One of the perks of working in a university in Japan is the time off. For instance, there were no classes last week because of the Komasai, the annual student festival.

Since I was going to be off from Friday to Friday, I decided to travel somewhere for at least a few days. I immediately ran into a problem, which should come as no surprise if you’ve actually been reading this blog.

The problem this time was that I couldn’t make hotel reservations online because I didn’t have a credit card. Let me rephrase that. I had a credit card, but it had been canceled. Why? Well, in accordance with some apparently divine plan to mess up everything I tried to do to come to Japan this time, my credit union had merged with another credit union and all cards had been canceled and reissued.

The problem was, no one bothered to tell me about it. I had gotten some information in the mail, I found out later, but of course that information was sitting on the kitchen table 5,000 miles away.

It took some time to get straightened out, but I had the card activated and put in the mail to Japan. However, the numbers wouldn’t work online for some reason. I didn’t really want to venture too far without a reservation or even a credit card. When I think about that, I realize how much I’ve changed. I once slept in a circus tent and lived on sausage and hard rolls for three days in London waiting for my flight home after I had overstayed my budget. I arrived back in L.A. without enough money to make a phone call for someone to come and pick me up. Come to think of it, that may be why I don’t want to do that anymore.

Anyway, there was plenty to see and do on day trips around Tokyo and I made my plans accordingly. On Saturday, I went to a huge book fair in Kanda, the used book store area of Tokyo. I buy and sell books in California in my spare time, so this was just great for me. I bought a nice book on Japanese art and culture from 1940 and saw a few tons of other books and had a nice day at it.

On Sunday, some friends took me out to an Italian restaurant for lunch and when I mentioned having gone to the book fair, they insisted on giving me a set of 12 ukio e (an old style of Japanese art) books that they were going to throw out. Throw out! I spend a lot of time trying to find books like that. There’s a different trash/recycle mentality here that I’ll have to get into at a later time. Anyway, that was another good day for me.

On Tuesday, I undertook a train trip to a place called Mt. Takao or Takao-san as the Japanese call it. It’s actually considered part of Tokyo, but it’s three-hour train ride for me - each way. There’s an online trip planner for trains in Japan, so it was relatively easy for me to figure out how to get there.

I got off to kind of a late start mostly because I don’t like getting up early, so I didn’t arrive until early afternoon. Let’s see - walk, train, change trains, change train, wait, change train, change train, wait again, change train, walk, cable car, Mt. Takao - yeah, about three hours.

The first thing you see from the mountaintop is a tremendous view across the Kanto plain all the way back to Tokyo proper. It really is an amazing view. Pictures can’t do it justice.

Mt. Takao is known for its fall scenery and since it’s fall and Tuesday was a national holiday as well as a day off for my university, it was a bit crowded. There were even a few gainjin (foreigners), which I never see in my home area. On the mountain, the main destination is a temple that’s been there since forever, I guess. I wandered around until I found it and was duly impressed. After that I just took off walking to see what I could see. I wasn’t worried about where I was because I realized long ago that you can’t get lost if you don’t know where you’re going in the first place. That’s been my philosophy of life. You may think that sounds a bit shallow, but it’s worked out for me so far.

So I walked and walked and thought about turning around and going back the way I had come and heading home, but I kept wanting to see what was around the next bend. That’s a corollary to my personal philosophy, by the way. Well, what I found around the last bend was the picture you see on this page.

I didn’t even know I was anywhere close to Mt. Fuji (Fuji-san) and was rather startled to see it off in the distance. What a reward for a long walk and a long day. The picture was taken with a telephoto, but the color is what my camera recorded, unaltered. It was just before sunset. That’s what gives the mountain its shine.

It was beginning to get dark so I turned round and headed back to the cable car. As I walked down the steps back by the temple, I noticed a group of people standing in the middle of the walkway with their cameras out. When I got to where they were, I saw what had stopped them. There was a full moon rising over Tokyo.

