robbieinjapan.com

“Keitai” is the Japanese word for cell phone and I finally got one. I got a Japanese girl (Michi) who I met through my college friend, Andre, to go with me to sort through all the different plans and options. I still don’t completely understand it since it involves not only buying different time periods for talking but also buying “packets” which allow you to do things like send e-mails to other phones, surf the internet, download things, etc. Because it is pretty expensive to actually use your cell phone to talk, e-mailing and c-mailing (another form of text sending) is more popular.

I got a cell phone from the cell phone provider “AU” because they offer a student discount. In Japan, the student discounts for various things are pretty good. For my cell phone plan, my student discount gives me 50% off the monthly rate which means I save about $40-$50 per month.

The cell phone style that’s “in” right now in Japan is blocky. This was sort of surprising since I was used to seeing really sleek phones in the US. Here it’s not uncommon to see large blocky phones that look more like bricks than cell phones. However, the phone I chose doesn’t particularly look like this. It is a bit longer than my cell phone back home but it is much thinner.

For the past few days, I’ve been busy learning the different characters for things like “send”, “reply”, “enter”, “end” and even things like “infrared transfer” so that I can actually understand my cell phone since there is no English option.

You would think that by now American cell phones would be up to speed with Japanese cell phones and I suppose in a way, things like the blackberry are pretty advanced, but as far as standard phones go, I was surprised by the features that my Japanese cell phone has.

For example, my cell phone has a GPS navigation system. So whenever I want, I can just hit a few buttons and it will bring up a map of where I am exactly and a map of everything around me which I can rotate, zoom in and out and move around in. It also shows me the names of various shops and train stops around me on the map. I can also enter in addresses and it will show me the route I need to walk to get there. Additionally, I can send my current position to my friend’s phone and he’ll see exactly where I am and also see the directions for how to get to where I am.

Another handy feature for me is that the phone has an English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionary. But not only that, it has a feature where you can use the cell phone’s camera to read text. What I mean is, I can place my cell phone’s camera over some Japanese text and it will recognize the written text, display it on its screen and provide the English translation of it. This is pretty handy when I read material or when I’m in a restaurant trying to decipher the menu. A similar feature I noticed in the menu of the phone was that the phone has a bar code reader though I’m unsure why I would need this.

It also has an FM radio so I can plug my headphones into it and listen to radio stations here in Tokyo. It brings up a menu of all the radio stations available and displays their names.

One of the features I really like about my cell phone here in Japan is the infrared transfer (called “sekigaisen”). When people want to exchange their cell phone contact information, all they have to do is select the “infrared transfer” option and then put their cell phones’ infrared sensors together. All of the contact information is automatically transferred and stored in the address book so I don’t have to spend time typing in the person’s name, phone numbers, e-mail address, etc., it’s all done in a couple of seconds automatically!

Because my cell phone is one of the low end ones (since I am using the student discount, they only let me buy the “poorer” phones), there are many features which I don’t have but are available for others. There were many cell phones at the store that let you watch TV on them. I heard from my Japanese friend that his phone allows him to wave it in front of a sensor at convenience stores and the amount of money required to buy his items is automatically deducted from his account so he doesn’t have to wait in line to pay.

Since you all love pictures so much, here are some pics of my new cell phone.

Oh, and here’s something I received my very first day here at the dorm. It’s the “residence rules” given to me by the resident manager to explain the various rules and regulations I have to abide by while staying here. As you can see, it is written in perfect engrish. Almost all of the signs and announcements here in the dorm look like this.

By the way everyone, you can leave me a comment by clicking on the “comments” link below the post. Just type in your name and what you want to say.

So I haven’t updated in a while. Today I went in to meet with my advisor here at Keio University for 15 minutes. She explained the courses I have to take and the courses I have to choose from. As for my placement test, I was placed into 2G which is the most accelerated class of level 2. This is fine with me, though I’ll have to see how hard it is or how good everyone else is in the class. There are some students from Korea and China here in Japan who are pretty good at Japanese.

