Benjamin Hourigan

Just a short post to indicate that yes, both I and this blog are still alive and operational. I’m still settling into Melbourne, having been back from Japan almost a month now. I found myself a cheap city apartment, and have been doing some transcription work as an office temp, while I look for something more interesting and more lucrative. Given the ludicrous situation that one usually has to wait weeks for an ADSL connection in Australia, I’m stuck on dial-up access, which is no inducement to blog. Expect the site to become more active once I have real internet access again.

Being in Japan for the last 8 months, where I’ve been not just isolated from the world, but cut off by language from most of the people here, has increased my sense of the importance of family and friendship. In the past I kept to myself, turned down invitations in favor of quiet nights at home, stewed in loneliness, and kept at bay the people I ought to have been close to. I wasted time on media escapism, time I should have spent on conversation, dinners, drinking and dancing.

When I left, I’d been stuck in life and love for a long time, and the only way of breaking free that I could find was to cut loose, to leave without a plan for coming back. Had I chosen a place worth living in, maybe I’d have stayed. But my old home is, from what I hear, among the best of cities. I chose my destination poorly, but my action wisely. Eight months in what may as well have been outer space cleared out my complacency, despair, and my reluctance to live boldly.

There are people I didn’t pay enough attention to while I was in Melbourne, and people I didn’t say goodbye to properly. There’s no excuse, but I’ll try to make amends. I’ll be back next Friday: expect to hear from me.

Japan was a bust. The slap-the-country-in-the-face-post can wait until I return to Melbourne in 27 days.

I’m looking forward to clean air, trees, beautiful buildings, great food, jobs that don’t take 14 hours out of every day, and women who speak English.

I also have a new header image featuring the Melbourne skyline (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons). Until I leave for Montréal, Melbourne is where I’ll be looking for home.

Here’s a great television commercial for a Final Fantasy-branded energy drink on sale in Japan at the moment. Two white collar workers fight for the last bottle left in a convenience store, Final Fantasy-style!

The answer, in my case, is ten.

In Japan, people are traditionally accustomed to sitting on the floor, so when one of my lightbulbs blew last night, I found my furnished apartment lacking a chair high-enough to stand on while I changed it.

Today, though, some lateral thinking led me to make use of a stack of ten comic books that I’d rescued from the garbage area about two weeks ago. Weekly comic compilations in Japan are very thick, so the bundle of ten, neatly tied up with string for collection, was quite high enough for me to reach the light fitting.

Ten comic books, next to one of the floor-sitting chairs that were in my apartment when I arrived.

After a whole weekend in Tôkyô, I was broke, and feeling like I couldn’t wait to get out of Ôta so I wouldn’t have to spend 4000¥ every time I wanted to do something interesting. Also, I’d finally settled in: I had internet access, a mobile phone, I’d finished my training, and I was working a regular schedule. With all that out of the way, I started to realize how little there was to do in Ôta.

Tuesday 20 September

Some time during the week, I think on the Tuesday, I asked where the transfer forms were at work. Brendan, the branch manager, told me where they were, but said that my request to transfer probably wouldn’t be processed until after my probation ended on December 1. The area manager, Tracey, was on the phone to our branch at the time, and Brendan confirmed this with her. What Tracey neglected to mention was that by refusing to consider my application before December, she’d get to keep me in Ôta until February, since NOVA offices are closed on January 1, and transfers can only take place on the first of a month.

Even so, I got the impression that NOVA wouldn’t transfer me out of Ôta in a hurry, so I started to look for jobs in Tôkyô and Ôsaka in earnest.

Saturday 24 September

During the week, I managed to get my MENSA membership transferred to Japan, and the membership secretary invited me to a function they were having on Saturday. I was looking forward to building a social network in Tôkyô, ready for a move there. The secretary had sent me several emails telling me she hoped I could come. But despite several requests for an exact address and time, the woman never gave me anything more specific than “it’s in Daikanyama, at an actor’s house, in the afternoon.”

Having planned nothing else, I decided to go down to Tôkyô anyway, hoping for an SMS with the address. It never arrived. So, I went to Ikebukuro to collect my sunglasses from Jim and Co.’s hotel, where I’d left them the weekend before, then walked south through Bunkyô-ku, Shinjuku, and part of Shibuya-ku to Harajuku, where I got thoroughly lost around Yoyogi park. The walk took 4.5 hours!

