasure of visiting the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Jose, California on a few occasions. It is gorgeous and made me think I was back in Japan – if only for a short time.

Learning Japanese can be a tough proposition, trust me, I know, but life in Japan when you can’t speak the language is fraught with uncertainty and some pretty amusing experiences (looking back that is!). Here is a portion of a comic strip from the Japan Times that illustrates the challenges well (click on the image to see the complete strip):

I gave my mom a laugh when, shortly after we had arrived in Japan in 1994, I told her that I was adjusting to life in Japan well and that I knew how to say most of the important things including please, thank you and “where is the toilet?”. In reality I got by fairly well because I made an effort to speak the language even if it was just one word at a time. I smiled a lot, pointed a lot and tried to be very polite and thankful for everything.

By the end of our stay in Japan I mastered basic counting, katakana (Japanese characters used to sound out foreign words) and some simple phrases. I could not have a conversation in Japanese but often I could understand what people were talking about but not what they were saying about it. My very basic language skills couldn’t help me in these situations…

One day while I was on the train it stopped suddenly in a tunnel which was very unusual. The lights flickered, the car I was in was shaking and I had no idea what was happening. Around me, some passengers looked up from their reading material, some were peering out the window and some appeared to be startled awake from a nap. We sat there for a few moments before the driver of the train came over the public address system and made an announcement. I concentrated hard and listened very carefully but the only words that I understood in his announcement were “left” and “exit”. That wasn’t very helpful to me but most of the other passengers went back to what they were doing so I assumed that this wasn’t a major problem. I sat there trying to remember exactly what the driver had said but I still couldn’t translate anymore of what I had heard. Was I was supposed to use the left exit or not use the left exit? Depending on the situation this could have been critical information but I was forced, due to my lack of Japanese language skills, to wait and follow the crowd once the train started moving again. It turns out that there had been an earthquake and that it is normal for the trains to stop and make sure that all the tracks are in working order before getting started again. By the way, we exited to the left!

On another day, my husband and I decided to take a taxi home from a restaurant. When you don’t speak Japanese well, or at all, you usually ask the driver to take you the train station closest to your destination and walk the rest of the way from there. Not a problem most of the time except we had taken this trip before and realized that we were going to drive by our house on our way to the station. As we started moving, I looked at my husband and asked him if he knew how to say stop in Japanese (we had different sets of vocabulary which came in handy sometimes). He didn’t know and was being cute when he said “Try stopu”. The Japanese do tend to borrow a lot of English words and pronounce them differently so it wasn’t entirely out of the questions that it would work so I tried it out. The result wasn’t good. The driver didn’t understand me and spoke to us in Japanese to which we responded with blank stares. Then I thought that I would try pointing at the curb. Now the poor driver was really confused and thought we wanted him to turn and started to change lanes. I then said “No, no, okay, okay!” All the while I am leaning forward toward the Plexiglas partition between the driver and us so that I can hear him and try to explain myself. The taxi driver finally figured out what I was trying to say, I don’t know how, and stopped quite abruptly causing my head to hit the Plexiglas partition quite firmly….but we got him to stop! I looked over at my husband only to realize that he was quite amused and was trying very hard not to laugh. The phrase that I needed was quite easy, I looked it up when we got home, and I will never forget it now! “Koko i desu” – Here is fine.

These are some of the funnier memories that I have of my challenges with the language and looking back I feel like I really cheated myself out of a better experience of Japan and its people by not trying harder to learn the language. This time will be different! My husband and I have dedicated ourselves to listening to the language tapes that I borrowed from our local library and I am hopeful that it will make a difference.

Eating out in Japan is a neat experience. There are stand alone restaurants and also food courts on the top floor of most department stores with a variety of different restaurants to choose from. Most have plastic models of the food they serve in the front window or menus with photos. Believe it or not the photo on the right is a plastic replica of ramen (click on the photo for more examples). Amazingly realistic, isn’t it?

So if you can’t decipher the menu, and no English menu is offered, you can always take your water or waitress outside and point!

Japan is not for the picky eating crowd unless your Japanese is extremely good. Mine wasn’t and my step-son was very picky when he was younger. He hated lettuce and cheese, to name a couple of things. When he and his sister came to visit us we had to change our eating habits a little bit to accommodate them. When we went out to eat we would go to one of many American chains rather than some of the local restaurants that we came to enjoy. It made things easier – for the kids!

McDonald’s here we come….

