Japanese Bugbears

I don’t want to put people off Japan or appear ungrateful to a country which has given me so much, but there must always be things which annoy the s**t out of you, no matter which country you live in. The traditional Western image of Japan is of a beautiful country of mountains and forests, serene temples and shrines, inscrutable, friendly people and a very high tech modern, forward thinking society.

BO*L*CKS.
While Japan certainly has elements of the above features, it has many many problems which tend to counter the rosy romantic image that we would all like to have of this ‘Land of the Gods’. Japan is a signatory to many international conventions and protocols, most notably the Kyoto Protocol, which was obviously debated over and created in the city of that name in the Kansai area of Japan. Sounds good doesn’t it, here we have a high tech country which produces the smallest, most environmentally friendly cars in the world, signing up to reduce CO2 emissions. Shouldn’t be too long before their engineers have given us an electric car that runs on power derived from the methane gas produced from Japanese sewage or something. Sorry to disappoint and disillusion, but Japan usually ignores things it signs up for if it suits them to do so. Civil liberties in Japan are precarious at the best of times. Despite being a signatory to the International Convention on Human Rights, Japan deports refugees who have been recognised as such in international courts, (especially if they have dark skin). So it is with the Kyoto Protocol. Any right thinking person would assume that the host government of such a treaty would bend over backwards to lead the world down the right path to a world of energy saving and environmental awareness, nope, sorry, style over substance every time. It’s currently cool to drive a car that looks like it could go from pole to pole cross country without difficulty and is large enough to house three peasant families from Thailand. Japan must answer the world’s cry for such gas guzzling monstrosities and thus remain ahead in the car sales stakes. Instead, Mr. Koizumi should pass a law banning the production of such pieces of s**t and at the same time, double the road tax for oversize 4x4s. I think Range Rover has a lot to answer for.
More ranting later. My next post will have to positive or I will end up totally cynical.

Shopping

We all went shopping at the weekend. We loaded Akira onto the mamma chari, (that's an old sit up and beg style shopping bike with a basket on the front and a little plastic seat on the handlebars for Akira), and I pedaled him while Reiko used her mountain bike. We cycled down to the park at the riverside and then along the bicycle path to the toll bridge, (free for bikes) and across the river. A short cycle through some farm areas and we arrived at Carrefour, a massive French supermarket/shopping mall. They are having a special feature on Thai food at the moment, so Reiko wanted to buy fresh herbs for making a green curry or something.

Unlike most Japanese supermarkets, Carrefour has wide aisles and plenty of space for browsing the produce. They also have an in-house bakery where we can load Akira up with free samples of bread, which he happily stuffs in his wee face. We bought some take out food for lunch and some drinks and went along to the food hall to find a table. It wasn't too busy and it's fairly smoke free so a good spot for us. There are so many noisy families eating there that one more squealing brat isn't even noticed, so that's a plus too.

After lunch, we headed home and Akira flaked out from all that fun and excitement,(sarcasm). I decided to cycle into Kawagoe to get a few things, especially a new CD-MD-Tape deck for school. I headed off along the cycle path again, but in the opposite direction and was in Kawagoe twenty minutes later, ( a journey which once took me an hour by car!). I parked my bike in a long row of bikes next to Atre department store and walked past Gaia Pachinko parlour to the station to buy a Japan Times, one of the English language newspapers here. I then went to the Virgin record shop on the top floor of Marui Department store for a free copy of Metropolis, the weekly classified ads magazine that is available in the Kanto area.

Reiko had asked me to get a few things at the hyaku-en shop, that's a shop where everything costs fifty pence. I walked down 'Kurea moru', (Clear Mall, so named as it is clear of traffic, I think). One thing that you can't fail to notice in Japan is the Pachinko parlour. There are hundreds of them. They form a blot on the landscape and Kawagoe must be the Pachinko capital of Japan. Pachinko is a wierd gambling game that sort of resembles a vertical form of pinball, but without any of the fun or excitement. The idea is to feed steel ball bearings in at the top of your machine and try and guide them through the maze to the bottom, thereby getting points which earn you extra ball bearings! Whoo hoo! fantastic and about as entertaining as watching paint dry. There are millions of Pachinko fanatics in Japan, you can see them queuing up outside to get on their favourite machine before the doors open in the morning, mostly pathetic wretches. To be able to enjoy pachinko playing, you have to chain smoke, this renders the atmosphere in a pachinko parlor completely toxic to normal people, and you must be almost completely deaf as the noise in these dens of iniquity is like a formula one Pit stop bay in the middle of a race. I had to run the guantlet of the pachinko parlours all the way down the street. The automatic doors, (almost all Japanese shops have them), will open as you go past and your senses are assailed by clouds of noxious ciggie smoke and the din of thousands of steel balls battering around stupid machines, not nice!

Hyaku-en shops on the other hand are great places. If you are only staying here for a year or so, you can pretty much outfit your rabbit hutch in these places, Maybe not with furniture, but dishes, cutlery, bath things, etc. All sorts of nick-nacks that you didn't realise you couldn't live without are available there. I managed to find most of the things Reiko wanted, ground sesame seeds, toilet cleaner, plastic disposable gloves for handling raw meat, a wind-up submarine for Akira's bath and a postcard album for Reiko's postcard collection. I then headed to Rogers, a large discount retailer to buy my favourite type of bread and get some staionery supplies for school.

I think that this post is long enough already and if anyone has managed to read this far and stay awake, they deserve a break, so I'll continue it another day. Cheers for now.

