This wombat went and had lunch the other day with one of the students at RAY English Club, along with Larrythecanadian and Tomtheamerican, two other staff here. It was well and truly a fantastic meal, with plenty of real cow, real vegetables, and the occasional piece of sushi. We all ate until we couldnt possibly eat any more - I dont believe I have been this full since I left the Kawata's in Okazaki. There are some photos up on the photo pages (now under a cute wombat picture, see right) of the food and the company. Lots of fun. They did have a lovely house (but no carpet) and a nice little gravel garden, a la buddhist temples, and the entire garden was surrounded by a lovely little bamboo fence.
Or was it? On closer inspection (instructed to by Kikuko, the student), the bamboo was revealed to be polyvinylchloride: PVC plastic. Doing a remarkably well job of faking it, it actually looked like bamboo, but had the distinctive feel of PVC and makes the same sound as electrical tubing when you tap it.
Most of Japan has a distinctly artificial feel to it: when you go into any shop, the first shop assistant to see you will yell at the top of his lungs "IRASSHAIMASE!" (meaning, 'welcome'), and this is the trigger for every other shop assistant who hears this to repeat the yell at the top of their own lungs. On the surface, this is rather nice and welcoming, if a little disconcerting when trying to keep a low profile in the coffee shop and having twelve people scream welcomes at you - except no one actually puts any effort into doing anything beyond forming the words. No one bothers to even look up from whatever they are doing. Yesterday I noticed a little fellow in the supermarket whos entire job description seemed to be to rearrange the little polystyrene trays with meat in them so that there was no gap between packages. Having such an intellectually stimulating job, he was of course compelled to come up with ways to keep his brain occupied while shuffling trays of mince meat; his best effort was to yell "IRASSHAIMASE" and follow this up with a yell of "please take your time and thank you for doing us the courtesy of visiting our humble supermarket", after which he would pause long enough to breathe back in again, and start the whole spiel over again. It really did look like he was talking to the diced pork, welcoming that to the supermarket. And really, we arent at the supermarket as a service to the staff; we are at the supermarket to buy food to eat ourselves.
Houses here seem to be built according to one of two designs; the traditional wooden building, which is just about anything built before 1970, which tends to leak, have a wooden sliding door and a floor of tatami matting, and a wooden shingle roof. The other style is basically anything built since 1970, without exception built and fixtured by the company Sekisui House, is completely ferro-concrete (which they call "Western Style" - I wonder where else in the world is ferro-concrete used to build every single house? Not only apartment blocks, but individual houses!), with aluminium window sashes, aluminium door frames, aluminium doors, walls that are relatively solid but covered with a weird substance making the wall ever so slightly squishy, and the outside is textured to give the illusion that the place is made of brick. I dont think Ive seen a brick in this country yet! The one thing that sets expensive places apart from cheap places is the floor. The good places have faux- hardwood flooring (the japanese word for this is "FUROORINGU" - applied exclusively to squares of plasterboard about a metre square with the surface covered in a thin layer of wood, arranged to look like long thin floorboards, interlocking and covering entire rooms. The cheap places have lino.
On an unrelated topic, I managed to score a minor victory for the free world this evening in the ramen shop. I was sitting, calmly eating my ramen in peace, not disturbing anyone, as a good wombat should, when the fellow sitting beside me lit up a cigarette, resulting in a cloud of smoke. Well, what else could I do but erupt in a coughing fit, pick up the menu (A4 sized, too), and fan all the smoke back in his direction. Thus far, normal. What he did next completely floored me.. he extinguished his cigarette, smushed it into the ashtray, and actually apologised to me!! I was stunned...
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