I might still be driving the Saturn, but the Army wouldn’t ship it to Korea. The standard tour here is only a year; they don’t figure it’s worth shipping cars for such a short time. I extended my tour almost immediately on arrival, and gained eligibility to have a car shipped, but it was sold by then.

I almost bought a cheap ancient hoopty, as is traditional for army folks in Korea. For $500, you can get a car good enough to last you your year or two–probably. One of my friends here literally had one of his wheels fall off as he was driving down the highway last week. He was fine. The car was totaled. I was lucky, though: before I went with the hoopty, I happened to see a nice-looking sports car with a For Sale sign in the window. The price was right, and I ended up owning a 1992 Dodge Stealth.

It’s been a good car for Korea, quick and agile enough to blow through traffic while being cheap enough that I wouldn’t be devastated if it got wrecked somehow. Still, when I PCS out of here, I’m going to sell it off and upgrade. I’ve never owned a new car, but I’ve got enough in the bank to plausibly buy one outright. (I’m not particularly interested in buying the biggest car I could afford the loan of; it’d be a bad value proposition and also far too easy to drive beyond my abilities and wreck it.) It’s become a question, now, of what I want to buy, and (after much research) there are three major contenders.

The first option is a Mazda Miata, in its highest trim level, with the convertible hardtop. After throwing in all the options, it’s both the cheapest car I’m looking at and the most luxurious. The issue is power: it only runs a 4-cylinder engine displacing 2 liters, and statistically it’s just not in the same class as the others. Still, every review talks about its wonderful handling and the pure exhilaration of driving it; it also gets many bonus points for being a hardtop convertible. It’s the current leader in my mind for what to buy.

Alternately, I could go for a Nissan 370Z. Its ancestor, the 350Z, was the first car I ever looked at and thought “I really wish I owned that thing.” It’s pure beauty, power, and good reviews. The convertible version is reviewed even better, but costs more than I want to spend. Even as a coupe, it’s a car that looks fast standing still. Of course, the speed isn’t just in its looks; it goes quite nicely. The only real issue is the price: it’s the most expensive of the three. If my budget were 25% higher, there’s no question: I’d get this car as a convertible. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The last option is to go pure musclecar and buy a Ford Mustang GT. Here, the convertible version got markedly worse reviews than the coupe, so that’s not really an option. On the other hand, this is by a large margin the most powerful (and heaviest) of the cars I’m looking at. I honestly do not know how atavistic the thrill is of laying down twin rubber streaks on takeoff, and how it balances against the budget for tires; it’s one of the things I want to find out in a test drive. This car really has only two niggling and strange cons. The first is simple: I’d prefer a convertible. The second is that, of these three cars, this is the only one that actually makes me worry about driving within the car’s capabilities but not within mine and killing myself by accident.

If I worry about pushing too hard in the high end and dying, why bother with a sports car at all? It’s simple: they are fun. They are adrenaline in a shiny metal body; sexiness on wheels. They are enablers of joy: there is simply nothing like darting through medium-light traffic at twice its average speed, planning your movements three lane-changes ahead. There is much about driving in Korea that I’ll gladly forget the moment I leave, but I suspect that the sensation of freedom when the traffic finally opens up and the next obstacle is a speed camera 5 miles ahead is one I’ll treasure for a long time. I would never have experienced that in a hoopty; my ancient, base-model sports car is the only reason I have had that feeling. I can’t help but look forward to knowing what it will be like in a car that is modern and even more capable than what I have now.

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.

Big silverback
Having a snack
Out in the woods
Where life is good

What was that shout?          King
Go check it out               Kong
Offered Faye Wray             King
Take her to play              Kong

Through forest racing, puny men chasing,
Leap from a bank, shot with a trank.

Wake on a stage               King
Feeling enraged               Kong
Bound up in chains            King
Cranky with pain              Kong

Spot lady Faye                King
Did she betray?               Kong
Paparazzi                     King
Having a spree                Kong

Oh! flashbulbs blinding, smashing your bindings,
Scoop up the lady, up Empire State.

Many, many, many biplanes
Many, many, many biplanes

Peppered with lead            King
Feeling the dread             Kong
Losing your grip              King
Starting to slip              Kong

Tumble through air            King
Into Times Square             Kong
Blonde lady cryin'            King
Big chalk outline             King

Konnnnnnnng.

I hope one day to have the same sort of inspirations.

I promise that once the server is online (I disclaim responsibility for the fact that it currently isn’t, as it’s now in the hands of the ISP) I’ll upload everything and there will be total access to every picture I’ve yet taken, and all sorts of cool browsing-by-tag stuff. Until then, though, I’m stuck using flickr.

If this goes on much longer, I’m probably just going to do the normal thing and rent a server from a company whose job it is to make all the annoying parts of server maintenance go away. Anyone know of a reputable host which won’t break the bank? Minimally, I need one with MySQL and PHP support, though I’d prefer that they use a database which fully supports the SQL standard, and Python. Also, I would need them to be able to provide primary and secondary DNS.

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.

I finally got around to checking the blue book value: $1760. Oops.

It’s a 1993 Eagle Vision ESI, 119300 miles, good condition (as established by the blue book website’s condition quiz), and has the following features:
AC
Power Steering
Power Windows
Power Locks
Tilt Wheel
Cruise Control
AM/FM Stereo with Csasette
Dueal Front Air Bags
4 Wheel ABS
Power Seat

So far, I’ve only had one real nibble. However, this fell through, when she discovered that she didn’t actually have that much money in the bank right now. So, anyone interested in buying a car for $1500? It’s $260 of pure savings beyond the blue book value!

The thing is, the parts I listed are the small print. The bold text just rails on the imf and world bank for being elitist, undemocratic, promoting environmental destruction, benefittign the wealthy at the expense of the poor…

I could argue each point. I could explain why everything listed here is a good thing. If you really want me to, toss me an email; I’ll put up another post.

But it just makes me angry that people organize these things, with the sole purpose of gathering an angry mobtude…

well, i was interrupted and never got to write the rest of this. so i’ll just post it incomplete and write a new one talking about what’s going on now.