My meeting with the advisor was conducted entirely in Japanese. Which, when I think back about it, is pretty amazing seeing as I was able to understand everything she said without any real difficulties. Speaking Japanese is a different story. I’m still rusty from not using it for many months and it is sometimes hard to say what I’m trying to say.

Though I will say that a couple days ago, I returned to a store called Zara in Ginza in order to exchange a shirt I had bought over the weekend because the shirt had ripped. I was able to tell the person working there the problem and what I wanted to do in Japanese without any real trouble. So I can get by in basic situations.

I’ve gotten the hang of the subway system here pretty much. The one annoying thing about it is that the subway system is not owned by one company or by the city alone. There are five different companies with subway lines and each does as it pleases. Although they are pretty integrated, it does pose some annoyances. For example, on my way to the university from my dorm, I have to buy a ticket and get on one line owned by Japan Metro. Then after a few stops, I have to get off, put my ticket into the exit machine and walk a while to get on to another train which is owned by a different company called JR Lines. There I have to buy a new ticket (since it is a separate company) and ride that line. It would be much easier if there were one company and I could simply change trains by going up a level or moving to a different platform.

I suppose this problem is slightly solved by the fact that I recently bought a student discounted commuter pass which is valid only for trips between the station near my dorm through a particular travel path to the station near Keio University. I have to pay for a ticket if I choose to use any other line or go to any station past the station near Keio University. It cost about 6,300 yen which is roughly $55 for one month. This pass is valid for both companies’ lines that I take on my way to  school; although, I still have to exit the station and then enter another one at that particular place.

However, I am lucky. It just so happens that one of the stations that I travel through on the way to my university is Shibuya which is one of the more popular places in Tokyo to hang out, go to restaurants, shop, etc. I’ve already been there a few times with my friends and it is the closest destination to all of us when we want to go out. I am lucky because I can simply use my student commuter pass to get there and back making the trip essentially free.

Japan is a cash based society. It is not uncommon for Japanese people to carry hundreds of dollars in their wallets since credit cards are not really used or accepted here. For example, when I wanted to buy my student commuter pass at the train station, they would not accept my credit card. Luckily I had the cash on me at the time. As a result of only using cash, nobody will give another thought to it if you decide to pay with a 10,000 yen note (almost $100) for something small like 500 yen (almost $5) because they have no other choice.

Also, when I take out 10,000 yen from the ATM (almost $100), the machine gives me one 10,000 yen note since it is okay to use this where ever. The same situation would be a problem in America, if you asked for $100 and it gave you a $100 bill instead of at least five $20 bills since it would be ludicrous to pay for a pack of gum with a $100 bill in America.

Also, coins are meaningful here. In America, with the failure of common use of the $1 coin, the highest worth coin is the quarter at 25 cents. One night, I looked into my wallet and wondered why I only had one 1,000 yen note left (about $10)since I knew I should have had much more money than that. It wasn’t until later that I looked at the change in my pocket that I realized that I had six or seven 500 yen coins (about $35 in all). I was carrying more than $40 in coins in my pocket!

As for now, the three major things I have left to do before I am fully settled in is register for my classes, get a cell phone and open a bank account (which I was hoping to avoid by using my American account, but unfortunately they want a Japanese one to withdrawal money from for housing). So we’ll see how those things go.

I’m not the only one from Middlebury College who lives in the dorm here. Tyler arrived here from spending some time in Osaka with his old host family from his homestay in high school. His room is sort of across the hall from mine. It is off to the left, but very close.

So, yesterday, he and I decided to get our Gaikokujintourokushou which means our alien registration card. Every foreigner in Japan that plans on spending more than 90 days in Japan has to register him or herself with the local district. After three weeks, we will receive our cards which we will have to carry on us at all times in Japan.

We took a train to get to the office. The area there seemed different from the area where our dorm is. There were no tall buildings and it did not seem as lively. There was even grass and trees in various places. Though, this was not a suburb, it was simply an illusion since the area is surrounded by urban areas.

