Appetizers

• 30C is now “cool” to me. (??!)

• I have 5 different trash sorting guides on my desk and I need all of them.

• Assembling the life of my predecessor through rumors about him from various people and the things he left behind. No murder discovered. Yet.

• Ubiquitous bidets might be the best quality of life improvement since coming here.

• Unintended consequence of moving to another country: getting tripped up by the slight differences in their keyboard layouts.

Main Course: Initial Impressions, Settling In

After two weeks of flailing and grasping for anything familiar, I finally managed to settle into some alpha version of a life here in Matsusaka. True to the advice of the alumni who came before me, prior experience living in the inaka (the countryside) can only get you so far. Coming here has been quite the test of my adaptability, improvisation skills, and flexibility, particularly of the neck as my primary communication survival tactic here is constantly nodding and saying yes.

The space around my apartment is not quite as desolate as Google Maps made it out to be, although my reality is that I am located smack next to a video game store (a luxury I never asked for), a crisscross of accursed four-lane roads, and, like, five car dealers. Despite this, I still managed to catch a particularly lovely view reflecting the inaka nature of the city one evening while walking home from the nearest train station.

It’s a 26 minute walk between home and the station, which is frankly unreasonable from a walkability perspective, but the sight of the cheerful river I cross every day to get to work makes it slightly more bearable.

Just outside the frame is concrete and car country. I suspect I will follow the footsteps of my predecessor and spend much time seeking the tea fields, rice paddies, and (according to the evening paper guy) crags that lie west of the metropolitan area.

(I know. Crags?? In my countryside city??? May be more likely than I think. The guy apparently did a trip there for one of his assignments, so I must believe it exists.)

New spaces and different available transportation modes call for new routines and planning methods. My grocery runs are now done by single gear granny bike, which means I must take great pains to avoid hills. These grand detours add much time to my travels (and every second hurts when you’re under blazing 35C sun and unspeakably humid conditions), but lead to fun discoveries, like this backroad that crosses two train tracks and slices through a rice field.

I have only ever seen one other person using this road and thankfully we were both headed in the same direction, as their destination turned out to be my neighbor, the video game store. It is such a skinny path that I truly fear the day I meet someone coming from the opposite way. I will enjoy this golden view before I perish from that inevitable encounter.

(Shortly after writing this, one of the fields was chopped and harvested. The refuse from that process left on the path made for quite a bumpy ride. Also, Japan is in a national rice shortage, so it turns out every day I have been riding past extremely precious commodities.)

Work Thoughts: I Worked Forty Hours a Week And All I Got Was Chronic Pain

Well, anybody who knows me knows that my thoughts on work are generally that 9-5 as a concept is good for business but bad for human (bodies).

(Also, people in my office don’t seem keen on getting up and doing stretch breaks, so I use visits to the restroom as my time to slow down the reformation of the rocks in my shoulders and quell the tingles in my radial and ulnar nerves.)

I am now rediscovering just how much time it takes to maintain my physical existence. The moment I get home from a normal work day I am basically doing chores until I sleep. I forget the last time I hit my bed so physically exhausted that I don’t even have time to properly spread my blanket over my body before konking out, but it’s every night here. I realize that the fatigue is from a multitude of nonstandard stress factors like adjusting to a new life in a new country, working and living in another language (which probably sets a high baseline level of stress and energy expenditure by default), relearning how to be on a 9-5 schedule, learning how to work in a physical office for the first time… the list goes on. But even being aware that I’m under a lot more stress than I would normally be starting a new job in the states, being a business boi just seems plain tough even on its own. I’m impressed and terrified that people here just grind it out no sweat.

(As an aside: It’s common to do chores here in smaller regular chunks due to the way things are set up. Laundry and cooking are usually every 2-3 days. For reference, my meal prep and laundry cycles used to be weekly. It’s all little things that add up. Surprisingly, this seems to be the hardest part of life here so far, minus the lack of car outside of dense city. I anticipated being very lonely and culture shocked etc. but mostly it’s just me being annoyed at how long it takes to exist. I count that as extremely lucky, because curing loneliness is much more difficult.)

Pain and lack of free time aside, working in Japanese has been much less daunting than I had initially thought! I feel like part of the language learning experience is feeling like your skills are never enough (in a healthy motivational way), but it’s nice to occasionally see proof that you can handle more than you think. Steady maintenance and active language absorption pays off.

I’m working on a hefty translation project with a lot of jargon and it’s one of my favorite work duties because of the all the research I get to do. Reading in Japanese has always felt like a treasure hunt to me where every new unknown word is like a neat find I can put into my pocket to look at later. Sleuthing out a sentence and finding ways to phrase it in another language never fails to feel like an exciting puzzle.

