Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

Something an expat must be careful of is blaming on a country those problems that could happen anywhere.  Problems are infinitely more frustrating when they come up in a foreign culture and language, but it's important to keep separate the problems from the place in which they happen to occur.

That doesn't mean it's easy.

After twelve days in the hospital, I returned home Monday.  For almost two weeks, I looked forward to sleeping in the only bed in a room, the absence of constant crying and moaning, to eating flavorful things at irregular times, and long hot showers in my own bathroom.  Monday night,  leaving, I gulped the fresh air, smiled at the clouds, bought too much of my favorite foods, and cranked up the shower, giddily awaiting the steam.  No hot water.

Today, Thursday morning, the landlord finally sent a man to fix it.  The blah blah something broke, but that is the domain of another company.  Today is a national holiday though, so no one can come until tomorrow, or Saturday, December 25th, which is not a holiday.

Since the surgery now twelve days ago, I've had only one shower, quickly and wincingly taken in the hospital's communal bathroom.  Also it's winter now, and Japan is very cold.  Doctors forbade me from baths, which rules out public bathhouses.  Most of my friends have left the country for the holidays, and I'm not yet allowed to drive my car or ride a bike.  This morning I worked my two stove burners furiously, and the resulting two inches of warm water in my bathtub felt like heaven.  Two-inch deep heaven.

It seems I'll be getting hot water for Christmas this year, with any luck.  There really aren't any presents I'd like more at the moment, and it does make me reflect about priorities, but mostly it makes me very cranky and annoyed.  I just have to remember not to blame it on Japan.  It would help if I could picture instead the face of my landlord, and since I've never seen him, I'll just have to imagine a face for him.  He won't be handsome.

My first Japanese apartment's shower confounded me. Behind a small smoked-glass door down the hallway from the tiny separate toilet room was a small room with a plastic floor and a bathtub. There was no curtain rod, and I couldn't imagine why some idiot had installed the showerhead on a wall in the middle of the room instead of properly above the bathtub where everyone knows it's supposed to go. Every morning I would irritably stand in my curtainless tub and aim the showerhead to shoot water halfway across the room into the bathtub, wondering just how difficult it would be to remove the showerhead and install it correctly.

Maybe a month later, I was venting to a friend about this ill design. He laughed at me for maybe five full minutes after I finished my little rant, and after catching his breath, asked to come over to my apartment and show me something. I consented, more than confused. He opened the door to my shower room and pointed at the plastic floor. "See that little trapdoor at the base of the outside of the tub? It's a drain. This whole room is the shower, and you're supposed to stand outside the tub and shower here before you get in the tub. Get it?" I got it, although I'd never expected to have to get directions for a bathtub. Coolest shower ever though, and I never had to scrub the bathtub. What a great country. If only it came with an instruction booklet.

I've been cooking a lot lately, and I've always hated cooking. I've always viewed hunger not as the grand creative opportunity my cooking friends seem to, but as an annoyance to be dismissed as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Let's just say I eat a lot of toast. Lately though I've started cooking for what I'm guessing are the following reasons: 1) I'm lonely and it fills up the solitude, 2) I always get to preface a cooking attempt with the adventure of a trip to the grocery store; who knows what I will find there and how I will find it?, 3) I'm starting to miss familiar foods, what with having to eat plastic boxes full of god-knows-what five lunches a week at the kindergarten, 4) I actually kind of enjoy cooking, for about a week or two each year, and 5) at the age of 29, I feel like I should finally start eating something more than toast.

