Hi from Tokyo

This is Nana checking in from the Tokyo airport. I'm on my way back to the USA without Justin (GASP) to attend a college counselor training workshop in Washington, D.C. Justin will follow shortly but for now he's still in Fukuoka doing epic battle with the legendary Japanese driver's exam. (They are guaranteed to fail white male foreigners at least twice - and although it's certainly not official, nonwhite foreigners or females should apparently expect more fails than that).

Nothing to report except the consumption of a really large bowl of Tokyo-style soy ramen, and the fact that Terminal One's post-passport control food options are kind of lame. I had to walk 20 minutes to find this place. Otherwise, my options were "cafes" (read: packaged sandwich), McDonald's, or a Japanese restaurant serving fifteen dollar udon. If you connect through Narita and you have time, eat before security, which never takes long in Japan anyway. Terminal Two is much better.

So Justin and I will be back in the states for the summer soon. Email remains the best way to get a hold of us. Hope to see some of you soon!

The Toilets of Asia: Tenjin Beer Garden

Today's featured toilet:

Gender: Male
Toilet type: beats me; I wasn't there
Special features: designated barfing toilet

Our friend Matthew arranged for us to spend an evening hanging out at a rooftop beer garden in Tenjin, in downtown Fukuoka, a week or so ago. Unfortunately I didn't get the name of this particular beer garden at the time, but some detective work (i.e., cutting and pasting " ビヤガーデン," or "beer garden," into Google Maps) suggest strongly to me that we were at Nishitetsu Plaza.

To understand the need for a designated barfing toilet, you must first know a bit about Japanese drinking culture. In a nutshell, drinking culture means you drink. A lot. Japan has lots of "all-you-can-drink" promotions (henceforth AYCD, because I'm too lazy to type it). I think this is illegal in the US, and in the British Isles, judging by the way our Irish friends cleaned a place out last fall, it's probably just bad business practice. Karaoke parlors, for instance, may be AYCD. Rooftop beer gardens (we went to another one just last night for the faculty end-of-term party) can also be AYCD. The price for AYCD beer and AYC eat food at the places we've been, karaoke and rooftop, were in the $30-$40 range. That's cheaper than a beer and a meal if you go to the Hard Rock Cafe.

AYCD beer gardens are particularly popular with businessmen. When Japanese businessmen go out to drink, they are expected to D.R.I.N.K. As long as the boss keeps going, so do you, regardless of your own personal tolerance and what time you have to be at work in the morning. It is my understanding that this is a pan-East Asian phenomenon: one of our Korean students included a drinking tableau in her art show, meant to show the difficulties faced by an older but still subordinate employee at that type of event. When I worked for the Ohio Department of International Trade, I read a pamphlet that suggested that you should include a woman in any trade delegation to China, because women culturally are not expected to keep pace with the drinking and will prevent you from agreeing to anything questionable. (Japanese beer gardens actually charge 2oo yen, or about $2.50, less for women). This jives with my study-abroad time in China, in which the Chinese host students seemed discomfited by the drinking capacity of the two women's rugby players in my program. I think they felt it was "unfeminine." If that's the case, I have the most feminine alcohol tolerance in the world.

With all this gender stuff going on, you may be wondering why I'm writing a blog post on a men's toilet. Well, it's because the women's toilet doesn't actually have a designated barfing toilet. After Justin spotted the one in the men's room, I immediately went to the ladies', only to discover to my vast disappointment that there was nothing special to see except rows of squatty potties. (More on those some other time). And no, I did not go to the men's room to see this fabled barfing toilet myself.

Justin felt it was awkward to take a picture in the men's room, so we don't have a large photo, only this shot covertly snapped by our friend on his cell phone on a different trip:

According to Matthew, who speaks and reads excellent Japanese, this is accompanied by a sign which says "People that feel ill, please use the machine on the right."

Overall verdict: Both hilarious and disturbing, and most of all, I don't want to know what it looked like at the end of the night.

