Clueless in Tokyo - Stumbling Through Daily Life

Washing my hair with conditioner for a week

- by Tara
We moved to Japan on June 25, 1998. Starting that day and for the next 7 days, I washed my hair with conditioner, not shampoo. I was wondering why my hair was looking so greasy and bad - but I thought it was maybe the water in the apartment or the chemicals in the swimming pool. No. It was me! I did not take the time to distinguish "conditioner" from "shampoo" on the bottle of Panteen I bought in the store. I just saw the familiar English letters PANTEEN & didn't look any further. Doh!

High-tech Toilets

- by Tara
 
We were REALLY surprised the first time we sat down on a toilet at work in the Otemachi First Square Building. The seat was heated! We liked it. 

Thus, a heated toilet seat was my one request for our apartment. You can basically figure out the functions from the illustrations, however, it was an adventure to test it out since we had no idea what all the features were!!! Too bad we didn't get the deluxe version with blow dryer and remote control. I'm not complaining though, as ours is much more deluxe than any toilet I've ever had before. 

We especially enjoyed how the seat was heated. It is one of the main things we miss from Tokyo.

The video store

Sunday, September 13, 1998

Every day, if we get off at the Ebisu station, we walk past a video store. We hadn't been in before since we didn't have "official alien registration" cards yet. But now, armed with Tara's alien registration card, we entered. The movie cases were ALL IN JAPANESE. No huge surprise since we live in Japan, but a bit daunting. So, we start perusing our
respective sections. Tara heads straight for the little kids animation - finally setting on a Pooh Bear video. Seth starts checking out the whole place - including the HUGE porno section. Even more surprising than its size, was the number of checked out movies, esp. considering they are loaned on a one night basis only.

Well, we never did find a movie we *really* wanted to see, so we took Sabrina, as we had seen it on a plane and missed the ending since we were landing. We were sure this one was in English as it said "subtitled version". Our videos were handed to us in a plastic case without box covers and they were due back in one week - pretty nice; but overall disturbing since we had spent more than an hour in the store & not really gotten what we wanted. But, first time in a video store in the country at least.
 

Feeding the kitties in the "park" next-door

- by Tara; Friday, September 18, 1998

After a LONG day at work, I went to dinner with work colleagues at a local yakitori restaurant. Seth and I had heard that the yakitori restaurant was very tasty and it was. Seth couldn't come though, as he was still working. After dinner, I went with Pat & Ginnie to a local video store (a much more foreigner friendly one that we had been in last Sunday). While walking down the street the video store was on & back home, I saw lots of restaurants that we have to try: Indian, Garlic, Flaming Japanese food and more. It was a very lively night & by just walking around the neighborhood at a different time than usual, it was do different. I even found Seth's favorite brand of peach soda in a vending machine just a 1/2 block from our route to work.

I passed a convenience store on the way home and decided to stop in for breakfast ham. However, the ham never made it to breakfast. As I walked past our empty lot/park, I saw three kitties: two golden and one black. I figured they needed the ham more than Seth and I did. As I started feeding them, a little old bent over Japanese lady came up and said "ahh, kawai desu ne" - aren't they cute? I answered and we had a very nice conversation in 1/2 Japanese, 1/2 English. The Japanese conversation was mostly, "aren't they cute?", "they are hungry" and "I like cats". The only word we couldn't find a common ground for was FROG. I was trying to tell her how Seth rescued a frog from our apartment building foyer the other morning - It didn't work! I decided not to even try his caterpillar rescue story for that same afternoon. After I finished feeding the cats, we said "sayonara" and went our separate ways. She was really sweet and nice. I had noticed her crossing the street as I was walking up to the cats as she had on these wild looking short brown rain boots - the kind you see on little tiny kids. She was really cute and kind.
 

Figuring out our new phone / fax / answering machine

purchased in August, 1998

Seth wanted to get one of these gadgets from a departing foreigner, but every time we called about a used one for sale, it was already sole. We just couldn't wait any longer, so, we went to Sinjuku and found one we liked. We now have a phone that speaks better Japanese than we do!  Our greeting message sums it up "Hi, this is Seth & Tara's. We now have a Japanese answer phone that we have no idea how it works. So, leave a message and there's a chance we'll get it. Thanks. Bye!"

Seriously, every time we need to know how to do something on it, Tara has to take the manual to work and ask her Japanese colleagues. She's inquired about how to page the handset from the base when you can't find where you left the phone and how to delete messages. Both of these we needed because the phone we unusable. When we couldn't find the handset in our apartment, we'd initially have to call our apartment from our mobile phone, listen for the ringing and then locate the handset. Next, after we'd had the phone a while, it stopped taking messages. Presumably because the digital memory had become full. Tara's method of "look for helpful pictures in the manual" and Seth's method of "push every button on the phone hoping you'll figure it out" wasn't working, so we couldn't receive any more messages until Tara took the manual to work!