I think it’s also ironic that my first experience in a physical office is in Japan. Things are extremely analog here; everything that requires approval is printed and passed around, and we stamp documents with our personal seals to mark them read. Cultural things like greetings in the morning, greetings when people are coming in and out of the office, and goodbyes when leaving for the day are pretty important. I think I’ll be so confused if I ever go back to the US and get an office job.

Side Dishes

Tanabata

A lot of people I’ve spoken to here have agreed that August is matsuri season and that you have to get used to people launching fireworks you can hear from your apartment every weekend. I did not have this experience, probably due to my apartment being nestled far from any zones of revelry between a Honda dealer, a train, and a rice field. However, I did get my share of festivities when I was invited by my section chief to attend to the city’s Tanabata festival within the first week of arrival.

I meandered leisurely past live jazz bands and a taiko troupe until at last I arrived at the beer tasting my chief was running, thinking I would just say hi and move on. However, I knew something was up when chief said something that was drowned out by the cursed 2000s EDM the DJ was playing and waved me over to a small round table where two other section chiefs and our department head (very, very important man) were there enjoying beer. Apparently I was to join them. I ended up staying for a single cup of non-alcoholic beer desperately trying to understand three tipsy oji-sans slur in dialect.

(They were very kind, but between the dialect and the DJ, I could not understand 75% of what they were saying.)

My Fifteen Minutes

Everybody told me I was going to have to meet the mayor at some point, and all I knew going in was that I was going to talk to him and snap some pics. A week before meeting the mayor I was interviewed by the evening paper folks and told them my early memories of exposure to Japanese culture were of watching Naruto on TV as a kid, so now apparently everyone believes Naruto is what got me to Japan, which is just plain false, because everybody who knows me knows it was Ace Attorney. Then finally on the 15th I met the mayor, I discovered he was a super chill dude, I succeeded at avoiding talking about how Ace Attorney is the best language learning tool, and it was all over in 15 minutes. However. I had no idea I was going to be recorded until they starting waving microphones and setting up man-sized cameras around me. So now my nasally voice from being nontrivially ill two weeks prior is immortalized on my little personal page on the city website.

Recently (as of writing) when I was chilling walking home from a work activity, a random man called out to me, yelled out that he saw me on TV, then walked away, never to be seen again. It seems I can’t let down my guard out here anymore.

Bell Farm is Actually Heaven, and other Food-Related Bits

Gone are the days where I am walking home with my Trader Joe’s bags full of groceries for the week. Things here expire after like three days and come in the itty bitty two serving packages. This is one of many things that has forced me to drastically change the way I plan out grocery usage.

Also, peanut butter does exist here now! You used to only be able to find the cursed sugary kind. The catch is that it only comes in a size that I can devour in 3 days. Before I discovered this mini pb, I imported eight (8) small pbs and three enormous bags of flax meal because there was a sale. (The eight pbs might last me until October.)

I can compromise on many things, but bfast will not be one of them.

On the topic of bfast, I’ve been experimenting with getting the right amount of protein in my first meal of the day in a country without the amount of pb I require. I’ve deemed it impossible without turning to a rice-based meal that would require non-trivial prep (which is why I’ve resorted to importing pb), but I had some exciting weird combinations going for a while, eventually temporarily settling on yogurt + nuts + oats + frozen fruits + protein powder + silken tofu. It honestly wasn’t bad, but the tofu was definitely odd, and it still couldn’t sustain me until lunch. The protein powder seemed a waste when I barely had brain cells to exercise and therefore no muscles to repair (only muscles to lose…). Pb solves all of these problems.

I’ve never before been so elated to see cheap vegetables and fruits until one of my new friends kindly offered to drive me to Bell Farm, a small farmer’s market at a lovely plaza outside the city center. Fruits in Japan come at a premium, which is why I went bonkers when I saw the cheap prices at Bell Farm and bought:

• Kuri Kabocha (possibly my favorite food ever after pb?!)

• The Fancy Sweet Potatoes (I didn’t know they were fancy)

• eight apples

• four pears

• probably another ungodly amount of fruit I’m forgetting

• six cherry plums

If you ever want to lure me out of my AC cave, just say there’s a fruit sale and I will come running/biking.

Disgustingly Torrential Downpour and Surprise Sleepover

The biggest typhoon (which I have since learned is a hurricane with another name) since 1959 came in and dumped so much rain on us that the water came up to my front doorstep. I was extremely fortunate to have had a friend who offered to let me evacuate to her home for the night, so I ended up helping to entertain her son for the evening. He listens to my every word very intently since I’m still fresh and cool in his eyes, so I did my duty and used that power to get him to do important things my friend was unable to get him to do, like make him eat his dinner and help with dishes. We played a duet on his baby 60 key piano keyboard with the stickers that help you cheat on the notes. He eventually demanded to read me a bedtime story (Guri and Gura, apparently Goodnight Moon level of classic here and similar to Frog and Toad) before turning in for the night.

