Narrative Disorder… in Japan!!

Like so many people, one of the things I’ve always loved about Japan is their design. The Zen-influenced minimalism of their architecture and landscape architecture was introduced to me as the ultimate design when I was a small child and so I have held simple elegance above all other design for as long as I can remember being aware of such things. This is not to say that simple elegance has no roots in the West - the Scandinavians are, of course, expert (often producing eerily similar pieces to the Japanese at times) but Western minimalism, no matter how sun-drenched, is always, it seems to me, so severe. Being raised in Melbourne, severe suits me to an extent. I have an aversion to bright colours (esp when it comes to clothing hehe) but also to the cluttered patterns or frilliness of design which is ‘prettiness’ in the West. What I really love about Japanese design is that their philosophy of simple elegance does not prevent them from venturing into the very very pretty.  A girl likes a little pink in her life (literally and metaphorically) so I intend to make the most of being here by getting some.

So, here is prettiness purchase number one - simple ceramic bowls and plates from a variety store called Daiso which sells everything from candy to laundry bags to simple shelving racks. These were 200yen each - about $2.00AUD

Hmm that white kitchen bench washes out the lovely cream colour - I’ll have to get myself a background cloth to make these shots better in future.

Have I said how magnificent the early evening winds are here? Seriously worth the heat of the day (esp if you can hide from it inside with air-con but even then…)

/happy sigh

Well! Our air shipment arrived today - exactly on time according to the shipping people so we are hoping the sea shipment will also be on time in a few weeks (though it is taifun season.) Brigie is happy to have her food bowls here and even more happy to have her brush - got some good brownie points time with her this afternoon heehee.

We also now have our computers and on the 11th of July we will have desks to put them on - yay! I can’t wait to have sofas and a TV stand for this ridiculously huge (and yet the third biggest we could have chosen) flatscreen TV they’ve given us. I’ve been watching as many melodramas as I can find that aren’t actually Korean or Chinese because they speak slowly and repeat everything over and over to each other hehe. However I have to admit our favourite TV experience still looks more like this:

Damn Colbert and Stewart are on their two weeks off which they seem to take every three weeks at the moment though lol

So, as promised though a little late, here is a virtual tour of the inside of our new digs - not hugely interesting for many but just the sort of thing I was hoping to find when I was hunting for info on moving here the last few months so here goes.

Welcome! This is our little genkan (entrance way) where everyone will leave their shoes so as not to track dirt inside or damage the floors. This is probably the most "Japanese" part of the whole house - at least traditionally, the place is filled with very modern Japanese house-gadgets but I’ll get to them later.

To the left of the entrance is this lovely shoe closet, again very normal in Japan but different for us. What I can’t show you is that the shoe cupboard smells wonderful! It seems to be impregnated with some kind of wood oil - makes total sense of course, shoes being shoes, but was a nice surprise.

This is the kitchen window (to the left of where I was standing to take the above picture and looking out onto the entrance porch) it is a sliding door and so it can be left open if you are expecting visitors or just to let air through - at around 4 each afternoon I turn off the air-con and open up and get a wonderful breeze through the whole house.

And this is the cute galley kitchen (looking a lot neater than it is today with all my cooking utensils all over the bench.) The little window below the stove is a fish grill - ovens are fairly unusual in Japan unless it’s a really swish place or one of the houses important holus-bolus from the States. We have a dual microwave-convection oven which will likely get some use in winter as a conventional oven if we start to crave a roast chicken or lamb tandoori or some such.

But this shot is tastefully hiding something…

THE RUBBISH!! Anyone who has looked into living in Japan will have come across someone lamenting the complexity of recycling here - and it’s true! First you must use the bags from your local supermarket as the marking on the bags include which council you are in so you’d best not shop near work if you work far away. Then you have to separate the burnables and organics (red printed bag) from non-burnables (like old cameras or leather gloves - green printed bag) and then the recyclables must be separated into different blueprinted bags - PET bottles together in one, paper and cardboard into another, tins and cans in another and then plastics that aren’t PET (called pura) into another - oh and all glass jars and bottles or steel cans into baskets out front without bags. Almost everything has little symbols on to help you out and some packaging is quite complex as, for example, a PET bottle may have a pura label which must be cut off and of course the lid is also pura. I actually had to go out and buy a pair of scissors so I could do the rubbish! At the moment we are getting mounds of pura since we are eating from the wonderful fresh bento you can get from the supermarkets until we have the facilities to cook.

