J3J Episode 08: A Normal Day Today, I'm going to tell you about a normal day. And I'm serious. No raw horse meat, no giant iron penis festivals, no alien abductions: just an utterly normal day at work in Japan. To me, it seems so routine and banal that it's not worth writing about, but who knows how unimaginably alien it will be to you...? My day starts when my Palm beeps at 8:30 AM and every 5 minutes thereafter, trying quite unsuccessfully to rouse me, as I always ignore it completely and let it beep until it gives up in disgust. Eventually sometime after 9 I wrench myself out of bed, take a shower and prepare breakfast. If I cooked rice the day before, my breakfast is Japanese style: a bowl of miso soup with spring onion, leftover plain white rice, occasionally a pickle or two, or some dried seaweed to wrap up the rice. Not much, but usually enough until lunch. By ten I've usually gotten myself out of the house and started my hour-long commute. 10 minutes to the station, 5 minutes for Komaba Todaimae-Shinsen-Shibuya on Keio Inokashira (always crowded even after rush hour), 5 minutes walking inside the cavernous bowels of Shibuya Station, then as far as I can get on the Hanzomon subway platform. 10 minutes for Shibuya-Omotesando- Aoyama Itchome-Nagatacho, usually plenty of standing room, then 5 minutes walking to the Namboku platform and, more often than not, 5 minutes waiting for one of the infrequent and almost empty trains to pass. Until this point I've killed time by decoding advertising posters and watching how people try to avoid appearing as if they're watching me, girls often trying not to smile and failing as they spot the funny-looking alien. (Naturally, Tokyo is chock full of gaijin and most locals couldn't care less, but hey: some are also bored...) But at Nagatacho I usually pull out my Palm Vx and start hacking away at KanjiTest, 930 characters in the vocabulary as of today and new ones being added at 10-20 per day. KanjiTest introduces new characters by frequency of use, so the list I actually know is in reality larger -- and naturally there are some in those 930 that I don't actually know, but the program is pretty good at catching my lucky guesses sooner or later, even if my accuracy is still holding steady at 95%. Lately I've started to devise mnemonics to better remember characters, preferably perverse ones: subordinate official (属) is obviously a stick figure inserting their head up their superior's buttocks (尻), and to undress (脱) is clearly a wide-eyed big brother (兄) looking at naked flesh (月). Nagatacho-Yotsuya-Ichigaya-Iidabashi-Korakuen-Todaimae takes 15 minutes. I enter the grounds of the university through the Agricultural Dept gate, cross the pedestrian bridge over Kototoi-doori, go under Engineering Dept building VII, into building VIII, take the elevator to floor 7, climb one last flight of stairs into the Sanpo Lab and enter the graduate students' room. Konnichiwas all around, I turn on the monitor of my desk machine and connect my laptop to the network. Time for work, sort of. I plow through my personal mail, read up on the wearables/mobile computing lists I'm subscribed to and check out any interesting developments, then hit the newsgroups and websites. (I still find reading Slashdot as a part of my job to be bizarre.) By the time I'm done with all that it's usually about 1 PM and time for lunch. Unless it's lunch-meeting day or I'm kidnapped by my professor, I tend to eat alone, more often than not at the Chuo cafeteria. I browse through the day's plastic and actual food displays, calculating cost/calorie/taste coefficients. I buy the meal ticket from a vending machine and head down the stairs to the specified counter, where I exchange my ticket for the meal: the typical set being a plate of rice, a bowl of soup (usually miso), a main dish of meat or fish (stir-fried, broiled, deep-fried) and a little plate of pickles or "salad" (read: cabbage with a token cherry tomato on top), plus unlimited hot green or cold barley tea. And then back to work. After brewing a mug of green tea, I draft specifications in HTML, hunt for groovy MP3s, debug a chunk of Java, get detoured to a web page on the breeding habits of the common marmoset, head to the 809-lab to torture my Glasstron with a soldering iron, sneak a peek at Entropy's list archives