Before going on with the Menkyo Center saga, here's a picture that ties in with cars and licenses a little bit, anyway - the Toyota Hello Kitty.

That critter is everywhere. It has a lot to do with cute in Japan, being both brought into existence by cuteness and perpetuating it. At one time in my early days in Japan, I thought that the Hello Kitty craze was so completely Japanese that it could never catch on in the U.S., but of course you can see Sanrio shops in malls at home now, too, and preteen girls everywhere still seem to love the stuff they sell, for reasons I can't see. Maybe that's because I'm not a preteen girl.

The thing is, in Japan, adults love Hello Kitty, too. Some adults...

When I first saw this, I thought that there was actually a Hello Kitty model car being made by Toyota. Then I saw the same emblem on a Honda and realized it was just an fan add-on. That makes it marginally better than actually having a Hello Kitty car, although I have to wonder about someone who is old enough to drive actually wanting to put a Hello Kitty emblem on their car. And these are made for cars. They are metal and look just like a factory logo on other cars. That means the target market is drivers, i.e., adults. Go figure.

That reminds me of two things - stream-of-consciousness writing again. We will get back to the Menkyo Center, I promise.

The first thing is, coming out of the Menkyo Center (See? There it is right there.) with Mitsuru-san, I saw a car called the Naked. That's right, the Daihatsu Naked. Commercially, you can see where they were going. It's just a cheap, basic car for around-town errands - no frills, no extras. On the other hand, it's an English word, but I can't see Daihatsu trying to market it in the U.S. That reminds me of something else in the brand-name category, but I'll get into that another time.

The second thing has to do with marketing, as well, though.

When I lived in Japan in the '90s, I had to go to a hospital at one point for something minor, I forget what. At some hospitals, as in many places in Japan, you have to take off your shoes to go inside. Slippers are usually provided and are usually sitting there waiting to be used. At this hospital, however, they had a slipper room, with an attendant. You would hand over your shoes and he would hand back a pair of slippers.

When I handed him my shoes, he looked at them and then looked over the counter at my feet and sucked air through his teeth and tilted his head. That's very Japanese and means, basically, "What the hell do I do about this?" I don't think he had that many challenges in his line of work.

He thought for a second and then he took off into the racks in the back and returned with a size 11 pair of slippers - well, to be exact, a size 11 pair of bunny slippers. The rest of the afternoon, I was walking around the hospital in very large bunny slippers, feeling somewhat akin to a fool. I didn't need to feel that way, though, because nobody noticed and nobody cared, which is a little weird in itself.

It was later that this thought occurred to me. Who in the world MAKES size 11 bunny slippers and why? How much of a market can there be?

Okay, back to the Menkyo Center.

It worked out that Yoh-san was able to go with me on the following Monday. That, of course, made it a lot easier to get there and to get through the process of just starting the test. The idea was that he would get me started and then leave me there to spend the rest of the day taking scooter-riding lessons and doing whatever else they would surprise me with. No reason for him to waste his whole day, too. I could probably find my own way home.

What with the train and bus ride and being at the center by 8:30, I had to be up and on the first train by 6:30. Early rising is not my favorite thing, but I did it, met Yoh-san where we changed trains, took that train to where we caught the bus and arrived at the Menkyo Center with time to spare.

The first step this time was to stand in line to buy about $16 worth of stamps to stick on my application. The stamps showed that I had paid the fees and could be allowed to take the test. Then we sat and waited for the license windows to open for business.

In the meantime, Yoh-san found a booklet on the scooter test. Although it was only in Japanese, it showed some road signs that I hadn’t seen before and gave me an idea of what the test would be like. Sounds helpful, right? Yes, but... it also showed me that the test I was going to be taking was nothing like the test I had been studying for. Completely different. Totally different. Just great...

I went through the line to have my paperwork checked, anyway, and went in to take a quick eye test. The eye test was in Japanese, but basically all I had to say was ‘right’, ‘left’, and ‘red’, ‘yellow’ and ... ‘blue’?

