Counterattack of the Dreamer

I haven’t put much effort at all into describing my favorite Japanese foods yet, in this blog or my previous one, so here’s a small step in that direction.  I snapped a shot of my lunch at Sukiya, a fast food joint, the other day:

meatloaf curry set meal

Japanese curry is food that sticks to your ribs.  It’s delicious, and with this particular dish of meatloaf curry I ordered the optional cheese on top to give it some extra pizazz.  On the back left is hiyayakko, my favorite tofu dish, which is just soft, raw tofu served cold with fresh ginger, green onions, and soy sauce.  On the back right is the ubiquitous miso soup, beside which is a glass of barley tea.

Not bad for 6 bucks, especially considering it’d normally be 5 if not for the lousy exchange rate.  And one mustn’t forget that the staff at fast food restaurants around here are exceedingly friendly and cordial, which stands in stark contrast to the approach of many fast food workers in St Louis, who are not unusually disinterested or overtly hostile.  Even the antics of St Louis service workers are starting to get a bit nostalgic now, though, kind of like the rain in Portland will always be for me.

I’m not doing the series any favors with my convoluted translation of the title, but 大東京ビンボー生活マニュアル is an excellent piece of manga. I managed to fit two copies of it in with my carefully packed luggage for two reasons: 1) it’s awesome and I wanted it with me, and 2) I feel a bit of comradery with Kosuke, the main character, as I watch my expenditures while I await my first paycheck and make the transition to life out here.

Manual to Living in Poverty in Greater Tokyo

I also can’t lay claim to leading a lifestyle anything like that of Kosuke’s, as he is truly impoverished and lives in an unfurnished one room apartment without even a rice cooker to his name.  My situation is far more comfortable than that.  Yet it has been really interesting, over the past couple of weeks, to see how my attitude towards spending has evolved.  I have significant expenditures to think about, like rent, a new cell phone, public transit, room furnishings, etc.  And although I have enough of a financial cushion to get by just fine, barring any unfortunate turns of events, I also have a fair amount of uncertainty regarding my future income due to the nature of my contract work as an English teacher.

These inevitabilities have led me to refashion the way I think about spending money, specifically to categorize everything in terms of need instead of want.  Food and shelter, reasonably I think, come first.  And ensuring my food and shelter means that everything else I could spend money on becomes colored in terms of how much food and shelter I could get in its place.  Ordering a beer at a bar suddenly seems like a reckless frivolity (dude, I could get a whole set meal at Yoshinoya for that and be full until morning!).  Thus, ordering more than one beer at a sitting seems more like the act of a lunatic than one looking to relax after work.  My amazingly comfortable urethane pillow, though I feel it is worth every yennie, is even harder to justify (holy crap, I spent a week of groceries and lunches at Sukiya on that lump!)  I should also note that at least one person, who shall remain unnamed, has claimed that this soft object of my nocturnal affections looks “gross” and “like I bought it at a thrift store,” which is neither here nor there, but offended my sensibilities and therefore seemed worth mentioning.  Let the record show that, while I think a great deal of life’s necessities can be obtained at a good thrift store, pillows and other intimate accessories are not among them.

In any case, all of this thinking about spending reminds me of a conversation I’ve had numerous times with different people, most memorably with my friend Justin.  A coworker of his was telling him that no matter how many raises he got, his expenses would simply grow along with his income, such that he found it impossible to set any significant amount of money aside.  I have usually scoffed at this kind of thinking, because I was on the conservative side with my money for my first three years in Japan, and I’ve been able to set some kizzash aside to start a nest egg.

But it was easy to do so with a cushy package from the Japanese government including subsidized housing, tax protection, and a free car.  Out in the real world, now, with no clear path to the standard of living I took for granted a mere two years ago, the way I have spent money until recently seems downright profligate.  There must be a lot of truth in the idea that expenditures will naturally expand in lockstep with earnings.

The true test will come once I’m earning decent money again, in how effectively I can remind myself of the satisfying lifestyle of my first weeks in Japan, when I rented fewer DVDs, chose my restaurants and groceries more carefully, got to know the library better than amazon.com, and walked from Ebisu to Shibuya to cut down my commute by one transfer.  The poignant glory of Kosuke’s story is that he doesn’t miss out on any of the good things in life, despite having hardly a tin cup of his own, and that’s something I would do well to remember on my second Japanese adventure.