After making some wrong turns and mistaking the correct building, we finally made it to the correct office and went through registration. I was surprised that I was able to understand the Japanese the worker there was saying to me so well. I haven’t really spoken Japanese over the summer, so it is a bit rusty when I try to speak it. But it seems that I can get by for most things. I hope that in the next couple of weeks I’ll be able to adjust again to speaking Japanese fluidly.

After doing registration for the card and getting a temporary slip of paper for it, we tried to get cell phones. The slip of paper we got from the office was necessary for getting a cell phone. I suppose this is because it is proof of residence in Japan and so they know they can find us if we try to run off without paying. We could have gotten cell phones yesterday but unfortunately, we don’t have our student IDs yet from Keio University. Thus, we could not get the gakuwari (student discount) which reduces the rate of the cell phone plan by 50% which is definitely something we don’t want to pass on. So, we’ll just have to wait until Tuesday at registration to get our cards and then apply for the cell phone.

Recently we’ve eaten at a few places which are interesting in that they seem to be common here in Japan but don’t really exist in America. Basically, just inside the restaurant or right outside, there is a machine with lots of  pictures of food or the names of the food and a price. You then put your money into the machine and press the button for the food you want. You get a ticket and take it inside where a worker will take it and begin to process the order. These places are nice because they usually get your food to you quickly and once you’re finished you can simply leave since in Japan, there is no tipping custom at restaurants and you’ve already paid at the beginning. No waiting around for a waiter to pick up your money and then return with change or your credit card.

This morning, I went into campus with the rest of the Japanese language students to take the placement test. It lasted for a few hours and wasn’t so bad. In typical Japanese fashion, they had us sit in prearranged seats in the lecture hall. They had a map of where we sat at the doors into the lecture hall, however they showed us on that sheet of paper where we sat by our ID numbers which I did not have on me nor cared to remember from before. Eventually someone brought out some sort of packet which had our names and our corresponding ID numbers, so I made it to my seat. The room was full of foreigners from everywhere. There was a group of girls speaking Korean off to my side, two guys  in front of me speaking in some Scandinavian language and some people to my right speaking Chinese. I spoke English with Tyler who turned out to have his seat behind me and the guy to my right, Lance from Seattle. Seeing as there are so many students in this program and he lives in a different dorm, I’ll probably never see him again.

Now I just wait to see where they place me. Hopefully, they’ll put me in a level that is slightly below my actual level so I can have it a bit easier with the homework and have time to study on my own and also go out. Afterwards, I explored the campus for a while with Tyler and then we left with another student from Middlebury, Brian, who is staying here for only a semester.

After talking to my fellow Middlebury students like Brian who live at a different dorm, I realized that Tyler and I have it pretty good at Willing Setagaya. Brian told me about this meter in his room which monitors his utilities. At the front of the building, there is a vending machine looking thing (Japanese people love vending machine type things apparently) where you put money in and then select your room number and that amount is credited to you. The meter in your room then shows the amount of yen in your account and as you use your utilities, it begins to decrease.

Brian wrote all of the Middlebury students in Tokyo going to Keio University an e-mail with a few questions about registration and other things, but concerning this meter, he wrote:

“this isn’t really a questions but that stupid box in our rooms that tell us how much money we have left for water and electricity is driving me nuts. i just sit in the dark all day and brush my teeth in the lounge sink, and i STIll went down 200 yen.”

Needless to say, I’m glad I don’t have an electronic big brother monitoring me everytime I decide to charge my digital camera. Also, it seems that at Brian’s dorm, when they leave the room the electricity automatically goes off (since they need to put a card in a slot to turn it on and that card is attached to their keys). So basically Brian has no chance of charging his laptop if he’s out of the room. And according to the meeting he recently attended about his dorm, he is not allowed to have any visitors anywhere inside the dorm or he will face the punishment of eviction from his room.

I guess I have it pretty good here, huh.

As promised, I took pics of my room and after searching the Internet for the correct drivers for my camera, I finally have them. So here they are as proof that I do not live in a closet in Tokyo…

I live in a dorm called “Willing Setagaya” which is located near the Sangen-jaya metro station on the Tokyu Den-en-toshi line which is near Shibuya. My room is on the second floor, room number 209.

