It has been a long and arduous road trying to get set up in all manners relating to daily life. When a foreigner comes to Japan they first have to get the Alien Registration Card, or ARC. This card is affectionately known by many as the Gaijin Card, “gaijin” being a somewhat pejorative term for foreigners in Japan. This usually takes about two weeks to arrange, or in my case, two and a half weeks. And since I arrived in Golden Week, a week-long national holiday, I could only apply for my gaijin card after a week. This left almost a month of existing as a non-person in Japan. Without a gaijin card you cannot get a bank account or a phone or the Internet or a credit card or pretty much anything that helps daily life move along smoothly. This means a month of having to carry around a passport, counting large sums of cash under mattresses in the middle of the night, scurrying into damp Internet cafes and hissing at any policemen who get too close.

Here is a picture of a gaijin card. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of putting my own gaijin card up here, so here is a picture of someone else’s. He’s got a pretty expressionless face though. And I have no idea how to pronounce his name.

When I finally did get my gaijin card I was able to lock horns with Round Two of Japanese red tape. Maybe it’s not so bad for those who speak Japanese, but for me it was a little tough, trying to open a bank account in the dark. I wanted to open an account with SMBC, which is a major bank over here. After presenting a prepared letter in Japanese (“please help this gaijin, she needs a bank account, she doesn’t know what she’s doing”) and trying to explain that no, I do not want to set up with the small time bank indicated on my letter – I want SMBC, and waiting for almost an hour, and the bank having to phone someone in my company to act as an interpreter, they told me that I couldn’t open a bank account there anyway. I wasn’t Japanese enough. I had to have lived there for at least six months. And so I went to the more minor bank and opened my account there, reliving approximately all the stages of confusion.

I went through a similar rigmarole to get a phone, followed by Internet rigmarole. I think rigmarole is a popular dessert over here. Anyway, these days I only have to count my mattress money about once a week, and I don’t have to go to Internet cafes anymore, so daily life is a little easier. When I say only “a little” I mean that for example, now that I have a bank account and a cash card handling my money is so convenient. And by convenient I mean I can only pay in cash in shops and Japanese ATMs usually close at about 8pm. Rigmarole.

My working life so far has been varied and surprising in a lot of ways. I do have to work very hard for pretty long and weird hours (and I am obliged to work on the occasional day off) but there are many things I am quickly coming to love and there is not much to dread. I work in a different school every day of the week, Saturday to Wednesday. My Saturday school, as I have mentioned, is bizarrely in the middle of the department store in my home town.

This summer because of the nuclear disaster up at Fukushima everyone is trying to save electricity. That means making do with far less air conditioning than normal. The Myoden school is entirely at the mercy of the department store’s air conditioning policy, which, since it is conservative, is responsible for me referring to Saturday as “Sauna Day”. It also seems that the Japanese have an unhealthy attraction to fragrance beads. I say unhealthy not just to be mean but because so far my room being baking hot, smelling of locker room deodorant and being unnervingly full of 4 year olds for the last lesson means I have left the majority of my days in Myoden school with a headache. But at least I know the week only gets easier from there on.

Sundays I spend in a swish office block on the 10th floor. Sundays are good days. It is the neatest looking school and it’s a pretty short commute. Sunday is also “Deli France Day”. My first ever day on the job was here. I was certainly introduced in style to the tradition of “apple for teacher” that seems so prolific over here. Firstly, one of the receptionists brought in cakes from her home town. This was just following Golden Week, a week-long break where most Japanese return to their home towns to visit their families and return with local speciality sweets for people at their workplace. Next, the mother of a girl I taught that day turned up with not only a pot of ice cream for everyone there, but also an entire pastry lunch for me. There are many good bakeries in Japan, but I think the best is Deli France, where the free lunch came from. I think maybe that mother was a secret Deli France agent working on the “give ‘em the first one free to get ‘em hooked” policy, because every Sunday I have gone back there to stock up on pastries for lunch, as well as occasionally grabbing a few more for the way home.