Plus, I'm sure there are multiple features that we'll never be able to take advantage of because we don't know Japanese. For example, it's now December. We bought the phone in August, that's THREE months. Seth has just put two and two together and figured out that those phone calls we receive where we hear beeping, which we previously figured was the phone company testing our line or something bizarre like that, are actually INCOMING fax advertisements! Yup. If we get a call where we hear beeping & we hit some button on the fax machine, we get a 100% Japanese fax telling us of some great local offer in our neighborhood. No idea where they got our number from, but their advertising is lost on us!!

Our ISDN modem

We never did get it to work exactly the way we'd like it to. Seth reconfigured the telephone, fax and modem connections every few months. He ended up labelling every wire into and out of the ISDN modem and plugged them in every which way while Tara would phone home from her mobile phone. Even so, we'd end up running to another room to answer the phone since when we were both on the computer, our phones would only ring in the other rooms. We wish our friend Mike good luck with the ISDN modem since he is now it's proud new owner.

Our Scooters

Tara really wanted a little scooter to get around on like she used to have in college. So, we went out and bought two in November, 1998. As we bought them very near to Seth's birthday, he calls them a "homer" birthday present. Our first trip on them was to see how far Denny's was away by scooter. It was shocking how quickly we got there. But, then the real adventure was getting home! Tara didn't want to take the big road back, so we wandered through back streets trying to find home. We ran into one of Seth's colleagues from work. (Seth was embarrassed by how he looked in his helmet!) We made a wrong turn & circled around hopelessly in the wrong direction for a while; but then, Tara saw the familiar Urban Resort neon sign in the distance and steered us home without error. We still have yet to visit a gas station to fill them up, so that's an adventure still to come! 

Eating Out

We haven't let the fact that we typically don't understand 80 - 100% of what is on a restaurant's menu deter us from eating out. We've actually both gained weight living here as we have been eating out so much. I write this after we've been here 6 months, so I can confidently say that we are not nearly a clueless as we originally were. Plus, if we are looking for an easy night, we can always stop at Wendy's on the way home from work or we can choose a restaurant based upon the fact that we've been there before & know what to expect!

Any new restaurant - especially if it's a new type of food - is an adventure. For foreign restaurants, we have about a 50 - 50% chance of getting a menu which includes the native language of the food. ie. in Italian restaurants, we are very pleased to get a menu which is also in Italian. We have our set favorites memorized and can easily find a Japanese restaurant that servers them. So, it now doesn't matter that we can't read the menu as long as we are happy to choose from the 5 dishes we know by heart. Some of the best stories we have are detailed below:

Ordering Pizza

- by Tara
 
This is my specially! We were here for less than a week and really wanted food delivered. We were inside, didn't want to go out and walk for 2-5 minutes to a restaurant and very hungry. It's amazing what hunger and laziness will drive you to do. 

And it's not just us who consider ordering pizza to be a MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT. See our friend Kristen's saga also. 
 
 

We'd seen the Domino's delivery motorcycle outside, so we *knew* it was possible. However, making it a reality did bring a bit of fear into my heart. The first step was to find the number! Thank God for the English phone directly we received with the apartment and the Japanese-English dictionary. After I was armed with the phone number and the Japanese phrase for "delivery". I called the Domino's in the phone book, told them in very halting Japanese where I lived & said "delivery" with a question tone in my voice. They didn't deliver to me, but gave me the number of a Domino's that did. So, I called the next Domino's and (anticipating what they would want) told them my name, phone number, address and the pizza I wanted. My comprehension of what the Domino's person was saying back to me was at about 10%. So, I hung up and we waited..... My first pizza delivery was a success as the pizza arrived to our door 30 minutes later!

However, Domino's pizza is Domino's pizza and not my favorite, so now we order from another local pizza place. We found the Strawberry Cones pizza place one day when we walked by it. That's where we order from now a days and it's barely an adventure anymore. I have about 80% comprehension of what they are saying to me on the other end of the phone AND, I can even convince them that I want the "summer special" 4 pizza toppings and not the "fall or winter special" 4 pizza toppings.

However, as I used to work in a pizza place, I won't call on what I would expect to be a busy weekend night, since I would have HATED to get some non-English speaking foreigner on the phone on Friday night when I had 4 other callers on hold! So, it's pizza delivery for us only Sunday - Thursday nights!