Cooking in a foreign country presents of course its own unique challenges, things that never would have occurred to me before. It's difficult to find cookbooks in my language here, but luckily I have the Internet. I've been spending a good deal of time at Recipeland, and dealing with a discouraging set of limitations. I'm mostly vegetarian, meaning I don't eat meat unless it means getting involved in lengthy difficult explanations to dinner hosts I'm trying not to offend, or missing the opportunity of just trying something truly unique or bizarre during my travels. But meat recipes are out. Japanese kitchens typically don't have a proper oven, so oven recipes are out. I never learned cooking techniques or terminology, so if it involves braising or yolk separation, it's out too. I don't own a food processor, and I'm not sure that I've ever even seen a Dutch oven. A lot of Western ingredients just aren't available here, or come only at a ridiculously dear price: jalapeno peppers? Nope. Buttermilk pancakes? Please. And sometimes even if the ingredient is available, I wouldn't know how to find it. I've finally learned the kanji for flour, milk, and salt, but bulgur? Besides all this, I have the palate of a six-year-old, and in the kitchen, the patience of one too.

So what was the first thing I cooked? Pancakes. Which is really just another form of toast, except that it involved a 20-minute long search at the grocery store for baking powder. I never did find any syrup.

I find neighbor-relations strange. I may not know my neighbors' names, nor (depending on our respective work schedules) even their faces, but I know many intimate things about them even their best friends may not know. I am privy to detailed information about their love lives, their ability to hold their liquor, certain aspects of their hygiene, I even know what their underwear looks like when it is drying on a line, yet I wouldn't know them if we bumped into each other down in the parking lot. For instance, since my left-side neighbor's acquisition this week of a home-karaoke machine, I know that either she or his lavender-cotton-underwear-wearing companion is very very tone deaf. This is the second time I have had a neighbor with a home-karaoke machine. Why are those allowed by the lease but cats are not?

I am extremely unsympathetic this year to other people's complaints and flippant comments about having to spend Thanksgiving with the relatives, as this is the third year in a row that I cannot.

My new apartment has a button in the kitchen I can press to automatically fill the bathtub in a room maybe 6 feet down the hall. The water stops running when the bathtub is full. (I do however, have to first go into the bathroom to stop the drain.) That is so much cooler than the electric toilet seat warmer in my first apartment in Japan. That just felt like someone had already been sitting there.

Sometime in September I was planning to move into a different company apartment, one not directly above the company's head office. It was offered to me just before I left for vacation, to be moved into at some convenient point in the future. I'm back from vacation now, but yesterday I received the following phone call while in a city several hours from home:

[Ring! Ring!]
Me: Hello?
Caller: Hi, Karla. This is (my boss' name). How is your vacation?
Me: Good. I think I'm going home tomorrow, I haven't decided yet.
Manager: Oh, good. Because we want to move the new person into your apartment the day after tomorrow.
Me: !!!

In Japan, "unfurnished apartment" means no stove, no fridge, no air conditioner (you have to go live in a shopping center if you want central), no light fixtures. I'll have to spend the next day or two between packing boxes and evicting dust bunnies rounding these things up. So unless I can arrange a way to post photos using two empty tin cans (anyone got a good pickled fish recipe?), and some twist ties, it might be a while.

I am uncertain of what I ate for dinner. I bought it at the grocery store and cooked it myself, yet I am still puzzled. It looked like fried tofu. It tasted like fish. It smelled like WonderBread. I hate not being able to read labels. It once took me four tries to buy hand lotion. I'm still not sure what the first three bottles actually contained, but two of them were sticky. The first time I bought laundry detergent, I had to first peel the label off the bottle I found in the back of a cabinet left by a previous tenant who pointed it out to me when he handed me the key, and I took it to the store with me so I could fish it from my pocket and buy the exact same kind. A year and a half later, it's still the only brand I've ever tried.

Today's lessons. 1) Incinerating, while fun, is dangerous. I actually singed an eyebrow a little on my last trash run. I need to buy one of those really long lighters from the 100-yen shop that I thought were for novelty purposes. One man's novelty item is another man's necessary household appliance. 2) Even if my washing machine is really only a glorified spinning bucket, one half of most of my sock pairs will still tend to mysteriously vanish from the laundry.

