Gaijin Chronicles Issue 10: Of Toast and Telephones

Rice paddies near our neighborhood.

(Originally published September 18, 2007)

I set two pieces of toast on fire today.  Really.  I didn’t just burn them.  There were actual flames.  Twice. 

Before I left the states, I told many of you that we’d be living like college students.  We weren’t shipping any furniture, I ditched my cat at my sister’s house, and we were taking only what would fit in two carry-on bags and five suit cases of various sizes.  This means, however, in some aspects we are worse off than college students. 

We don’t have air conditioning.  In the winter, we don’t have heat.  We do have two fans and some space heaters.  We have a coffee table.  We have four cushions for the floor in nicely coordinated shades of sage green and brown.  We have two of those adjustable “banana chairs” that sit flat on the floor and have a back.  In the States, we didn’t have a “real” bed.  We had a king-sized Aerobed with a heated mattress pad and a featherbed on top.  Western beds here are very expensive, and for the average westerner, futons (not at all like the ones in the States) are uncomfortable.  So Sean lugged our air bed across the Pacific Ocean in his baggage.  What we didn’t lug across was our featherbed, considering it costs more than the rest of our bedroom furniture put together.  So, we have a bed.  Not as comfortable as it could be, but cheap and big. 

The garbage days here are complicated.  Recyclables go out only twice a month.  Garbage can go into the dumpsters any day.  But… garbage here is incinerated, so only the burnable garbage can go out whenever.  There is a separate once- or twice-monthly day for “unburnable” garbage.  Then there’s a once-a-month day for “big” garbage.  And it stinks (no pun intended), because you place your recyclables, unburnables, big garbage, etc, in a big fenced cage.  However, the cage is locked except for garbage days.  This means, of course, that everything accumulates all over the apartment until garbage day.  Sometimes this isn’t a bad thing.  On one of the big garbage days, Sean and I were walking past the unlocked cage and saw some bookshelves and other furniture.  We looked at each other, got an evil gleam in our collective eye, and went dumpster diving. 

Did we feel foolish?  Heck yes.  Were we ashamed?  Heck no.  So, in addition to our coffee table, bed, and two floor chairs, we also have a skinny and a wide bookshelf.  No books yet, but we have the shelves.  One is in the kitchen, holding our Costco supplies of black beans, chicken broth, tomatoes, and cereal.  The other one is a table for our phone and a landing place for our junk. 

In the kitchen, we have a decent set of dishes that we got from the “Hyaku Yen” (read: Dollar Store), a pan, and a pot.  A microwave, a mini-fridge, and a rice maker complete our additions.  We have a mini two-burner gas stove, but no oven.  And no toaster. 

To make toast, we use the mini-broiler in our mini-stove in our mini-kitchen.  The problem with this is that you have to be REALLY attentive.  The other problem is that wheat bread is rare, and it’s expensive.  So my timing, for white bread at least, is nearly perfect.  For some scientific reason, wheat bread toasts FAR faster than white bread.  Don’t believe me?  Try it at home.  Use the same toaster setting for white bread and wheat bread, and see which one comes out toastier. 

So today, I go to make myself some toast (wheat…it was on sale) for a snack before I start writing.  I put it in the broiler, walk into our “living room” to pull up my document, and then I smell smoke.  I dash the three steps into the kitchen, pull out the broiler, and once the smoke clears (we don’t have any smoke alarms, either), I have to blow out my toast.  Yes, I had to blow it out like a marshmallow that “accidentally” catches fire during the s’more roast. 

I looked sadly at my poor slice of wheat bread.  Normally, I would get the knife and scrape off the charred parts in the sink and figure it was good enough.  This poor bread, however, was unsalvageable.  Still smoking.  Charred a quarter of an inch deep.  The purest black.  So, with a sigh, I place it in the sink to cool down before I throw it away so that I don’t set the garbage on fire.  I get another slice of bread, put it in the broiler, turn around and throw the other bread away, turn back around, and the other piece is on fire!!

Again, I pull out toast, blow it out, and survey the damage.  This one isn’t as bad.  I whip out my knife, scrape it off in the sink, and flip the bread over to toast the other side.  This time I crouch down on my knees and watch it the whole time through the little window.  Yup.  Sure enough, it’s done in about 5.4 seconds.  When Sean asks why we went through bread so fast, I’ll tell him I made a sandwich. 