Pizza Delivery - more than one year later, August, 1999

Now, ordering a pizza brings no fear. I need no preparation when ordering from home, I can understand 90% of the conversation, the Strawberry Cones people who answer the phone know me, and I've even ordered from work and received what I ordered!! Ordering from work was the real test. One Friday night, I was stuck on a work conference call until 1:30am - joy! Especially since our friends, Tod & Kristen had invited us to go with them to the Izu 7 islands that weekend, I was less than thrilled to be working. So, I decided to make it better by ordering a pizza in. There was some doubt in my mind - since I've never ordered from work before, so I'd be calling a completely new pizza place, communicating a completely new address and having to convince the pizza delivery guy to come to the 12th floor in the East (not West) tower. Well, I needn't have fretted at all. I ordered the pizza with ease, reminded the delivery man that he had to come to the 12th floor East tower and happily received a pizza 30 minutes later.  My manager and colleagues watched via video conference as II ordered and said I looked very Japanese while I was on the phone - bobbing my head up and down saying "yes", "yes" just as a local would!
 

Shopping by Picture

What do you do when you want to buy milk and you can't actually read the Japanese symbols for milk? Well, what we ended up doing was finding a refrigerated section that looked like it contained milk, cheese, yogurt, etc. and then narrowed down our choice by picking a carton with a picture of a cow on it since milk comes from cows. Thereafter, we always bought the carton with a picture of a grazing cow! We also always relied on the product packaging pictures to figure out cleaning products: 
    • toilet cleaner is the cleaning bottle with a picture of a toilet on it
    • laundry detergent is the cleaning bottle with a picture of sparkling clothes on it
    • dish washing detergent for a dish washer has a picture of a dish washer on it
    • dish washing detergent for the sink has pictures of sparkling dishes on it
    • glass cleaner has a picture of sparkling glass

    • furniture cleaner has a picture of shiny furniture
 
This "shop by picture" approach served us extremely well except for once when Seth got over zealous when cleaning our glass table. He took three bottles of cleaner (all of which had plausible pictures on them) and proceeded to use all three on the glass table. In the end, he ended up waxing it. 
 

Discovering Unusual Foods

 
We discovered unusual foods in Tokyo that we had no idea how to cook. Often, we had NO IDEA what we were seeing in the supermarkets. 

One purchase was especially disappointing since Tara was so excited to find a big, American-sized watermelon. It was really hard to carry this watermelon home in the rain from the little fruit stand near the Nakameguro station. Imagine her disappointment when we cut the "watermelon" open and found a white, winter squash!

 

Never Being Able to find seats on planes
 Why traveling from Japan is so difficult
- by Tara, 12 August 1999

Someone is always already sitting in the seat we want!!

I often ask myself, am I doing something wrong???

The first time we had this problem was soon after we arrived in Japan. We found out that there was a long weekend coming up in three weeks and decided that it would be nice to take a weekend trip. We finally decided that Guam was where we wanted to go. Initially, we went into a local travel agent near work and asked about the cost of a flight. Well, the cost wasn't the problem, the problem was that EVERY SINGLE SEAT on EVERY SINGLE AIRPLANE headed outbound from Wednesday to Sunday was BOOKED SOLID. Since we were flexible on where we wanted to go, the travel agent checked Guam, Beijing, The Philippines, Seoul, and other places I'd never heard of. No seats - oh, except to Seoul in first class. So, I decided to start calling the airlines direct. I called United, JAL, Cathay Pacific, Continental and who knows how many others - ALL INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS were sold out! So, we decided to try for a domestic flight. Okinawa sounded good. Same problem. EVERY SINGLE FLIGHT was sold out. We ended up staying home for the eekend.

The next time I remember not being able to go where I wanted was for the Sapporo Ice Festival. I started planing early since I figured there might be a problem. So, THREE MONTHS before the event, I found out the dates & started trying to get tickets. Again, I started with a Japanese travel agent. This time it was much more fun, since she spoke hardly any English & I spoke hardly any Japanese. Well, to the Sapporo Ice Festival, they had 3 day package tours available in a nice, glossy brochure. I picked the one I wanted over a weekend and AGAIN, IT WAS SOLD OUT. So, I changed my dates & asked about leaving mid-week - but staying longer than 3 days - you couldn't do that. 3 days was the package & that was it. So, OK, I decided fine, mid-week then. NO LUCK. ALL SOLD OUT 3 months ahead of time. So, I had given up. But, the week before I was going to go, I found out that my manager at work was going for the weekend, so I thought I'd see if any last minute seats were available. Oh & they were! JAL would have happily sold me an economy class seat on a very inconveniently timed flight. ie. 5am & charged me the equivalent of 500 US Dollars for a one-way fare. ie. 2,000 USD for 2 people round trip for a 2 hour flight. NOT. Again, we stayed home.

