Please Read Before Use...

I love the Japanese version of the dollar store (100 Yen Shop), all of the products have really hilarious English instructions. It's the thought that counts. And I know they don't expect me to buy a cleaning product because I'm actually going to use it, I only buy it so I can read the directions when I go home.

Telephone

No, not the Lady Gaga song that’s music video was playing on a giant 3D Sony TV at the electronics store the other day, it’s the thing that makes everyday at work exciting (in a if-you-don’t-role-with-it-you’d-feel-humiliated-so-it’s-better-to-find-the-silver-lining kind of way).
One of the most important new words I’ve learned coming to Japan this time is ‘shomu’. I think if you look it up in a dictionary you’ll probably find something vague and innocent like “general affairs”. But what shomu really is, is all of the little things that incoming employees are expected to do during their first year. I think I heard the term “grunt work” whispered somewhere ;)
I imagine shomu duties vary by company, but in general you can assume it’s probably stuff you wouldn’t want to do for more than a year.
Anyways, one of my duties is answering the phones. There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of protocol that goes into answering phones in Japan. For example, (after picking up the phone in one ring) you use a different way of speaking depending on if the caller is from within or from outside of the company. It gets tricky so I have a lovely chart that I have basically permanently affixed to my desk to help me along. A lot of the time, people have no idea that they are speaking with an American and that leads to a lot of embarrassing stories, wait, I mean funny stories in a non-humiliating sense…
I’m thinking of starting a hall of fame for my most entertaining hiccups. In the meantime, here is my latest failed, I mean interesting, exchange:
I picked up a call from a local chain in Japan called Yodobashi Camera, or in Japanese-English Yodobashi KAmera (pronounced kah-meh-ra). I’ve always had the bad habit of saying camera with a slightly more English accent, ‘kyamera’. When I was taking a message for the caller, I repeated the store name to double-check and he stopped me, “No no, it’s not Yodobashi Kyabakura, it’s Kamera”. I burst out laughing as soon as I hung up. The caller mistook my accent and thought I was calling his store a ‘kyabakura’, a Japanese host club where men pay lots of money to sit with pretty girls!! Cest’ la vie :)
Incidents like this make me wonder who gets to decide the Japanese-English pronunciation of English words, it always gets me into trouble. Like, I can’t call Ikea ‘Ikea’ anymore, it has to be ‘Eekeha’. So now I call my iPhone an ‘Eephone’.
Moral of the story, if you’re going to be making a lot of mistakes in the future, have some fun doing it. And eat some chocolate or something.

This is not a trick...

... and you won't have any money left for treats.

Two weeks ago I ran across these pumpkins for sale in Shinjuku. The top shelf (with the current exchange rate) would leave you forking over $30.50 per pumpkin.

Times like these remind me of good old 2004 when $1 equalled 122 yen. Now you ask? One buckaroo is worth an all time low of 81 yen! I try not to think about it.

Japan has actually been very conscious of the high yen since it kills the competitiveness of their export industry. I notice at a lot of larger chain stores there are efforts being made to "fight the high yen" by offering discounts etc. But why offer discounts when you can sell pumpkins for 30 bucks?

A message from the Dark Ages (aka before I had internet)

(Written in late Sept.)

After a few weeks of craziness I am finally settled into my new (well, new for me) Tokyo apartment. The most difficult thing moving to Japan has been registering as a foreigner. All foreigners moving to Japan are required to register for a gaikokujintorokusho card (they make the name short and easy to remember for us). You basically can’t do anything without this card, like rent an apartment etc., or technically even be caught walking around without it (though I’ve never had that problem). Naturally you have to have a permanent address in order to apply for the gaikokujintorokusho so that you can rent an apartment… wait, what?? Right, so I ran into this conundrum where I needed to rent a place but I couldn’t because I didn’t have my gaikokujintorokusho card, but I didn’t have my gaikokujintorokusho card because I didn’t have a place to live…
Anyway, I ended up applying through the city office of my former host family with their address. Which was fantastic. Until I actually found a place in a different ward and realized I needed my new address on the card (that was being processed in another city) in order to open a bank account to receive my salary, get internet, and a phone. Somehow everything worked out, but not without a lot of commuting back and forth between home and city offices because they forgot to tell me something or gave me incorrect information. One good thing was that because the city offices made so many mistakes, they were obligated to put a rush on my card, so I got it a few days ago instead of mid-October (yayyy!).
In the meantime, I have been hitting up the area equivalents of dollar stores—100 yen shops. 100 yen shops are amazing and generally have anything you could want from cookware to school supplies. Since space in Tokyo is pretty limited, I have to get creative with storage and organizing. In my ‘kitchen’ I have one burner with a very small space (counter?) between the sink.