On appearing stupid on a regular basis.

"No no no", my dentist tells me. It's nine in the morning and I am barely aware of my fingers and toes. I haven't had coffee or breakfast. My head feels like an untuned radio.

He begins to explain in halted English. "This filling" - he points to the diagram he printed out for me at my visit two weeks ago - "is a filling you have. Already."

"Ah. So...I'm not getting a filling today?"

"No filling. No treatment. All is okay. Not problem. Please come back in a half-month."

But that's what you said last time. Here is a diagram of a mouth, with one tooth highlighted saying "filling". Come back in a half-month. Here I am, a half-month later, apparently making myself look like an idiot.

He says something to the receptionist in Japanese. I catch the word "hantoshi" - half a year. I realise he must have made a mistake with his English at the last appointment and told me to come back in two weeks, when he meant six months. I repeat: "Ahhhh, hantoshi! So desu ne! Okay! Arigato, gomen, arigato gozaimaaaaaasu" and hurry out of the clinic backwards, half-bowing as I go, flailing as I change from slippers to outdoor shoes. I just want to get out as soon as possible, rushing out so quickly that the receptionist has to chase me down to give me back my health insurance card. 

I'm too polite to set the dentist straight on his error. And I'm still not sure why he gave me a picture of a filling I already have. It doesn't really matter. As the foreigner, you always look like the stupid one.

***

"Ima", my hairdresser tells me, "なになになになになになに".  His face indicates that he's expecting something from me but I've no idea what. Not a clue what's supposed to happen next. He seems to be indicating that I should stand up - maybe to go over to the sinks? But he's already done the shampoo - or at least expecting me to say or do something. I'm wary of randomly choosing to say yes or no, in case it results in him giving me a massive weave like they do on America's Next Top Model. So I stand up. He looks confused, then seems to make sense of my bizarre decision.

"Ah!". His face clears. "You want bathroom." He points. I don't need to go but obviously I have to go now anyway. I'm at least grateful he gave me a way out of the situation, making me look like I'm just shy to ask about anything toilet-related rather than just clueless about how to operate as a human.

***

These two things happened in the space of two days, yesterday and the day before. It might seem like I'm sharing these stories to make fun of myself, but the truth is I'm sort of proud of them. If I were being melodramatic I'd say they're my battle scars. If there's one thing I can put on my CV after I come back from Japan, it's not language skills or teaching abilities - it's simply the ability to get used to looking stupid. It's a very underrated skill. 

See, I'm a petty person, and I don't like to appear as though I don't know what I'm doing. One of my parents' stories of my early childhood involves me furiously shouting "BY MYSELF!" as they try to help me solve a three-by-three puzzle, batting them away as I try to shove incompatible pieces together over and over again; I'm a bit better at puzzles now but emotionally I'm not sure I've moved on that much. But continually being placed in situations where you can't understand people, don't know the rules and have very little skill in communicating your problems really is one of the best things that can happen to you, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone. Your skin thickens. You brush off embarrassing moments more quickly. You start to be more open about your fallibilities. See, just now I had to Google how to spell "fallibilities" and I was perfectly comfortable telling you that. Maybe I'm just trying to put a positive spin on things, but whenever I feel my gut twist sideways during an awkward miscommunication, I like to think of it not as an embarrassment to be forgotten, but a moment of personal growth.

Tomorrow I have to go to the local government offices to fill out my tax forms. I expect I'll grow a lot.

On tiny plastic bags.

Dear Japan,

It's fine. Really.

I don't need you to put a plastic bag around my fruit. When I picked it up and put it in my basket, I chose not to bag it for a reason. When I get home I'm going to peel it/wash it/eat the dirt off it like an urchin anyway. It's fine. I promise.

I don't need you to put TWO layers of plastic round my meat and cheese, before you put it in a separate plastic bag. I understand. The juices of animal products are best kept separate from vegetable products, for reasons of safety and out of respect for the four vegans still alive and well in your country. Nonetheless, you're being a smidge excessive. I think the four vegans might agree, before they make the forty-minute trek across town to the one restaurant they know that doesn't put beef chunks in the vegetable soup.

I don't need you to wrap pharmaceutical products in a miniscule plastic bag, and then put the miniscule plastic bag in a paper bag. I don't need you to put feminine hygiene products in a separate bag from all the other pharmaceutical products in case they get tainted with Witch Disease. (N.B.: I also don't need you to get a matronly female clerk to push the young male clerk aside and take over when the feminine hygiene products need to be scanned. It's okay. Really. He will learn.)

I don't need to open a bag of sweets and find every sweet in there individually wrapped. It's okay if I offer someone a sweet and they put their hand in there. If their hand is gross, or they are of an age where their hand is very likely to be gross, I'll shake the bag over their hand until it comes out. We do it all the time back home. I swear it works.