Out of all my schools, Monday’s is the furthest and most provincial. I am also the only teacher at the school, so it can feel like a bit of a journey out into the wilderness. I enjoy the day though, and I have some really great students. Izumi in particular stands out – she has a very good level of English. On my first day she turned up at the school very early and talked to the receptionist for a long time. We had a great lesson together and afterwards she stayed in reception again for a long time. She started chatting more informally to me out there – amazed by the relatively short time I’d been in Japan and asking me about whether or not I had tried various things yet. She said that I could find a Japanese boyfriend. “Or a girlfriend! I don’t know! If you want a girlfriend you can go to Harajuku – there are many places there. Not that I’m saying you’re a lesbian! But it’s ok if you are! Did you see that show ‘The L-Word’ in England? So beautiful! It made me want to be a lesbian!”
I finally had to tear myself away from this amusing conversation, and later the receptionist handed me a note that she had written down on behalf of Izumi: “If you have any problems or you need someone’s help, feel free to contact with me at any time. This is my phone number.” She is so sweet, so I think I must name Monday as “Izumi Day”. Today she gave me a cupcake. I have another student, a businessman who works for a cosmetics company, who recently returned from a business trip in Russia. And he brought me back some fine English tea! He also gave me some face wash and lip rouge from his company.

On that note, actually, there seem to be many great and generous gifts and nibbles disseminated throughout my working hours by various people. Apart from the pastries and ice creams and tea and cosmetics I have had a great deal of speciality sweets and cakes from various Japanese prefectures, as well as some cute panda bear sweets from China.

Tuesday I name “Fujiko Day” solely in honour of the seven-shades-of-awesome receptionist, Fujiko. Each week she plays music in reception. The first time it was a catalogue of Beatles songs to keep me amused throughout the day. She is very helpful. When I was still getting my bearings I needed to get a Passmo. These are the Tokyo equivalent of Oyster cards. I nonchalantly asked her how one acquires a Passmo, and at the end of the day she came to the metro station with me, asked about the places to go, helped me press the buttons, everything. She knows I am studying Japanese, so she has decided that she is now my Japanese teacher. Each week she quizzes or drills me on certain aspects of Japanese, and I once received a very dirty look from her for forgetting a word she taught me from the week before. We both have Fridays off, so she once offered to come with me on her day off to any place, should I need her help with something. She is very professional almost to the point of seeming stern, except she is very outgoing and almost silly in social situations. I went out to a foreigner’s bar with her and the other teacher in our school one night and we had roast beef for dinner. After that we played Jenga (what an awesome bar, we got to play Jenga!) and there Fujiko was, dancing around the tower to reggae music.

Wednesday’s school is also quite far away, but also has a very friendly receptionist who offered me any assistance and who seems to regularly have sweeties to offer. Always, always something to eat on Wednesdays. Wednesday just has to be “Treats Day”.

That is my working life. It is generally very busy and I have to work hard for long hours. Sometimes I have to work on my days off. But also, I get good holidays, and occasionally I will have a shorter day. I like every day (maybe except Sauna Day), and get to spend most of my time talking to really good people. I try to practise as much Japanese with the receptionists as I can and I think it will be really cool one day when I can have entire conversations in Japanese.

My first week in Japan consisted of teacher training. I guess they don’t believe in a day’s recuperation – “make ‘em sign the contracts when they’re jetlagged!” I hope they don’t start bitching to me about pre-existing scratches and such in my apartment that I was too tired to notice when I signed my apartment checklist. The training was pretty monotonous, but it was nice to meet some of the other teachers. It seems the majority of them either already live in Japan or have been here before, and they all seem to speak better Japanese than me. Interestingly, I am here with a couple called Ben and Emily, who I did my CELTA training with. And by a complete coincidence we seem to have got the same job in the same country, and we now live on the same block.

On the last day of training most of the teachers decided to meet up in Ikebukuro for a night of frivolity. Ikebukuro is a very overwhelming place with a lot of lights and noise. When I got there with Ben and Emily we had to be met by one of the other teachers who had already been partying there for quite some time. I guess I got to see a lot of Ikebukuro because he got lost trying to show us the way, first to meet up with those who were already there, then for us all to find a new place to go. We eventually settled on a great Japanese pub. To my unfamiliar eye at least, it looked very cool inside, with cushions and low lighting and smooth wooden floors. We had to take off our shoes at one point and were shown to our own private room with a screen door. It had a low table coming just off the floor, but beneath the table there was a recess for us to drop our legs into. Instead of ordering from a menu there was a gadget there like a tablet PC. We looked at the menu on there and used it to order directly.