It was twilight on the mountain in the trees, but still daylight on the Kanto plain. What the combination of dark and light and city and moon and trees and mountain created was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. It was surreal. I took several pictures, hoping to capture the scene, but when I looked at them later, none of them had come out. Something with the distance and the differing light caused bad exposures

and longer exposures which I hadn’t kept still enough for. I was very disappointed, but the picture you see here can give you some idea of what it looked like. This one was taken further down the trail when it was getting darker. It was still beautiful, but I missed capturing that golden scene at the first stop and I’ll always regret that.

Well, as I said, it was getting dark. Everyone was leaving the mountain and there was a wait for the cable car to get back down. After that, it was the train ride in reverse and three hours later, I was walking up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. Not quite like climbing up to a temple...

The next day there were still no classes. I went to school in the afternoon to start to get ready for Friday, but it was still an easy schedule for the last couple of days off.

The thing about living in the midst of a different culture is that every day has the possibility of showing you something new. My week off showed me the magic of the unexpected and made me realize. I live in Japan.

This is another picture from my balcony. You can see a little bit of what I mean about the overhead wires.

That's the train station in the front. At the back of the picture is a pachinko parlor, one of two in the immediate area.

The second pachinko parlor across the parking lot from me moved into the ground floor of my apartment building while I was gone in August. The move included various sprucing up of the building - painting, new signs, general remodeling - so it’s not all bad. It does get a little noisy occasionally as the late-night players are removed from the premises so that the place can get cleaned up for the next day’s business. I don’t know why a move of about 20 yards should make the clientele louder, but it seems to have done so.

I’m guessing they moved just because the space is a bit larger. Apparently pachinko parlors aren’t suffering because of the economy the way Las Vegas is. Oh, yeah. Maybe some of you don’t know pachinko is a gambling game... of sorts.

What it is, as near as I can tell, is a kind of pinball game. The way it works is that the players shoot what look like small ball bearings through a vertical pinball-like table that is more the size of a slot machine. Getting the balls to go in the right place triggers a payoff of more balls, the object being to accumulate as many of the balls as you can. That’s it.

This shooting of the balls is rapid-fire, not just one at a time like in a standard pinball game. Now imagine a room full of people throwing a bunch of steel ball bearings into machines made of glass and metal and catching the cascading steel balls in buckets. The noise level is hard to believe. There is some serious sound-proofing going on in pachinko halls that keeps the noise in or else they wouldn’t be able to exist in the residential neighborhoods like they do. Lucky for me, too, being that I’m a mere four floors above one. That’s a positive point of living on the fifth floor, I guess.

I like to take people who come to visit me through a pachinko parlor just so they can hear what it’s like. We usually last about about two minutes before heading back to the quiet, peaceful traffic in the streets. The pachinko patrons, though, spend hours at a time watching those little balls rolling down the boards.

You might wonder, as I did, how these people could stand the noise for such long periods of time. Well, it turns out that the pachinko balls fit perfectly into one’s ears and if you look, you’ll see that everyone in the place is using a pair of them as stainless-steel earplugs.

Often when I’m walking past a pachinko parlor early in the morning, I see people lined up outside waiting for the place to open. It reminds me of when I was working in a pub in London. The legal opening hour was 11 a.m. and every day, people would be lined up outside waiting to get in. If we were even one minute late they would start pounding on the doors and complain quite bitterly to us once they made it in.

I’m sure pachinko has addictive qualities similar to alcohol and gambling. And it is gambling, but in a uniquely Japanese way.

In fact, gambling is illegal in Japan. There are no casinos in the entire country. Online gambling is against the law as well, with no money transfers from banks to gambling sites allowed. So, for pachinko, they give prizes for the number of ball bearings that a customer accumulates. It’s not considered gambling to compete for prizes. BUT then what they do is take the prizes to a little window located somewhere close by outside, in the same building, mind you. There they sell the prizes back to the pachinko parlor and walk off with the cash. I’ve had a couple of students tell me they can make good money playing pachinko.

Good money, eh? And here I am living right over a pachinko parlor. All I would have to do after a hard day of pachinkoing would be to stagger up five flights of stairs. Hmmm...

The picture here is of my view to the west from my balcony. It can be very pretty and transcends the often tacky-feeling urban landscape.