Not moving, for a change

Justin and I calculated it, and if you count college summers (in which your entire dorm room has to be emptied out), I have moved every summer since my high school graduation in 2001, and Justin has moved every summer since 2002. This means that I have moved every year for the last decade, or for my entire adult life and married life: four years of college, one year after college in New Haven, one year in Washington, two apartments in Korea (first year here; second year here and here), one year in Edinburgh (here) and then here to Japan (on the old Educated Burgher blog here and here).

But this year, we're staying put. It's bewildering. I've moved so many times it's just a part of the annual routine. For us, spring is that magical time of year when a young man's fancy turns to dismay that he ever bought it in the first place. New life begins, old leases terminate; buds open, bank accounts close. March comes in like a lion and goes out in a cardboard box.

I'm genuinely worried that I'm psychologically unable to transition to summer without moving. For the last few days I've snuck downstairs to coworker Dayle's place to help her with her packing (she's on to Turkey next year). Today, I dismantled my entire classroom.

Don't get me wrong, moving really sucks. It's expensive, it's exhausting, it's disheartening and uncomfortable, and every year I reach the point where I consider pushing whatever I have left into a giant pile and setting it on fire. I think some years it might have been cheaper for us to start over than to pay shipping.

There's one thing I love about moving, though, and that's the annual purge of accumulated junk. Books I won't reread. Clothes I don't wear. Shoes that don't fit, no matter how much I want them to. (I'm still in denial on the cute black heels) Piles and piles and piles of paper, all into bags and into the trash, recycling, or donation bins, as appropriate. As painful as the moving process is, it is so satisfying to see those bags of junk flying out the door and out of my life. It is also great to arrive at the new place, unpack, and feel smugly Thoreau-ian, at least for the forty-five minutes it lasts before I clutter it all up again.

I suppose I can go through the apartment without moving... but without the sword of Damocles of imminent eviction, it is significantly harder to motivate myself!

Melon Milk: Justin & Nana Drink Weird Stuff for Your Entertainment

They're big on flavored milk here in Asia. Besides the classic chocolate milk and the not-too-out-there caramel milk, you can also find fruit milks flavored with apple, peach, and even melon.

This week, while reeling from the onslaught of minor crises that's part and parcel of the last days of school, Nana and I decided to try some melon milk we found at the Daiei, our go-to supermarket.

No doubt about it: the container is prominently marked with the katakana for melon. However, we weren't 100% certain this would be melon milk rather than melon yogurt, as the bottle was right on the border between the milk and yogurt sections.

It was milk, after all.

Not bad, in fact. A bit rich for an actual drink, as I can't imagine it going well with any food (except, maybe, melon), but it made a pretty good snack.

Cost of Living in Japan

Japan is widely seen as an expensive place to live. Sure enough, Japan isn't cheap, but so far, Nana and I haven't found life here to be all that expensive.

So why the gap between expectation and reality? I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head, some of them particular to me and Nana, some of them particular to Fukuoka, and some of them general to the experience of picking up and moving somewhere new.

1. Location

When people say Japan, they often mean Tokyo. And Tokyo is expensive. However, outside of the big four (Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya), most cities in Japan are pretty reasonable.

According to these surveys, for instance, only Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya rank in the 150 most expensive cities in the world. That puts most Japanese cities well below moderately expensive American cities like St. Louis and even some reputedly inexpensive cities like, say, Pittsburgh.

Of course, those surveys are specifically geared to measure cost of living for expats, and if you care to click through, they have some serious methodological flaws. But still, when you think of cost of living for a small Japanese city like Fukuoka, it's roughly in the same ballpark as small-to-medium American cities.

2. Lifestyle


Often, when people consider living in another place, they think about what it would cost to replicate the literal trappings of life in their old home. In other words, Americans imagine what it would cost to buy (and own) a three-bedroom detached home, two cars (preferably gas guzzlers), and twenty gallons of gas a week. If they're really digging into the details, they'll also look at the cost of a burger, or a pizza, or a beer.

