Off Base

Whew! Gotta learn Japanese. All my blogger commands are now in Japanese. I knew one of the strings of characters had to be "new blog entry". Just kept punching till this screen showed up. Hope it's not an application for settlement on Mars!

Last week I moved in here, my "Western" house off-base. That is, I live 25 minutes south of base in the little town of Yuu. I love living 25 minutes south. I'm about 20 km from the very southern tip of Honshu, and it's only that far because a little peninsula juts out at the bottom. My address is described as oki, that is, near the sea. It's about a five minute walk away, and it's only that far because of all the windy roads. It's a trip living in a Japanese house. First of all, it's a gorgeous house! It's brand new, all wooden floors, which I must not damage, we're talking breathing too hard on it, on pain of terrible punishment, it sounds like. I love the layout of these houses. You don't just step into the main rooms of them. You enter a little foyer. It's at a lower level than the rest of the ground floor. You shed your shoes. You step up onto the main platform of the house, and then turn a corner, and there is a long hallway, with mysterious rooms leading off on both sides. What's in them!!!!! The first door on the left is to the anteroom to the bath. In this room are a big sink, cabinets, and washer-dryer. Both washer and dryer are small and set on a rickety stand, but this is apparently normal. From this room a double door leads to the bath proper. And wow is Johanys impressed with this bath. It's a whole room in which you can shower and bath. You need not scrunch yourself up to fit in a tub next to a toilet. There is no toilet. There is only what amounts to a very large shower, the whole open room, that is, and you wash and soap BEFORE you get in the tub. And the tub! I have never liked taking baths ever in my life, but now I take them twice a day. I love my tub. It's roomier, curvier, with armrests, and you sit back and let the cares of the world and the cold soak right out of you, and your pores when you emerge are open. You feel like a million bucks. Alan Booth says the Japanese get in tubs to get warm, and that's the truth, because who can afford to heat a Japanese house??? More on that later.

Next down the hall is the toilet room. Think you know what that is? The toilet is there all by its lonesome, all right, but it's a machine, it's automated, it comes with a 1/4" thick manual, 8.5 x 11, and it has about twenty buttons and a hundred settings. The two Japanese housing officials were reading it trying to figure out some of its functions. What could a toilet do? you ask. Well, for starters, the lid lifts once you get close to it. Then if you're a man, know what I mean? you punch another button and the seat comes up, too. You sit and stand. As soon as you get up, it flushes, and 90 seconds later the seat and lid come down by themselves. In the meantime the refill water flows from a fountain above the toilet so you can wash you hands in it. But say you want a water bidet? That is, a water spray. Push a button. One for women, one for men. Don't like the water temperature? Adjust it. The air temperature (when you're drying your bottom)? The same. Want the seat warmed for you? Pick your temperature. Don't like the placement of the nozzle? Adjust it in more than one way. Want a massage of water? Another button. Want the toilet to warm the room for you? No problem. And so it goes. There are PhD's available in Japanese toilet. The upstairs toilet is a lesser version of the downstairs one. You have to lift the lids by yourself. Damn! But it's really nice to sit on a toasty seat in the middle of the night.

Whew, that's just two rooms. Next the storage room under the stairs. Opening to the right the tatami room. Mine is rather large, and I walled two walls with handsome bookcases. The outside wall has French doors. In the middle of the tatami room, nine tamamis, which are greenish and soft to walk on. I do my yoga there. The tatami room opens onto the dining room, which also has French doors and a little concrete shelf outside to do small-size gardening. Many Japanese houses have no, I mean NO, landscaping. No grass, no bushes, no steps, just dirt. Mine being brand new, ditto. Then again some Japanese houses have old inward private beautiful gardens. And some have a bit of garden on a concrete stoop. That's what I aim for some day here. The kitchen is at the end of the hall, over a counter from the dining area. Nice roomy kitchen, IH stove, requring special pots. There's no oven in these houses, just a grilling rack, to grill fish, very small. I had the landlord install an oven for me. It's a box like a microwave, more robust, nicer, gleaming silver, and it both microwaves and bakes, depending on which of the many controls you push. The rest of the kitchen is pretty normal. Lots of nice cabinets. The whole house is very tastefully done, in rice papery walls, sliding doors everywhere, nice counters in the kitchen, nice hardware.