So there you go - if anyone in Australia doesn’t recycle because it’s too much trouble then there’s a different perspective for you. What happens if you get it wrong? Well, there are no fines but your rubbish won’t be collected if the men see the wrong thing through the clear plastic bag and it may just end up on your doorstep with a stern admonition from the neighbourhood "Queen Bee" - we haven’t met our yet but I’m happy to believe there is one and do everything to avoid her lol!

So, back to the tour.

This is what is known as our LD (Living/Dining) (this view is from beside the fridge.) It’s a great space and should have plenty of room for the two two seater sofas we have coming and a dining setting we will buy later so we can have people to dinner. You can see the monster air-con unit which cools the whole downstairs beautifully and also the doors that I open up for the wonderful tropical breeze - no issue with privacy as the wall of the terrace is one story tall.

A note about renting in Japan: most places will require you to provide not only your own air conditioner (which will be vital) also window coverings and even light fittings - so be prepared. We are paying a little more for our place than we intended but, unusually, it included all of those things AND basic fibre optic internet AND parking in the rent with no monthly maintenance fee (also usually required) so the extra monthly rent was totally worth it. Definitely something to look out for :) 

If you look carefully on the shadowy orange wall on the left of frame in the picture above, you can see two white panels, one is the light dimmer and the other is one of the house gadgets - it’s basically just the hot water control BUT it has a button on it which will automatically fill the bath upstairs for you! Lovely idea though you still have to go upstairs to put the plug in so… hmmm

Looking back from the glass doors you can see down the hallway to the front door and the stairs. Under the stairs there is a small powder room with an ingenious toilet with a hand basin fitted above the cistern and makes use of the clean water that comes in to fill the cistern by routing it through the tap wash your hands with before it goes down into the cistern. There is also a little laundry with a washing machine which sings to me as it starts and finishes a load and is also a dryer (though it crushes everything almost beyond ironing!)

But there’s something missing in this picture…

Ah, that’s better. Brigid has decided that her Japanese persona will be "the cat upon the stair". I’m not sure what she likes about it, maybe it’s because neither of us can sneak upstairs or down without her knowing where we are or perhaps it’s the point the air-con hits with it’s monster fans but she seems to love it.

At the top of the stairs and straight ahead is our study (or will be when the furniture arrives.) You can see how lovely and light it is and how green the view. This was the room that sold me on the place (and allowed me to put the big orange "feature" wall behind me hehe.) The top three windows open wide and you can get a good breeze through the top floor, too. 

This is a close up of the view, you can see that across our little step-street is a traditional house - I will put my desk at the window so that it can inspire me! No excuse not to sit at the desk and write everyday with a view like that!  I am fairly sure that the trees on the right of the photo are prunus trees so I can’t wait till next Spring to find out!!

Boring orientation shot - this is from the study door looking past the bathroom door on the right to the bedroom.

This is our oddly large bathroom, well half of it, and here the gadgets really begin - yes as you can see below we have an automatic flushing toilet with a bidet - no heated seat, though, at least not that we’ve worked out lol!

This is the other half of the bathroom: the shower which is actually more a a big wet-room with a bath in it. The Japanese have a stool beside the bath and a large bowl which they fill and then wash from before getting into the wonderfully deep bath for a good, mind & muscle relax. We mostly just stand and shower - switching on the water and letting it run on the floor takes some getting used to! I’ve never been into baths but I’m getting into them here - after all it’s the most comfortable place in the house at the moment! I must get myself some good onsen salts soon.

The panel on the wall near the bath is a wonderful house gadget - it is connected to the one downstairs and also has an auto fill button. Up here you can set the water level you want and the temperature you want and it MAINTAINS THAT TEMPERATURE FOR AS LONG AS YOU ARE IN THE BATH. The fiddling with taps to try to keep a bath warm is the main reason I’ve never been a bath person and this feature is what has won me over.  There is a "warm up" button, too, so you can start the bath cooler then reset the temperature to warmer if you like.

And the last house gadget I’ll rave about is also in the shower room. See the rods over the bath in the picture above with towels hanging from them? Well, with the use of special monster-sized versions of the clever little things you can hang on a line or clothes rack with multiple pegs on them from which you can hang socks and smalls, you can hang at least a couple of loads of washing in there and dry them beautifully!

Here is a shot of the water-proof shower door when it’s closed and you can see the panel just to the right of it above the light switch.

Here’s a close up - the wonderful relocation consultants have put little white labels with English translations on all the appliances for us.