I was extremely tired by the time I arrived back in Ôta around 22:00, but there was a big party on to say goodbye to Ken and Georgina, two NOVA instructors in the area who were going back to Ireland. I’d been dreading it a little, expecting more izakaya-style billing problems, but was also excited about meeting some more of the gaijin in the area. Sure enough, there were billing issues: the staff charged our table 73,000¥ for the night, and the money we’d put in based on what we ordered wasn’t enough to cover it. When asked to, the staff refused to give us an itemized bill, so there was about 30 minutes of messing around with the money (in which I stood silently and let other people cover it, since I only had 1000¥ left for food until Wednesday) before we finally had enough.

On the upside of the night, I met a Samoan-born rugby-player for Sanyo called Afai. He had one of the best attitudes of any of the gaijin I’d met in Ôta, and was super-keen to learn Japanese. Good work Afai! You cheered me up.

Aside from that, though, by the end of the night I was burning with rage. How dare NOVA place me in Ôta: didn’t they know who I was? I had a publications list on my resumé, for crying out loud! How could a MENSA member tell me several times she was looking forward to meeting me, but never tell me where I was supposed to go? And what was the deal with these izakaya? What made them think they could just make up a bill at the end of the night and expect us to pay?

As I said, I was burning with rage, and I was starting to hate Japan.

Hate Japan? Me? Wait a minute… This story’s no good…

Let’s start again…

So, I’ve been slack. What started out as a series of posts on two weeks in Japan still hasn’t been finished after a month here. It’s been long enough that I’ve started to forget what days I did things on, so this may be a little bit vague. On the plus-side, the boring bits have probably faded from my mind. The saga continues…

Monday 5 September

I can’t remember what I did on the Sunday, but Monday the fifth was my 24th birthday. With nary a person to wish me well, I decided to go to Tôkyô. Until this point, I’d been unable to recharge my laptop, because I couldn’t find, in Ôta, a power-plug adaptor for Australian appliances. Ah, actually, now I remember I’d spent Sunday riding around Ôta looking in vain for adaptors. So Monday I went in search of them in Akihabara, a district of Tôkyô famed for discount electronics.

I used the 2-hour train-ride to study Japanese. Already, I’d started to understand my textbook a lot better, leaping ahead through lessons from one to another recognition of something someone had said to me in a store.

At the end of the line, Asakusa Station, I was thoroughly bewildered about which way I was facing, and asked a man standing outside, in Japanese “which way is north?” He pointed uncertainly in a direction I later discovered was something more like east than north, and delivered the first English word I’d heard out of a Japanese person’s mouth since I arrived “perhaps.” I arigatô gozaimashita-ed him and went on my way, trusting my own instincts rather than his.

As it turned out, I wasn’t totally wrong, for heading what I thought was North I did in fact arrive at the Sensô-ji, a famous temple north of Asakusa station. The Sensô-ji’s most striking feature is, hanging on its front gate, the most gigantic red lantern I have ever seen. I didn’t have a camera at the time, so here’s a picture I poached.

Something worth noting about Japanese temples is that while they’re nice to look at, there isn’t really a lot you can do there. For visitors, the bulk of a temple is screened off. You can see the main hall, but through a screen, and you certainly can’t walk in on their tatami with your dirty gaijin shoes. And yes, there are definitely people around Tôkyo who would walk in with their shoes on. People can go around the side to enter and pray, but I’m not sure what they’d think if a foreigner took a seat in there and started meditating. As a Western Zen practitioner, the idea of praying to a Buddha seems antithetical to the ideals of Buddhism, but whatever…

From the Sensô-ji, I continued to get my bearings, wandering into a department store before resolutely setting out to walk to Akihabara. Map distances in Tôkyo can be deceptive, and it probably took me the better part of an hour to get to there, given that I went the wrong way at least once. It was raining all day, too. Fortunately, I had an umbrella, but the city streets were covered in a layer of water, and I had holes in the soles of my shoes. My feet got soaked, and very sore into the bargain.

Though Den-den town in Akihabara has a reputation as a good place to buy discount electronics, I didn’t find it particularly mindblowing. I did see some interesting things not available outside Japan, such as Sharp’s Zaurus [model number], an Linux-based PDA with a built-in 4MB hard-disk. Computers, in fact, are extraordinarily cheap and small nearly everywhere you go here: a lightweight Sony Vaio that might cost you AU$4000 in Australia is about 120,000¥ here (maybe AU$1500). But then, I spend most of my time working with computers, so Akihabara was pretty mundane. What was interesting to me, though, was that a lot of the electronics stores in Akihabara employ Indian guys who can speak English to foreigners. I managed to find out, from one such guy, on the seventh and top floor of a multilevel electronics store, that the power adapter I needed was of a kind that I’d seen numerous times in Ôta: I just hadn’t known what it was.