Japanese TV

Life in Japan can be quite a shock for newcomers as the whole landscape is so alien, the writing is weird, the language is gibberish, the paople all look the same, (homogenous at least), and the shelves in the shops are stocked with things you won't have seen anywhere else before. However, one aspect of life here can be quite comfortingly familiar, the TV. Yes, TV in Japan is just as noisy, brash, mindless and irritating as it is everywhere else, only more so. The big redeeming feature, though is the availability of English language programmes, (although they seem to be diminishing lately).
When I go home at night, I can sit down and watch the news on NHK, (the national TV channel) and hear it in English by simply tuning the TV to play only the right hand speaker. It is very nice to hear a bit of English every day. Admittedly the news is very Japancentric and world news has to be fairly earthshattering to get a mention. Sports are also very much suited to this country's taste, with baseball top of the rankings, then a healthy dose of sumo and finally, my least favourite sport, bloody football. I rather like the fact that it isn't the 'national sport' the way it is in Britain. They also have some TV series on the bilingual system, but nothing that has really caught my eye recently. Films are almost always bilingual, so I can enjoy them perfectly well, but Reiko prefers the subtitled versions as the Japanese voiceovers are often of quite a low quality and can spoil a good film.
Many foreigners have satellite or cable TV over here, but I prefer just renting videos or DVDs, I watch far too much telly as it is. If I had a constant stream of English language programmes, nothing would get done. All in all, TV in Japan is a fairly pleasant experience, if you avoid the actual tat that the Japanese mostly watch. Incredibly inane game and chat shows with adults acting like very immature schoolchildren, all done at the top of their voices, not really something to soothe your jangled nerves after work. Choosw carefully however and you can enjoy travel shows that reveal hidden parts of Japan that most of us will never see and other countries that we can only dream of.

Katakana English

One of the worst aspects of life in Japan for foreigners is learning the language. Not only is it quite a complex language in its own right, (levels of politeness, hidden meanings, etc. not withstanding), but there are three scripts to master, Hiragana, a phonetic alphabet of sounds used for writing Japanese words, Kanji, Chinese writing symbols borrowed from China and with an amazing number of readings, meanings and combinations, and my least favourite, Katakana, which is used to write foreign words borrowed from other languages. The trouble with Katakana is that the Japanese language has a much smaller range of available sounds compared to English, so they take an English word like 'Christmas' and mangle it to fit their linguistic norms and it comes out as 'Kurisumasu'. That's not too bad, but many word are transformed into gibberish. 'Remote control' is twisted and abbreviated into 'Rimokon' Abbreviation only adds to the confusion. A personal computer is rendered as 'Passokon', and so the list goes on ad infinitem.

The worst thing about Katakana though is it's interference in English language learning. Because students have learned the limited phonetics attached to Katakana, when they try to learn English, they cannot guess at the spellings of words with any degree of accuracy. In fact, they are bloody awful at it. Katakana has no 'L' character or sound and therefore almost every word containing 'L' will be spelt incorrectly. Students soon start to realise there is a problem with their perception of English sounds, however, and they then tent to overcompensate. So, for example, the teacher might say a sentence for the students to write down, 'Round and round the ragged rock the ragged rascal ran'. The teacher shouldn't be too surprised to find it written down as, 'Round and round the lagged lock, the lagged rascaru ran' (they know 'ran' too well to make a mistake there). If I had my way, Katakana would be banned except for writing Japanese names. I think this would be a step in the right direction in helping Japan improve its terrible level of English ability in world rankings.

Golden Week

I'm sorry that I haven't updated for a while. I am just back at work after what the Japanese call 'Golden Week'. Japan is famous the world over for its work ethic. Salary men slog every hour god sends for the good of the group and the company, his family life suffers, his hair falls out, he chain smokes and hits the bottle and those who can't hack it jump in front of a train or end up living in a cardboard box under Shinjuku Station. Despite being allowed a generous twenty or so days holiday a year, most Japanese workers don't take them, at least, not all at once. My friend Steve, who now works for Matsushita Denki, (National Panasonic), informs me that the work force are so insecure and paranoid about their position in the company, that they will never take an entire week off at one go. What he finds is that the Japanese workers will take a Friday or a Monday off throughout the year so as to keep their absence as discreet as possible. Golden week is therefore very important as it is a conglomeration of a number of national holidays that allows people to take almost a week off to be with their families, travel to their hometowns or just kick back and relax.
There has been a lot of discussion in the media recently about the rise of social disorders and disfunctional families in Japan. Teenagers seem to be slipping over the edge into madness on an almost daily basis. Last month a seventeen year old school drop out smashed a four year old boy over the head with a hammer to see what it felt like to kill someone! (the little boy is still in hospital). What is going on in their heads? My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the fact that Japanese society places so much emphasis on fiscal gains and work that young people have very little in the way of parental guidance from parents who are never around and who, if they are around, are exhausted from overwork. What do the parents of such a disturbed child think or do when he stops attending school and his notebooks are packed with scrawlings of murdered people, blood and death? Not much it seems to me. A lot of hand wringing and wrinkled brows, but b**ger all of any real use. THey just don't know where to turn. (of course their first worry is the social stigma of having a family member who, gasp, sees a psychiatrist! Mother faints clean away and father has another double scotch!)
Perhaps what Japan needs most at this time is a few more Golden Weeks throughout the year to allow families to grow together and raise children who will respect their fellow man and other creatures and not turn out as psychotic murderers.
Our Golden Week was quite relaxing as Kaori, Reiko's sister visited us and enjoyed looking after Akira and cooking and cleaning for us. It was a very welcome respite and we thank her from the bottom of our hearts for her generous nature and her cheerfulness. We are looking forward to visiting Kyoto for the school summer holidays and being pampered some more by Reiko's lovely family.