My step-son loved the Big-Mac and asked me to order him one with no cheese and no lettuce. My first thought was that there was no way that I would be able to explain that so I suggested that he order a double burger instead. That was a no-go – it had to be a Big-Mac because he liked the special sauce! The menu consisted of mostly pictures so I stepped up and pointed at the Big-Mac and tried to explain what I wanted. It went something like this…. “Sumimasen, rettuce nashi, cheezu nashi, onegai-shimasu.” (Translated: “Excuse me, without lettuce, without cheese, please”). All the while, as I say “nashi”, I am crossing my arms like an X in front of my chest for visual impact. It appeared that I was understood – what a relief! We received the burger, found a table, sat down and my step-son opened up his burger only to find cheese. The conversation went like this:

Please take this back and get them to make me another one.

Why don’t you just scrape off the cheese?

Eeeeeewwwww! I can’t scrape it all off – there will still be bits of cheese on it! (Like it was going to kill him!)

OK, if you are serious, you go over there and explain it – I’m sure you’ll do much better than I did.

Needless to say he scraped the cheese off and ate the burger, complaining the whole time. Thankfully, the kids are adults now and they can hardly wait to come to Japan and eat the food. Their picky days are mostly over – I hope?

About a week in to our stay, I thought that it was time to get out and do some exploring. My first trip on the Japanese train system was very intimidating. Just to give you an idea of the systems complexity here is a map from Japan Corner. (If you zoom in you to the bottom right corner you will see a silhouette of Cinderella’s castle which is near where we lived.)

First I had to figure out where I wanted to go and how to get there. My lifesaver was a bilingual train guide that you can purchase in most major bookstores in Japan. I would map my route by saying to myself “take the red line to the yellow line, transfer to the blue line….” Just like a first grader!

Then I had to buy a ticket. The first time I attempted to do this it took quite some time as I needed to analyze a complex grid to determine the correct fare. In smaller stations there is often no English on the grid and you need to match the Kanji of where you are to where you are going which can be very time consuming. It’s sort of like the game of memory where a whole bunch of cards are face down on a table and you have to match two in order to get an extra turn! Japan-Guide.com has a great overview of the train system.

Now I put my Yen in the machine, pushed the button with the right fare, and crossed my fingers that the ticket that I purchased would get me through the gates of the station where I was and out of the station at my destination. If the fare was wrong a machine would stop me from exiting and I would need to go to another machine to fix it!

Next I needed to go to the platform to wait for the train. I had to make sure I was on the right platform otherwise I would catch a train going the wrong way! In order to prevent this from happening to me I would make sure that I knew the name of the last station on each line and go to the platform that indicated that station on the signs (maybe English, most likely Kanji).

Somehow I managed to get where I was going and back again but I was exhausted by the time I got home!

I didn’t go to Japan thinking that grocery shopping would be easy – in fact I didn’t give it much thought at all!

On my first trip to a Japanese grocery store I found that I could identify the general sections of the store but from there it went downhill. My initial discovery was that very little of the product packaging was labeled in English. This made what would have been a quick and easy task at home quite challenging. My goal was simple; I needed to get something for dinner and to start stocking the empty cupboards in our new home. That shouldn’t take too long right? Well, after about a half hour of wandering up and down the aisles and analyzing the various packages to determine if I could glean their contents I gave up and headed for the fresh produce and meat. I had a lot more success there and actually put some items in my basket.

So what was the end result? (more…)

It’s been almost a month since we found out that we will be spending the better part of the next two years in Japan. This isn’t our first time being part-time residents of Japan. Back in 1994 we had the privilege of starting a four year adventure in Japan. We enjoyed daily life in Japan, living there was a very satisfying and enriching experience overall. We have a lot of great memories from our time in Japan and are very excited about going back. This is not to say that we didn’t experience some culture shock during our stay! I have decided to share some of my more vivid memories of those first few days and weeks back in 1994 in a series of posts which I will call “Memories of Japan”. The experiences that I will describe are not that uncommon for foreigners coming to Japan for the first time and they made me realize, and appreciate, all of the things that I took for granted at home. These things take a lot of effort to accomplish when you first get to Japan but the good news is that over time, and with practice, everyday life in Japan becomes easier, more routine, but never dull!

Here is this first installment of “Memories of Japan”:

The Trip & Our Arrival

The trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Tokyo, Japan was the longest trip I have even taken in my life both by the clock and emotionally. In reality it was about 16 hours from the time that we left Phoenix until we landed at Narita Airport. I can’t sleep on planes and have been told that I am over-analytical at the best of times. Given my nature, I spent the whole flight thinking about what I was getting into, all of the challenges that I would face and how I would handle the whole experience. The excitement of living in Japan was temporarily overshadowed by these thoughts. (more…)