Though my trip was, in a sense, unneccessary, it introduced me to what I was missing in Ôta, what I’d come here for: some of the major cities of the world. Tôkyo is a sprawling, sometimes stinking, sometimes very shabby metropolis. But it’s damned impressive, even the most unkempt parts like Asakusa, part of the old Shitamachi (literally downtown, or under-town). With all its obvious flaws, Tôkyo is still a monument to the great power of human intellect and industry, a great congregation of humanity in pursuit of happiness, wealth, and progress. As important as Ôta, a factory town, is to human industry, it’s not at the center of things, and at the center is where I want to be.

Tôkyo is inspiring. After seeing it, Ôta seems like a prison.

(After returning from Tôkyo, I went out to an Ôta izakaya called Gin for a few birthday drinks. Great sashimi and interesting yakitori [including skewers with nothing but chicken skin on them]. Thanks for taking me out, guys.)

Tuesday 6—Thursday 8 September

For the next three days, I had training at Takasaki in Saitama prefecture, about an hour from Ôta. On Tuesday I yet again caught the wrong train, to Akagi, got off early at Aioi, made a phone call to NOVA HQ in Tôkyo to say I’d be late while waiting for the train to Kiryû, but then managed to get to Takasaki for training with about 2 minutes to spare. It was a mistake I haven’t made since.

As with orientation, training was for me alone. Paul, the trainer at the branch, had a great sense of humour, as did the staff at the branch, and though learning to implement the extremely packed lesson format at NOVA was a little stressful, the three 8-hour days I spent in Takasaki were fun. I got to meet several more instructors, and see them at work. One, Brendan, had an MA in Japanese Studies, which he’d got for writing a thesis on how Japanese attitudes to Nobunaga Oda had changed since the Meiji Restoration (based on an analysis of textbooks). Again, I came face to face with instructor lack of Japanese ability. Behind Brendan, and Richard, a guy from Adelaide who’s been here six years and has a Japanese wife, my Japanese was probably the third best in the office, and at that stage I was only up to Chapter 8 or 9 of my beginners’ textbook. Disappointing.

Friday 9 September

My first day teaching a full schedule (a whole 5 lessons over four hours) at the NOVA branch in the Aeon shopping centre here in Ôta. For the most part, unremarkable. Preparing lessons and filling out reports in the meagre 10-minute breaks allotted is a hard task for a newcomer, but in the days to come, it turned into a habit rather than something to be thought about too much. As a beginner, one can teach only a very small range of ability levels, and one doesn’t take free conversation (VOICE) or kids’ classes, so shifts can be a little monotonous. But it’s a pleasure to meet students, and the shifts, for a part-timer, are very short. Easy money, perhaps…

Saturday 10 September

Today I took the plunge and went up to Yamada Denki to secure my own mobile phone, no thanks to NOVA who led me to expect they’d help and then didn’t. Though I asked, reciting a phrase I’d meticulously and (I now know) incorrectly composed in my notebook, if anyone could help me in English, the only person in the store who could was busy at the time. If you thought Japanese people learned English at school, and could speak it, think again: if you’re out of the major cities, odds are they can’t. So I tried in my broken Japanese, and to my surprise, once the woman who spoke English was free to help, it was usually easier to keep the explanations in Japanese. So, I got a phone, a Sharp 903SH with a 3 megapixel camera built in. 15000¥ (about AU$180) on a 1-year contract. I swear the same phone would have cost me at least AU$600 in Australia. We sure do get ripped off at home.

At night, I went out to Gin again, this time with a much larger group of gaijin, including instructors from schools other than NOVA. Though it’s fun to go out drinking, staff at the izakayas around here don’t have the best ordering and billing practices. I kept getting sent beers I hadn’t ordered, and as a result ended up being both drunker, and poorer, by the end of the night than I intended. Once Gin closed, we went to an all-night place where my intention to order nothing but Coke was actually heeded, but we didn’t stay there long.

Sunday 11 September

The national election is today, so I can say goodbye to the vans waking me up with blaring political slogans at 8am in the morning. I was going to try climbing the local mountain today, but it was rained all day. Just as well, since I was hung over from drinking beers I hadn’t ordered. I stayed inside and… I don’t know. Did I read a book? Somewhere around this point I managed to get internet access by plugging an Airport Express into my upstairs neighbour’s broadband modem, so creating a wireless network that I could use in my own apartment. So I may have spent the day Skyping or something.

An uneventful close to a big week. More coming up.