***

I have six different waste disposal bins in my flat. Paper and card, plastic, tins, PET bottles, burnable refuse and non-burnable refuse. "Does this burn?" is the mantra of our household. I have thought more about which materials could be defined as burnable than most chemists and a good deal of serial killers. I do this because obaasan yell at you if you fail to separate burnable and non-burnable refuse properly. Putting recyclable material in non-recycling bins is punishable by staring and pointing, and littering is punishable by catapult. In short, you seem to put a lot of effort into the environment in this area. And the Kyoto Protocol was invented in Kyoto (I guess), so the environment definitely on the agenda. I'm here to tell you, you don't even need to deal with electric cars or whatever. You can fix the environment right now. Just stop putting plastic bags over everything.

It'll be fine. I promise. They're just cluttering up your house and mine; I've got a whole shelf of them in my kitchen. And I can only draw faces on them so many times before I get bored of pretending they're my ghost friends.

Typhoons

A typhoon has come, the second in a week. There was another a couple of months back too. The previous two both spun out into mere gusts that wouldn't bother a moth, but this one seems more serious, and we had a proper man coming round with a loudhailer telling us to stay inside and everything. My phone went off with a special ringtone I didn't know it had, which basically declares a state of emergency and tells you to get your shit together. I am in my flat with the doors and windows shut. I have an emergency bag ready, containing energy bars and flashlights and my external hard drive because what on earth would I do without my Elder Scrolls saves from eight years ago. I took the washing in. I steeled myself.

And it turns out typhoons are really, really boring.

I have to wait here until tomorrow morning. The internet is slow because everyone is in watching students prank cats on Youtube. We forgot to stock up on food, so I can't snack out of boredom and then wonder why my teeth hurt all the time. I poked my boyfriend with a stick and he didn't do anything worth observing. Nothing else to report.

Bored.

Music and castles

I always start posts short and then they grow like tapeworms. So I thought I'd keep this one to a mere threadworm for a change. A couple of weeks back I had a couple of nice, low-key days I thought I might tell you about. I have action-packed posts on Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, sumo, tissues, foot peels, tiny plastic bags and much more waiting in the wings, but we cannot do everything at once.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Inuyama for work. Inuyama is known as the home of the oldest original castle in Japan. 'Original' is a key word here. Despite being stalwart-bordering-on-stubborn when it comes to tradition, Japan has an odd habit of...moving its prized historical buildings about. Castles, temples and shrines get rebuilt and shifted about every now and then, perhaps to evenly distribute the magic all over the country, perhaps just for a laugh. I'm not sure. Whatever it is, any time you pick up a tourist pamphlet for a beautiful piece of architectural wonder, seemingly frozen in time and quietly proud in its longstanding majesty, there'll be something in there about it being moved from some other place on wheels in the 1920s. Like Springfield in that one episode of the Simpsons (the one from the season where you finally stopped watching). 

So Inuyama's quite special. I went there for a festival back in April, which involved blokes in trad clothing heaving giant wooden carts full of children in between sips of Asahi. (You can read about it here, on my gentleman companion's blog.) That time I didn't get to explore much, what with trying not to get crushed by floats, but this month I ended up spending the day there for work reasons, so I took the opportunity to enjoy a little after-school excursion.

Wasn't quite the same without the doom-floats this time, but still perfectly nice.

The old town streets feel calming, and since they lead towards the castle and several shrines, they seem to build a sense of anticipation and purpose within you as you walk along them, like the path towards the final boss in a videogame. At one point I walked past a building with a couple of dozen people hanging round it, looking inside. The door was open and inside were a bunch of people watching a guy with a clipboard telling jokes to a few other people on stage. Haven't got a clue. My bafflement punctured the final-boss effect a bit. A few blocks down, I came across a couple with a giant dog which I was too afraid to take pictures of. Inuyama means "dog mountain", so I can only presume he was the city mascot/security guard. Fortunately the house a couple of doors down had a front yard full of small cats, so the balance of the universe was restored. Great trip so far.

The castle itself was closed, but I didn't mind. I just like looking at them and picturing myself in a big crown. I enjoyed taking time to walk around with no real goal in mind. I also found this rather attractive series of gates, at the end of which was a bunch of love notes written by visitors on wooden pink hearts:

I was too chicken to put my dead-spider handwriting all over one.

Inuyama, there.

Then I just returned to the station, down quiet streets featuring the occasional unexplained steampunk statue:

and went back home. The next day was even nicer - I went to a gig featuring some all-girl pop-punk bands - but I can't think of much to say about that apart from that it was brilliant and fun. (This lot. Also this lot. Recommended.) This was all after a few weeks of being ill and doing nothing with my life so it was good to get back into general being-aliveness again.

That's it really. Coming up, my trip to Tokyo last week, then maybe I might have to face going into my backlog of stupid shit I didn't write about but meant to.