Sadly enough, that’s about as much excitement as my average day holds.  I have, for all intents and purposes, become a housewife.  Not a very good one, at that!  My days are quite dull and unadventurous.  Every other day or so, I’ll do laundry. We do have a laundry machine, but we don’t have a dryer.  For that matter, hardly anyone in Japan has a dryer.  Everyone, regardless of wealth, generally hangs their clothes out to dry.  In the closet, we don’t have a closet rod, so Sean went and bought a tension rod when he first got here.  However, the rod—no matter how much or how little we put on it, no matter how much strain we exert to tighten it beyond average human strength—won’t stay up. 

Therefore, when I hang the laundry, I take great pains to snap it out, shake it out, smooth it out, and hang it with as much care and consideration as I can so that it doesn’t wrinkle, pucker, or stretch…especially because I DON’T want to iron it!  However, the last time the tension rod fell down, we didn’t bother to put it back up.  Which means that whenever I take down the laundry, Sean takes all my carefully hung, lovingly caressed laundry and throws it in the closet.  He does take some care to lay it flat.  But more importantly, now I can appreciate my mom’s frustration when I did basically the same thing to her as a teenager.  Sorry, Mom.  I get it now. 

I usually shower and get dressed in the afternoon sometime before Sean gets home, so that he doesn’t think that I’ve been hanging around all day in my pajamas, which I usually have been.  I might do the dishes, or I might not.  I almost always make dinner and have it nearly ready by the time Sean’s home.  In the beginning, I would spend hours looking for and applying to jobs.  Not so much anymore.  About every four to seven days, I’ll make a batch of tortillas to last the week.  Every once in a while I’ll pick up or clean, but not often enough.  Plus, I feel like sometimes it’s a losing battle, and we don’t even have kids.  I might go to the store, or I might not. 

The other day, I decided to tackle cleaning our “living room” because it was getting a little bit disgusting.  We do all of our day-to-day living in this room and in the kitchen, so it gets the most abuse.  I had been avoiding trying to clean the floor, because I wasn’t quite sure how.

The actual rooms are all floored with tatami mats.  Tatami mats are tightly woven reed mats with black cloth borders—the quintessential Asian floor.  But how the HECK do you take care of them?  They have little swiffer-like pads, but those are for wet use.  I haven’t tried them, yet.  I think you can vacuum the mats, but like so much else in life, we don’t have a vacuum.  So I got out our mini-broom, and I started sweeping.  First, I went with the grain, then against the grain, then with the grain, then against the grain… and the whole time I was thinking, “Man, I shed a lot!”  I felt like for every forward sweep, the fanning motion of the broom would encourage the little hairballs and other debris to retreat half-a-sweep.  Forward one, back one-half.  The tatami mats are not laid out with the weave all in the same direction.  Nor are they all precisely the same size.  Thus, for this room which is not more than about eight feet by seven feet, I used nearly fifteen minutes just to sweep it.  I leave wet mopping for some other day. 

In midst of my domestic mundaneness, two days ago my life was turned briefly upside down.

The phone rang. 

It took me two rings to realize what was happening.  It took me one and a half rings to make it out of bed and to the phone.  It was taking me one and a half rings to decide to answer it or not, and then the machine picked up.  I stood there, heart beating fast, listening to our very polite and pre-recorded lady give our “we’re not home” message, my hand poised over the receiver, ready to snap it up should it prove necessary.

Alas… as the gentleman started speaking, it was, of course, all in Japanese.  I caught lots of the “-mashite” conjugations, and a series of numbers at the end.  But that’s all.  Disappointed, I shrugged and went back to bed until my alarm went off.  Sean has listened to the message.  He doesn’t know what it says, either, but at least he understands all the numbers. 

I make no secret of the fact that culture shock hit me quite hard, but I’m also not sure how much of it is “Japanese” culture shock and how much of it is just a giant change from my old life.  At home I had a job that—whether I liked it or not—kept me commonly occupied for 12 hours a day with an hour commute, total.  I had a cat to keep me company before I got married, and then later whenever Sean was out of town.  I had a car that I could use to jet off for errands or whatever.

All of that, of course, has changed.  We live in a beautiful area over the mountain from downtown, but it’s considered the boondocks, and thus there’s nothing here.  I can walk to a veggie stand or a miniature grocery store that is over-priced.  There is a French Boulangerie ten minutes away, but it is a pointless destination because I never buy anything.  It’s the same story with the optician, the dentist, and the liquor store.  We went to the ramen shop once.  I can walk 20 minutes to Tanigami station to a bigger, but still small, grocery store, or McDonald’s, if I really want it...and usually I don’t.  But I did use my broken Japanese, some sign-language, and lots of funny faces to order some french fries for the first time last week. 

