The Old Apartment

This all happened two weeks ago.  I am woefully behind on the blog.  Even if I omit all of the really boring things that happened (which represents about 98% of my experience), there's a lot to cover. 

Finally in our Nagoya hotel room, Lily fell into the fetal position both from fatigue and despair at the lack of good programming on the hotel television.  She curled up tighter when I suggested it was "nothing that watching a good sumo match can't solve."  

Parenthetically, this was before she discovered Gilmore Girls on Netflix.  Now she only curls into the fetal position when we cut her off before she finds out who Rory is going to date.

Amy and I went to the lounge, where we both assumed the adult version of the fetal position.

Nagoya from 24 floors up.  

Breakfast at the hotel.  At this point, both teens were secretly wondering whether they might be able to live at the hotel or possibly be adopted by the Hilton family.  From their perspective, the only downside was being in the same room as their father.  But perhaps he might get his own room or pay for our stay by working in the kitchen (or both).  

That afternoon, we took the metro from Sakae to Hongo Station, which was a few blocks from our new apartment.  

I feel compelled to note that it is impossible to rent an apartment in Japan as a foreigner.  Not virtually impossible, but plain impossible.  As some of you know, I spent most of the summer hyperventilating every time I searched online for a place to live.  There was nothing.  My search terms were comprehensive and ranged from 'furnished apartments rent Japan' to 'warehouse space desperate foreigners."  Our success in renting an apartment was completely dependent on the kindness of a friend.

We later learned that Japanese landlords are reluctant to rent to foreigners because they are convinced we cannot understand the trash sort system.  As someone who has lived here for 3 weeks, I can tell you that is absolutely correct.  The first week, we had piles of trash stacked in the apartment while we debated what exactly went in the blue bag versus the red bag.  It got dark pretty fast.  

Although we did find this helpful guide online, we honestly just run downstairs every day and see what other people have stacked in the dumpster area.

Shots of the interior.  We weren't hoping to take 'spartan' to the next level.  Our rental furniture had not yet arrived.

Lily demonstrating an advanced modern dance move known as the shindig.

Lily's attempt to break into the little known but ultra competitive Genkan modeling.  

This is our tatami room.  As a quick wikipedia search will tell you, tatami rooms are traditional Japanese rooms that are designed to serve as spaces of peace and meditation.  Years ago, they were a sign of nobility.

Those days have clearly passed.

Lily had other ideas.  Her first plan was to use the space as a "flop room" (not to be confused with flop house) in which we could randomly walk in and flop on the floor.  She claimed that flopping filled her with a sense of peace and gravitas.

Her second idea was far more ominous.

Upon seeing this sign on the door, I should have immediately recognized that I had no place in that room.  But, a remote, primitive and immensely powerful part of my brain has long refused to acknowledge that I am older than twenty four.  That part of my brain continues to insist that I can do anything younger people can do, including walking at 4 mph and getting out of bed in the morning.

So I agreed to do the workouts with Lily (you should be grateful that there is no visual record of that experience because it involved a lot of sweating and grunting and complaining).  She brought up an "easy" workout on youtube and it is here that I will offer some very useful advice to my elderly readers.

If the yoga instructor a) looks nineteen, b) can touch her toes, c) behind her back, and d) while speaking in a calm voice, you should immediately end the video.  Don't be seduced by the "easy" label on the video.  That is a lie.  You can tell by the suggested video links to the side, which will include EMS Rescues and Pain Management Without Opioids, and Pain Management with Extra Opioids.

What I now realize I needed is someone who understands both me and my body.  In the future, any and all ab workouts must be led by a fifty-something, "stout" individual who intersperses an occasional crunch with several sips from a craft IPA.  You know, a routine I can do without injury and which simultaneously works abs and biceps.

If I can't find that online, I'm starting a yoga vlog.

In closing, I should mention that Lily crushed the ab workout.  I didn't end up in traction, but I had to find creative ways to avoid using my abs for a few days.

