"I'll just head on over to the Meito City Ward and take care of our registration cards."
If you ever find yourself saying anything remotely similar to this, you need to stop yourself. You are about to make a mistake that your spouse will hold over your head for years.
Amy looked at me with the world-weary expression of someone who has heard many stupid things in her life and is assessing whether this might be the stupidest. "What did you say?"
"Registration cards. I'll just head over and get them stamped. Maybe they can tell me how to sort our trash."
You see, in my mind, I was about to head over to a small city office that had two windows and a bored clerk who would be happy to spend fifteen minutes explaining not only how to get our registration forms approved but how to sort our trash into the eight different piles required by the city. In my fantasy, the clerk had a good command of English. My plan was to 1) establish rapport, 2) use my well practiced but limited Japanese (Konnichiwa!), and 3) sign a form and perhaps receive a welcome package consisting of a small chocolate in the shape of a rabbit (it is the Year of the Rabbit after all).
But Nagoya is not Lewiston. Nagoya is a city of three million. So the small city office is not small.
As you might be able to tell from the picture, there are more than two windows and the only thing that remotely resembles English are numbers. Also, in case you can't tell, none of the clerks look remotely interested in practicing their English or bantering with a forensic psychologist. However, I've discovered that the benefit of looking desperate and hapless is that someone will eventually wander over and ask if you are in the right place. And by place, I'm thinking she meant country. The woman had a badge that we ultimately deduced meant 'information' or 'help for the stupid.' She produced a required form that was completely in Japanese and, correctly assessing our looks of terror, she then brought an instructional guide in English. After a painstaking process of learning how to spell our name in Katakana (one of the three alphabets) she shepherded us to window number four. There another very nice woman managed to correct all of the mistakes we made on the form and provided us with a card. Our number was 148. The problem, and it seemed profound at the time, is that the numbers were read aloud over the loudspeaker in Japanese. We were therefore trying to listen for 'hyakuyonjuuhachi,' which only sounds like 148 if you are slurring your words because you've had most of a bottle of Sake. Which in retrospect would have made the entire experience more enjoyable and equally efficient. But we were in luck! Word had spread throughout the Meito City Ward workforce that there were two clueless Gaijin camped out in the waiting area and these Gaijin did not seem likely to leave on their own account.
The steely eyed determination of someone who wants to learn how to sort trash.
So after twenty minutes of arguing about whether they called 148 or 209 over the loudspeakers, we were interrupted by a reluctant employee who beckoned us over to window 3, where we either agreed to pay something for healthcare insurance or authorized the sale of a kidney.
Then we were asked to go to the last window. Window 2. Although we didn't know it at the time, it was the dreaded Pension Window. You see, in Japan, you must pay into the National Pension System even if you are a temporarily unemployed forensic psychologist. By now, it was about 5:10 pm and they were turning the lights off as we stood at the window. But we were too close to our goal to take a hint. We were greeted by a surly man who looked exasperated when I kept repeating konnichiwa to all of his questions and then decided that his best course of action in dealing with two clueless Gaijin was to repeat the same Japanese phrase over and over again while jabbing his finger on different parts of an orange form on which there was not one word of English. By this point, however, I have to admit that I was distracted. I was wondering whether we could legally leave the building without filing the pension paperwork, whether anyone would try to stop us, and whether I could vault over the last row of seats. But the chair backs looked pretty high and the 'Information' lady looked like she worked out, so I stuck it out.
There was a happyish ending to this story. After ten minutes of jabbing and konnichiwas, an incredibly nice man emerged from the nether regions of the office and explained (in English) that we might be able to receive a pension exemption but that we needed to do this in a different office. Although I recognized this might be a desperate gambit to get us out of the office, I was grateful for the out. The nice man repeatedly apologized for his near flawless English. Amy laughed and said 'your English is much better than my terrible Japanese' - but she tried to say this in Japanese and ended up saying something roughly like 'your poodle is eating our trash.' Which is a pretty rude thing to say while laughing.
The nice man smiled and said he was going to destroy the paperwork that we painstakingly completed earlier. He gave it to the other guy who ripped it into more pieces than seemed truly necessary.