This is an odd piece of linguistics that I haven’t quite figured out. It turns out that Japanese and many other languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, some traditionally, some currently. There’s an interesting article on it in Wikipedia on it, if you care to check it out. The weird thing is that there is a word for ‘green’ in Japanese (midori) and a word for ‘blue' (ao), but ‘ao’ is used to describe a green light. Luckily, the guy giving the test knew that English speakers say ‘midori’ for ‘ao’, although he probably doesn’t understand why we would do such a thing.

I passed the eye test and went on up to the third floor of the Center to give the written test a try.

After the test - 30 minutes long, but in English, of sorts - I met up with Yoh-san again and we went back downstairs to await the results, which are shown on an electronic board in the main waiting room. To pass, you need to get 90%. There had been about 7 questions that I wasn’t sure about on the test, but figured that since it was only a true-false test, I should get three or four of those right and would squeak through with a 90. I was wrong.

When the numbers came up on the big board, mine was not among them. After decades of driving in California, I wasn’t able to pass a scooter test in Japan. It was really embarrassing, but more than that, frustrating! It meant that I was going to have to come back to the Menkyo Center a third Monday.

Yoh-san was consoling and told me that actually most people, including Japanese citizens, don’t pass on the first try. The powers that be do not check your knowledge so much as try to trick you with the questions. For example, Question 7, if you’re crossing a sidewalk when exiting from a parking lot, you should proceed slowly, watching for pedestrians. Of course, you say. Wrong. You should STOP and then proceed slowly, watching for pedestrians.

In addition, although I’m grateful for the effort made to accommodate English speakers, the translation often leaves a little to be desired. Question 12 - The scooter requires brake-play. That's not really a question, is it? Anyway, I had no idea what it meant. It turns out that they were trying to say that there should be some play in the brakes. (It’s true.) Question 15 - When you stop at a stop sign with no stop-line on the street, you should stop at the beginning of the intersection. Nope. You should stop BEFORE the beginning of the intersection. They were playing semantics games with me in a second language.

Regardless of the reasons, I was embarrassed to have failed, but I was determined to get my license and immediately started to make plans to come back the next week. Now that I knew the way and knew the procedure at the center, I wouldn’t have to prevail on my friends to accompany me. I could fail just as well on my own. That was something, anyway.

So, back onto the bus, back to the train station, back to the other train station, then off to a different train station (the university stop), 15 minutes walking in the rain, and back to work for the rest of the day. Ironically, that was exactly the type of trip I was trying to avoid by getting my license.

The trains and buses were on me, by the way, since I wasn't going to make Yoh-san actually pay money to help me out, and that added about $40 to the rapidly escalating cost of being a driver in Japan.

It goes on...

The picture here has nothing at all to do with the Menkyo Center. I don't have any pictures to go with that, but I want to put up some kind of illustration with every post, so here's today's.

If you look at it for a moment, you'll get it. I'll wait...

Yeah, the dog is asking the boy to remember to clean up after him, with attendant vocabulary. In case the written message isn't clear, there's the graphic in the bag. That ain't soft serve...

Everything in Japan seems to be made cute. Both of these characters seem to be very happy with the situation. It's an anime-like tradition, I think. I tried to think of an equivalent in the U.S., but there isn't one, just "Curb Your Pet" signs once in a while.

This sign is at the entrance to a cemetery.

Back to the Menkyo Center...

So there we were. Mitsuru-san was providing translation, but this was, again, fairly straightforward. The only problem I had was that in Japan on a true-false sheet, X means ‘no’ and O means ‘yes’. There were a couple double negative problems. Number 23 - “I have not had any vision problems diagnosed in the last three years.” I marked ‘X’ for “No, I haven’t”. The answer needed here is O for ‘Yes, I haven’t”. You can see the confusion. I hope it’s not just me.

