Actually, there is a small difference: practically every image in this series is just begging to be re-captioned in photoshop.

I love the weapons that each person has chosen. The naked man has a brick. The ranking officer has his trusty riot shield. One of the on-call officers has an actual person catcher: a tool designed specifically for handling people who you don’t want to touch. The other has a flimsy plastic traffic control device; its normal function is to sit between two traffic cones to direct pedestrian traffic. He is not afraid to use it.

The full article is here.

Kind of the Shinto version of St. Expedite.

I like the Japanese language, of course; its grammar is simply better than that of any other human language I’ve ever encountered. I’m still not sure that I agree with the notion that kanji are inherently more efficient than spelling everything out, but the more I learn about them, the less I find them distasteful. Japanese is aesthetically pleasing in its structure, and an interesting challenge in its implementation. Even so, there’s no real need for me to study it; I have no need of it unless I return to Japan, and the most likely case in which I go back to Japan is the one in which I do so for the purpose of studying Japanese.

You’d think that the time I spent there would have been enough. I made some friends, proved to everyone concerned that I could support myself far from the safety of my family, got to soak in the experience of living in a foreign culture. I got to figure out that job satisfaction requires more than a generous salary for minimal work requirements. I even exceeded my own completely arbitrary minimal stay length by about 15%. All in all, it was a successful year-and-change abroad.

My current living conditions are closer to what I had when I lived there than any others I’ve had since my return. It is perhaps because of this that I most often find myself wishing I were back there. I live in a small, mostly rural town–but where Matsubushi was defined by its parks and paddies, Enterprise is defined by its giant strip-malls and chain stores. I live in a very humid, barely temperate climate–but where in Japan this led to refreshingly cool midnight bicycle rides, here I’m constrained by the knowledge that every day, I have to wake up again at 4 AM to get to work on time. During the bubble of non-training at least, I work almost as few hours as I did as a teacher while making more money, but it feels like my options for extracurricular exploration are far more limited here. This town exists because of Fort Rucker; it boasts large-scale generic commercialism, long roads of identical housing units, a few smaller stores supporting the local farmers, and little else. In Japan, I always felt like I could walk in any random direction and find something interesting, from a park to a shrine to an otherwise normal intersection done up in aesthetically pleasing tile patterns.

There are advantages to being in the US, of course. My apartment now is three times the size of the one I had in Japan, and includes amenities like a drying machine and a private toilet. I have a car here, and despite all my complaints about its cost of ownership, it’s still cheaper in every respect than its equivalent there would be. It is easy, unconscious, to socialize as much as I want with my coworkers here; there is no process of picking my way through the translation of both language and social norms.

The thing is, I think I would trade back those advantages to live in Japan again. It’d be difficult to go back to an apartment as cramped as I had last time, but the car and the easy socialization feel like incidental benefits that I could easily live without. The sense of being surrounded by fascinating things which make it worthwhile to get out and just explore seems a lot harder to replicate here in the US.

Perhaps I’m approaching this all from the wrong direction. I never really question myself for thinking that programming is an interesting and fun mental challenge, or that flying is a pretty awesome thing. I just accept that I can personally take those as self-evident facts even if they are not so to the general population. Maybe I should just accept in the same way that I’m fascinated by the prospect of returning to Japan any way I can, and that studying the language is rewarding in and of itself. There’s a nice sort of symmetry to it, if I can divide my interests into the Productive Hobbies of programming, flight, and Japanese, and the Personal Hobbies of books, video, and games.

The Holy Grail, then, is to find some sort of paying job which unifies the Productive Hobbies and leaves time for the Personal Hobbies. Such a thing, in this case, would be an odd job indeed; I can’t really imagine how it might plausibly exist. There exist jobs using various combinations, though, and those seem like interesting possibilities to investigate in the future.

I think I will take that approach. There’s the danger of sugarcoating my memories of my time there and rushing back to find a nation that would be quite happy without me, but I think it’s a risk I can take. In the worst case, I spend my interest in the place and language and end up with a much clearer picture of where I should take my future. In the best case, I love it again, and further my goal of living interestingly.

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some of those videos:

Crab Walker with clever leg placement mechanism:

Industrial robot arms fight a lightsaber duel:

Robot Waltz

0: How I Got there
1: Culture Shock
2: Exploration as Recreation
3: A Cross-Country Drive
4: Combini and Vending Machines
5: Bicycling and Injury
6: Shopping Blind
7: The Elusive Asian Girlfriend
8: Nonverbal Communication
9: So You Want to be an Expatriate
10: All Good Things

Note that for nearly every picture included, if you right-click it and then click “View Image” in the popup menu, you will then see a significantly larger version of that image. I eventually intend to implement the proper measures so that you can click directly through–livejournal prevented that, but now that I’m self-hosting this, I now have the means to do so–but it’s a back burner thing.

