1st-Timer Shinkansen and Onsen!

That’s Bullet Train and Hot Springs to you and me, bub. They’re both very famous here.  But I’ll get to that. We’ve been busy-busy-busy and I’ve got a lot of nifty updating to do. 

Outside of looking for my job teaching English at an eikaiwa (Conversational English School) and preparing for a couple of upcoming interviews, I’ve been shopping for some of the things that a baby needs- things we had in America but couldn’t take with us. Like a quick-folding stroller. They’re big news in Japan right now because strollers take up a lot of space on the trains, and trains are the life-blood of the metropolis. 

Plenty of room now, but wait for RUSH HOUR!!!

A lot of Japanese riders (younger ones, especially) are annoyed at mothers with strollers because technically, six people can stand in the same amount of space. AS IF WE WEREN’T ALL BABIES WITH MOTHERS ONCE! I say, let’s not make it harder on mothers than they already have it! Either let them in and SHADDUP or provide them space, like an extra car for those with strollers, wheelchairs and walkers, etc. Don’t take it out on the future generation, folks. That’s the end of that soapbox. Phew! 

So anyway, while shopping for strollers, here’s yet another example I found of why Japan should hire me to check their English:

Colorplus = Success!!----------------------------------------------------------- FAIL!!!!

I guess you need to pay the extra 2,000 yen if you want spellcheck.

After being chastised by a sweaty baby-store employee for taking pictures in his store, I stopped at the local Daibutsu with Mom and Dad and looked around, snapped a few shots and picked up a traditional charm for a friend who can use it. 

Daibutsu basically mean HUGE-UNGEOUS Buddha and is one of those amazing ancient-looking I-drove-a-DeLorean-at-88mph places you’ll find in the middle of a suburb. They look like places that don't belong in the 21st century, is what I'm trying to say. But I'm glad they are here. I honestly don’t know how old or new this one is and I’m not even sure if it’s a temple or a shrine. Even some Japanese people get them mixed up! But it doesn’t matter in the end because people just come here from time to time for a bit of positivity in their lives. 

Among some of the great traditional architecture and gardens are these little statues of the seven gods. 

Only one of them, third from the left, is female- and she’s the goddess of  DUN-DUN-DUNNNNN… beauty. No points for originality there! This photo is not her:

You can buy little tokens and place them in front of the god in charge of whatever you need help with. This guy is in charge of money. Very popular. 

We finally got to go up to Hanamaki and introduce Kyte to his great-grandpa. Hanamaki is in Iwate prefecture (like city and state, respectively) and that’s the prefecture that was hit hard by the tsunami. Fortunately, Hanamaki is far enough inland that it wasn’t affected that much. The place is GORGEOUS. If you’ve ever seen My Neighbor Totoro, that’s what the landscape is like (if you haven’t seen it, DO). 

It’s way north of Tokyo, a couple hours via shinkansen (bullet train). And that’s saying something cause the land-speed of those things is about 300km/h (186mph). Kyte had never been on a train before and we were wondering how he would fair. Just another playroom for him! When an express BLASTS through a station at full-speed, it’ll stop your heart and such the air out of your lungs. But when you’re in them, they’re quiet, smooth, spacious and comfortable. You can even swivel your row of seats around to face the people behind you, as you can see from the video, across the aisle. 

And the seats both recline and slide forward more than they do on airplanes, so napping is easy. And the trains are so frequent that they're rarely crowded, and there are no security hassles to get on one... yet. Why take a plane? We need to lay more track!

Hanamaki is country-side, very agricultural. If you’ve ever thought that its stereotyping Japanese country-side to think of wrinkled old men wearing big hats hunched over bright green rice paddies interrupted by small groves of lush trees with forested hills rising steeply under the rolling white clouds- it’s not. That’s what it’s like. Cosmos growing six feet tall along the roadside and a mile between people. The shinkansen gets you from Tokyo to That in about 5 minutes. So we visited Grandpa and introduced him to his first great-grandchild and took 1.27 million photos and eventually were off to lunch (for dessert: ice-cream cones so tall you have to eat them with chopsticks) 

...and then to our hotel at some of the famous Hanamaki Onsen!

