The First Two Days

I made it here in one piece!

The flight from JAL was painless and (mostly) comfortable; I sat next to Rob, who’s also studying at ICU this year, with a nice woman called Sayuri on my other side. We talked for a little – mostly in English, though with some Japanese – and I told her about wanting to teach. She said she knew a lot of families with children who would like to learn English, so we exchanged contact details.

I also watched some films. Monsters Inc is pretty well dubbed in Japanese, and a lot of the language is fairly simple. It was also pretty cool to see how they translate some of the jokes – for example, in the blooper reel, a character says ‘Go on, go throw up’ instead of ‘Go grow up’.

In Japanese it’s changed from ‘Ookiku naru’ (grow up) o ‘oishiku naru’ (get tasty).
Yeah.

I watched a few other kids’ programmes in Japanese, including a very surreal, Neil Buchanan-devoid Japanese Art Attack. I also tried to watch Goemon but fell asleep, which was a shame, as it looked very good.

On touching down, we were ushered through a very efficient checking in  system and were then met by a tiny crowd – Kazuya, Rob’s friend, who I know from Japsoc; and also Chihoko and Shin, two students from ICU who were sent to help us get to the guesthouse.

So we navigated our way to Higashi-Koganei to finalise our guesthouse reservations. Shin fell asleep on me at one point, but it was a very long  journey.
I also realised the problems of having a ridiculously large/heavy suitcase – you can’t get it up and down stairs. Kaz lugged it up and down about five flights of stairs while I guilted in the background. Next time I stay somewhere for a very long time, I’m gonna get a lighter one.

Around this time I started noticing just how…Japanese everything is. I’ll admit I play a lot of videogames, and there were little things – the wa-wa-wa-waaaaaah noise that cicadas make, the reflectors hung everywhere, the flags outside of shops, the sheer abundance of anime-styled art – that really drive it home.

It’s…peculiar, but not bad. I actually really like it.

So we made it, sweaty and jetlagged, to the guest house main office.  Then we had a grilling about rules and regulations which, in my bleary state of mind, set off a whole host of alarm bells: the internet is free, but it’s temperamental and occasionally stops working all together when lots of people are using it. You can only use one electrical appliance at a time. If you have a friend over you have to alert the guesthouse.
But we had nowhere else to stay, so we paid up our first instalment and agreed to sign on for three months. Then we were driven to the guesthouse itself and were given out keys. The room was actually really nice; small, but fitted with everything you’d really need. The bathrooms are close by and there’s a shower downstairs (though I’ve yet to work out how to get the hot water working).
Then we went for a little wander before we met up with Kaz again to go out to eat. A woman politely asked me if I’d like a points card and I said ‘no’ in Japanese and left, only realising how rude I looked afterwards.
It took a while to meet Kaz due to lack of mobile phones, but we managed it eventually. We ate in this little restaurant that I can’t even remember the name of, but the food was very good – I was just too tired to actually eat, so..
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The next day, homesickness hit. And hard.

I felt under the weather for most of this day, which was a severe downside when going food shopping. However, I did buy some English muffins :B
We’ve yet to do our Alien Registration, but we did walk around town and stock up on a lot of supplies. Met up with Kazu again; there’s upsides and downsides to the fact he’s so good at English, because on the one hand, he helped us to get things done really quickly and efficiently, but on the other, we’re not really speaking as much Japanese as we should be.

It’s still early days and I’m feeling really prone to crying and being sick, but I’m sure things will clear up soon. Unfortunately, I’ve also mislaid a £150 camera in the meantime and have no idea where I’ve left it.

Going without a camera isn’t really an option though, so I’ll have to buy another if I can’t find one….

Hopefully the next entry will be more cheerful.

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