[edit 20080717]

I have not only gone through and fixed all the images, this post is now its own page.

Around the end of January, seven months into my stay, I started thinking seriously about whether or not I should renew the contract. I wasn’t worried at all about whether corporate would decide to retain me; both the area head teacher and the parents who came in during open-house week had given me very positive reviews. I couldn’t complain about the compensation; I was paid a full time salary for less than 20 hours of work weekly, and it was enough that I was saving about a third of it in an average month. I got along well enough with my coworkers, liked my students, and loved living in Japan.

The only real problem was my job itself: teaching. I dated a woman for a year and a half who was training to be a teacher, but that was as close as I ever got to formal qualifications for the job. Over the course of my stay in Japan, I learned enough to perform adequately, but the the job just wasn’t fun. I don’t know if, with the proper training, I could have been a dynamic teacher investing a lot into creating unique lesson plans and working to truly develop my students; I do know that without that training, I was just teaching straight from the book and desperately inventing tactics on the fly to try to keep the students engaged. Despite the feedback from the parents and the area teacher, I felt underqualified; despite the assurances of my coworkers and my adult students that I was doing well, I couldn’t help but notice that every few months a student would leave, and it took a lot longer for new students to enroll. A decline in the customer base, no matter how gradual, is a bad thing for any business. It was hard to escape the conclusion that, as the only actual teacher in that school, I had something to do with that decline.

Once the time came to notify corporate, I had decided not to stay at that job another year. I would attempt to stay in Japan if possible–there aren’t very many options for people of limited Japanese ability there which aren’t teaching English–and I would also look into other options in the US. On 15 April, I sent an email to the Army on a whim asking if they had any options for a direct path to flying helicopters. Flying helicopters sounded like it might be cool; I actually expected them to say that no, I could enlist in the hopes of earning flight but there could be no guarantees. I was startled and pleased when, two days later, they told me that I could get a guaranteed pilot slot if I was willing to become a Warrant Officer.

Exactly one week after I sent that email, my immediate boss died. A month after that, I was informed that his heir was going to shut down the business at the end of July. Technically, my contract expired a month earlier, but I wasn’t going to stick the bereaved with the responsibility of finding a replacement teacher for a single month. All of a sudden, there was a definite end point in sight. I found myself scheduling a return flight, and making decisions as to how to dispose of my stuff. My experience moving to Japan taught me that the less I tried to bring back, the happier I would be. I ended up selling my bicycle to a tiny Japanese woman who could barely reach the pedals; one of my adult students volunteered to interpret at a pawn shop so I could sell those miscellaneous things I didn’t think worth the price of shipping home.

In the meantime, the only fruitful job leads were to be English-speaking tech support in Japan, or to go with the Army to fly. There was no question about which was the better deal; while I wanted to remain in Japan, it wasn’t a higher priority than the opportunity to become a pilot. The decision to leave, when it came, hardly felt like a decision at all. It was just the natural course of things; I follow interesting opportunities the way water follows the lowest path. I had about as much choice as the water does.

People react to endings in various ways. When my students found out that the business was closing, some of them quit immediately. Some, including all of the adults, decided to stick it out through the end. Some stayed exactly long enough to determine which other English school in the area they preferred, at which point they transferred without any duplication of service. For my own part, it was an intensely bittersweet feeling to realize that there would be nobody to train up as a replacement; that shortly after I left, there would be nothing left of the business but memories. Despite my lack of training, I was doing my best to teach well and improve the school in whatever ways I could think of; all of that effort, in the end, turned out not to mean very much at all.

With one chapter of my life closing, I turned almost instinctually to the next one. I counted down the days and hours to various final events in Japan. Even as I said any number of fond goodbyes, I was already thinking of the upcoming hellos. I’m not a real fan of the emotion of loss; perhaps that’s why I concentrated so very hard at that time on looking forward to upcoming adventures.

As it turns out, moving internationally is a lot easier the second time, despite all the TSA’s efforts to ensure that every year flying is more annoying than it was the year before. I shipped the majority of my luggage to the airport in advance, I took some final photos of the area where I lived, and I cleaned the place. The morning of my departure was beautiful: sunny, cool, scattered clouds. Somehow, 16 months after the fact, I can’t remember the bus ride, or the trains, or the flight. All I remember is locking up my apartment for the last time, checking carefully to ensure I hadn’t left anything behind. I adjusted my backpack, and then I moved out.

Assuming that you’ve got all four of those things, you can find yourself in Japan within weeks of deciding to go. You’re probably expecting certain differences from life elsewhere in the world–if you’re like me, odd surprises are one of the reasons you’re moving there–and if you’ve done your research you’re not going to run into any really difficult surprises. However, some aspects of life caught me by surprise; they aren’t well-documented in the guidebooks because they’re the sort of thing that few tourists will encounter.