So after a while, the paperwork is taken care of and I’m okayed to take the test. So, I ask, where do I go to take it? The man replies the test starts at 8:30 every day. This, of course, is one hour BEFORE one can start to get the paperwork for the test done, meaning that every single person caught up in the licensing process must make two trips to the Menkyo Center and, it follows, take two days off work. In addition, I’m told that after the test that second trip out, I have to stick around and take a scooter driving lesson in the afternoon of that day, making it a full day’s outing. Whoever Yoh-san had talked to when he called up to get the information for me the week before had not thought it necessary to mention those little points.

Well, I was a bit upset, but tried not to show it. Unfortunately, I’ve come to expect things like this whenever I try to get things done here. I’m sure a lot of it is because I don’t understand the language well enough and miss some of the explanations, but some of it is definitely cultural and that’s just the way it is.

For example, I wanted to get a table for my office for work-related purposes - grading, sorting papers, etc. I went to my department head office and made the request. A 10-minute discussion between staff members ensued, followed by a five-minute phone call, followed by me being told I already had a table in my office. By this, they meant a small coffee table that goes with a sort of lounge suite of chairs that were furnished with the office - not a work table in any way.

I think they were all wondering why I hadn’t noticed I already had a table. When I said that table was too small for what I needed, they told me to use my desk for sorting papers and grading, like I hadn’t thought of that, either. I explained that with a computer and printer on my desk, there was no work space left. Didn’t matter. I already had a table and a desk and I didn’t need another table.

Mitsuru-san finally cut through the red tape and introduced me to someone in charge of tables and we all went down into the basement and chose a nice, functional unit, put it on a cart, and trundled it across campus to my office.

I now have a table, but I was told not to mention it to the other instructors because they’ll all want one, too. True.

So, anyway, the Menkyo Center...

Well, there was nothing that could be done about it, so I just had to make plans to go back there the following Monday. It was a long trip by car, but at least Mitsuru-san knew the way. Now I was going to have to figure out how to get there by train and bus by myself. On the plus side, I had another week to study before taking the test. Stay tuned...

Okay, here’s a rundown on the process for getting a license in Japan. It varies according to what country you’re from. It has something to do with international agreements on license exchange and the U.S. loses out for reasons unclear to me. There are several theories online of why this is, but each one seems to be canceled out by another one. All I really know is that it made my four decades of driving in the U.S. insufficient experience for driving a motor scooter in Japan.

First, I had to get a paper from my city government office that showed that I lived where I said I lived. No matter that I had just gone through the two-week process of getting an official alien registration card with the same information on it. Couldn’t use that... The official paper costs about $2.

Next I had to get my California license officially translated at a JAF office (Japan Automobile Federation) - $30. Because of my work schedule and general ignorance of where to go and what to ask for, my friend Yoh-san took care of that for me by taking a morning off from his experiments and riding the train to some faraway city where said office is conveniently located. He also picked up a book for me called Rules of the Road, a well-translated English version of Japanese driving regulations - another $10. Yoh-san also ordered a book online for me that had several practice tests in English - another $20.

I had a weekend to study the tests before Mitsuru-san took a Monday off to drive me to the licensing building - hereafter called the Menkyo Center. I had read online that the gentsuki (scooter, remember?) test was 50 questions and the first three practice tests were 50 questions, too, so that’s what I spent my weekend studying. (Actually, I had also read somewhere that the test was only ten questions. That’s what I was hoping for).

The books were pretty straightforward, except for a couple of things. For example, overtaking and passing are two different things. Overtaking is passing something slower without crossing into oncoming lanes.

This happens quite a lot here, with lots of bicycles and scooters as well as pedestrians on the road. Outside of the big cities, sidewalks don't always exist. I think this is a holdover from the past. The streets are actually for pedestrians. The vehicles are just allowed to use them, too.

Passing is the crossover into the other lane. There are just slightly different signs prohibiting each. Also, there are three different signs that mean 1) road closed to all vehicles, 2) road closed to vehicles, and 3) no entry. The book did not do a good job explaining the difference, or the need, for that matter. In addition, the English translation for these signs on the practice test was a bit garbled. True or false - this sign means cars cannot enter. False - it means ‘No entry’. They throw little technicalities like that at you for no other reason than trying to trick you.