I can’t believe it took me over 10 days to get into a public bath here.  Hitting the hot spring used to be one of my favorite pastimes in Tokushima,  and I took it seriously enough to develop a pretty nuanced routine of tea bathing, cold bathing, and sauna rotations.  But ye olde hot spring is a bit harder to come by in Tokyo than out in the mountains of rural Shikoku, so the siren call of steamy relaxation has been a bit less pressing.

Today the mood struck me, however, so I set out in the evening for a post-dinner ice cream snack and the short walk to Bath Land Eifuku, a public bath (not a hot spring, but similar).

Bath Land Eifuku

It’s an unassuming establishment, clearly frequented exclusively by locals.  Nothing flashy here to draw people from outside of the immediate vicinity.  They don’t even provide soap and shampoos in the washing areas, something I had grown accustomed to back in Shikoku, so I had to be satisfied with a thorough rinse.  What they do have, that I had yet to experience in my time in Japan, was an electric bath.  It’s the section in the middle shown here:

The Electric Bath

I had heard about electric baths before, and always wanted to give them a shot.  It’s a pretty simple concept: passing electricity through the water to achieve what the brief passage above the tub describes as “a pleasant tingly sensation.”  I must admit being a bit intimidated though, a fact for which I believe the reader will forgive me upon consideration of the courage required to electrocute oneself while naked in public in a foreign land.

As such, I initially sat in the massage bath section (on the far right in the picture), and stretched a tentative hand into the electric bath nextdoor.  I immediately thought that I had grievously misinterpreted the phrase for “pleasant tingly sensation” as my forearm flooded with throbbing electric sensation, my fingers twisted inexorably into a claw, and I was left with no recourse but to violently fling my arm free of the devil water and glance sheepishly around to see which of the old naked men in the vicinity had noticed.

In hindsight, a few seconds of throbbing terror should have been enough for me to wash my hands of the electric bath and focus on the parts of the Japanese bathing experience that I know I enjoy.  Those who are close to me, however, will know that I usually need to do something stupid at least twice before I learn my lesson, and today was no exception.  I got it into my head that the reason my forearm throbbed so strongly must have been because I was forcing all the electric current in the water through that one, narrow extremity of my body.  Surely if the same amount of electricity were passing through my entire body at once, I reasoned, the diluted effect would resemble the pleasant tingle I sought.

I thus popped my entire body into the electric bath and promptly experienced quadriplegia.  I do not recommend it.  There was no dilution of electric sensation, waves of shuddering pain flooded my torso, both of my hands curled into claws, and I lost the ability to breathe.  Fortunately I came to my senses soon enough, mustering the effort to heave my unresponsive limbs out of the path of the electricity.  I huddled, briefly, sent a betrayed glance at the words “pleasant tingly sensation,” and resolved not to try the electric bath again until my next visit.

I’ve taken some shots of the area around the house I’m sharing in Tokyo, and I thought I’d put it up here to give you a bit of a visual tour.  I knew Tokyo was a green city before I moved here 10 days ago, as I’ve seen the downtown buildings crowned with gardens, the tree lined streets, and the outcroppings of greenery that sprout out from balconies and various architectural extrusions.  Even so, I have been surprised and pleased to see the greenery in my neighborhood on the walk I take each day from Eifukuchou Station.

the street to my place

Walking around here really calls to mind the third short film in the compilation “Tokyo!”, which I was fortunate enough to catch at the Tivoli in St Louis with great company of the form of Amykins.  The next shot is of my house, in which my room is upstairs to the back, and roughly the size of a king bed.

my house

I think it’s fair to call it quaint, though I call it tiny from time to time. The next shot is one I took down the street.  It’s a pretty cool neighborhood.

the neighborhood

The house in the next shot is just utterly cool.  I haven’t met the people who live there, but they must be eminently awesome to maintain a place like this.  Note the garage on the ground level, which is appropriate to lodge a car or perhaps 2.5 bicycles.

the cool house

Will I ever live in such a bodacious abode?  Perhaps. Right now I’m cool rocking the king size room.

I have to admit, I experienced some fleeting doubts. On the long bus ride from Narita International Airport into the city, it crossed my mind that maybe I was just running away from the challenges posed by the prospect of establishing a life in the US during a recession.   Then an even more disturbing idea hit me.  What if the only reason I wanted to be back in Japan was the simple fact that it was all I knew of adult life after college?  That was a scary thought.