But to go anywhere or to do anything like going into the Cultural Center to read the Spanish or American newspapers, or maybe to eventually get a free tutor, I walk a long distance and then pay $5 one way.  Because we live on the other side of the mountain, the train tunnel is fairly new, and thus fare is expensive until the tunnel is paid down.  With me not working regularly, it doesn’t make much financial sense for me to spend $10 (or more, if I want to come in to the station that’s close to our apartment) to go into downtown for a lark.  As a result, I lump my trips together, and normally I go with Sean on the weekends.  I did brave everything on my own to get my Visa adjusted to work part-time, and to my chagrin that necessitated two different trips.  So I hit the grocery store downtown while I was there, and traveled all the way into Shin-Osaka for a job interview that has so far yielded me no private students like they promised. 

I do, however, teach a few classes to children ranging in age from three to nine years old, and with varying degrees of English from none to basically fluent.  I teach these classes in a private school in Mondo-yakujin, which is a part of Nishinomiya, which means by the time I walk to the station on one end and the school on another, it takes me nearly an hour and a half to get there.  It also costs me nearly $15 U.S. for round-trip transportation.   On top of that, it’s basically exactly the hours that I didn’t want to work.  Eventually I will work some of Wednesday evening, and then work from 3:00-8:00 pm on Fridays.  Right now I work a couple of Saturday mornings a week, but once my Friday gets extended to 8:00 pm, I probably won’t work Saturday.  Normally, the proprietor only pays 600¥ in transportation… which doesn’t even cover half.  So… the whole thing is up in the air, but for now I enjoy teaching the kids. 

In the meantime, I’m shamelessly hawking myself.  If any of you know of any decent free-lance writing gigs that I might be qualified for (or can MAKE myself qualified for), keep me in mind! 

This last weekend, we did break down and buy some speakers for our iPods, which means that now, at least, I can have music during the day.  As a result, I’m in a slightly better mood by the time Sean gets home at night.  I can boogie down all I want in private during the day.

Today, I hope to pump out a lot of writing.  We have done and seen much since I have been here that I haven’t written about… but perhaps today is the day.  For now, though, it’s nearly three o’clock, which is generally my cue to rush about and be domestic so that Sean thinks I might have actually been moderately productive.  Plus, the kitchen has aired out now, so I can comfortably do dishes without inhaling toast-smoke.

Thanks to all of you for your words of encouragement regarding my journals… and remember, if you call, leave a message.  I’m probably standing there in my pajamas, holding a flaming piece of toast, trying to figure out whether I should answer the phone or not!

~~~~~~~

This post was one of my sister's favorites. She said she could just imagine me in my pajamas, leaning intently toward the phone while I waited to see if it was worth answering. 

We very seldom got phone calls, and we also very seldom got any visitors. Normally if a knock came on our door, it was a delivery we were expecting… no super Japanese skills required. However, one day much later than this post, a knock came to the door that I wasn't expecting. Normally I would just hide and ignore it, because what could I do? But instead I answered.

Standing on the stoop were two Japanese men, one probably in his mid-30s and one much older. Their eyes widened a bit when they saw a Gaijin answering the door, and they shared a quick glance before saying something to me. Of course I didn't understand a thing. 

"Sumimasen. Nihongo o hanasemasen!" (I'm so sorry! I don't speak Japanese!"

The younger man lifted his eyebrows quizzically and gestured towards me. "Eigo?" 

"Yes," I said. "English."

He lifted up a brochure, and said--very slowly and deliberately--"We… are… Jehovasu Witnessu."  

"Ah, so!" I said. "Jehovasu Witnessu waskarimashita. Eigo o hanasemasuka?" (Ah, so! Jehovah's Witness, I understand. Do you speak English?)

He took half a step back and shook his head somewhat wistfully. "Ie." Reaching into the pile of pamphlets he was carrying under his arm, he took one out and handed it to me.

"Dozo," he said. "For you." It was a Japanese-language edition of the Watchtower Magazine. 

Then, with short bows and slight smiles, the young man and the silent gray-haired man made their way up the stairs to knock on more doors. 

I shook my head. Across the vast Pacific Ocean, I never once imagined that I'd open my door to a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses. Smiling wryly, I told myself that I'd have quite a story to share with Sean when he got home. I went back inside, putting the copy of the Watchtower on the bookshelf…right next to the phone.