From Tokyo to Nagoya on the Shinkansen

Our last full day in Tokyo was spent downtown because Amy had a meeting at Fulbright.  This meant that I was in charge of the kids, which broke two cardinal rules of parenting; first, never be in charge and, second, if you find yourself in charge, never allow yourself to be outnumbered.  Luckily, Lily was too tired to move anything other than her eyes, so she decided to spend the two hours reading in a corner while Amy's Fulbright contact told her what to do in the event of a tsunami.  So that left me with Tessa, who immediately asserted that she "needed Starbucks."  This proved to be an unforced error as a parent, as giving Tessa caffeine is like giving Adderall to a Jack Russell Terrier.  I was able to bring her down through a sustained and severe embarrassment caused by my existence.  

Then we went off to explore the city.

A few steps from Starbucks we found the stairs to a shrine.

I have no pictures of the shrine itself, as it is apparently embarrassing to take photos in public.  Unless they are selfies of 13 year olds or pictures of "really hawt guys."  My selfies do not fall into either category.

Tessa and I also skirted the parliament building, which is surround by ten foot barbed wire fences and signs ordering you not to take pictures of the parliament building.  After an exhausting march around parliament that was no doubt surveilled by very bored Japanese special ops, we reunited with Amy and Lily.  We experienced abject failure in finding a restaurant that served vegetarian food, so we returned to Daiba and ate snacks from 7 Eleven.  We then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening exploring a flea market in a mall.

The next day we left for Nagoya!

Bullet train.  The name says it all.  But instead of five assassins, it's four Douglasses.

Buying tickets for the Shinkansen very nearly exceeded our resourcefulness and completely exceeded our language skills.  Yet we were finally able to purchase tickets through a creative combination of repeating English words over and over again and full body pantomime.  Then we rushed to the platform to see our train waiting.

It was there that we had our first international incident, when we had to politely confront two passengers who were sitting in our seats (9-D and 9-C).  Amy assumed her firm tone that she uses with Murphy when he's wedged his bulk into the nether regions of the dishwasher.  She prominently displaying her ticket, which clearly showed that she had seat 9-D, and said 'our seats.'  Or something.  I wasn't really listening, as I was developing an exit strategy in case things got rough.  There was a confusing moment of cultural miscommunication during which the passengers spoke rapidly and repeatedly pointed to the time on the ticket (10:09).  I was like yeah, 10:09 people.  We got places to be.  

The core problem is that we were on the 9:59 train.  Now I'm sure all of you know that this would never have been a problem in America, where trains do not run every ten minutes.  That would be insane.  Luckily, I had been waiting to unleash a torrent of sumimasens (I'm sorry).  A couple of those with an arigato thrown in and we were  back on the platform waiting for the 10:09 train with crisis averted.  As we boarded our train, part of me really wanted someone else to be in our seats.  But it turned out that everyone else knew how to tell time.

Wait, I'm sitting next to dad??

We were able to see Mt. Fuji for about fifteen seconds as the bullet train bulleted by.

Then, suddenly, we were in our new home city.  Nagoya.  

This is Tessa stomping to the hotel.  I can't remember why.  It probably had something to do with me existing.

Signage Part 3

As long as I can remember, my father has been fascinated with signs.  Throughout my childhood (and adulthood), our walks and deep meaningful conversations were frequently and abruptly truncated by a familiar pattern; he would stop, whip out a camera and take a picture of a 'help wanted' sign.  To be fair, some of those help wanted signs were pretty unique.  One time in the UK, we saw an advert for "Bar seeks waitress.  Only the well endowed need apply."  Not necessarily what you'd see in the states.  But still.  I was pretty sure I was saying something important.

In any event, I thought he'd appreciate some of the signs we've been seeing.

 

Okay, I know this is not so much a sign as a really angry foodstuff.  But it left me wondering ... did they do any focus groups on this?  You know, compare this psychopath red dino who seems to be saying 'eat me or else' to a happy blue dino saying 'I taste good and I'm smooth going down.'

Come on people.  Mind out of the gutter.

This fish is either a) the road's mascot, b) a way to make you pay attention to the fact that there are earthquakes so major that they close the emergency roads, c) one possible cause of a major earthquake (massive falling fish) or d) an advertisement for a nearby sushi restaurant that remains open during natural disasters.  