While kids can be fun, I cannot handle more than one consecutive day with them. Thankfully, my apartment was fine and the rain subsided, so I was able to return home the next afternoon and wash all the dishes I had hastily abandoned to evacuate.

You know you’re starting to get used to the weather around here when you walk out with full rain regalia (rain shell, pants, umbrella, and water resistant shoes) over your business boi outfit (long sleeve button up, undershirt for the inevitable waterfall of sweat, and slacks) in 25C and disgusting humidity and think “wow, it’s actually cool out today! :)”

Shielded by the Hands of Love

One of my biggest worries about moving to another country was feeling lonely. I had already experienced a lite version of picking up and moving to a new place and starting a friend ecosystem from scratch, but I had struggled quite a bit and still didn’t quite crack the code even after three years. I was so worried about feeling isolated and culture shocked that I wrote multiple long motivational notes and self care guides for myself in case I needed the boost.

Despite my worries, from the moment I stepped into the airport I discovered that I would have people to support me every step of the way. In fact, even before I was preparing to leave for JET, it became ever more apparent to me that I was always fortunate to be surrounded by kind friends who had my back. It hit me in the shotgun seat of my roommate’s car on the way to Seatac that the last people I would see in person before being shipped off to the Japanese countryside were not my family, but the lovely people who accepted me into their living space during my time in Seattle, brought me ice cream on the way home from the store, invited me to lively functions with all of their friends, floated in Green Lake with me in hot summers, watched Jane the Virgin (and the slightly cursed time travel plane show) with me in rainy winters, and entrusted me with the care of their big dingo whom I love. I can only hope I have been able to return even a fraction of their generosity and affection and friendship.

I heard all sorts of odd stories about the mixed bag that the JET participants can be but I’m happy to say that my local JETs (plus everyone around them) are the sweetest, most welcoming folks. I hope to adventure with them soon.

What I’m Reading/Watching

Despite everything, I somehow managed to squeeze in some reading here and there this month. A friend pointed out that I unexpectedly read a nontrivial number of books with sapphic romance, which is hilarious because I’m really not even trying.

August Media:

• I Love my Family for Who They Are, Kishida Nami

• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

• The Boyfriend (2024)

Gideon was so fantastic that I had to pause the never ending chore grind to finish it, at my own expense (but also my own benefit because it was a great book). The space fantasy of it all was very unique and the gothic touch gave it a delectably dark vibe.

Kishida Nami is an essayist from Kobe and she often puts her local dialect (I think it’s Kansai dialect) into her writing, which is nearly unreadable to me at times. I think if I manage to decipher her dialect I will get much closer to understanding the Matsusaka dialect, and thus one step further in understanding the hot goss at the office.

Paris 2024

The Olympics became a comfort to me in my first week here as I could put it on while trying to figure out what to make for dinner after eight long hours at the office fighting intense jet lag to read government documents in a foreign language. The Olympics are the only time you will ever catch me acting patriotic. Ironically I only knew the Japanese comp climbers via instagram, so being here in Japan while watching comp for the first time felt very appropriate.

Koshien

I missed sports after the Olympics so I put on the biggest amateur inter-high baseball tournament and decided that the ball was good enough as a replacement. Koshien is an extremely huge deal here; it’s televised like an official sport, and apparently when a team is eliminated, the losing team’s players all take a bit of the dirt from the stadium home in special bags. They are often seen crying while doing so. Some teams will coordinate an expression of gratitude for having the chance to come and play at Koshien before quickly shoveling the special dirt into their little drawstring bags (seemingly carried only for the purpose of storing the sacred dirt) with bare, baseball-worn hands. This begs the question: what happens to their ball dreams and aspirations when Koshien stadium runs out of dirt? What do these lads do with their little dirt bags? And who is paying for their fancy matching uniforms and backpacks??

Next Month’s Menu

The unintentional sapphic book streak continues because the Japanese book club I am trying to join is reading 光のとこにいてね by Ichiho Michi. From what I can tell, it’s about two bffs and one of them falls in love with the other, but all the reviews (in Japanese) are talking about how friendship is magic etc. so this might be a “and they were roommates” situation.

Goals for next month:

• Find a way to lunch with the coworkers who don’t eat at their desks

• Visit the climbing gym in the next town and ask where the mythical local crags are (and get in on any climbing excursions??)

• Make ?? a new friend??? (possibly at the gym? ?)

• Find structured study material and schedule for Japanese that actually works for me

Stay tuned for another helping.

Your fruit sale splurging, raw mallow leaf eating, constantly sweating in 35C humidity semi-celebrity (?),

Alex