Well, the weekend just flew by with me trying to figure out things like that and bright and too early Monday morning, Mitsuru-san showed up at my apartment to take me to the Menkyo Center, conveniently located in the middle of nowhere about an hour’s drive from my town. That’s not really fair, I guess. I’m sure it’s very convenient for the people living in the town in which it’s located. That just doesn’t happen to be my town.

So we drive the hour and arrive in plenty of time to start the process of converting a foreign license, which takes place only between the hours of 9:30 and 11. We found the correct office and sat down to wait our turn. Next - the Menkyo Center.

Here's the graphics posting for today. An interesting use of English... We can get the idea, anyway, but kind of creepy, isn't it? It's got a Rolling Stones feel to it, but why? The thing is, what is this stuff called? Can you go down to the store and ask if they've got any Xylish in stock? Another example of English that isn't really.

As far as living in Japan goes, what can I tell you today? I eventually managed to get a real contract at work. It took a while. If you remember, I came to Japan on a tourist visa and couldn’t get paid until I had a contract and couldn’t get a contract until I got a work visa and couldn’t get a work visa until the paperwork came back from I don’t know where, and THEN couldn’t get a work visa incountry and had to go to Korea for a few days to get that done. When I came back, now that I had a visa, I had to register with my local council, I guess you’d call it, city government, anyway, and get my gaijin card - an official driver’s-license type card that tells the government exactly who you are and where you live and even who you work for. Very 1984. That took another couple of weeks. In the meantime, I bought that scooter I mentioned earlier, just for getting around a little more quickly and easily.

Well, that was my plan. I bought the scooter, yes, with a lot of help in translation from another friend from the university, Mitsuru-san. It’s all registered and licensed and insured, BUT they won’t let me drive it. Turns out that the driving license process is a lot more complicated than you would think it should be. I’ve got a lot to say on that next, but basically, I can’t drive on my California license, understandable, I suppose, and I can’t use an International Driver’s Permit because I’m now registered as a resident. I have to take a driver’s test in Japan, also understandable, but not even close to easy. That process is going to be a whole nother day’s writing.

The thing is, I decided to drive the scooter anyway the day after I got it - just to the university and back. I thought, well, if I get stopped, I’ll just show them my CA license and explain the situation and they’ll let me off with a warning. No big deal.

When I got to school, I checked the internet to see just what the penalty was for driving without a license in Japan, and it is actually a very big deal indeed. The penalties are, and this is true, a $3,000 fine, a year in prison, and deportation. I suppose those are imposed at the discretion of the judge, but, oh, wow. I drove back home very slowly and carefully and the bike has remained parked outside my apartment house for a month now while I try to get a scooter (gentsuki) license.

I will try to describe the level of hell they put you through next time.

Well, I started out on this blog with good intentions. I meant to write something every day, but that trick never works, as Rocky used to say to Bullwinkle. If you understand that reference, I’m afraid that really dates you. (When I write, I seem to go into a stream-of-conciousness mode fairly often, but stick with me. I get back to the point eventually.) And the point is... Oh, yeah. I didn’t even come close to writing every day, or every week for that matter. I’m going to try again, but don’t let the time-line throw you. It’s no longer April or even May. I’ll put in some time references in the future when appropriate, but other than that, it’s going to be just day-to-day stuff.

So, anyway, from the first day back, it has seemed like I never left. I don’t mean that in just a poetic sense. I actually wake up in the middle of the night, thinking that I had only dreamed about being back in California. Of course, the feeling doesn’t last long, but it’s pretty intense for a while and actually rather spooky. When I got back to my old university after 10 years absence, I was given the same office that I had in 1999, there were still tape marks on the wall where I had put up a poster, badly, and I found one of my old tie clips in a drawer of the same desk that I had made so many lesson plans on. I’d been wondering where that had gotten to.