Onsen are natural hot springs, fresh pure hot mineral water bubbling up from the ground, and Hanamaki has several and they often have nice hotels built over them. From what I’d always heard, they were more than just a nice hot bath in the wilds of Japan. They been long thought to have medical use, so people come from all over the world to soak in them. Don’t worry, though- I’m not saying that you’re gonna be climbing into some disease-ridden bog of nasty human waste-water. These things are clean, and our hotel offered both private and non-private, indoor and outdoor options. 

Some other guy's photo of our non-private men's bath.

The non-private ones are separated male and female. So we got checked in, a process that comes with a traditional bowl of maccha (Green Tea) and azuki (sweet red bean paste). Yum!

Yumi and I started by reserving a private indoor spring, and after the initial shower to rinse out my deodorant and buckets of hair gel we...(BIG BLACK CENSOR BAR). That's just a little fiction for the ladies. 

The hotel provides everyone with yukata (like bathrobes but you can wear them in public).

 So we all went to dinner in ours.

They don’t withhold anything for the dinners in these joints. All kinds of things appear on the table. I took pictures of the initial spread but they kept bringing more and more and I just had to stop. I’ve never tasted half of what I ate that night, nor can I name it. Some of the things I couldn’t tell if they used to swim around or if they were pulled out of the ground, but it was all quality stuff. As you can see from some of the photos and video, they light little fires under some of the food and it cooks there right in front of you.

That all conked me out pretty hard so I woke up after a good night’s sleep to find out that Mom and Yumi had somehow woken up at 3:30am and decided to take another dip in the hot springs! The non-private ones are open 24-7. Also, Dad woke up at 4am and went as well! What’s with these guys?! I know a hot soak feels great and all, but so does SLEEP! And plus, there are bears out there, man! No kidding, they post signs. 

Well, the next morning, after Kyte and I woke up (some of us have some sense) and ate at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet (of more weird things you’d never think of as breakfast food in Iowa) Dad wanted to take one last dip before checking out. So I went along with him. I didn’t exactly relish the idea of bathing all nekkid with other men, curse my American prudishness! It’s just not something I’ve even gotten into the habit of. Plus, the guys here were Olde! The hotel was mostly populated by members of a high-school reunion that must have been from the world’s first high school. I was half-afraid I was going to have to make sure no-one went belly-up mid-bath or give mouth-to-mouth sans dentures. Seriously, though- onsen are great for the elderly.

I didn't take this photo but it is the one Dad and I soaked in.

Turns out it was actually pretty great- no one was at the bath outside, open to the sky and the crows above. So Dad and I had the pool to our "steam our vegetables" in all by ourselves. Or so we thought…

I looked up and Dad was standing, full monty, waving back at a couple of women on a balcony that could juuuust see down to us. Fortunately, it was my wife and Mom. Unfortunately, they had a camera.

FYI, Much Happiness is Choked Up

“Do you want go back to America?” she asked, barely stifling a laugh.

“I want to go to the graveyard,” I replied, wringing sweat from my aching hands.

 

        Yesterday I got my very own bank account! Now I feel like I really exist. Getting a bank account in Japan is a must if you want to get a job and GET PAID. There is no checking system here. Come payday, you don’t get a paycheck from your company. WHAAAAA???

How do you get paid?

How do you pay bills?

Wazzup, Nippon?

All that stuff here is electronic. Automatic deposit, money transfers, etc. It's like The Future here! People still carry little books around that shows their current balance based on deposit and withdrawals and transactions and stuff, but instead of hand-writing the numbers, there is a slot in the bank machines for your book. You put your book in, do your transaction, and take your book back. The machine prints everything on the page for you. Oh, people in Japan still use cash just as much as Americans, just no checks. And if you want to open an account, you might want to learn the language first.

Exhibit A:

I walked into the bank about ten minutes before closing time. The weathered security guard glared directly into my very soul. Yumi and Mom were there, which is good because Mom used to work for a bank. There was some initial trouble when she explained to the teller why we were there. Turns out if you want to get a decent account, you have to have lived in Japan for at least six months. I got here a week ago. So to make sure that I wasn’t going to be the next Drug-Dealing Kingpin Yakuza Boss, they gave me the form for The Most Restricted Bank Account Ever Conceived by Man or God. I can't even get a payday deposit for my future job without my future company paying a large future fee. But that's fine- I'll take what I can get :D

The paperwork was a multi-page form all in Japanese… and I had to be the one to fill it out!!! Gulp. Fortunately, Yumi was able to sit next to me and point and explain and translate. Unfortunately, when I finally filled out the entire form (after much sweating and gnashing of teeth) I was told that I’d filled it out WRONG! In the space that asks for first and last name, I hadn’t put my middle name, as was listed on my foreigner ID card.