I arrived at my new home and settled in as best I could without my luggage, as it had been delayed in Chicago.  My first meal was katsu curry, a rice dish with a fried pork cutlet.  I mostly got it to make my friend Justin jealous, as his favorite curry place in Chicago has recently turned into a burger hut.  It was an uneventful night, as I was tired and had a ton of errands to run in the morning, so I turned in and slept on top of my lonely sleeping pad without sheets or pillows.

The morning brought heavy rain, and I felt lower than on the bus ride as I sloshed my way through town in sandals that, once soaked, rubbed the insides of my feet raw and red.  I got lost in Shibuya while looking for the municipal office, and finally arrived over an hour later to find that it was the wrong one, and I needed to go elsewhere.  I wasn’t proper miserable, but I probably looked it.  Any onlookers could be forgiven for thinking to themselves “hey, look at that dude with the too-small umbrella walking all funny in uncomfortable-looking sandals with a soaked backpack.  He looks proper miserable.”  It was, as my friend Shawn might say, The Suckage.

Then the sun came out.  As my time in country approached 24 hours, I walked home from the (correct) municipal office having registered as a foreigner and enrolled in the national health plan, and followed a greenbelt along the river through parks and playgrounds.  The river leads right by my neighborhood, which I find quaint and reassuring.  I got some coffee at a nearby shop and finished the Sakura Momoko book I had been reading.  I started to feel pretty calm.  All the reasons I have worked hard to get back here started trickling back into my consciousness, and my sleep-deprived worries of the previous day began to fade away.

Within a few more hours, my emotions had done a 180, and I was feeling excellent about my situation.  Now, five days later, the feeling that I’m precisely where I need to be hasn’t left me.  I see it in the simple things, like chatting with my Japanese/Korean/Italian housemates, or strolling to the train station, and in the sense of peace that I feel now about being headed in the right direction, even though I’m not entirely sure what that direction is.  When I get into bed in my tiny room, I fall straight to sleep, which is a big deal for me.  It took me a year to straighten myself out and get to where I need to be, but now I’m here.

I’m on vacation this week with my family, enjoying my first foray into the tropical climate of Costa Rica.  It’s actually my first trip to Central America, or rather my first trip anywhere in the Americas south of Mexico.  Pretty awesome.  The highlights of the trip have included the tropical staples of impossibly beautiful beaches, delicious local cuisine, and breathtaking jungle.  The downside of the trip is simpler to describe: bug bites.

I have been fortunate enough to travel in tropical destinations in the past,  like Hawaii and Cambodia, but never have I experienced a relentless onslaught of ravenous insect invaders like this week.  I stopped counting the bites once they numbered beyond 50, and that was three days into our week-long extravaganza on the coast.  While earlier this week I held hope that I would solve the riddle of how to avoid the cutaneous massacre, I have since resigned myself to returning to the US in red, itchy defeat.

During the day the hordes of insects barely register as a mild annoyance, and even on expeditions into the jungle you can get away with forgetting the bug spray.  One must sleep, however, and during the night the devil bugs become virtually inescapable.  I have experimented with numerous different strategies: the installed mosquito net (obvious, perhaps, yet largely ineffective), cocooning beneath the sheets (too frickin’ hot), lavish quantities of repellent (temporary relief from non-spider attackers along the lines of 2 hours), and long pants and shirts (no more effective than the mosquito net, too frickin’ hot, and too frickin’ not-covering-my-face).

And so we are a deranged Swiss Family Robinson, a haggard bunch of bedraggled misfits absentmindedly scratching at chins and earlobes like homeless crack junkies.  It’s going to be difficult convincing people back at home that we stayed in a nice rental on the beach as opposed to roughing it naked in the Amazon jungle for a sadistic reality television program.  In the end, however, I have made my peace with the legions of biting flies, spiders, mosquitos, ants, and no-see-ums.  My left cheek may be swollen larger than my right, but you can only really tell if you are looking for it.  My ankles and forehead are riddled with lumps like a bad case of the chicken pox, but I was flying hundreds of feet above the ground through the canopy level of the jungle on a zip line the other day, and that’s more than a fair trade.  I just swatted something crunchy away from my temple, but it didn’t faze me in the least.  Take that buggies.