and find out that nothing has changed, update a software package on Linux and tear my hair out recompiling kernels and trying to fix everything it just broke, and send yet another letter to Sony tech support whinging (in Japanese) about lack of Linux support. Evening rolls around. I almost never get back home before sundown. About twice a week I head to the gym to pump iron, about as often one of the four Todai Finns suggests dinner at 6 or 7. Sometimes I'm on a roll and stay at the lab until 10 or 11 PM, but if I need to go shopping or am planning on cooking my own dinner, like today, I leave around 7-8. I say the obligatory "O-saki ni" (I regret to leave before you) and the few people left recite the equally obligatory "O-tsukare-sama" (lit. "honorable tired lord", in practice more like "thank you for your work"). The same old, same old commute route in reverse. I know everything by heart, including the right place to wait for the train so walking distance will be minimized (eg. from Nagatacho to Shibuya on Hanzomon, pick the first door of car 5 and you'll be deposited next to the elevator). This time, instead of taking subway exit 5 to Tokyu Mark City, I detour to the subterranean Tokyu Food Show food market. The Food Show is composed of maybe a hundred-odd specialist shops bolted onto the supermarket, each a few square meters in size. First, I head to Andersen's to pick up a loaf of their truly amazing bread, baked on site (the bakers work behind a glass wall in the shop) and considerably better than anything in Finland, and then head past rows of shops selling 3000-yen boxes of biscuits, 187 varieties of pickles, Chinese gyoza dumplings with crab meat, shoppers queued up at most and shopkeepers yelling out their specials and discounts. 「さあ、いかの塩辛、100円割引! いかがでしょうか?」 I spot the shop that sells tonkatsu & korokke (deep-fried pork, meat, fish and veggies), study the selection and queue up. The owner looks at me with a hint of apprehension but smiles when I order: 「なすの肉卷き、一つ、あじフライ、一つ、ピーマンの えびクリーム、一つ」. One eggplant-meat roll, one piece of horse mackerel and one bell pepper filled with shrimp cream duly materialize. --> http://jpatokal.iki.fi/photo/travel/Japan/Shibuya/ I emerge aboveground at Hachiko square and walk up Dogenzaka. Blinking neon, giant TV screens and sales clerks shouting their pitches into megaphones and in-store PA systems assault me. It's almost time for Shibuya's yearly matsuri (festival), the streets are already decked with purple bunting and each street light has a lantern marked with the Shinto triple yin-yang and a little speaker blaring out lo-fi traditional matsuri music, lots of shamisen-plucking, shakuhachi-blowing and taiko-banging. In the only unusual event on the entire day, an o-mikoshi (portable shrine) lurches past, several dozen young men clad in pink happi-coats inscribed with "Dogenzaka" carrying it around, shouting "Yoissho! Wasshoi!" to pace their movement. It looks incredibly incongruous in the neon blare of Shibuya... but the procession is swallowed up by an alley and I head on, past the 100 Yen Plaza and another of my favorite haunts, the "Book 1st!" shop opposite today's destination -- Don Kihoote. As always, the theme song is playing. I head for the food section, snap up some "curry-style pickles" (pickles for Japanese curry, not curried pickles!), a package of preboiled yakisoba noodles and a bucket of Bihidasu ("bifidus", as in the bacteria) yogurt. The day's shopping out of the way, I head back to the station through a sleazy Dogenzaka alleyway that happens to provide the shortest direct route from Donki. One sign proclaims Freedom beneath a thonged ass, one shows a beatiful girl in an expensive dress kneeling atop a man ("special massage only Y6000/30 min!"). Buzzwords in every sign and flyer: エステ ("esthetic", ie. almost-naked girls), ヘルス ("health", ie. various 'treatments' to ensure male vigor), エクサイチング ("exciting", an English adjective used exclusively as a code word for sex in Japan)... touts in black suits and smiling hostesses in microskirts hang out on the street, ad cards and tissue packets in hand, waiting for potential customers. As a foreigner I am naturally ignored: not only would I probably not be welcome, but they know quite well that I don't have the money -- or the need -- to patronize their services. (If