(See, Japan doesn’t have middle names, so there are no spaces for them in the paperwork.)

So I tried again. I made another mistake and was told that I had to put my last name first. I got another form and made another mistake. Then another.

It was long after closing time now, and the I was in the process of adding my final stamp to the form. In Japan, there’s a lot of paperwork that you sign with your personal stamp, or inkan. When you go to the bank, for example, you need to carry it with you. If you accept a package delivery at your front door, you use your little inkan stamp. It's a small piece of wood, like a thick pencil a few inches long that comes with a little ink pad and carrying case. 

So with a very cramped hand, I put my final mark on the paperwork. The bank-teller’s head dropped with a grimace. The stamp was not complete- it was missing a little ink in the top corner. I had to start over again. Yumi had been shaking with silent laughter for the last half-hour and finally had to move away from me.

Eventually I drilled a hole in the ink-pad with my little stamp, got it right (after being told that my European 0’s, 1’s, and 7’s were unacceptable but they would let that slide this one time) and I was ready to leave, as was the entire staff. I staggered over to Mom.

“Do you want go back to America?” she asked, barely stifling a laugh.

“I want to go to the graveyard,” I replied, wringing sweat from my aching hands. She then told me that it happens that way at banks all the time...

...with the very elderly.

For all its value in precision, you would think that Japan would pay someone to double-check English spelling, grammar, idioms, etc, when selling products with English on them. We went to the baby store today and I saw this gem of a little girl's shirt:



Pardon me, little girl. Would you happen to be carrying a delicious...OH! Well, it says right there!



 There are some more great things I saw Japan pitching to babies, like this snack especially formulated for your toddler:

                                          Mmmmm...Crispy!!!

You’ve heard of Mickey Mouse? Well apparently he’s a knock-off of this guy:

Miki was there first- says so right there on the package. So it must be true. That Walt Disney, wadda thief!

                              No, It's completely different see cause like this one is made up of a big circle and a couple of small ones for the ears and then just a couple more for the- HEYWAITJUSTAGALLDURNMINUTE!

And in honor of the upcoming October festivities, Japan would like to wish everyone a:

I’ve been finding some of the adjustments here a tad difficult, as expected. So the family came through again and surprised me with this little piece of heaven:

It translates to Peanuts Cream! It’s a little carton of refrigeratable food of THE GODS!!!

(Peanut Butter is an American product for Americans in America, I’ve come to find out.)

 But they gave me a little peanuts cream sandwich- I wish I had a picture of the whole thing but I ate this rarity so fast I couldn’t see straight. Two pieces of white bread, crust removed, then sealed all around the edges to make like a Wonder Bread sort of pita pocket filled with Peanuts “OH-MA-FRICKIN-GOSHNESS” Cream.

I recommend it a little bit.

After much lightning and wind and rain, the storm of the past couple days has passed.

Dang. I liked the rain.

But I hear it’s supposed to rain again tomorrow...

...

Soy Sauce and Mayo

I love my balcony view of a storm approaching Mt. Fuji at sunset. It makes one ponder themselves, their inner-most workings. It makes me think: I’ve been eating, since I came to Japan. It’s just one of those things I can never stop doing. What gives? A Japanese breakfast at our house often consists of:

1. Left-overs from the previous night’s dinner. This often consists of some sort of salad, potato or otherwise, rice-balls (onigiri), sometimes miso soup, and slices of hot dog, and pickles. Soy sauce and mayo (Japanese mayonnaise, pronounced "my-oh") go on just about everything.
2. Tiny bowl of cereal. Yumi’s mom (hereafter referred to as “Mom”) has been extremely considerate in buying me a box of cereal, which is still kind of an oddity in Japan. They don’t come cheap, and so I eat very small portions to make it last, which is fine because the cereal bowls are microscopic. Also, Mom makes me a mug of coffee. Did I mention that she officially rocks?