The view of the town is actually interesting to me. With the overhanging wires and the houses crowded together as they are, if I were in California, I would consider it much differently. The novelty of the Japanese urban landscape, to me anyway, gives it charm. It won’t let me forget the corresponding novelty of just where I am in this world.

The second picture is looking down on the street in front of my apartment building. The streets in Japan can be, often are, very narrow. Even in Tokyo, they can seem more like alleys to North Americans. In addition, sidewalks are often lacking. This puts life right in the streets. It’s not unusual to have someone walking on each side of the street, a car going each way, and a scooter or bicycle threading its way between them. I don't know why the streets aren't littered with wrecks and bodies, but everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing - everyone except me, that is.

All that activity is something that I have to get used to in addition to driving on the left. It’s much more complicated than it seems. No one reacts in a manner that one used to driving elsewhere would expect.

Just the other day I was waiting on my scooter to make a right turn. There was someone coming towards me in the opposite lane and he made a left on the same street that I was going to turn on. There was a car following him and I waited for that one to pass and then accelerated into my turn only to find that the car that had turned before me had stopped 10 feet up the street, in my lane, to let someone out. This put me in the position of having to go from acceleration to a dead stop in about 1 second flat. I did it, but I had some choice California driving expressions for the guy.

I’ve adopted the Japanese habit of riding scooters in the rain, too, at least on occasion. I’ve mentioned before that it’s done all the time here. Yesterday, on my way to work, I saw three different people riding their scooters in the rain carrying umbrellas. I don’t even know how that works. You have to keep one hand on the throttle, of course. How can you brake? I learned the hard way when I was in 6th grade that you don’t hit your brakes even on a bicycle unless you have both hands on the handlebars. I’ve got the scars to remind me of that particular lesson.

Another thing I can’t get used to is the attitude of pedestrians.

Today I was driving along, rather slowly because there were pedestrians, and a university student started to walk into the street in

front of me without even looking to his right - the direction I was coming from. I thought, “Wow. How did he get to that stage of his life with a lack of a sense of self-preservation like that?” As he stepped in front of me, he turned and looked me in the eye and I thought, okay, he sees me and he’ll stop. Nope. He looked at me and continued to walk right in front of my moving scooter. Apparently, he expected me to stop, and I did, but it seems to me that a pedestrian would not count on a driver and vehicle being so obliging. He’s the one that’s going to suffer if it doesn’t work out the way he hopes.

That particular kind of incident has happened to me before. When I told my Japanese friends these stories, they agreed that the actions were dangerous and said that they, personally, wouldn’t do anything like that, but that they are common occurrences.

It’s culture again. Somehow, the people in the cars and on the scooters and bikes and those walking along the streets anticipate what all of the others are going to do. The constant movement in the streets, as well as the overall crowding, seems to give people almost like a sixth sense.

I’m sure it doesn’t always end happily, but I’ve only seen two accidents in my time in Japan, and I was in one of them. The first time I lived here, about 15 years ago, driving a scooter on an international permit, I got run off the road by a woman in a car coming towards me who looked me right in the eye and made a turn in front of me anyway. We were obviously working on different signals.

It makes me worry about Japanese students and tourists visiting the U.S. They have to unlearn quickly what they know about traffic in Japan in order to stay safe and it goes well beyond just driving on the opposite side of the road.

By the way, did I mention that I’m now living over a pachinko parlor? Stay tuned.

I’ve mentioned convenience stores in Japan before. Let me add a little detail.

For starters, they’re everywhere, in great variety. There’s Lawson Station, Daily Yamazaki, New Days, Familymart, Sunkus - which is part of Circle K, of which I’ve also seen a couple - and still others, including, of course, 7-Eleven.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the picture. 7-Eleven in Japan is now known as 7&iHoldings.

Why would they do that? The name 7-Eleven is short and clever, even though an anachronism since the advent of the 24-hour store, and it’s a world brand. With its subsidiaries, 7-Eleven is now the largest distribution and retailing business in Japan and the largest chain store in the world. 7&iHoldings sounds just like what it is - a holding company.

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? “Honey, could you run down to the 7&iHoldings and get a quart of milk?”