What they should be asking, however, is how much it would cost to replicate a similar level of comfort. In Japan, for instance, you don't need a car, let alone two, to get where you want to go when you want to go there: the trains and buses are reliable, and if the weather's nice you can just bike. And while an American-style meal will make a dent in your wallet, cheap Japanese food and groceries abound.

3. Healthcare


This one's simple: in Japan, as in almost anywhere else in the world, healthcare is dirt cheap compared to what Americans pay. (Here and in Korea, it's even pretty decent healthcare!) While for privacy reasons I don't want to go into details, my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that we're paying about 10% of what we paid for similar coverage when we were living in Washington, DC.

4. Taxes


In many countries, foreigners pay taxes at a lower effective rate than locals. I still have yet to figure out why this is. This effect is less pronounced the longer you live in Japan, with an especially big jump around year three, when the residence tax kicks in.

5. Education


Simply put, we don't have to pay to educate a family. You can get your kids a public school education in Japan for next to nothing, but by American standards it's a pretty miserable education. (Seriously. Don't believe what you read about Japanese schools.) Private school, on the other hand, is exorbitantly expensive, with yearly tuition that's often in line with private colleges in America.

6. It's All Relative!


It's actually been a really long time since Nana and I lived anywhere you could consider cheap. We went from college in Connecticut to a year in D.C. to two years in Seoul to a year in Edinburgh. Of all of those places, D. C. was where we had the smallest apartment. Next to that, our little place in Fukuoka seems pretty spacious!

7. Language: The Reverse Foreigner Tax

In Korea, Nana and I often complained about the "foreigner tax," which was our term for the extra money expats had to pay to get stuff done simply because we lacked the language skills to figure out the cheapest, most effective way. (This also covered times when we were flat out ripped off.)

But there's also a kind of reverse foreigner tax at work: you end up spending less because you don't know the language. So many leisure costs are tied to language-based activities. Here, though, we don't really go to the movies, we don't have a TV or a cable subscription, we don't buy a lot of music, and so on. We read, hang out, go to the beach if the weather's nice--all free activities used to replace expensive habits in the States.

Conclusions


Don't let the headlines scare you. Most of Japan is pretty affordable, and the US is a lot more expensive than people like to think.

(PS: I'm interested in hearing readers' thoughts on this. Am I right? Have I missed something? Oversimplified? Let me know what you think!)

Look On My Curtains, Ye Mighty, And Despair

Occasionally I suffer from urges of a kind not stereotypically experienced by heterosexual males. A couple weeks ago, for instance, I was overcome with a sudden loathing for our curtains. Inspired by my recent ode to the Manila Airport Hotel, I could not for one minute longer bear to look at the translucent yellow shrouds that hung limply over our windows. They'd already been old and ratty when we moved in back in August, and though we'd mused about replacing them forever, we'd never gotten around to it.

Seeing that this repulsion came upon me at about ten o'clock on a lazy Saturday morning, I did the only thing I could: I roused Nana from her sleep (!) and promptly packed her onto her bicycle for a trip to the Nitori.

Nitori is the Japanese Ikea-meets-Bed-Bath-and-Beyond. It's also probably the most Japanese home furnishings store on the face of the planet. Quick, in your head, picture a Japanese home. That's not what they actually look like--who can really afford the space to hide away all that clutter?--but it is what Nitori makes you think yours can look like, if only you buy that second rattan lampshade and that beige stoneware bowl.

Now, I should tell you that I had never before in my life purchased curtains. I did manage to come armed with measurements (in metric! take that, NASA!), but beyond that, I knew nothing. Which is another way of saying that I wasn't even qualified to buy curtains in English, let alone in Japanese.

Nevertheless, the expedition started out as a success. Nana and I found the curtain section, quickly agreed on a pattern we liked, and grabbed some standard sizes, pre-packaged, that would get the job done. No Japanese required!

