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.

Despite that, it was very rare for me to speak in Japanese to anyone except my teacher or my students. Speaking Japanese with my teacher was natural. I didn’t speak much in Japanese with my students, but whenever I could illustrate a new concept or grammatical structure to one in their own language, I did. My students were paying for lessons in English, but I couldn’t really expect them to pick it up entirely by inference; it seemed only natural to communicate as effectively as possible when introducing a new idea.

With everyone else, though, it was rare for me to use the language. Probably the single biggest reason for that was embarrassment. The ability to express myself clearly and concisely is important to me; when my only option is to speak poorly, I would rather not speak at all. The only surprising thing was the extent to which that was possible.

Every Japanese person spends a minimum of six years learning English in school. The degree to which this study actually helps varies widely–it is far too common for them to simply memorize huge lists of vocabulary and phrases without any instruction of how to actually use the language to communicate–but it does mean that almost everyone in Japan has a certain baseline ability to understand simple sentences. Combining those with exaggerated hand motions and facial expressions gave me a means to communicate which covered pretty much everything that really needed to be said.

Sometimes I needed to express complex ideas; for that, I had to be inventive. I established my bank account by printing out pictures of the necessary forms that I found online. I shipped a package to America, from a convenience store, using stick figures and hasty sketches of what I wanted. People were very willing to accommodate me in this; nobody in Japan really expects anyone who doesn’t look Japanese to be able to speak the language.

Despite the fact that I shied away from speaking Japanese to most people, I made real efforts to understand what they were saying. It became second nature to attempt to think in Japanese as much as possible, and use English only when I didn’t have the vocabulary or grammar to express myself otherwise. The results of that attempt were rarely correct in a formal sense, but it felt like there was some good in constantly trying. If nothing else, it kept me thinking about the language, and it was more entertaining than studying properly.

Having a background in programming turned out to be a mixed blessing. Programmers by necessity have to have a certain facility with languages; a well-rounded programmer has at least two or three programming languages they’re comfortable with, plus maybe half a dozen technologies which aren’t properly programming languages but act kind of like them. The fact that Japanese is an immensely regular, well-structured language felt very good to me, as that is a trait shared by programming languages. It let me focus on really grokking the grammar and memorizing the vocabulary instead of having to worry all the time about exceptions and irregularities which plague European languages.

However, the single universal characteristic of computer languages is that they are all designed to be understandable to computers. Spelling and grammar aren’t refinements, they’re essential elements which must be used perfectly. The best possible result of a spelling or grammar error in a program is that the code won’t compile, and you have to go back and fix things to get your code to run at all. The worst result is that everything seems to work fine, but you’ve actually introduced a weird and difficult to debug error into your code which will come back to bite you months down the line. Programmers consequently get kind of fanatical about grammar, as it always requires less effort to express an idea properly the first time instead of having to go back and fix things later.

The most natural way for me to construct a valid grammatical construct, whether a sentence or a block of code, starts with semi-verbal intent. I then arrange the components I’ve assembled according to the appropriate grammar; if there is any doubt in my mind that I have done this in a valid manner, I look to online references to ensure that I have. This is efficient when programming, and I’ve completely internalized the rules of English, but it makes for a cumbersome process when attempting to express myself in Japanese.

Could I have worked to break that habit and simply speak uninhibitedly? I probably could have, but when programming, it’s actually a habit I want to maintain. It was far too easy to just accept that for me, grammatical perfection is mandatory, and therefore construct elaborate workarounds so that I could communicate in realtime without having to dive into a reference book every few seconds. Besides, there’s a certain amount of entertainment to be derived from using stick figures and handwaving to communicate; it was a contrarian impulse that required that whenever I couldn’t just blend in and act the way a Japanese person would, I’d at least be amusing at it. I think I generally succeeded; even though I couldn’t always know what the people who interacted with me were thinking, I was having fun.

Given that this has been the snag point for every bank I’ve tried so far, I gave up today and went out to have one made. Or rather, I went through the half-hour process of conveying to the clerk exactly what I wanted to order, and she placed the order. Next week, I get to go back and pick up my new Official Signature. It has the word グッドスピード written on it (note the new spelling; apparently this better represents the sound of my name). I could have had them just write my name in romaji, but even if I were sure that it would be accepted at the banks, I would have felt even more foolish than I do now at paying as much as I did for something I can just write down.

The most difficult part (aside from shelling out $85 for a rubber stamp): figuring out what they were saying while they were asking me what font I wanted.

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.

—
* I just love Orwellian doublespeak.

The past 7 days have been somewhat stressful. In the sense that I’m a camp counselor, and have to manage the 6 unruly kids in my cabin and bear ultimate responsibility for them, it’s been great; this is what I’m used to and (I think) good at. And that part’s over next week anyway. It’s more that last weekend,

• I banged up my left knee by slipping on wet tile while turning and for the past few days it hasn’t wanted to work properly,
• I got a speeding ticket, the second in a month (the second ever) which basically cleaned out my bank account,
• I was rearended on the highway and the damage to the car (which I was borrowing from my parents) was significant enough that we’re still trying to figure out whether it’s totalled, even though it’s perfectly drivable.

Add this to the sinking realization that my finances are in a pretty somber state because I’m suddenly paying for things like school and room and board which used to be covered by my scholarship. I’ve paid tuition for the next semester, but I still have to come up with quite a bit for the rest. My computer works now, kind of, but something about the setup makes the screen flicker uncomfortably now whenever a key is struck or a mouse event is registered. Next semester, I have to be on top of ROTC, academics, my IQP, the fraternity, loan applications, and getting and keeping a job all at once, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy.

I’ll pull through, I think, but I don’t really look forward to the next few months of my life.