Emergency road closed due to earthquake?  Come on down to Bob's Sushi.  

So far, the signs have been pretty threatening.  Welcome to Tokyo.  Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Angry Red Dinosaurs.

I don't know what they have against dogs, because what harm could a little pasturing do?

I would not have considered golf an inherently dangerous activity, unless we are talking about the new hybrid sport, MMA golf.  It's true that the crowd went wild when Mickelson made Woods tap out on an arm bar, but that's definitely not something you want to see in this area.

Sometimes, I think they have some extra space on the sign and so throw in a pretty unlikely prohibition.  Midnight windsurfing?  Maybe it's a thing.

Subway advertisement for feline specialized clothing.  I know, I know.  Technically lions are Panthera and only distantly related to cats.  If you think specialized feline clothing isn't a thing, you haven't been to Japan.

This isn't a photoshopped pic or something I downloaded from the dark web or a wanted poster.  No, this is real.  Cat cafes.  A place where you can go to drink a cup of coffee and be scared shitless when a cat jumps on you out of nowhere.

There was a woman standing by the side of this sign with two cats stuffed into her kimono.  You can see her foot at the bottom right.  I wanted to take a picture but I thought it might be disrespectful and my eyes started itching.  For those allergic to cats, the cat cafe is the equivalent of a CIA black site.  Waterboarding?  Hah.  How about a kitten rub down?!

This box pretty much confirmed every QAnon conspiracy theory I repeated mindlessly when I got sucked into things I read on the internet.  Human Shape Snacks!  You know Soylent Green is made of people, right? 

You've gotta be thinking exactly the same thing I was thinking.  What words came before that?  Bona fide?  Authentic?

And what does it say that the human shape is the same as a can of Coke or a package of cigarettes?

"Come back soon!"
Sob.
It's like the universe saying we made a mistake.

Correction

My astute daughter Lily inadvertently called me funny when she said 'Daddy, how do you make funny things come out of thin air."  That's a win.

But that's not the correction.

Lily noted that there was a serious error in my Christmas letter.  I wrote that she was the sole professional author of the family.  I was wrong.  When I wasn't looking, it turns out that Amy published a few journal articles and chapters and "an edited book and a textbook.  Do you mind??"  Tessa is now working on a biography of Murphy.  So when that gets published, I'll get to be the sole something.

Plumbing the depths of plumbing in Japan

A few years ago, one of our friends muttered that we needed to include trigger warnings for some of the posts.  Apparently, he had been reading the blog during breakfast and happened upon my post on daggys.  His black coffee was suddenly no longer quite as appealing.  

Well, consider yourself warned.  Today we are going to tackle the issue of Japanese plumbing.

It is safe to say that the Japanese are literally decades if not centuries ahead of the US when it comes to the sophistication of toilet tech.  The toilets are a marvel.  First, the seats are contoured, comfortable, and heated - so it may not be uncommon in drafty apartments to find your spouse hunkered down on the lav as a way to keep warm.  I'm not saying that's happened.  I'm just ... not not saying it.

Second, the seats have an array of 'after-business' options best explained by the hieroglyphics below ...

There's the torpedo

or the tsunami

and the seats also allow for various levels of pressure.  You'll notice that this toilet was set to the lowest level, also known as "the American."

And finally, the all important stop button.

You could theoretically entertain yourself for quite a long time trying all the options.  If there were a mini fridge by the toilet, you would almost never have to leave.

I should parenthetically also note that if you are intending to take pictures of toilets in a foreign county for your blog, it is best to lock the door.

Over the course of our first few days in Tokyo, an odd thing happened in our hotel bathroom.  The three women in my life all experienced existential crises in deciding whether to "take the plunge" and hit torpedo or go full tsunami and I often heard them gathered in the bathroom debating about who should go first and how hot the water might be and how big a difference pressure level 2 was from pressure level 1.  From what I understood, they all seemed troubled by the possibility that the water jet might be strong enough to eject them from the toilet and pin them against the far wall.  My best advice to them was to relax and accept what comes.  However, I drew the line at sitting down and taking a tsunami for the team for no reason.  I'm not a show pony dammit.  They could just wait a while.