     As far as I can tell, there’s not much difference between breakfast food and dinner food in Japan. Maybe add a bread-product in the morning. And in America, we tend to eat one or two main things per meal, and just heap them up on our plate. Mountain of potatoes- BWAHHHH!!!! Half a cow- MEAT!!! RRAAARRRRR!!!! Maybe a sprinkling of ceremonial vegetables on the side, ya know, for color. YEE-HAWWWW!

     Japanese cuisine means variety in small portions. The tables here are scattered throughout the day with many small dishes of all kinds of things. These communal servings usually cover all the food groups and are relatively healthy, especially compared to American microwave-cooking standards. The result: Japanese people look fan-TAS-tic in slim-fit clothing! But take note: if you find a plate you especially like, please refrain from multiple visits to said plate. Share the wealth.

     In The States, I’ll bury everything on my plate in mashed potatoes, shunting anything with any sort of color pigmentation cleanly off the plate. In Nippon (that’s Japan, to the Japanese) you’d get dirty looks for hoarding any one particular item. Ask Yumi’s brother, any time we have Chicky-Chicky-Bone, or buffalo wings, as we know them. If you’re not fast enough, or if you like to wash your hands before eating, you’ll arrive at the table to find Yumi’s youngest brother (hereafter referred to as Youngest Brother) picking his teeth with the last of the tiny bones. Chicky-Chicky-Bone is one of the three predicted causes of an impending WWIII.

     As I try to adjust to this style of eating, my stomach rumbles between meals. Or maybe that’s the thunder from the typhoon off Okinawa just now. So on the way back from the supermarket, I bought one of my favorite doughnuts to tide me over til lunch.

An open letter to Cicadas:

“Dear Cicadas,

Please LAY OFF MY CURRY DOUGHNUT! This is MY curry doughnut! It and its tasty filling are not for your kind, so you can just stay up in your jealousy-tree and scream your whining song of pure insanity down all into the night, cause you aint getting any of this here CURRY FREAKIN DOUGHNUT! It’s MY doughnut! Get a job and get your own 98 yen. Ikea is currently hiring part-time!

             

Yours everlasting,

Brett J. Farnsworth

Oh, and PS, Cicadas: Don’t even THINK about dropping any more of your creepy-nasty discarded exoskeletons down on my head, cause I’d hate to bite into, for example,  a curry doughnut, and find a misplaced crunchy bit that came off of that Starship Trooper-looking thorax of yours in my tasty pastry. That’d really chap my fuzzy white-boy hide. FYI, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. Just a head's up. Laters!

...   ...   ...

PPS. Winter is coming…BWAHAHAHAHAAA!”

Also on the way back from everywhere we’ve been going lately, we’ve been running into these great little local festival parade thingies. Yumi said that each little locality has their own shrine and right now, throngs of people, little kids to really REALLY, like medieval-period-OLDE people, have been marching the streets in their traditional garb, matching yukata’s and tabi and all, playing flutes and drums and banging wooden blocks together while teams of people hoist their shrines onto their collective shoulders, chanting and singing who knows what.

One of these days I’ll have to learn Japanese. Even an ignoramus like me knows that we should have more community pride and all-inclusive street parties like this in The US. Even not knowing the language here, these little parades are the most charming surprises to encounter around the many narrow little corners. Yumi says these sort of mark the end of summer. For those of you who are thinking of coming to Japan, please know that these in no way resemble what Kurt Russell encountered in the very realistic documentary “Big Trouble in Little China.” Japan is a very safe place (but do watch out for those dirty, thieving cicadas and all the Godzillas- they’re everywhere here).

By the way, I've been looking ALLL over for one of my favorite seasonal flavors: Pumpkin. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumkin soup, all those things that I know you see state-side right now. I can't find it ANYWHERE. Really! Starbucks doesn't even have Pumkin Spice Lattes here (those traitors!)... But I'm learning a bit about fall seasonal foods in Japan. Chestnuts! It's all about chestnuts here, and yes- they do start roasting them on an open fire long before Bing starts crooning it across the Pacific. You can get them roasted at a street-stand or as a flavor in many many things here. That's Nuts!

