Simple Daily Life

I've had many comments about my pictures; everyone says how I look like I'm having such a good time here in Japan. Well I can't disagree with that, I really am having a good time here! But I worry that I'm giving the wrong impression - that people think my life here is just one non-stop wild party.

But in reality, most of my time here in Japan is spent on more routine, day-to-day activities. So what are these activities you ask? Well, I'll talk about them a little bit:

The Train
While most of the things I need are easily purchased within walking distance of my house, every time I go to meet a student, meet a friend, or go to a job interview, I am on the train. And depending on where I'm going, sometimes I'll take three or four trains to get there. If I'm going to a major station like Shibuya or Shinjuku, then the ride is only about 15-25 minutes (depending on the time of day). But many other places can take 40-45 minutes or longer, so I need to leave myself lots of time. Of course the train gets crowded sometimes, but it's not always quite as jammed as some would have you believe. It's actually a very convenient and efficient way to travel, as long as you know where you're going (getting lost on the train, especially when you have to be somewhere quickly, is not fun)

Cell Phone
Although I don't know if Japanese cell phones are quite as good as they're hyped up to be (personally I'd replace my phone with a 3G iPhone in a heartbeat, if they were available), I nevertheless find myself spending an endless amount of time fiddling with my cellphone. Checking train schedules, reading e-mails, checking hotmail, reading mixi.jp, etc. But mostly reading and sending e-mails. I was a text message junkie in Toronto, and e-mails on Japanese cellphones are pretty much the same. The only catch? Japanese cellphone have no English predictive text, so I write everything in Japanese, and almost all the e-mails I receive are in Japanese. Writing is usually fine, but often the e-mails I receive have kanji that I don't recognize T-T so I have to either use my best guesswork or ask the person next to me.

Interestingly enough, I got my first cellphone bill, and I wasn't sure how to pay it. Aki said I could pay it at the convenience store. But I was shy to go there; I was sure they were going to ask me questions that I couldn't understand or ask me to read things that I couldn't read. So I thought long and hard about what I was going to say. There is one girl who works at the 7-Eleven near my place, and every time she sees me, she makes eye contact and smiles a genuine friendly smile (not the fake smiles you often get from Japanese customer service staff). So I waited until the late evening to go there, because I know that girl doesn't work during the day. I thought because she seems so friendly, she would probably have the patience to bear with me if I don't understand her. Also, in the late evening the store is usually not very busy.

So I went to the 7-Eleven but the friendly girl was not there - there was another girl about the same age that I had never seen before. So I was a bit nervous but I finally decided it was silly to be so nervous, my Japanese isn't that bad! So slowly walked up to the cashier and pulled out my cellphone bill.

"Umm... I have this cellphone bill. In this store, is it possible to p..."

"Pay?" she replied. "Sure." And she took my phone bill and scanned the bar code. "That will be 4660 yen."

I handed her a 5000 yen bill and she prompty smiled, gave me my change and receipt, and told me to have a nice day.

So there you have it. I was so nervous about paying my phone bill, and it turned out to be about as challenging as buying a pack of gum. I guess sometimes you never know until you try!

iPod Touch
About the only thing I fiddle with as much as my cell phone is my iPod Touch. Although the availablity of free Wi-Fi in Tokyo is disappointing at best (yet understandable, who needs Wi-Fi when you can get broadband-level connection speeds on your cellphone?), I'm constantly using it to check my schedule, update contact info, show pictures and videos of my travels or of my home country, and of course listen to music. I can only imagine how useful an iPhone would be, because then it would be constantly connected to a network, so I could always use e-mail, web browsing, maps, weather, YouTube, etc. Are you listening Apple? We want iPhone in Tokyo, and we want it NOW!

Laundry
In Oakhouse, the washing machine has no dials. There is no way to set the temperature, or delicate cycle or whatever. You just put in 200 yen and the machine starts working.
The washing machine works fine, but the dryer is a piece of... well, anyway you get the idea. It's horrifically expensive (100 yen for 10 minutes), and you can't put too much in the machine or else it won't spin. Even still, sometimes it takes 40-50 minutes to get the clothes dry!
So in other words, for the cost of doing laundry myself in Oakhouse, I could take my laundry to a professional in Toronto and have it cleaned, pressed and folded neatly into a nice plastic bag waiting for me to pick it up.