This snazzy little machine keeps the shower room ventilated at all times but also allows you to push a button to warm the room in winter, dry the room and bath (and your towels at the same time) after bathing or you can push another button for "clothes drying" whatever is hanging on the rails - either cool air or warm air as you wish - set the timer for anything from half to 12 hours and Bob’s-your-uncle!

If you’re looking for a place in Japan I highly recommend getting one of these. In the Summer you will be showering almost every time you return to the house - that’s lots of laundry and lots of towels if they haven’t dried since your morning shower!

And finally the bedroom, view not as good but there is a little green and it is wonderfully light, though you want to keep your blinds closed to the heat till the afternoon.

And, to come full circle, here is the view of our little terrace from the bedroom window.

We are very happy here - it should be the perfect place to spend a couple of years, in fact, I reckon it will be hard to leave - but then, I’m currently in the Euphoria stage of the culture shock cycle so bring on the roller coaster LOL!!

SO, where are we exactly? Nagoya is on the main island of Japan, south west of Tokyo. In the map below the sprawling brown, tree-less area on the right edge is Tokyo (or part thereof) and the compact brown, tree-less area to the South East, surrounding a bay is Nagoya.

Here it is from just 40 miles.

And we live east of central Nagoya in an area called Kakuozan which you can see in the green area on this map - it’s not outer east but not inner east either, it takes 12 minutes by train to Nagoya Central station. 

Nagoya is one of those cities which has semi-highrises and huge multi-lane roads and motorways all over it so it can be hard to tell where the ‘city’ as such ends and the suburbs begin - but we are definitely in the suburbs.

Nagoya is a city of contrasts… sigh, did I actually write that? Well, it fits. In Nagoya the old and new stand side by side - though not necessarily happily as much of the old is below code and is gradually being either lovingly brought up to standard (which means won’t collapse in an earthquake of 5.5 Richter) or, unfortunately, knocked down and replaced. This photo below was taken the car park of our local supermarket.

And this is around the corner from the supermarket on my way home, it really is a beautiful thing to see - I hope it doesn’t disappear…

Even the new has its cutenesses though, this is our local florist As well as the obviously cute name, if you look carefully on the left of the door (your left, not the door’s) you will see white pointy things hanging down - these are small paper cones about the size and shape of a large waffle cone from a generous ice-cream parlour and they have small posies in them! There is something so delightfully child-like about them they always make me smile when I pass.

Bringing you closer to our new home now, this is our street - it is off a major road (6 lanes, I think) called Higashiyama-dori (dori being Japanese for road) - our railway line is Higashiyama and apparently it runs under the road for most of the way - I assume the railway line came after the road, though.

So, as I was saying, this is our street which is very green for Nagoya. I have no idea what the street is called - it does have a name but it’s in kanji which I can’t read and the addressing system is not related to your road so I have not yet had a chance or need to find out.

FYI the addressing system is rather confusing, everyone lives in a ‘cho’ which is an area and you live in a block within that cho - we are in the first block of Otana-cho - needless to say the GPS system in which you can enter phone numbers to find places has taken off here as even the Japanese find it difficult.

Kakuozan is very, very hilly and off our street are roads which are either like this not-so-steep one (seriously there is one near the supermarket which is more than 45degrees - no exaggeration!)

Or pedestrian-only streets like this one.

If you look carefully on the left edge of this shot, you will see Superman standing at the (out-of-shot) gate to our apartments!

And these are they - DEFINITELY a member of the ‘new’ architecture faction! I didn’t take this shot very well it looks like the building could go up and up forever but actually the window on the left (which is our study) has no building above it. The block is really more of a set of two story villa units built up the hill. You can’t see the first floor of our apartment at all because of the wall around the entrance porch but our front door is below the study window, as is the kitchen.

Not hugely interesting pictures I know, there has been little time for sightseeing as yet - there is a temple near by which I will visit soon and a local fire festival soon, too but for now the above is pretty much all of Kakuozan I have seen outside of ward offices and supermarkets/shops that sell things like bathmats and laundry supplies! Touristy pictures will flood in once I am a) driving and b) living in an apartment with furniture… but you’ll see how it is next post in a fascinating tour inside…