We stayed at the pub until about 1am, and by that time we had all missed our last trains home. The trains don’t run too late into the night for some reason, so we indulged in an activity that a lot of Japanese end up doing when they miss their last trains home. All-night karaoke. In Japan they have private karaoke booths that you can rent all through the night. We duly rented our own, along with three Japanese girls we met who had also missed their trains. It was a pretty bizarre experience in a lot of ways, especially considering stepping outside our booth to navigate to the toilet somewhere in five stories of drunken men wailing their favourite tunes. Since going to that karaoke bar I have realised that given the opportunity it could become an addiction. Being quiet in Japanese apartments is so imperative that it robs me of the opportunity to indulge in my usual desire – singing absent-mindedly around the house. I may need to karaoke. I hope Tommy Lee Jones will be working there next time I go.

I live in a town called Myoden. Well, it is called a town, but really it is just an area of Tokyo itself. There seem to be many places that, while a part of Tokyo, tend to be named as cities and towns in their own right. You can see my stop on the Metro map. I’m on the east of the map on the Tozai line, T21.

It is a really beautiful place. While there is a lot of concrete, you can see the Japanese have made the effort to cram as much greenery into the space as they can. Since I’ve arrived in Spring the flowers are out in full force. Along every street there are hedges crammed with pink flowers, sometimes so densely that you can’t even see any green. There is a park just outside the station full of poppies, and a house nearby with bountiful baskets of pansies.

Near the station there is a cinema and a crazy-big department store. Every time I go in there I get lost and I discover entirely new sections. It’s pretty good… all sorts of clothes, stationery, electronics, home furnishings, a full-on supermarket on the ground floor with a dedicated Japanese sweet stall, a tea stall, a pharmacy, a food court and (lucky me) a Baskin & Robbins counter. My god, they even have an entire English school in there, and that’s where I teach on Saturdays.

There are also plenty of vending machines, wherever you go. Most of them serve drinks such as iced tea, but there are also plenty with cigarettes and beer, and many, many Boss Coffee vending machines.

I have not tried Boss Coffee yet, but it seems very popular over here. The mascot of Boss Coffee is Tommy Lee Jones. But in Japan, Tommy Lee Jones is actually an alien who has been sent to Earth to research humans and drink Boss Coffee. This is the way it is here.

As it turns out, March was not the time to be heading to Japan, due to a somewhat noticeable series of disasters there. I delayed my move until May, and now, since being reunited with the lovely Internet, I am able to bring you tales of my new life.

Japan is a very strange place in a lot of ways, but also pretty sane in a lot of ways I had not anticipated, due to overexposure to its “waaaaah crazy!!” kind of reputation. I feel like I am settling in very well to my little apartment, however, stepping outside the door is almost always a whole different story.

On arriving, I was met by a representative of the school and all the other teachers who had landed on the same morning as me, and then taken by train to my apartment. It feels like such a wonderful experience when even something as mundane as riding the train seems fresh and intriguing – look! It’s all in Japanese! It’s full of Japanese! I was too jetlagged to really venture outside that first evening, preferring to acquaint myself with my new home and bitterly resist the urge to fall asleep. I remember the next morning what a challenge it seemed to be to step outside and into… Japan. The opposite side of the world.

On my way to my first day of training I stopped at every street crossing wondering if I’d be an idiot for waiting or an idiot for walking. Wondering if my dress sense stuck out. If I was unknowingly committing any untold number of faux pas just walking down the street. It was (and still is) quite unnerving that as a Caucasian I am clearly marked out as a foreigner, and I find people do stare.

I find the train system at times convenient and at times confusing. There is just about enough information for an English speaker to find their way around, but it can still be confusing, trying to work out the difference between the two rail networks, the fare to be paid, the fare to be adjusted, repaid and purchased again. The local vs. the rapid trains. The different levels for different destinations. And the songs. Most stations have some very melodic chimes to be played for each arriving train, and it seems to be a different song at every station. Not just the trains, actually, most gadgets have a song to sing. I pressed the wrong button on a coffee machine the other day and it started singing “Danny Boy” at me. The whole song.

Of course, pretty much anything that requires any element of language is confusing to me. Whole load of important looking documents regarding the utilities at my apartment? Too bad. Can’t read the Japanese. Shop assistant say something to you? Try “hai” or “iie”. There’s almost a 50% chance you’ll get it right. Need some groceries? Is that stir fry sauce you are holding, or shower gel?

Oh, and my toilet seat has more settings then my microwave. A few times over.