nothing else, the happy yellow plastic Don Kihoote bag is a sure tip-off.) Quite a few newcomers assume that these places are bordellos and that hostesses are whores, but so it ain't. At your average hostess bar, for Y10000/hour a cute girl in a bikini and bunny ears, or whatever your personal kick happens to be, will pour you beer (separately charged), let you try to ineptly hit on her and, maybe, if you're nice about it, fondle her leg. Of course, it may be possible to come to an agreement about some 援助交際 ("compensated companionship", as the Japanese euphemism puts it), but any such activities will take place outside the bar, perhaps in one of Dogenzaka's several dozen love hotels. But I just pass through, silently bemoaning the fact that taking pictures of any of this is very much an unwise idea due to the shadowy yakuza (mafia) types guarding all these operations of questionable legality. Eventually I reach the lodge, check my mailbox, take the elevator to the fifth, wrangle the key out of my bag and enter room 508. The air-con is turned off during the day, so the room is sweltering and humid, water still on the bathroom floor from my morning shower. I take off my shoes, turn on the air-con, strip off my sweat-soaked shirt and hang it to dry, then measure exactly 1.5 cups of rice and wash it, running water into the kettle, swirling it by hand and pouring it out until the water no longer turns milky. I plop the kettle in the cooker and press the button. 50 minutes until dinner, just enough time to hack some more code or write up a chunk of the next J3J episode. I plug in the laptop and flop down on the bed, typing away. Eventually the cooker beeps: I scoop out the rice into a bowl, throw a clump of ごま昆布 on top (looks nasty, smells worse but tastes delicious: only today, when decoding the kanji so I could enter it for J3J, did I realize that it's pickled kelp), and add in one of the korokke I purchased. And that's dinner. I rarely prepare anything complex during the week, and like the average Japanese single man, the food I eat most often is curry rice, the quintessential Japanese dish that bears zero resemblance to what is known as "curry" on the rest of the planet. I do cook "for real" on weekends, and given its drastic size and equipment limitations (one electric range and a sink, period) my kitchen has proven surprisingly useful. I've already stocked up on all the essentials of Japanese cooking -- sake, soy, mirin, dashi, aonori, katsuobushi, ginger -- and in fact my sole concession to Western tastes (literally) is a rarely used salt shaker, used pretty much solely for cooking spaghetti and omelets. By this time it's usually past 9 PM, and there are only a few hours left to go in the day. This means time for more computer hacking (probably including the obligatory game of mahjongg at some point), planning for the weekend or the next day if I have something out of the ordinary in mind, maybe decoding one of the three Japanese books I've purchased so far... I've decided to forgo fiction for the moment and concentrate on the severely practical, so my bookshelf now contains 日本語能力2級試験問題と正解 (Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 2 Questions and Answers), 北海道キャンプ場ガイド (Hokkaido Area Camping Guide), and 焼物の見方 (How to View Pottery, lit. Looking-Direction of Fried-Things). Especially the last of these is a never-ending fount of truly obscure vocabulary. Did you know, for example, that a Japanese teacup has 10 different named parts, ranging from 茶溜り (chadamari: the deepest inside point, which slightly deviates from the curve to collect the tea leaf bits) to 高台畳付 (koudaitatamitsuki: the ring at the bottom actually in contact with the table)? And based on these criteria it is possible to identify different characteristics, ie. a cup with multi-part koudaitatamitsuki can be referred to as being in the 割高台形 (warikoudaikata) style, but a cup with rough lips and a squared inner angle is in the 沓形 (kutsukata) style, much favored by tea ceremony enthusiasts. But, lest I get overly excited and have a heart attack from drooling over my luvverly full-color illustrated pottery handbook, I usually turn off the lights and go to bed around 1 AM, listening to the crickets and frogs chirp outside. And the next day the cycle starts anew. Normal? You tell me... Cheers, -j.