As you will have gathered from the change in blog title and in the weather widget in the sidebar…we’ve arrived!
Superman and myself were installed in our new little villa unit in Nagoya on Monday 23rd and Brigie joined us (somewhat sorry for herself but extra cuddly) on Wednesday 25th. The new house is pretty bare except for a temporary bed until our sea shipment arrives and appliances as we were unable to organize leased furniture from Australia. We organized that the day after we arrived and we should have somewhere comfortable to sit in a couple of weeks. In the mean time, we are making do with two floor chairs we picked up for about Y3000 each ($30AUD) which are made for tatami rooms. The fluffy blue pod which Brigid is stubbornly looking at rather than sitting in cost twice the price of the floorchairs but of course Brigie won’t use it - we never learn lol. The floorchairs are actually quite comfortable but not having a table and so, for example, resting my laptop on the box the transformer came in as I write this makes for back-breaking work. Our desktop computers are arriving by air next week (we had an allowance of 4 teachests by air and we filled most of them with our computers - priorities, priorities…) but we will likely not use them till the desks arrive even though all my current email and skype addresses are on the desktop and I am hanging out to contact everyone!

I’ll make this a quick post and get working on a couple of longer ones I’ve been planning. Standby - pictures incoming…

As we take a break from packing to enjoy the bounty that is the-last-stuff-in-the-fridge, I thought I’d take the opportunity to make what will no doubt be the last post from Australia for quite some time.

I say "packing" but we are, of course, not actually packing but rather preparing for the packers of OSS (Overseas Shipping Services I believe) to arrive at 7:30 tomorrow morning. As lovely as it sounds to have someone else pack for you I would actually venture that it is far more stressful because of the sheer level of organization required. When you pack for yourself you can organize as you pack: "Hmm, forgot we had that, guess I’ll put this in this box here" "Ah we’ll need that before the Sea shipment comes guess I’ll put that in this box here." Instead,one must provide a detailed inventory to the company some weeks in advance for both insurance purposes and as a guide for the packers THEN, as the day approaches, you have to find ways to ensure that it is communicated to the guys on the day. Having experienced this process to a smaller degree when we were transferred to Sydney, I can attest that packers (as in the guys who come and pack your stuff, not a certain wealthy Australian family with a penchant for gambling from both sides of the table) give a good impression of locusts. They arrive, they buzz about determinedly for what is probably a few hours but feels like a few minutes and when they are gone everything, and I mean everything is gone. I was recently told about a diplomat whose shipment arrived after two months on the sea and eagerly opened it up to find her partially full rubbish bin in a box. Seriously. Think about it. Two months in the sun on a container ship…

So, we are grouping everything in stacks or on shelves with big yellow, blue or pink stickers with Air, Sea or Store on them and hoping we’ve got it all right! Our consultants in the office have asked us to be around to direct everything which is a good sign since the lat guys asked us not to be present - so we should be okay. When it all comes down to it though, by midday Friday everything will be packed and "uplifted" and there will be nothing we can do anymore - which is exactly why I always preferred exams over assignments lol.

Sydney has been … well it’s been. We really, really, should not have lived in The Shire. We chose it because it was 3 minutes from Superman’s work and, frankly, we just didn’t know.  We had some glimpses when we told people where he was working and they said "You’re white, you could live down there." We wondered at the seeming racism but ignored it. No one suggested we NOT live here though. No-one told us that we would never hear a language other than English spoken nor see a complexion darker than ours that wasn’t due to an insane amount of time spent on a tanning bed. No-one told us that in the very few, just-barely-above-supermarket-quality greengrocers here garlic would be found "down there with the other exotic things" or that "brown" is still a descriptive used to describe bread - though "whitebread" is a perfect descriptive for the whole area so that’s probably ok. Having our cars vandalized when they couldn’t break into them three times hasn’t really helped our impressions either…

We were told that, because of the traffic (made worse, especially for new people by the higgledy piggledy civic "planning"), you’d have to "live" where you live  and that was, essentially, true - going into the city from here is a nightmare by car or public transport. Nevertheless I found solace slowly driving the 25 minutes to Hurstville to do my grocery shopping. The Westfield mall there is quite small and has become like a small town market. Every time I went around 11 in the morning I would see a group of ten or so 65+ yr old husbands of various European origin who seem to have made a club house of some sofas near the exit to the car park and chat for seemingly hours while they waited for their wives to finish shopping. I could shop for terribly exotic things like mirin or Chinese cooking wine or - shock horror - homemade kibbe and hummous.  Best of all, I could stand in the medicare line and eavesdrop on little old french ladies lamenting their daughters’ not yet being married or listen in blissful ignorance to the gentle rhythms of Mandarin or the bright clang of Cantonese. When we return we will live in Hurstville I think

Anyway enough procrastinating, my feet are almost not sore!! Must get back to it. No doubt my next post will be from our new home in Nagoya!!

