ダニエルの冒険

Japanese business has lots of interesting rules, and I learnt a very interesting one yesterday.

I received a letter from my fibre provider, NTT, requesting my payment details. Inside the envelope was a document explaining the process, one form for bank account details, one for credit card details, and a small, addressed, franked envelope to return the forms in.

In Japan the addresses are “backwards”, beginning with the lowest level of detail (country or city) and becoming more detailed as it progresses, ending with the recipient’s name. In this case, it was to NTT. There was a suffix after “NTT”: “行” (yuki). 行 means “to”. Satomi’s mom crossed it out and rewrote it as “御中” (on-chuu).

When sending a letter to a company in Japan, the correct suffix is 御中 (on-chuu) as this is most polite. To an individual, it’s 様 (sama). 行 (yuki), however, is not polite at all, and is complete neutral, meaning simply “to”. When NTT wrote its own address, it would have been embarrassing to use the polite suffix for itself: using an honourific word to refer to oneself is a big no-no in Japanese. However, it is good form to change this to the honourific form when sending it back as you would never write someone else’s address without an honourific if you were writing it yourself.

This is one example of the big differences in Japanese depending on the relationship between the speaker and listener. When I speak with someone older than me, or a stranger, I conjugate my verbs politely, but when I speak with someone younger than me, I conjugate them casually. When I’m a customer, the staff use very formal conjugations and vocabulary with me, even though I am often much younger than them. In business it’s very important to get this right, and in English the words “our company” and “your company” are simple, but in Japanese they come with honourific/humble prefixes: 御社 (on-sha) means “your honourable company” and 弊社 (hei-sha) means “our useless company”.

There’s very little room for error, which is a challenge I look forward to every day.

This is some sort of group of storage container by my new apartment. One of the containers has a green sign on it from Pitatto House (ピタットハウス) looking for a tenant to move in (ご入居受付中). Wouldn’t be so bad if it had windows and electricity I suppose.

Delicious delicious cream stew!

A sign in the underground explaining the “Women Only” carriages. These have been around for ages, and exist to prevent men from groping women in the crowded trains in the mornings.

Recycling outside an apartment block. On this particular night, the boxes for PET, glass and aluminium were out. Everyone in the apartments separates their rubbish into the appropriate boxes and the following morning, they are collected. Every day is a different type of rubbish, and there are lots of types. On top of the 3 above, there are also burnable, non-burnable, dangerous, and plastic types: which all have to be separated and put out on the correct days. Everyone co-operates, though, and it’s a very efficient system. More modern apartment blocks have areas outside where you can put your separated rubbish at any time, rather than having to do it the night before collection.

Shimokitazawa (下北沢) is a shopping area with lots of tiny shops in a labyrinth of tiny streets. One shop (I think it was called Shimokitazawa Garage) is actually a collection of smaller shops, and one of those shops rents individual shelves to individuals to sell their wares, most of which are jewellery. There have been a lot of second-hand clothes shops opened recently, and it’s a big trend here now. Shimokitazawa has quite a lot of them.

Alf is still around here! Yesterday I saw some Alf DVDs in Tsutaya and today this was on TV. Apparently it’s on every Monday night.

Other random news:

• Soba-yasan curry isn’t as nice as regular curry.
• Found a beautiful shrine less than a block away from the apartment I’ll be moving into Feb 20th. I’ll take photos when I’m there at daytime.
• There’s a huge mall and cinema across the road from the apartment, and a big park one block away. Lots of tiny streets around it filled with izakaya and various little restaurants selling sushi, monja-yaki and donburi.
• Blu-ray is cheap here! I’m going to get a 32″ LCD TV for about ¥90,000 which has a Blu-ray recorder in it. BD-RE (re-writable discs) are less than ¥400 each (and are about €8 each in Ireland). The TV is 1080p, chi-deji compatible (explanation in next post), and if you plug in a LAN cable it has a full web browser. Plays DVDs and CDs too.

I went to an Irish pub (The Dubliners Irish Pub) in Shinjuku yesterday. It was packed with people, as it was the night I went a couple of years ago. It was similar to an Irish pub except for a few important points:

• When we went in, a man immediately approached us, asked how many of us there were, and led us to our table.
• The male/female ratio was much lower than in Ireland.
• The TV didn’t have soccer, rugby, or hurling, but had skiing on. Close enough I suppose.
• Most importantly, there was no bar. Everything is ordered through the waiters.

Guinness was almost twice the price that it is in Ireland, and my friend tried it and said it tastes a lot more watery (less creamy) than it does in Ireland.

I got a new tshirt in a shop on Takeshita-dori.

Haiji is the Japanese pronunciation of Heidi. Here’s some context:

Today I was eating ten-don (天丼: tenpura donburi, where tenpura is fried shrimp and donburi is a bowl with rice at the bottom) and when I was leaving the shop I saw that the noren was inside. A noren is a short curtain that’s put outside restaurant entrances in Japan when they are open for business. In the photo you can see the noren is propped up against the wall inside. You can always tell when a restaurant is open when the noren is outside over the door.

Maybe I should eat faster next time!

Exploring Ginza at Twilight.

Seen in Loft, Lazona Kawasaki.

In Japan they love using charts in the mornings. They assemble the charts while describing a piece of news. The most interesting news is always about famous couple’s relationship troubles.

“Iris” was on the news yesterday.

Here we see her beside her “TOY BOY” with 不倫 (“adultery”) in a heart in the middle, along with ４０歳差 (“40 year age gap”).

And here we see that she’s married with 3 children to Peter Robinson.

The presenter reminds us that they have been married for 40 years (結婚４０周年) and that they are an “ideal couple” (理想の夫婦).

Finally we are presented with the “secrets” (秘) recently discovered: a confession of unfaithfulness March last year, and a suicide attempt.

I finally got a phone sorted. I wanted to use my Irish iPhone but the mobile companies here weren’t having any of that so I ended up buying a new one. The girl in the SoftBank shop was incredibly helpful and after a lot of various obstacles owing to my non-Japaneseness, I finally ended up with a new iPhone. It’s a 16GB 3GS, like my Irish one, but I got it for free. Normally you either pay for the phone up front, or pay for it bit by bit over 12 or 24 months. In their current “iPhone for everybody” campaign, you pay for it every month over 24 months (1920 yen/mo I think), but they also give you a 1920 yen discount every month, so it ends up being free. However, I paid for the iPhone up front and will get that money back through the discount over the next two years.

I ran into quite a bit of bureaucracy when trying to get it sorted. For example, if you don’t have 90 days on your visa you can’t enter the contract, and I had 87 when signing up because I had been here for 3 days already and the tourist visa is 90 days. This means that if I had arrived and immediately done my alien registration, then hurried along to the phone shop, I could have done it without any trouble. In the end I needed Satomi’s dad to put his name down on my contract to cover them in case I skip the country.

It’s a relief to have constant internet access back, and since then I have filled up my schedule until Monday! SoftBank gave me about 4 or 5 different passwords for different things when I signed up and I’m having trouble figuring out which ones go with which services, but soon I should have it all figured out.