The truth is, I hadn’t missed it that much because I don’t think I’ve worn a tie more than two or three times in the last 10 years. That’s something I’ll have to be getting used to again. I still manage to wear Levis to work, something I’m happy about. Not blue jeans, but black or gray or brown that can camouflage quite well with a suit coat and tie. My Japanese counterparts are almost all in suits and ties, although I have one friend, Yoh-san, the aforementioned professor of physics, who manages to get away with casual clothes as well since he spends a lot of time in his lab. He has a an office similar to mine except his has a home-made particle accelerator in it...

Yoh-san has tried to explain his experiments to me before, but I haven’t got a clue what it is he’s doing. When I see his apparatus, the only thing I can think of is that tunnel in Switzerland where they might be making a black hole that will swallow the universe. My friend the professor scoffs at that. He says if a black hole is created, it will only be a small one. That’s reassuring to him, maybe...

The language lesson for today, children...

In Japan, English has a certain cachet, [I may have said that before - sounds familiar] that goes beyond the actual meaning of the words. Think about it. The people here who make all of the things with English words on them are usually looking for design and thinking about style, not actually sending a message. Their audience, for the most part, doesn’t understand the words anyway, so technically, it doesn’t matter what they say. The t-shirts and other clothing with English slogans on them are cool in Japan and often hilarious to English speakers. [As a side note, I’ve often wondered what Japanese and Chinese people think about the use of their alphabet on American items, including tattoos. I’m sure mistakes are made there as well.]

I saw a young girl the other day wearing a t-shirt that said ’Brigands demand your money or your life’. Yeesss, but why put it on a t-shirt? At least it was grammatically correct and that doesn’t happen often. I have a student in one of my classes that wears a t-shirt that says, on both sleeves, ‘Knowledge and recommendation, my ass.’ Again, correct English words, but I have no idea what it means. I do think it’s very funny, however.

The sign here is a good example. I saw it and thought, "None of those words go together”. Still, I guess it achieves its purpose. It's hard to see, but the photo on the right side of the billboard is of a beauty shop. Go to Fresh Salad Emotion for all your clinic and design needs.

[This was written in the first week of April. It doesn't match the date of the posting and I wouldn't want anyone thinking the cherry blossoms came out in May or June.}

As you can see from the photos here and on the previous posting, the cherry blossoms - sakura- are out. One day, nothing and the next, there they are. They get pretty intense for a few days - seemed like less than a week - and then start to fall. If the wind is blowing, it looks like a snowstorm. My physics professor friend from the university said it's actually called a 'snow storm' of blossoms in Japanese. The ground is covered in pink petals. Then they get swept away and the trees come out green and they're gone until next year, when I have it on good authority that they'll be back. Samurai poets used to consider the short cycle of the cherry blossoms as a metaphor for life and it's easy to see why. Well, I think it's easy. Go ahead and take a poetic view and see what you come up with.

The weather here is not a surprise to me, of course, because I've been through the seasons before, but actually after living in California again for the last ten years, I had forgotten all the problems that come with the weather in Japan. I remembered some of them today because I got caught without my umbrella. This was especially annoying because I have a collapsible one that fits in my backpack and I had made the conscious decision to leave it at home this morning, apparently momentarily forgetting just where I was.

I only had to walk a short distance - far enough to get as wet as I wanted to, thank you very much - to get to a convenience store, every one of which in the country has a supply of cheap plastic umbrellas. Actually, you never have to walk more than a short distance to get to a convenience store in Japan no matter what you want. You often have to decide between convenience stores, there's that many. The umbrellas can run from about $3 on up and really help the stores live up to their 'convenience' theme.

Cheap is the operative word here. No one cares about them once the rain stops so they get thrown away, left in umbrella stands, forgotten on trains and stashed in clusters in closets. I saw a still-life of broken, discarded umbrellas under an apartment stairwell today. My own apartment came equipped with about six umbrellas, plus, of course, my own. I know - you're thinking 'and he still got caught out in the rain'. How dumb do think I felt?