On our first day in Nagoya we discovered a new solution to the age old travellers problem of "How to Get Directions When you Don’t Know the Language."

Step one:

Find a car showroom (any will do but of course we recommend Toyota)

Step Two:

Take inordinate interest in a car with latest technology.

Step Three:

Boot up the touch screen GPS!!

Et voila! You have a map which tells you where you are and which with the use of nothing more than your finger on the touch screen you can find anywhere you need - even a specific address in Nagoya as you can enter phone numbers if need be - so no language issue either!

Happy travelling!!

Since the Japanese drive on the left as we do here in Australia, the main concern Superman and I have about driving in Japan is not being able read the street signs. I’ve been hunting for something which would allow us to learn them before we move but have had little luck till today (when I used the term "road sign" instead of "Street sign" D’oh!)

So for anyone interested here’s the link!

New International and Japanese Road Signs

Small quibble - on the first page two of the signs look remarkably similar and yet have, admittedly slightly, different translations… I think if I see this one I’ll just stop anyway hehe

This was our one really touristy outing - we really only had one day to ourselves. I have had various pictures of Nagoya Castle as my desktop for months so it was magical to be able to be there in person and take my own!

The original castle was a small castle built in 1525 but was only occupied briefly. In 1610 Tokogawa Ieyasu (the first Shogun of the Tokogawa shogunate) had a larger castle built on the site. Tragically, the old castle was destroyed by American bombs and the resulting fire on May 14, 1945 (it was targeted as a district army headquarters and POW camp.) The building we see now is a replica of the donjon (the keep) only which was built in the 1950s - the palace itself has not been rebuilt though there are plans for it.

The Entrance proper, to the right of the ticket booth (above)

As you enter, the castle peeks at you over the trees, ah wonderful, blessed, green trees …

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the castle is surrounded by an impressive moat which is actually what cuts through the city looking like a river from Google Maps …

But right up at the base of the castle the moat is currently dry and a haven for other inhabitants…

The path around the castle takes you around the moat and gives some magnificent views…

(BTW above on the right is Superman and in the middle is his colleague, Duc, who is also transferring with the project. )

At last we come to a small entrance across the moat of this fort…

The forecourt is now rather like a school quadrangle with a few ranger cars and some benches and tables in front of a cafe - I’d love to know what this area would have been filled with when this castle was the hub of life in the early Edo period. This is the ramp up into the castle.

No photography is allowed inside but there wasn’t much I’d have taken anyway. There is no sense of what it would have been like to live in the castle, the first 6 floors have simply been made into museum rooms - the displays are lovely but, again because of destruction, many of the displays are "examples" either from other areas or complete reconstructions from modern times.

The 7th story of the castle has been turned into a viewing room with windows all round (and a shop full of touristy bits and pieces including Disney in Nagoya things - very odd.) From this vantage point you can see how vast and sprawling is the city we will soon be calling home and why the lush and beautiful gardens are a haven from the concrete city surrounding it.

All over the gardens and castle there were signs first in Japanese then with white English translations beneath - except for this ancient little hut opposite the castle, just over the internal moat. The sign you see is Japanese only and I so wish I could find out what this little thing is but I could find noone to ask. If anyone knows an answer to my little mystery, please email me and I will post when I find out.

Requisite vending machine shot - yes that’s canned hot coffee in some of those

Dotted all over Nagoya are what look like slot machine parlors and are filled to the brim with suit-and-tie salarymen at all hours of the day…

in fact they are called ’slots’ on many of the windows…

But gambling is illegal in Japan, right? Well, yes. But these "pachinko" machines are, essentially, vertical pinball machines and it’s NOT illegal to play them and win extra metal balls for high scores, NEITHER is it illegal to trade said balls in for prizes NOR is it illegal to take said prizes to various, totally independent, stores around Nagoya which buy them from you - for cash. Apparently it is also not illegal to perpetuate ear-destroying noise in these places - seriously don’t go in if you value your hearing!

We spent a good part of our time in electronics stores checking out solutions for bringing our computers and peripherals to the different voltage of Japan. These cord ties for keeping your under-desk spaghetti neat demonstrate the attention to detail as well as the love affair with customization in Japan. Gone will be our rubbish bin ties for colour coordinated, padded ties…

And if that’s too boring for us well, there’s always these cuties…

And speaking of attention to detail and cute, I bought some aspirin for the trip home and got a fix for my tins and boxes addiction…

No longer will I endure the indignity of having a loose slide of aspirin floating around in my bag hehe. I think I’m going to fit in juuust fine!