Japan catch-all whatever, 2020! Olympics, etc. blah blah.
So, I have been living in Japan for almost a year (not quite). It is the year of the rat which means me, and I’ll give my general observations:
-I sit on the floor, A LOT.
At my house. At my in-laws house. At my wives grandmas house. I hated it, but I now choose to sit on floor. Conditioning.
-Highballs. Whisky soda. All the time.
-Despite its reputation, Japan is…super old school ultra throwback paper work bullshit. Stuck in the '90s…'80s…'50s? Tower records lives! Zima! Travel Agencies! Arcades! I bought a house, 100% pressing the flesh. No emails. A tome of documents. Lots of paper work. I have to go to City Hall dozens of times. Fuck this garbage!
-A '“DVD shop” is for adult videos.
-People at an ice rink wear helmets. Sorry, it it is funny to me.
-The secret best thing about Japan BY FAR is bath culture hands down. SHUT UP. Onsen. Sento. Super Sento, Roten-buro, etc.
Everything in Japan is smaller, EXCEPT for the bathroom. It’s bigger, it’s better. It is amazing. That’s all.
My friends got married in Tokyo last Summer and they asked me to be a witness whilst I was on holiday there with my wife. Turns out getting married in Tokyo is a very bureaucratic process, and we went with them to the ward office in Setagaya and it was in some basement of a brutalist municipal building. There were two guys behind the desk in uniform who’s job mostly seemed to involve giving out forms for parking or something.
We had beers on the steps outside afterwards, it was a fun afternoon.
I went for a couple weeks last year and fairly desperately want to go back. I don’t think I’ll every get to live there thanks to my particular situation. Pretty jealous of you!
Also one particular thing, if you move, you have to report to the local town hall. The government tracks you. Literally a guy pulls out this map book and pin-points your house, and documents it. Super analog.
My two weeks there were incredible, and I still have my credit card statements / debt to remind me.
Going to a Hanshin Tigers baseball game was something else. How that came about was a bit mad. I had looked into buying tickets to a baseball game a bit before heading out but the Yomiuri Giants games were sold out and that as far as I got. I wanted to buy a hat for a team anyway and went to a New Era shop in Shibuya, and decided I liked the Hanshin design the best. Later that day at a meal out with the happy couple, one of their friends saw my new hat and said “Oh, Hanshin Tigers, you want to go on Saturday? My colleague has a spare ticket, we don’t really like baseball but it’s a laugh”. And so I went. And the Tigers won. Ex Cub Kosuke Fukudome was playing and I ended up buying a Fukudome shirt as I was a bit drunk by the end of the game.
Or more likely, tradition is SUPER hard to overcome.
Never been, but my godson is half Japanese. His dad was over there for 10 years working for SEGA and brought a wife when he returned to 'Murica. They were always trying to hook me up with their other Japanese friends. Which was an interesting if futile time although I learned a lot of culture and a smattering of language!
I suppose another thing worth mentioning is nomihodai or all-you-can-drink. You can go to a restaurant and get all-you-can-drink. Usually limited to 2 hours. Although there are places you can find that are longer, or shorter for on the cheap. Like about 10 USD for 1 hour. (Akabane) It’s usually always time limited though.
Probably my favorite experience is a sake (nihonshu) place that is 5 hours, if you come at opening and stay till closing. It’s self-serve. I went solo and ended up with a group who went to a nijikai (second party). We got a bottle of Awamori, which is a spirit on the level of vodka…I forget what happened after that.
Have they started enforcing the requirement for foreign residents to register by their local ward offices or face fines yet? I remember the expat/immigrant community being up in arms (me included) when they moved this from being a courtesy to a hard requirement but I left a year or so after so curious how that turned out.
My friend just spent 2 weeks in Japan with his son, who is on a 2yr teaching stint there and was so impressed with the toilet seat that has a little bidet arm (that is heated!), he bought one and installed it when he got home.
A friend went to a Korean bath house when he visited LA. Not the same, I’m sure, but he made it sound so frickin’ luxurious (closest to a Super Sento, I guess) that I’m itching for the chance to visit one.
There’s not a big deal with toilet seats in Japan. But there are parts of the country where it’s just a hole in the ground, and squatting is required. Those places are beautiful though so totally worth it.