I'm planning to get a motorscooter soon, for the general convenience and especially to save myself the 15 minute walk from the train station to the university. When it rains, it's a wash, pun intended, whether I get wetter walking or riding. When it's not raining, it's humid enough that when I get to my office, I look like I've been walking in the rain. Yes, I'm already tired of the walk. I'm not a person who gives himself a lot of extra time to get where he's going and when I'm already running late, that walk is a killer. Good exercise, true, but I can get that when I get back to my apartment and forget to buy bread.

Meanwhile, back at the supermarket...

I go there pretty much daily, too. I was actually in the store for the second time yesterday because I seem to have a problem these days with my memory and don’t like writing notes. Unfortunately this tendency now results in extra trips up and down five flights of stairs so I may be revising my habits.

Anyway, when I was next in line to pay, the checker was startled to see me. This happens once in a while, but not as often as one would think. I’m pretty much the opposite of anyone Japanese - 6’1” with red hair - and I always expect to be noticed when I go out. However, that very seldom happens. I haven’t been able to decide if it’s because everyone is getting used to foreigners in Japan or they’re just too polite to act surprised. I think I’m still the subject of a lot of dinnertime conversations, though. “Guess what I saw today!”

In all the time I’ve been in Japan, it has only happened a couple of times. Once, a child yelled at me from the other side of a train platform, “Gaijin-san!” (Mr. Foreigner) and once I sat down on the train and the man I sat next to got up and left. That was a shock, but someone told me later that he was probably just afraid that he would have to speak English. That’s what she said, anyway, but she might have just been being nice.

The checker was startled, but not afraid and used the encounter as a chance to speak English.

Her: Hello. Me: Hi. Her: What’s your name? Me: Rick. What’s your name? Her: Mariko. What’s your country? (Someone somewhere teaches this way to ask “Where are you from?” to most of the students in Japan. He must be found and stopped.) Me: I’m from California. Her: How old are you? Me: Sorry? Oh... well, I feel kind of old these days. Her: Are you married? Me: Ummm..., ahh, no. Not at the moment.

Now, back home, this would be considered either pretty direct for an introductory conversation, especially in the checkout line, or as rather suggestive. Of course, she was just practicing the sentences she knew in English with no awareness of the cultural attachments that go with language. I knew that, but even then I didn’t know exactly how to answer her. I didn’t want to answer her, even though I knew it didn’t mean anything.

That’s just one of the problems with learning a second language. Words carry a lot of meaning beyond their dictionary definition and it’s hard to know that and hard to teach that. In more serious conversations in Japanese, I often apologize for my Japanese ability at the start, trying to avoid any cultural misunderstandings that I may stumble into. Japanese, in my limited understanding, has words that are used only in certain situations. Your language depends on whom you’re speaking to and what you’re speaking about. Americans are a whole lot more casual with their language, but it’s still very possible to use the right words to say the wrong thing.

We parted friends. I’ll talk to her again when I can and let her practice her English on me. I’m not going to get into cultural context with her, though. I get paid for teaching things like that.

The cherry blossoms are out. The picture here is from my campus.

My apartment (on the fifth floor, remember) is right across the street from a Yaoko supermarket, a corner of which is pictured here. It's really quite handy.

Most Japanese people, I believe, go food shopping daily and there’s always very fresh prepared food available in supermarkets - fried fish, cooked vegetables and noodles, obentos - boxed takeout meals of fish or chicken and rice and vegetables - and packaged sushi, which must be fresh because no one likes day-old sushi. A lot of people I know don’t even like fresh sushi that much - in the U.S., I mean. Here, nobody doesn’t like sushi, to paraphrase Sarah Lee. It’s one of the questions you’ll get asked if you ever get in a conversation with a Japanese person. They know a lot of the world thinks eating raw fish is kind of a strange thing to do and are a tiny bit defensive about the fact that people in Japan love it. I mean every single person.