It turns out, however, that one of our windows is an odd one--double-width, with an awkward height. The only way we were going to cover it was with a custom job, which meant somehow ordering custom curtains, for delivery, entirely in Japanese, when I have a hard enough time ordering dinner at the ramen place, where the options are pretty much limited to ramen, ramen, dumplings, and ramen.

And yet, when plunged into the searing fire, I emerged anew, forged into that timeless hero among the household gods: Justin, the Custom Curtain Orderer (in Japanese).

I'm still not sure how I did it. It involved a lot of pointing and gesturing, followed by emphatic repetitions of the three-digit numbers I'd learned to say only a couple days before. A flash of my gaijin ID (aka "whitey card") was enough to provide my address, and seeing that I learned to tell time in Japanese a three weeks ago, I was more than apt to the challenge of arranging delivery. I did end up with a Nitori "pointo cardo" I don't recall ever asking for (or wanting), but hey, it was free, and you can't win 'em all.

But most importantly: the curtains are up, and they look pretty good. So now my tortured soul can rest at peace.

The Philippines: More Food!

I seem to be pathologically unable to travel without penning long, pointless blog posts about food. If only there were some way to transmit tastes and smells over the internet, these posts might be marginally interesting to our readers, instead of just rambling and self-indulgent.

Anyway! Here goes.

The produce in the Philippines is absolutely amazing. Not only are the islands home to a significant percentage of the mangoes, pineapples, and bananas eaten around the world, they're also home to a host of other fruits, including varieties of the above, that are hard to find elsewhere.

One of our best meals of the trip was really just a simple showcase of fresh Filipino ingredients. It was in Tagaytay, outside of Manila, at a place called Sonia's (also known for its toilets, apparently).

If you squint enough to see through the dim lighting, you can see chunks of fresh pineapple, mango, and papaya, plus some yellowish slivers of jackfruit, which has a texture sort of like thick artichoke but tastes something like a mix of Asian pear, mango, and banana. And that was just for our salad! Later, we had bread and pasta with various sauces, including sun-dried tomato, pesto made with fresh basil, and green peppercorns in olive oil. Dessert was a plate of banana spring rolls with a side of honeyed sweet potato, capped off with tea made from sprig of tarragon.

Honestly, one of the best meals I can remember. The simple trick? Pretty much everything on the table was grown within walking distance of the restaurant. More easily done in the middle of a tropical paradise, of course.

Sonia's was a great showcase for the natural abundance of the Philippines, but how about actual Filipino cuisine? Well, our lovely host, Beia, and her family treated us to a full Filipino breakfast one morning. Quite a feast:

Fresh fruit featured prominently (that's papaya and mango), with generous helpings of mushroom omelette, corned beef hash, and a local roll called "pandesal." We washed it down with mugs of drinking chocolate.

Nana learned the stabby method for eating the middle slice of a mango . . .

. . . and I discovered the joys of coco jam, which is basically like peanut butter, but made with coconut instead.

Beia's family also hosted us for a family potluck to celebrate the various auspicious occasions we happened to crash.

Here, you can really see the odd fusions of American and Spanish cuisines with the Filipino palate. We have Filipino spaghetti, a stew of red peppers and chicken bits, a kind of spiced meatloaf, and garlic sausages with . . . marshmallows. Tasty, if somewhat puzzling!

Finally, a dash of traditional Filipino cuisine, sampled at a well-known eatery near our friend's place of work.

The centerpiece was a big bowl of simple beef soup (upper left) with a plate of veggies and seafood in Filipino "curry," which is actually a peanut sauce. We also had a side of crispy fried pork rinds in blood sauce. Totally awesome, but too rich for more than a couple bites!

Overall, Nana and I really liked the food we ate in the Philippines. In many parts of Asia, to get a lot of flavor, you have to put up with a lot of spiciness. Not so in the Philippines!

Final verdict? If we lived in the Philippines, we would get HUGE.

*Special thanks to our hosts, Beia and Romel, who found us some awesome stuff to eat!