After just entering my room through the door, you are greeted with this… my small kitchenette is on the left and the bathroom is on the right. Dead ahead is the rest of my room with the bed.

To the right through the door is the bathroom…

Continuing into my room, on the left is a desk, table and some other things where I’ve put my laptop and papers for now.

On the right side of the room is my bed. The closets are on the wall opposite the foot of the bed which you cannot see in this photo.

Here’s a reverse shot from near the window showing my desk, the small kitchenette and the small hall into my room from the door.

Looking out my window, we find an overcast day and other buildings. There seems to be a small landing right outside my window. I believe it’s so that people can escape since there’s also an emergency ladder in a steel box out there. I don’t think I’m supposed to go out there but I’m the only one who has access to this landing through my window. Further out and to the left is a courtyard for our building and then some walls separating our property from the other buildings.

Well, that’s it for pictures so far. I like my room, it’s bigger than any of the rooms I’ve had at Middlebury and having a private bathroom and area to cook and wash things is nice. Also, there is a large air conditioner which has been handy these past few days since it is still a bit hot.

So I finally finished setting up my blog today… who knows how often I’ll write in this. Hopefully it’ll be quite a bit, so check back often.

Yesterday I arrived in Japan. I slept a few hours the night before my morning flight since I was busy finishing packing everything into my two permitted suitcases. The flight from Philadelphia to Chicago went well enough but that wasn’t the flight I was dreading. The flight I was dreading was the one from Chicago to Tokyo, Japan which lasted for about 13 or more hours I think.

It actually wasn’t so bad because I had hardly slept the night before and didn’t sleep for a long time so my memory of it isn’t very good now. My seat was in a middle section with five seats. I had the seat second from the right. I felt bad for the guy to my left who sat in the very middle because not only was he trapped in there with two people on both sides of him but his seat was broken so he couldn’t really move it. He tried to change seats but the flight attendants wouldn’t let him. He was going to Korea and I think he was part of some military branch for the USA. He often cursed at various things throughout the flight. The guy on my right was pretty nice. I think  I caught a glimpse of his passport once which was Chinese. I’m not sure if he really spoke English or not.

After landing in Japan, I showed them my passport and so forth. The differences in Japan were evident from the beginning. When I was waiting for my baggage, there were two people with white gloves whose only job seemed to be to make sure that the suitcases coming down and going around the conveyer belt were upright. They stood there and every once in a while would turn over a suitcase that had come down and was facing down. Also, there was a line about four feet or so away from the conveyer belt that encircled it all the way around. All of the Japanese stood behind this line until they saw their luggage at which point they would step in and grab it before moving back behind the line. No having to elbow your way in to get a shot at the conveyer belt here!

I got my two large bags and went to exchange some money into yen since I would need it to pay for the bus that would take me to Tokyo City Air Terminal where I would be picked up by a Keio student.

First I had to fill out some form before actually getting in line which included asking me for my flight number, hotel name, etc. I’m not sure if this is standard around the world or not but for some reason, I always remember just being able to walk up to the counter and change money, none of this paperwork. Maybe it’s a Japanese thing.

When I finally did get up to the counter, I handed them the form and started counting out the $20 bills on the counter. This seemed to make the person working there nervous. In Japan, it seems that they don’t like to accept money handed directly to them. Instead, there was this plastic basket there that looked similar to the type of thing that fast food restaurants put wax paper on top of and then throw the burger and fries in to. As I was counting the money before putting it into the basket, the woman seemed to get nervous that I might actually hand the money to her directly and so she pushed the basket a few inches so that instead of being a little off to the side, it was now directly between us. I put the money in the basket and she picked it up and then put the equivalent yen in the basket and I took it.

I got the bus ticket I needed and rode about an hour. In the bus, I noticed a woman reading a newspaper a few rows in front of me. I saw written in the headline “Burapi” which is the written Japanese version of “Brad Pitt” and then I looked down a bit and saw a photo of him there, too. I had always heard in my Japanese classes that Japanese people love Brad Pitt for some reason so it only made sense that in my first hours in Japan, I would see his face. I’m on the other side of the planet and my culture is still here with me.