If you do say you like sushi, the person asking you will be surprised every time. I don’t think the average Japanese on the street realizes how common sushi has become in the U.S. Sushi in Japan and in the U.S. can actually be quite different, though. There’s the standard kind of sushi - maguro, ikura, tamago - but the sushi chefs in the U.S. have gotten a lot more creative. Dragon, Caterpillar, and Volcano sushi plates are among those I’ve seen in California, along with something that included hash browns. I once took a Japanese friend and her parents to a sushi restauarant in California and the sushi was such a surprise to them that the parents took pictures of it to show the folks back home.

Another way to impress someone from Japan is to be able to use chopsticks. They seem to be pretty sure that it’s an inate talent for Japanese that no westerner could ever hope to master and if you can use them, everyone is very impressed and will tell you so. I have actually met a couple of Japanese students that said they never used chopsticks when they were growing up, but that’s extremely unusual. There must be whole forests cut down every day to provide Japan with wooden chopsticks. Koreans use metal chopsticks. This is a much more environmentally sound choice, but those things are slippery. It takes a bit more skill to eat with Korean chopsticks.

Anyway, there are lots of choices right in the supermarket. This is convenient for me for several reasons. First, I’m not a particularly talented cook. Also, I tend to put off meals until I’m hungry and ready to eat and then realize if I actually prepare something, I still won’t be eating for a while, and, as I mentioned, I’m already hungry. Now that tendency results in a five-floor each way trip to the supermarket when I realize I'm hungry and have nothing in the apartment to eat.

Or that the food I do have in the refrigerator may be a little suspect. The deciding factor for dinner recently has been that my refrigerator (reizoko) is maintaining about the same temperature as my kitchen or possibly a little warmer. It’s small by western standards in the first place and not a lot can be kept in it in the best of times, but now I don’t trust leaving anything in it longer than a day. It took me two days to figure out it wasn’t working in the first place. First, the control dial is where I have to get on my knees to see it. Then the markings are, of course, in kanji which is the Japanese writing system - one of four systems used in Japan, including western letters - that uses Chinese characters and they are too small for me to even see so I can't even check the dictionary and try to figure out if colder is to the right or the left. You would think to the right, right? Or is it the left that’s colder in the U.S.? See what happens? That’s the thing about coming here from the west. Things one country would consider logical are actually the opposite in the other country. To open my front door, first, I have to put the key in backwards according to my western ways (the opposite side of the key - not the opposite end!) - or maybe upside down would be a better description - and then turn the key towards the door jam to unlock the door. Of course, the reverse is true when locking it. I mess it up every time because at first it was my habit to do it backwards and I had to remember to do it in reverse of my natural inclination. Now that I’m getting more used to it, I start to do it the right way and then change it because I now feel like the right way is the wrong way. It’s the small things that make me realize I’m not in California anymore. (That’s my second paraphrase of the day.) One of these days I’ll talk about crossing the street here. Of course, that’s backwards, too, and a lot more dangerous than unlocking a door.

Oh, yeah - the refrigerator... So, what I had to do was turn the dial all the way one way and wait for a while to see if the refrigerator got colder. I tend to not think about the refrigerator until I need something from it, so this stretched on into one day because I forgot to check it. It still wasn’t cold the next morning so I just turned the dial the opposite way figuring then it would be okay. The next day it was still just as warm and that’s why it took me two days to figure my refrigerator wasn’t working. Actually, neither is my clothes dryer. That’s even more complicated because there’s a lot more kanji on it and I tried a lot of combinations of buttons before giving up and calling the landlord. Then I had to explain to him in my broken Japanese what the problem was and he explained something to me in his excellent Japanese that I couldn’t understand, but I think he said to just hang my clothes outside to dry and stop complaining. I may or may not be getting a new dryer and a new refrigerator in the next few days. There’s a problem with the toilet, too, but I don’t feel like getting into that again right now.