But you know, when things in Tokyo become prohibitively expensive, I start to wonder if I'm doing something wrong, or at least doing things in a non-Japanese way. And sure enough, most Japanese don't care about dryer prices because they don't use it - they just hang their laundry up outside.
I noticed that outside my window are a bunch of clotheslines, so I asked a friend what the word is for clothespins (he said laundry scissors), and headed to the １００-yen store. But the package of clothespins I got actually says "laundry pinch" which I think sounds more cute ^-^

So now I only dry my laundry outside. When it's a beautiful warm sunny day, the laundry actually comes out VERY nice and smelling very fresh, feeling much nicer than clothes out of the dryer. But when it's a cold cloudy day (like today), the laundry gets dry but it's not so nice >.<

Dry Cleaning
Dry cleaning is expensive and slow. I dropped off a suit and three dress shirts last Wednesday, and I have to wait a week to get them back! And they still happily charged me 2880 yen for the service. So that does it. I decided whenever I wear my suit, I can't eat anything. At least not anything with mustard!!

Grocery Shopping
I'm not a guy who likes to stock up on food, and I don't have any place to put it anyway, so I get groceries almost every day. Recently I found a grocery store that's only about a 2 minute walk from my house, and their prices are the same if not cheaper than the supermarket in Kichijoji! I didn't see it before because it's kind of lost in all the winding residential streets. It's small but it has pretty much everything I would need, including a fresh fish counter and lots of fruit/vegetables. They even have decently-priced breakfast cereal. I had a bowl of cereal for the first time in over two months... Frosted Flakes with some sliced banana.. it was like a taste of heaven. So these days I can eat very well, I just walk down the street and get anything I need!

CNN - And Toronto's Position as the Centre of the Universe
I can only get a few English channels so I watch a lot of CNN. The CNN we get here is a kind of "world edition" where I can get all the latest news and weather and sports information from places I know very little about. The American politics is at least mildly interesting, but I never see any Canadian news AT ALL.

In fact, the more time I spend out here, the smaller and more insignificant Canada feels. Most Japanese know that Canada is a country north of USA, but that's about it. It seems like most Japanese know more about Whistler, BC than Toronto!

In Canada we rather arrogantly like to make fun of "ignorant Americans" for not knowing who the Canadian Prime Minister is, or for thinking we all live in log cabins or whatever. But maybe it's not so much that they're "ignorant", maybe they just don't care, and frankly don't have a reason to care. I bet most Canadians couldn't name the Japanese Prime Minister, and why should they?

I've had many Canadians ask me so many "ignorant" things about Japan. They think every train car has 'pushers' to pack the people in, and that every hotel is a capsule hotel, and that every street corner has a vending machine that sells the used panties of local teenage girls. I honestly don't see how Americans having misconceptions about Canada is really all that different.

Video Games
I'd like to say I play video games to make up for the lack of English television, but who are we kidding? I often played video games in Toronto and Japan is no different. If I ever get bored, all I have to do is drag my Wii out into the common area and hook it up to the TV, and within minutes I'll have a crew gathered around waiting to play. Current crowd favorites include Guitar Hero (music game where you pretend to play the guitar), Mario Kart (cartoony go-kart racing game), Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (go through a haunted house and shoot the zombies), and of course the undyingly popular Wii Sports (cartoony version of Tennis, Bowling, and other sports). I got Wii Fit but I don't have enough space in my room to play it, so I might do some rearranging of my bed and fridge to make room.

When I'm on the train, on my Nintendo DS, I play Final Fantasy VI (an old aventure game), or a new adventure game called "The World Ends With You". I like this game because the story is set in Shibuya, which is my favorite place in the world and also only a 20 minute train ride from my place. So I recognize many 'real' things in the game like certain buildings or intersections. And it has a funky art style. Very cool!

Anyway, I don't know if that helps you visualize my life here or not, but these are some of things I deal with on a regular basis. If you have any questions about Japan, big or small, just ask me and I'll give you my opinion!