I turned my ipod on as I looked out the window of the bus. It was overcast and about 5pm so it was pretty dark. After a few minutes of listening to Manu Chao, I realized that the jabbering in Spanish over upbeat steel drums didn’t fit very well with the rainy, dark skies over the miles of concrete I saw around me.

At one point I looked out and realized that I was looking at the 14th story of a building. I looked down from the window and realized the highway we were on was hundreds of feet above the ground. Below I could see several other highways at varying levels winding and twisting beneath us. I saw huge apartment complexes that must have held thousands of people and sky scrapers that burst out of the ground like weeds. Tokyo seemed like a city that was bigger than anything I’d ever encountered before. Probably the only other comparable city that I had been to, New York City, didn’t give off this sense of hugeness and neverending concrete.

When we arrived at the bus destination, I was pleasantly surprised by Masa, a student at Keio who had been at Middlebury as part of the exchange program the year before. He was there to pick me up so we collected my bags and made our way to the subway station. The subway seems to be very extensive in its routes and the cars are cleaner than I could have ever imagined. I had ridden the T in Boston over the summer while I worked at MIT but this subway was white and clean with real seats, not the plastic hard kind they had on the T.

When we got off the subway, we walked about 10 minutes or so to get to my residence. The streets we walked through reminded me of my time in Taiwan. The street we went down seemed like an alleyway but was an actual street since cars would come from time to time down it. There were small restaurants and shops all the way up to the small street. There was no sidewalk. We were essentially walking in the narrow street there and sometimes had to stop and move out of the way as cars came.

We finally arrived at my “dorm”. It is owned by an old couple who live there as well I think. They gave me my key and showed me around as they explained the rules in a mix of English and Japanese. They showed me the room off to the left of the entrance where my personal shoe box was to place my shoes everytime I came in. They showed me the garbage room where we will have to split up our garbage into the correct bins at maddening division.

My room is quite nice. It is bigger than the rooms at Middlebury. I have my own private full bathroom which includes the deep bathtub typical of Japan. There is a kitchenette that includes a stovetop and a refrigerator. Luckily, the people who were in the “dorm” last semester left all of their things in the main lobby room where we can take them at our leisure. This morning after I had awoken, I went down and picked up quite a few things like a rice cooker, pots, pans, chopsticks, toaster oven, plates, trash can and so on. It is quite convenient.

I also have more storage space than I know what to do with. There are cabinets everywhere and I have a closet by the door as well as two small closets in my room. I was able to put away all of my stuff with plenty of room.

The “dorm” holds 35 students. All of the rooms are singles. This is an international student dorm so there are no Japanese students here, only students from around the world. I’m not sure how many Americans there are yet since most people are moving in today and I haven’t met them yet. But last night, I met some people who had moved in that day like me. They came from Singapore, Australia, Russia, Macau, Germany, Chicago from what I can remember. So the students here definitely come from all over the world, not just America.

After I had moved my suitcases into my room last night, I hadn’t eaten dinner yet so I went with my friend, Masa, to some small restaurant. It was one of those restaurants where they give you raw meat and you cook it yourself on an oven top type thing in the center of the table. He ordered for us and got some types of beef and also cow tongue. I don’t think I had ever had cow tongue. It tasted like beef. However, the image of putting an animal’s tongue on my own tongue struck me as not very attractive as I was eating it.

I said goodbye to Masa and made my way back to the dorm where I met and talked to some people in the common room just inside the main doors. I went to sleep around 1am after taking a shower and woke up around 11am, so I guess my sleeping schedule hasn’t really changed much even though the time zone difference is 12 hours.

Today, I didn’t see anyone around except for a German guy who was moving in who I opened the door for. We don’t have anything to do until Friday when we have our Japanese placement test. I guess most people haven’t gotten here yet today so I’ll probably go to the supermarket nearby. I’ll try to take photos of my dorm and room and post them up here soon. My digital camera is pretty old and falling apart so hopefully I’ll get a new one soon. For now though, I’m going to unpack a bit and head out to the supermarket.