I trace this change to language cultural differences. When business people in the U.S. start something new, one of the biggest things they consider is the name. It has to be catchy, it has to be clever, it has to be memorable.

Now I agree that 7&iHoldings is memorable, but not in a good way. I think that when the company got taken over by Japanese owners, the American penchant for creative brand names was not understood, language-wise.

Japanese companies go by different rules. They’ve got a chain of convenience stores called Sunkus and a gum called Xylish, for crying out loud. Those words don’t mean anything in any language.

I believe this is the same process at work as the one that puts nonsense English phrases on t-shirts and names cars Naked. There is just not the feel for the language that comes with being brought up in the culture.

As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t so much criticism as observation. I am well aware that I can’t convey the same feeling in my Japanese that a native speaker can. No matter what languages we’re speaking about, it’s extremely hard to get to the point where a person sounds like a native speaker. When you add culture to that mix, it becomes even more difficult.

On the one hand, in Japan, it doesn’t matter if 7&iHoldings sounds and looks odd to English speakers. Most of the people who see the signs don’t have the feeling for the language, either, so it makes no difference to them. On the other hand, it’s a world-wide name and I don’t think it will fly in English-speaking countries.

My prediction is that the name will revert to 7-Eleven before long or at least that 7&iHoldings will never be on any stores in countries where English is the first language.

Names aside, however, patronizing a convenience store in Japan is a different experience from going into one in the States.

The first thing you’ll notice is that when you walk in, all of the employees will greet you, often at the same time. The greeting is “Irasshaimase”, usually said rather loudly, and since you’re not the only one entering the store, the greeting is echoing around the place the entire time you’re shopping. (Actually, this will happen in all stores and restaurants.)

Being naturally polite, I have the feeling that I should be walking around the store and saying ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here’ to everyone.

It’s a stronger feeling after I make my purchase and the entire staff thanks me on my way out (Arigato gozaimashita). I have a hard time not saying ‘You’re welcome’ to each person I pass.

There’s a little bit of insincerity in this because while the employees are walking around doing their jobs, every once in a while they just suddenly come out with the greetings and the thank yous. If someone says ‘Welcome’, that’s a cue for everyone to echo it. The same is true for thank you. When the first clerk says thank you, everyone jumps in. You get the feeling that they don’t really mean it after a while. Still, it’s a polite insincerity.

I can’t help comparing it to clerks in the U.S. saying ‘Have a nice day’. Can you imagine all of the workers repeating that as you’re walking out the door? For me, it’s annoying enough for one person to say it. I’ll be glad when that expression dies a natural death, although I don’t think it’s going to be any time soon. It’s been around for going on 40 years already.

Embarrassingly, I remember having a ‘Have a nice day’ sticker on my backpack when I first went to Europe in 1973. I was only using it to cover up the insignia on my Official Boy Scout backpack, which I felt was more embarrassing, but even then it was getting to feel overdone. In my defense, it was not a Smiley face sticker, but had a more artistically designed smiling sun. That’s at least marginally better, but there's a reason that I still remember it after 36 years. I'm embarrassed in retrospect.

I know the phrase is trite and has outlived it’s usefulness and original intent because when I go to stores in the U.S., the checkout people always say ‘Have a nice day’ no matter what time it is. To me, it’s blindingly incongruous, as well as annoying, to say this to someone at six or seven p.m. That’s an example of insincerity if ever there was one. My response is always “Too late for that”, but no one ever seems to get it.

Now, even though the call-and-response in convenience stores here seems a little overdone on occasion, the clerks are unfailingly polite and helpful, even to one of the non-Japanese speaking persuasion. It’s a pleasure shopping there and I wind up in one or another almost every day, often to buy another umbrella (see my earlier postings). They’re very... convenient.

This is another picture from a bathroom. I’m not really sure why bathrooms have become a recurring theme in this blog...

Anyway, in some stalls, they have these baby seats that allow parents’ hands to be free. The idea would seem pretty self-explanatory, but, just in case, there are instructions.

1. Never turn your back on your baby. This woman is in a MUCH larger stall than I was. I had trouble turning my back on the stool.