Tessa is the only one who had good reason to be scared ...

Flashback to 2016

Tessa's first experience with a bidet was traumatic.  

The first thing to keep in mind is that Tessa is a button pusher.  If she sees a colorful button under a flashing light, she is guaranteed going to push that button at least four times.  If she happens to beat you into an elevator, you're hitting every floor from 1 to 10.  This tendency has changed over the years, as she now tends to push psychological buttons.  But it still holds.  

Tessa's traumatic event occurred our first night in Tokyo, when we ventured out of our hotel room and enticed the girls into a random restaurant around the corner.  To our eyes, it looked like an authentic Japanese udon restaurant - dim lighting, low seating, and everything written and spoken in a language we could not understand.  After sitting still for fifteen seconds, Tessa announced she had to use the bathroom and off she went.  This was not unusual, as Tessa has long attempted to spend most family dinners in the bathroom.

After a long time, Amy looked at me skeptically and said "Tessa's been gone a long time."

"Uh huh," I said, tapping a noodle with a chopstick to ensure it was, in fact, a noodle.

"I'm going to check on her."

Three minutes later, Amy returned with a bedraggled and wet Tessa.

The story goes like this.

Tessa handled the first several steps like a champ.  Find the bathroom.  Check.  Lock the door.  Check.  Sit on the potty.  Check.  Business.  Check.  But here is where it all went south.  Because buttons.  Tessa noticed that the toilet seat had many buttons with strange curved symbols.  So she selected one at random and pushed it.  

What followed was only described by a hysterical six year old, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of it all.  But my guess is that Tessa hit the tsunami button.  A massive stream of water struck her butt with the force of a hot tub jet.  She yelped and followed her instincts - which were to leap off the potty!  This might serve you well in some contexts, but in the bidet context it's a rookie mistake.  The water keeps coming.  So when Tessa leapt off the potty, water sprayed all over the bathroom - the mirror, the wall, the ceiling, the door, and Tessa.  Tessa's solution (and probably the only solution) was to sit back down on the potty.  But, as bidet pros know, this does not stop the tsunami.  The water kept spraying her butt and, every time she attempted to get up, the tsunami soaked the bathroom.  So Tessa was trapped.  For three minutes, she squirmed and shimmied and gyrated, seeking relief from the water cannon and promising that she would do anything (even sitting through family dinners) if she could just get off that potty.

When Amy finally got the door open, she said that the bathroom looked like the interior of a car wash.  

First day

Because we forced ourselves to stay awake until 8:30, we all had a great night's sleep.  And by great night, I mean that Tessa and I woke up at 4:45 and played Phase 10 until the sun rose.  This is a shot out our window towards Daiba, at the southern end of Tokyo.

After Amy and Lily woke up, we headed downstairs for our desperately needed breakfast and tried not to cause any trouble.  I practiced my two Japanese phrases (konnichiwa and arigato goziamasu) on everyone I met with the singleminded intensity of Rain Man.  

We wanted to travel into downtown Tokyo, but quickly discovered that you need cash in order to buy a subway ticket.  As you might remember, we were still on a credit union blacklist.  So we resigned ourselves to seeing the sights and walking around Daiba.  Walking might have been an overstatement.  People we passed would probably have described us as 'staggering' or 'shambling' and might have looked around for film crews thinking we were part of The Living Dead: Tokyo Dayz.

This is Fuji Television Broadcast Center, where they could film Tokyo Dayz: A gripping drama about a mild mannered forensic psychologist caught in the midst of a zombie apocalypse far from home.

Lady Liberty's sister.  The French really got around in the 1800s.

The Flame of Liberty, though Uncle Drew had a few NSFW captions for it.

There are vast underground labyrinths of these bubble machines, each of which will dispense an orb for the low cost of 300 yen.  Each orb contains a plastic Japanese artifact that is neither  necessary nor sufficient but still strangely addictive.  Because you're always left wondering ... what's in that next orb?

