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.

This has had all sorts of effects on Japanese culture, one of which is the fact that the woman of the family is expected to go shopping for food every day to prepare that day’s meal. This eliminates the need for a pantry or for a refrigerator larger than the one an average American might keep in their college dorm room. Though this means that food thus prepared is often wonderfully fresh, particularly as freshness of product becomes an evolutionary pressure in the stores themselves, it didn’t work well for me. It’s not just that I can make from scratch exactly one of each of the major meals (I can make omelettes, deli-style sandwiches, and steak tips with vegetables); my habit has always been to head over to a megastore and stock up on staples once a month. Thusly provisioned, I can spend my time doing things more important than worrying about what I eat.

Luckily for me, I could pretty much do away with the problem of cooking by going to the convenience store and buying a bento. Convenience stores in Japan are wonderful: they’re open 24/7, and they cram every imaginable service into a store the size of a US master bedroom. The fact that they’re open 24 hours is very odd for Japan, as no other type of business stays open then. Even the ATM machines shut down for nights and weekends. Add in the fact that they really are convenient, and combinis become almost magical. Want a hot, fresh meal? That runs about 4 dollars. Pay your bills? Ship a package? They can do that there. You can rent videos there, or stand by the magazine rack and just read. As winter approaches, they carry necessities like knit gloves and hats. If a sunny day suddenly turns to rain, the combini all suddenly have racks of umbrellas for sale. I have no idea how they achieve this level of efficiency, but it beats anything I’d ever seen in the US.

I probably ate more than three quarters of my meals directly from the convenience stores in my area. I had about an average concentration of them around me, meaning that one was 150 meters away from my front door, and there were two others available if I was willing to go as far as 500m. As common as they are, though, Japanese convenience stores don’t even approach vending machines in terms of ubiquity. If there is not a vending machine on every street corner, it is only because of the high local density of streets. There were three immediately adjacent to my house, and dozens in easy walking distance. You can buy anything from Japanese vending machines. Hot-coffee and cold soda machines are the most common ones, but there I saw vending machines which dispensed soup, beer, cigarettes, snacks, batteries, film–if a person were stranded in Japan and prohibited from ever entering a store of any sort, they could probably survive just fine on items from vending machines.

As nice as it was to live that way, I don’t think that I’ll have that kind of lifestyle again unless I return to Japan. I just don’t think that a Japanese-style convenience store and a Walmart can coexist in the same market; one or the other will inevitably be driven under. Does a society look more to price, or to value? Do people prefer that a store stock what’s necessary, updated rapidly, or do they want it to carry everything all the time? Are the employees paid minimum wage, or are they paid enough to be nice? These are all decisions made at a societal level, and I’m not positive it’s possible to make the choices which lead to Japanese style convenience stores without implying a whole lot of other choices which lead to, say, cooperation being a major graded subject in school.

I’m hoping to get pictures up fairly soon of this place; it’s essentially a small studio apartment. It occupied half of the first floor of the building that the language school is in; the school itself is in the second floor. The other half of the first floor is apparantly the headquarters of a shoe wholesaler; it’s got a separate entrance, and I was just told to generally stay away from the place. There are a few distinctly Japanese quirks, like the 4-tatami area on which my futon rests, but it’s pretty normal otherwise.

The thing about staying here is that the general foreign-ness of the place seems to diminish with time, as you begin to pick up the hints and clues that allow you to function normally. Some kanji become familiar just because of repeated exposure: 入 (entrance), 出 (exit), 大 (big), 小 (small), and so forth.

One thing which remains odd in my mind is that you almost never get discounts here for buying in bulk. It’s not uncommon to pay exactly the same unit price for a can of soda from a vending machine and a bottle 5 times the size from a grocery store. The Japanese way of dealing with this is simple: instead of buying from grocery stores and storing a pantry, they’ll just buy whatever they need for the day’s cooking that day, often from a convenience store. Such stores actually are convenient, because they’re everywhere, and you don’t face the absurd markup that you often see in the US for said convenience.

Actually, convenience stores are used for more than just food. They’re where you go to find an ATM, or even to pay your bills. This bill-paying aspect comes from the fact that Japan is a cash country; credit cards are rarely supported, and debit cards and checks just don’t exist here. Large scale money exchanges are usually accomplished by direct bank transfers. However, banks offer extremely restrictive hours. Therefore, convenience stores offer a reputable place where you can pay your bills 24 hours per day; they’ve got a network set up such that bills have bar codes; you can go to nearly any store chain and they’ll just scan the bill, take your money, and forward it automatically.

Unfortunately for me, this requires some adaptation on my part. The designers of the apartment didn’t include any place to put even moderate quantities of food in reserve, so if I want to make anything, I need to buy all the ingredients that day. Making extra and saving it is improbable, because the only fridge I have here is smaller than the mini-fridge I kept in my dorm room.

I don’t want to seem like I dislike it here; I’m still really excited about everything that’s going on. At the same time, I think I’m ready to start working on developing my daily routine here and settling in, instead of living every day as an adventure. Adventures will probably find me, especially while I’m still learning where everything is, but those can’t be avoided. I was lost for two hours today after taking the wrong path out of an intersection, but I came out of that with detailed knowledge of the area in which I wandered. I managed to find my way back without retracing my route and without asking anybody for directions, which certainly helped me feel less bad about the fact that I was very lost.

Next time I go exploring, though, I intend to do so on my bicycle. If nothing else, I’ll be moving faster while lost, instead of wasting time walking from place to place.

The minus side is that I checked my bank account at an ATM and discovered that I seem to be exceedingly poor, and several hundred dollars shorter than I thought I would be.

The doubleplusminus* side is that when I went to check my bank statement online, after one login attempt it gave me the error “Too many login attempts for this account. Please contact your Credit Union.” I know for a fact that I haven’t accessed this account online for many, many months.

And my email seems to be broken at the server level.

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* I just love Orwellian doublespeak.