2. Beware. Babies will make a break for it at the first opportunity.

3. Of course, there’s the obligatory finger-pinching warning for the mechanically disinclined.

4. And finally, never ever let your baby smoke while sitting in this chair.

Well, in the continuing saga of the Japanese driver’s license, I got to the right place at the right time and more incomprehensible lectures, to me anyway, followed, interspersed with scary video tapes about what can happen to careless gentsuki riders and then it was time to be taught how to actually ride a scooter. When I later mentioned this process to my friend, Jim, he said this seemed to be a bit backwards. Shouldn’t you learn how to ride and THEN get your license? I must be adjusting somewhat to Japan because that never occurred to me. At this point, our group had all passed the written test and we were entitled to our licenses, but apparently, besides for me, no one knew how to ride a scooter.

Also at this point, I realized that the rest of the people in the class were about 17 years old. The person checking us in looked at me and said “How old are you?” Her tone added ‘anyway’ to the question. I’m getting a little tired of that question.

In addition to being the oldest, by a long shot, I was also the biggest, by far. They had to send back to the main building for a larger helmet, which was handed to me with the English sentence, “You have a big head.” Hey! We needed some work on comparatives there - not big, just bigger.

A couple lectures - or instructions, I don’t know - and several videos later, we were ready to ride... and it was raining. Out with the rain suits. On with the rain suits. They come in sizes up to 3XL and that’s what they managed to find for me. Just to be clear, 3XL in Japan is about L in the U.S., but it fit fairly well and out we went.

The Menkyo Center provided each of the dozen or so of us newly licensed riders with a scooter and for the next hour or so, we rode around an obstacle course in the rain as instructions were shouted at us and demonstrations were given.

Now, to me, the first instruction for riding a motorcycle should be, ”Don’t ride in the rain!” It gets a little slickery out there. I think that’s a general rule in the U.S. There are lots of sites online with advice about riding in the rain, most saying just don’t do it.

It was never even mentioned in this class. They just put us out in it.

Thinking about it, I realized this. If you don’t ride your motorcycle in the rain in Japan, you’re not going to spend much time riding your motorcycle. It’s always raining or threatening to rain. Everyone rides in the rain and no one seems to worry about it. High school students and grandmothers and office ladies and postal carriers and pizza deliverers all ride in the rain, though the pizza people are on three-wheel bikes with windshields. There’s one more thing that is unexplainable about cultural differences. Why would it be safer to ride in the rain in Japan than in the U.S.?

The end of this part of the blog is pretty anticlimactic. We finished our training, went back inside, took off and returned our helmets and rain suits and were handed our licenses and that was it. Finally, I thought, and I'm sure you're thinking, as well.

Of course, I still had to do the reverse trip back home by bus and train, but the next day, I rode my scooter to the university and legally only almost got killed twice.

It’s that dang left-hand side of the road thing.

I think the people are around here are becoming aware that there’s a foreigner in town.

Well, I’m back again.

I had a nice, long summer break back home and just returned to Japan a couple of days ago. I’d tell you more about the break, but it seems like when I talk about it, everyone tends to get a little upset. I don’t exactly brag about it, but somewhere in the conversation, the person I’m talking to begins to realize that I have a lot of time off. Yeah, you, too, right? Well, it’s the Japanese university system. There’s even more time off than for American teachers and that’s all I should say about it.

Let's start with the photo(s) of the day. Here's a contradiction that I've always wondered about in Japan.

There are a whole lot of abandoned bicycles at most train stations in Japan. These are actually pretty orderly, set up in a line like they are. Sometimes the bikes just piled up by the door. The bike in the second photo looks like it was abandoned about 1956.

I have a couple questions about this.

First, where do they come from? Who takes their bike to the train station and forgets where they left it - forever? One theory I heard is that these bikes weren't left by the owners. They were 'borrowed' for a quick trip to the station and never returned. However, if this is true, why woudn't you go down to the station and look for your bike as soon as you saw it was missing? These bikes never seem to be claimed. Witness the one from 1956.

Next, why do the owners of the parking lots (yes, there are parking lots for bicycles) just leave the bikes there? After a certain amount of time, you'd think they'd be junked. In the U.S., they be in the flea market within a couple weeks.

