Day 5 Japan

More help from new friends, banking, shrine visit, my first fancy toilet.
Today we needed to revisit some of our attempts at settling in (getting temporary ID cards, opening a bank account, etc) so we meet dear Yasuko and Satoko (bless their hearts) again at the university.

Jim and I decided to walk to the university since it gives us more of a chance to see new places than taking the subway, and we took a new route through our little neighborhood. We are starting to learn hiragana, so we used our walk as a opportunity to practice spotting characters we recognized.

[FYI, Japanese writing consists of three kinds of characters: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana are symbols used to represent letters, with one symbol usually representing two-three letters such as “ya” or “tsu”. There are only 100 or so (!) Hiragana, so these are probably more doable (?) for foreigners to learn. Katakana are around 100 less complex symbols (with more straight lines) that are used to represent letter combinations in words borrowed from languages other than Japanese (cognates). These will also be very advantageous to learn quickly since we will more or less (emphasis on less) be able to understand the words once we read them. Kanji are the Chinese characters that are used to represent whole words or ideas. Kanji characters are extremely complex and there are 2000 of them! We will be taking a beginner Kanji class on Wednesdays, but needless to say, it takes years even for native Japanese speakers to learn Kanji. Hmm. Our 26 letter alphabet is looking pretty wimpy in comparison. Oh, how I wish there were only 26 characters to learn!]

Jim and I have discovered a Hiragana character that means “mo”. Since our cat (back home in SF) is named Mo, we are pretty excited that he can be represented by a symbol. Anyway, we have now started playing the “Mo” game in which whoever sees a mo character gets a point. We also pulled Satoko into our game, so our first day playing she and Jim tied with 2 points each. (Apparently it is a fairly rare character.)

On our walk, Jim spied a poster on a house wall with a mo, so he pointed it out. We then started pointing (from across the path) at the characters we knew. A woman had just come out of her house next to us and looked at us quizzically. “Posta?” she asked us, pointing to the poster (it was some type of political message.) We then (in baby Japanese) told her we had “little Hiragana”. She smiled and walked across the street to begin pointing out each character, saying what is was and that, “This looks like this, sideways” etc, all in Japanese but using great body language. It was such a sweet cross-cultural moment! SO cute!!

We finally arrived at the university (a little late from looking for mos) and Yasuko and Satoko were ready and waiting for us. (We understand that Japanese are very prompt which is going to be tough for us. Jim was wondering if we could possibly explain that we were “P's” (Myers Briggs types—which means we are not so into schedules), but probably not.

We headed out first to the bike store because apparently our bikes had arrived! Sure enough, two 27” used bikes were waiting for us—one orange and the other silver. I took the orange one because in addition to the front basket it had a luggage rack on the back, my justification being that I will be doing most of the shopping (for groceries, of course) ;). It's also the cuter bike. ;) The shop added a lock on the back wheel of my bike (again, yes, people do lock their wheels), added a bell to Jim's, and raised both of the seats as high as possible. (Ha. I think being so tall here—me at 5'9” and Jim at 6'3”--is an endless source of amusement.)

After a short time our group headed out from the bike shop, all on our own bikes. Yay! Next we blindly followed Yasuko and Satoko to get a family seal. Apparently on documents here you use a stamp that represents your family. The stamps can be purchased at various card shops and 100 yen stores (think dollar stores). Yasoko, Satoko and a store clerk had to get creative about how to represent “Stapleton”. It seems there is no Kanji equivalent for that name. Imagine! After much thought and contemplation, we finally decided on the Kanji symbol for “east” which (from my understanding may also mean the sound for “tow” which sort of sounds like the last part of StapleTON. Hee, hee.) How this is supposed to be official I have no idea...

Anyway, with our new “family” seal, we headed to the ginko, or bank. Whew. If you thought it was difficult to bank in the US, it is a cake-walk compared to Japan. When we later told our new expat friends about our bank experience they all just groaned. One replied that the reason he was learning Japanese was simply to deal with the bank. So, there we were with Yasoko speaking to one bank employee, then another, then another, trying just to open a bank account for us and deposit Jim's paycheck. After about an hour of serious discussions (indeed Yasuko was fighting so hard on our behalf that things were getting a little heated and other employees began to stare) we weren't successful. Formerly, foreigners had to be in Japan at least 6 months before they could open an account. Not anymore, but still, there was some problem with transferring money from the lab to us. We have to continue this saga next week. Poor Yasuko! (And Satoko, too, who was trying to translate this!)

After the failed bank excursion, Satoko had to leave but Yasuko motioned for us to follow her. We biked to a place that turned out to be another lab and after some confusing moments, Jim finally figured out that this was the “other lab” his professor runs. This lab has more post-docs and more of them speak English, so it will probably be a good thing for Jim. In fact, one of the post-docs, Aiya (sp?) spent several years in Minnesota so she served as our translator. She, Yasoko, Jim and I sat down for tea (Japanese green tea) and rice crackers and after a short while it was decided that we should visit the nearby shrine.

It turns out the Shinto shrine next door to the lab is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is beautiful! A group from the lab walked us over to the shrine and we all walked around, learning about its various aspects from Yasuko. It was funny because only Yasuko seemed to know anything about the meanings and traditional procedures in a Shinto shrine, so we were all learning, even our translator. (It might have made a difference that Yasuko was the only one from Kyoto; the academics had all come from elsewhere in Japan.) We learned how to clap, bow, pray and clap when praying to the god of our birth year. (As Jim and I had previously learned from US Chinese restaurant place mats, Jim is the horse and I am the sheep.) Apparently you give the 5 yen coin as an offering to gods because the 5 piece is spiritually significant. (Interestingly, it is also the one without a number on it, so we had previously had to ask someone how much it was worth.) We also paid to have our fortunes told. We drew sticks with numbers and then got paper corresponding to those numbers. It was all in Japanese, so our friends translated for us. Jim's fortune was “more good than bad” and fortunately said he would get any job he wanted. Excellent. Mine was the best fortune you can get (yay!) and it said that traveling was good for me, to which we all agreed. :)
(If we had received a bad fortune, we would not have kept the fortune papers but instead tied them to a line in the shine and asked for help from the gods.)

Sarah's first fancy Japanese toilet experience:
A trip to the toilet can be quite interesting for a foreigner in Japan. Aside for the standard, no frills Western toilet (we have one of these in our apartment), there is an Eastern “squat” style toilet that is a flushing porcelain in-the-floor job. There is also the incredibly fancy and fabulous Western with frills toilet and I finally encountered one today. I visited that necessary room at the lab and lo and behold, I met the toilet. When it saw me, it greeted me by opening its lid to expose a nice heated (yes, heated) seat. Ahh! There were buttons which fortunately had enough pictures for me to figure out that they controlled various bidet functions, spraying water in select locations. Once I had tried out one, I was ready to turn it off. I couldn't recognize a stop button and it didn't seem to be subsiding. Hmm. I pushed the button twice, hoping to make it stop but instead it caused a massaging experience. Errr. Did I mention all the buttons were labeled in characters? (I had heard an NPR special in the US about expats in Japan getting into toilet “situations” in which they couldn't turn them off. I had imagined myself emerging from such toilet soaking wet and traumatized. Right now, I suspected my fears might be realized.) It was clear I couldn't stand up with the water flowing or I would be soaked. I worried that randomly pushing buttons might get me into bigger trouble, though. Thankfully, after pushing an orange button that didn't have a picture, the stream stopped. Whew. I emerged victorious!