There have been other instances as well, but those are the two that stood out in my mind. Both on holiday weekends. So, this time, I decided.... we are staying away from holiday weekends, we are going to use the extra vacation days & just take time off sometime when it's not a holiday.

So, it's Thursday, August 12th 1999 & I've just gotten off the phone with Northwest & Continental Airlines. Both of these airlines fly to Saipan, where we've decided we want to go in two weekends. Well, on both airlines I heard the same story. You can't fly out next Thursday, all flights are FULL. Same story for Friday and only first class left on Wednesday. But, oh, on TUESDAY, there are economy seats. So, I'm humoring them & say ok, if I go out on Tuesday, August 17th, when can I come back? Maybe Sunday, the 22nd? OH NO, That would be TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR! The soonest I could get back was Thursday, the 26th & that in FIRST CLASS. Unbelievable. The first flight with a seat on it flying back into Tokyo was over one week later. Who knows, we might end up staying home in 2 weekends also.  :-(

The Japanese soap opera "Yamada san no Kazoku"
- by Tara
We didn't watch much TV in Japan. There were only 3 or 4 English channels. Seth liked the Johnny Bravo cartoon and we rented alot of movies. For a few months, I had alot of fun  watching Japanese TV. I would have loved to have seen Doraemon's show every Friday night, but it started at 7pm and we were rarely home from work in time to see it. It was a treat when we did get home in time!

The one show that I did really get into was on Sunday nights and was called "Yamada san no kazoku" ie Yamada's Family. I  first stumbled across this show on November 7th, 1999. Seth had left earlier in the day for a week-long business trip to the Stamford, Connecticut office, so I was sad and had nothing to do. I turned on the TV and happened across the opening of a show with a kool theme song. The theme song was Ricky Martin's Living La Vida Loca -- but not in English or Spanish! There were also neat graphics in the intra and I almost thought it was a sci fi show since everyone seemed to be "beaming up" in the intro. I kept the show on and was really, really surprised to discover that I could understand 50% of the words and could comprehend up to 80% of what was going in. It was ALOT of fun to find a show that I could understand. In the first episode I saw, the family and the father's boss went on a day trip to the country. The father missed one train and had a hard time getting back together with everyone, the boss's wife mistook the boss's pregnant girlfriend for Yamada san's son's wife, the boss's wife said she cooked up rabbit meat curry and the family could not find the pet rabbit they brought with, and Yamada san had a big crush on a young woman other than his wife, etc. etc. Just like you'd expect in a soap opera! I made a note of the time and channel and decided to try to find the show again the next week.

Yeah! I found it again the next Sunday night and got into the habit of watching the show. I sure do wish that I had taped an episode, but I didn't even think of it. It was a really fun show and really seemed to be moving along FAST. The Yamada san family consisted of the mother (a high school music teacher), the father (a salaryman), a younger daughter in school (who isn't that bright, so needs to be tutored), an older daughther (who works in the reception area of a building) and the grandma. Other characters are the father's boss, the father's boss's pregnant girlfriend + wife, the younger daughter's tutor and other various supporting characters. I couldn't figure out one man & woman who seemed to be over at the house alot. Maybe a son & his girlfriend/wife. I asked my Japanese teacher about the show and she didn't watch it, but she knew that Japan's "Brad Pitt" was in the show and then, when I paid attention, I realized that I did see him everywhere!

Anyway, I LOVED watching this show. The Ricky Martin song was fun and I got to know the characters. Even though it was in Japanese, I can remember the episodes moving along REALLY FAST. Some were about the mother being harrassed at school by the high schoolers, the sisters swooning over the tutor, the father's boss dying, the father's wife finding out about the girlfriend and more.

But, then all of a sudden, I couldn't find the show anymore! I checked two Sunday's in a row, but it wasn't Yamada san no kazoku's show. It was some woman in a wheelchair. I didn't understand where it could have gone. I asked my Japanese teacher and she said that it probably ended. I didn't understand at all! She explained to me that Japanese shows run for just a few months and then they are gone. Nothing like in America with MASH - that runs for years & years & years! booh hoo hoo. I never did get into another Japanese show the way I loved Yamada san no kazoku.

I did enjoy the "how do you say this in English?" show and the VJ's on one video channel in particular. And the "hitori de dekimasu ka?" show about 3-5 year olds being given chores was of course a classic!