Ah, the mysteries of the Orient.

Back to my original theme...

I was actually pretty busy most of my break. When I came to Japan at the beginning of April, I left a lot of unfinished business in California. I spent a good deal of my break this time catching up with stuff from last spring - insurance, taxes, car registration and repair, and other stuff that I couldn’t seem to take care of from Japan.

Not one thing that I attempted to accomplish before leaving California worked out. You may think that’s an exaggeration, but I’ve got documentation.

For example, I took the liability insurance off of my car because it wasn’t going to be driven for the time I was in Japan. My insurance company says okay, got it, no problem. Liability insurance off.

Then in May, I got a letter forwarded to me from the DMV that said my registration would be suspended for lack of financial responsibility unless I reinstated my insurance by May 25. That was, of course, the day before I received the letter in Japan. I guess I can understand that the state would require insurance and not care about my particular circumstances, but wouldn’t you think that my insurance company would mention the fact that my registration would be suspended if I took off the liability insurance?

Anyway, that involved several overseas phone calls to get straightened out and just when it was taken care of, it was time to register my Rialta - a little RV that’s just sitting in the driveway in California while I’m here but still needs to be insured and registered.

The problem this time was that even though, technically, you can register vehicles online, you need the internet registration number on the new form in order to do it and my mom, who’s taking care of my mail for me, insisted the number wasn’t there. The DMV, another overseas call, insisted that it was and wouldn’t register the vehicle without it, even though I had the license and vehicle identification number. It turned out my mom was right, the number wasn’t on the form, but it didn’t matter because by the time I got back to California, the registration was late and I had to pay a fine on it. I spent some pleasant hours at the DMV in August.

I mention all this to show that it’s not just the Japan DMV that has things going on. California can give them a run for their money.

Actually, it’s probably all bureaucracy everywhere. They’re all difficult to work with. They all have problems. The thing is that the problems I had in Japan had a cultural overlay - and here we go, back to the Menkyo Center.

Well, my thought on the test was that I would continue to take it on Mondays, when I didn’t have any classes and could make up any office time I was missing, as I continued to find ways to study and gather more information. Then, if I did pass, even if just by luck, I could forget about the damn thing. This idea was as opposed to taking two or three weeks for study and research and then failing anyway.

So there I was, at 8 a.m. the following Monday back at the Menkyo Center, with all that entailed - getting up really early, trains, buses, money, etc. [see previous].

I stood in line, bought my $16 worth of stamps again for the privilege of taking the test, and stood in another line to have my papers checked.

Something I forgot to mention - you have to provide your own picture for the test documents, two, in fact. They had kept one picture the first time I had taken the test. Why, I don’t know, unless they have a gallery of failures in a back room somewhere where the staff all have a good laugh comparing pictures and test scores. Anyway, I had to provide another picture. Add one more expense.

I was able to bypass the eye test this time, them (they?) probably figuring how bad could my eyes go in one week? Little do they (them?) know. And back to the third floor.

The test was the same format, different questions, but exactly the same problems as I had had before. Some questions were obvious, some were a little unclear, and some were just go ahead and guess because you’re never going to figure them out. But this time, an hour later, when the test numbers appeared on the big screen, mine was amongst’em. I passed.

You might be thinking I could now pick up my license and go home. If so, you weren’t paying attention earlier.

The next step was to sit through a series of lectures, in Japanese only, that made me despair of ever understanding the language and then following the rest of the passees around to see what to do next, presuming that they, at least, had understood the lectures and instructions. Basically this consisted of having my picture taken again and buying $65 worth of stamps that, I think, was the license fee. For all I know, I could have been contributing to the Society for Making Getting a Driver’s License Really Difficult, Especially for Foreigners.

After that, I was made to understand that the scooter driving class would begin after lunch sometime. I had a quick lunch and managed to find my way to the correct place by following some of the others that I thought I recognized from the morning. Luckily, I was following the right people. Otherwise, I would have just been a kind of creepy foreigner following people around the Menkyo Center and there’s probably a law against that, as well there should be.

Next - I learn to ride a gentsuki... again.