I finally took out my trash. I've been living in my apartment almost three weeks now, and this was the first time I've had the courage to face it. This wasn't the usual lazy suburban American aversion to taking out the trash. This wasn't a case of, the anonymous men with the big clean city truck will be driving by my house at their regularly-scheduled weekly interval to take away the pizza boxes and beer cans I've been collecting so I never have to think about them again if only I can get off my butt for two minutes and drag them out to the curb. This was more a woman-versus-fire thing.

In the parking lot on the side of my apartment building is a large rusty free-standing incinerator. It's shaped like one of those big pot-belly stoves from the Ingalls-Wilder cabin, twice as big. I squeeze through a narrow gap between the fence and the building and toss my bags over the top rather than going around. I approach the incinerator with caution, heel-toe-heel-toe, recalling that this thing has been intimidating me for three weeks. My kitchen is too small to be putting this off this long. Here goes.

I eye my opponent carefully. It looks dangerous and hungry. A long barhandle with a counterweight on one end protrudes from its belly, and assuming this to be Step One, I pull it down. An iron-lipped, ash-breathed mouth gapes open in response, and I pour my trash inside. Trash separation here is serious business. Staples are plied from boxes, plastic wrap is scraped from cardboard backings, all refuse is separated into its material components. When you live next to the incinerator, what you burn is what you breathe. Step Three, light a fire. I fish a lighter out of my pocket and search for the least soggy coffee filter. Puff, puff, smolder, whoof! I stare down at three weeks' worth of junk mail and banana peels and food wrappers on fire, until the floating ashes start to collect on my T-shirt. Trusting everything has gone as it should, I swing the heavy door shut. Flames lick out of the rust-eaten smokestack. There is a long-handled fire poker on the ground beside the incinerator, and I am happy to have a reason to peek in every few minutes and stir around the big stew of flames and garbage. When the fire settles into a mellow smolder, I hop the fence back home, glowing with accomplishment. Now I sit at my desk, the smoke from the incinerator trailing past my window, looking around the apartment in vain for some overlooked trash to burn. Incinerating is fun!

I have just figured out my washing machine. To anyone who has never known the joy of living in a Japanese apartment, I assure you this is no trite victory. Something I love about living here, one of the things that has lured me back for a second year, is the ecstasy of accomplishment I get on a daily basis, something that I haven`t really enjoyed since the age of 8, when I finally mastered my bike sans training wheels. Every time a soda in a vending machine responds correctly to one of the strange shiny coins I`ve learned to produce, I want a parade. Sometimes I find myself doing something ordinary, and then looking around to see if anyone has been watching, and is suitably impressed. Maybe they will come up and bowingly compliment my extraordinary skill. So far, not even once. But I know, and I am proud.

So the washing machine. A Japanese washing machine is a strange conundrum. In a country where self-warming toilet seats and remote control air conditioners live peacefully in the same apartment as tatami mats and an oil-burning heater (*sniff* do I smell whale?), the Japanese washing machine is a half-manual, half-electric puzzle. Like the bionic man. Like one of those old washboards my Great-Grandmother used had a freak accident and had to be rushed to a top-secret lab to be refitted with robotic limbs, but inside still beats the heart of a good old-fashioned washboard.

It`s a compact plastic rectangular box with two adjacent narrow buckets sunk inside. Studying it, you assume there must be controls to plug or let out the stopper, fill the bucket with water, make the bucket spin around, and then make the other bucket spin around really fast to whip the water out before you hang all your clean wet clothes on your balcony to dry because you`re living in an insane country that knows no dryer. Matching these abstract washing goals to the controls that will realize them however, is another matter. It`s a word match, only one half the words are only in your head, and the other half are written in strange scribbles. I`ve gained enormous respect for illiterates while living in Japan, it`s not an easy road. Twist this knob to stop the drain? No, that makes an airplane noise. Pull this knob out a bit to agitate? Wrong, that makes the lint trap fall off. Where`s the thing to fill it with water? Oh, right, that would be this garden hose. Where`s the hidden camera broadcasting all this to the public?

I`m thankful actually, for the lack of a dryer. Clothes pins and air I can figure out.