Dad, can I have another 300 yen?!

Tessa hoping for the Kiwi!

Airport '77?

Kudos to anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

Though maybe those aren't the kind of kudos you want.

Gundam Unicorn!

See you tomorrow!

And we are off ...

 At 1:30 am on the 2nd of January, we woke up (or perhaps more accurately briefly regained enough consciousness to rouse our children) and dragged our suitcases to the front while Murphy did his best impression of an NFL offensive lineman trying to protect the door.  He has this intuitive sense for the illegal chop block.  At some point in that transition, I managed to break my only belt and spent fifteen minutes blearily trying to put it back together while Amy hissed "are you still messing around with that damn belt?  For the love of God, either suck it in or grab some duct tape to hold your pants up."

Then we had to say goodbye to Murph.  From his expression, I thought he seemed to understand that we would not be "right back."

Our driver arrived and we set off.  Five minutes out, I realized with a chill that I'd forgotten something important.  Not my passport.  Not my credit cards.  My reading glasses.  As sad as it is, at fifty-two, reading glasses represent one of the most crucial survival mechanisms for a twenty two hour transit.  Not to mention a four month sentence with your family.

Made it through baggage without issue.  We all look pretty happy in this shot, though Amy does look like she's bracing herself for a dose of ECT.  I asked her if she wanted me to retake this shot because her eyes were closed.  She said "That was on purpose.  I was  pretending we were either already there or that you were sitting several rows behind us."

Our five hour layover in Detroit was spent trying to remember why we wanted to be in close proximity to each other for four months.  That three bedroom closet was beginning to seem awfully small in my mind.  Unfortunately, our family deals with sleep deprivation in different and mutually exclusive ways.  Lily does her best impression of a surly zombie who blames Tessa for everything.  Tessa does her best impression of a chipmunk on cocaine.  I do my best impression of a single guy sitting next to a crazy family.

Finally in our seats ....

Amy asking 'was this a mistake?' for the fifth time.  

Tessa saying "mistake?!  I knew it.  You guys don't have any idea what you're doing, do you?"

Me saying "Wait just a second.  I'm in the wrong seat.  I got that last second upgrade to business class."

Lily reading.

Fourteen hours seems like a long time until you are into your third hour (and fourth craft IPA) and your wife leans over and grips your forearm in a death grip and says "your daughter is driving me insane," when it seems like a really really long time and a really really bad idea.  That's when you go to the back of the plane and tell the steward that you need two glasses of chardonnay and any other central nervous system depressants they might have on hand.  You should use words like 'stat' or 'did you see the lady in 44E?'

Over the course of that fourteen years (not a typo, that's how long it felt) ...

Lily watched the Meg and Jaws (for the fifth time).  This from the girl who told us that she's really afraid of sharks while flying over the Pacific.

Tessa selected Cinderella, Clueless, Legally Blonde.

Amy went high brow and watched Emma and another Brit drama she can't remember.

I went full dystopian.  I watched Matrix 4, Parasite, and Nope.

You can see why family movie night is like electing a speaker to the House.

None of us took any pictures the rest of our trip.  What I remember through the haze of fatigue is that we disembarked to find scores of airport employees trying to hand out pink pamphlets that I initially mistook for an invitation to a religious service involving Kool-aid or an ad for a great deal on crypto (FTX FTW!).  It turned out that they were essential documents that certified we had been vaccinated.  Despite that, immigration and customs were a breeze.

What was not a breeze?  Currency.  We quickly learned that Japan is largely a cash based society and we brought zero yen.  No problemo!  Before we left we ascertained that we did in fact remember our ATM pin #s.  However, after ten failed withdrawal attempts and a finger bruised from jabbing the English button on the screen, I developed a sneaking suspicion that a) credit union ATM cards do not work in Japan, or b) I was trying to withdraw money from a slot machine.  The truth was even sadder.  In an effort to protect us, our credit union determined that we were North Korean hackers and put a freeze on our account.  

Prevent Fraud!  Choose Dirigo.