A final anecdote on food for this entry: Tomorrow is my 34^th birthday. I REALLY hope I outlive Kurt Cobain and Jesus because I’m having too much fun here. To celebrate, Mom and Dad ordered a delicacy called Dominos Pizza for lunch while Younger Brother is here. They asked me to choose the pizza, so I looked through the menu and veered promptly away from the one with the crab claws hanging over all sides, looking like a creature from some nightmare Tim Burton had. I chose a couple of options and they ordered two EXTRA-LARGES! WOO-HOOO!!!

This next part says a lot about the size of food-portions in Japan. The pizzas arrived approx. one minute before they were due and I couldn’t help but notice that the mondo-size in Japan translates to just slightly larger than our personal-size pizzas in The States. But Mom to the rescue- our pizza lunch also consisted of the aforementioned onigiri, kim-chi (yes, that’s Korean, but still popular in Japan), Chicky-Chicky-Bone (I got two wings and a new scar before they were gone) and a very rare treat indeed, Coca Cola! Ok, the coke isn’t rare, but the Japanese aren’t into it the way Americans are (you can’t find 2-liters here), and it just plain tastes better in Japan. Hey, it’s all about context! Plus, the pizza was pretty dang good, and just a mere $60! Happy Birthday to watashi!

Sayounara Los Angeles. Konbanwa Tokyo.

Sayounara Los Angeles. Konbanwa Tokyo.

We made it across the big pond today. After months of selling; packing; donating; trashing; shipping and pawning our junk off on our friends, my family and I have relocated to the largest metropolis in the world. What’s our plan now? I dunno. Good question!

I’m Brett: a tallish white bad actor with bad hair- think of a Nicholas Cage that no one had ever heard of (wouldn’t that be nice?) People who new me as an actor new me by my middle name: Jonathan. You with me? Last October (2011), my awesome ninja Japanese wife Yumi and I had our first baby, a beautiful little biter named Kyte. Over the last year, we got to thinking that it might be a good idea to take our little boy to Japan for a decade or so. Things weren’t going so well in America at the time- bad economy, bad school-system, my acting career went from a snail’s pace to just plain dead, and Yumi and I had both been laid-off multiple times, losing our health insurance in the process. We figured it was high-time we jet over to her native Tokyo and give Kyte a better start than we could in the good olde U. S. of A. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country, but when you have a kid who has dual citizenship, you owe it to him to let him try both out, and maybe start him off with the one that will give him better education, health care, child care, healthier food, multiple languages starting in Elementary School, etc. So we’ll bring him back to the US in ten years or so and give him the things America can the Japan can’t. Kyte’s gonna be one amazing boy! Once he stops biting my face every chance he gets.

But for now, we’re off the plane and walking around Tokyo like zombies wandering through jello. Yumi’s family are here, and we’re staying with her parents in their four-bedroom place until we’re on our feet. So it’s up to me to get a job and get us our own place as quickly as possible. The idea is for me to start teaching conversational English in the private sector. I have a bachelor’s degree (in theater- does that even count??) and I’m a native English speaker. That’s about the only requisites, or SO I HEAR, for landing a job at an eikaiwa, or English Conversation School. These schools take students who’ve learned grammatically correct English in the public school systems over here (it’s required starting young!) and teach them what English actually sounds like. The idea is that no one in America speaks proper English (WHAAAAA???) so, forget everything you’ve learned. We’ll teach you to understand what a mess we’ve made of the language. So that’s what I’m going for… starting Tuesday… once the fog of jetlag has oozed out my ears. We’ve arrived on a holiday weekend- Monday is Old People Day (celebrating those over 60 Years Olde!)

In the meantime, Yumi’s parents are being very helpful about making such a large transition as easy as possible. Item 1: I LUUURVE me some Halloween. It’s right up there with Christmas for me (neither of which are really celebrated over here). So Yumi’s mom researched a little bit about Halloween traditions and found out about carving pumpkins. Then she asked me who Jack of the Pumpkins is and made the announcement that she is ordering me a pumpkin online! Yup! That’s right. An online pumpkin delivery service that even provides you with a carving tool! I’m eagerly anticipating an exquisitely-wrapped pumpkin-shaped cardboard box arriving any day now :D  I already love Japan. I’m thinking of creating a sort of Halloween-educational event and showing John Carpenter’s “Halloween” in the park, just to give the little kiddies here a taste of how great American holidays can be!

Oh, and Special Bonus Thought: Watching “The Final Countdown” on Japanese tv with my father-in-law = Awkward Awesomeness.