There exist small concrete cul-de-sacs scattered through the local neighborhoods; these are trash collection points. In the interest of civic beauty, it is discouraged to put trash into these before sundown. Tax-supported garbagemen remove trash from these most mornings around sunrise; each day is for a particular type of trash. There is a day for burnable trash, and a day for non-burnable. There is a day for plastic recyclables, a day for metal recyclables, and a day for paper recyclables. Twice a month there is a day for trash containing toxic components, like most consumer electronics; once a month there is a day for large trash, meaning anything larger than a trash bag of maybe 15 gallons of capacity. Any trash of the wrong type on a given day is left there by the garbagemen, in the expectation that you will reclaim it and put it back on the correct day.

I suspect that the complexity of the garbage system is the reason that there are almost no public trash bins anywhere in Japan. Depending on where you are, there may or may not be a three-in-one sorted trash can on the platform of a train station, but elsewhere they just don’t exist. There may or may not be a can-recycle-bin at a vending-machine cluster, but if you buy a snack of any sort, expect to carry all the packaging home with you.

No matter what you buy in Japan, there will be packaging. Typical canned drinks come in steel cans which easily supported my weight; an American trying to crush one against his forehead would likely knock himself out. A boxed curry dinner from a convenience store will have the plastic container to eat it out of, an internal plastic strip to separate the curry from the rice before eating, and another plastic strip to separate the garnish. This entire thing is lidded and shrinkwrapped, and before you take it home the clerk will double-bag it. Even fruit in the grocery store have individual anti-bruising styrofoam pads wrapped around them.

When you purchase your items, the only plastic involved is in the packaging, as you will almost certainly be paying with paper money. Japan’s economy is heavily cash-based; outside the big cities, it’s rare to find a merchant who accepts credit cards. Those who do typically push the credit-card processing fee directly to the consumer. I am told that checks do exist in the Japanese banking system, but I never saw one. When I needed to pay a bill, I would take the bar-coded bill and the appropriate amount of money to a convenience store, where they would process the bill. When I was paid each month, it was with an envelope full of cash, which I then took to the post office to deposit in my account.

The post office runs the largest bank in Japan. My entire life in America, access to my bank account was mediated through a mag-striped plastic card. Not so in Japan! There, you’re given a paper book. To process a transaction at an ATM, you insert the entire book, opened to the current page. As you insert or withdraw cash, the machine prints out the transactions as they are processed; the means by which you access your money is also the statement of transactions. It’s a pretty clever system; I just wish there had been some sort of PIN required so that I might have had some protection had I ever lost that book.

It actually took me a few months before I ever established a bank account in Japan, though. This was partly because at first I didn’t really have enough cash on hand for it to matter, but also because it took a while for me to procure a means by which to authenticate myself. This went beyond having my passport handy; I also had to finalize my working visa. Once that was finished, only days before the 90-day tourist visa would have expired, I had to set about acquiring an inkan.

Handwritten signatures as a measure of personal authentication never took off in Japan. Instead, they use personal seals, or inkan. Foreigners can sometimes get away without them–I was permitted to sign for receipt of packages from the shipping company before I had mine–but for official and governmental documents, they are the only allowable means to document personal authentication. In other words, they’re necessary before you can get a bank account, before you can enter any sort of contract; I know they’re necessary for people to get married, and I suspect they’re required to acquire a lease. Fortunately, they’re not that difficult to acquire; all it took was a trip to the local photography shop, an order form, and a bit less than a hundred dollars, and two weeks later mine had come in.

Why do you go to the photography shop to get an inkan? I have no idea. Finding odd instances of misaligned expectations is the rule there instead of the exception. For some things, like this one, there’s no recourse to sort things out except to ask someone where on earth you get your seal made. Other things kind of fall into place in bits and pieces. Some things feel extremely natural: there was a small dry cleaner’s down the road from me, which cleaned and pressed all my work clothes for about $20 a week. The shopkeeper was one of the few people I met in Japan who seemed to have no comprehension English whatsoever, but the ritual was so familiar to both of us that it proceeded smoothly anyway: I would come in each Friday with that week’s used clothes, she would hand me the previous week’s clothing and ring it up, and I would pay and leave.

There’s no way I could run down all the little miscellaneous oddities that I encountered while I stayed there; I doubt I even remember the majority at this point. What I can say is that they made living there a wonderful experience. I liked Japan not only for the individual differences, but for the sheer fact that there were so many of them. Daily life was a matter of exploration, discovery, and adaptation. I suppose that with sufficient time in the country, that may have eventually ceased to be the case, but as things stand, that constant pressure to learn and evolve was exactly what I wanted and one of the reasons I look back at Japan with such fondness.