The feeling of being ensconced is accentuated by the foyer and the hallway, but also by the video viewer of the front door. Someone rings the doorbell and the ringer in the tatami room shows their video and you talk to them. You open the front door and talk some more. You invite them in. They have to take off their shoes. You walk the long hallway in the cold. Finally you arrive deep in the ho use in the tatami room or the kitchen.

Even when the movers moved me in, every time they stepped up onto the floor of the house they took their shoes off. I've never had such a polite, nice, and professional move. Not a single yell or swearword, and they were so solicitous of the house. And they helped me set up the things, putting soft shoes on my furniture so it wouldn't mar the floor, organizing my storage closet for me, etc.

Up the stairs, a typical three bedroom layout. The master runs the whole width of the house and looks out on the Inland Sea. It has windows on two sides, and a balcony on the third. Then a middle room, across from the toilet. Then the guest room, with its own little balcony overooking the vegetable fields which line the other side of the road. I have no near neighbors. This is rural Japan, and the smoke from fields burning sometimes blows through the house. It feels nice up there, like another country, and the master is special. I bought a futon at a Japanese store, with bedcovers, and sleep like a baby on the floor. (Not a good metaphor.)

Now to the serious business of trash. Today I took and passed Trash Class. The Japanese are very serious about their trash. I have to segregate trash into six bags, green or gold. There's a calendar showing which days they pick up which trash. Each category has about ten things that go into it, and these must be learned. The Japanese lady who's helped me get into the house said she keeps six trash bags. And you don't just toss the trash in, you have to lovingly prepare it piece by piece. Then you follow the Trash Calendar and cart you trash to the local trash pickup place the morning of pickup, different days for different kinds of trash. Then there are three or so other kinds of trash that take special handling and cost money. The night after pickup you must go by and see whether any of your trash has been rejected. Your name is on the bag, and the neighborbood is organized, with a head man, so you will receive a reprimand if you don't collect your bad garbage. Some pickups are only once a month. So it goes.

I have NTT internet and phone, and it's fast. It's DSL not cable, because there's no cable out here. And my blogger is in Japanese.

There's a feeling of peace down here. I love the run down to Yuu from work, along the narrow Japanese highway 188, lined its entire length with at least one line of houses and shops. There's plenty of restaurants, too. Of course the little local restaurants are one of the great joys of Japan. Last Saturday night I walked around Yuu in the dark. There's a dome that's lit at night. You see it from the highway. I wondered what it was. A gym and "cultural center." There were people on exercise machines looking out in to the night from the second story, and inside on the basketball court it was set up for pingpong, with 6-10 tables lined up in a row. I came across many hole in the wall restaurants. They have the curtains out front and the sliding doors. One I stepped into was only a counter that held just four seats, all taken. The woman shooed me out. I found a Korean barbecue place off the main road that charged a fortune even for rice. Then in my own oki neighborhood there's another place and right down the road from my house a saki shop. But the real find of last week was a place on the way down from work. It was a sushi bar, but the real thing, not just serving sushi, a single chef at the bar. I sat there with one other man. The couple spoke as much English as I Japanese. Yet how charmingly welcoming they were. They served me a wonderful sashimi meal with five different courses for about $12 (¥1300), one third the cost of that Korean meal (which was good but not comparable to the sashimi). The woman behind the bar, the main helper, possible the man's wife, though she talked of his trip with family to Las Vegas, as if she weren't his wife, but no matter, she was cute as a bug in a rug and she went out of the way to talk to me and make me feel welcome. Oddly, I had walked into another restaurant earlier that evening and the waiter pointedly ignored me while waiting on other customers. I was being shunned, and walked out, and went down the road and found this other, glorious restaurant. The woman fussed over me. She didn't stand on ceremony. She'd lift the lid of one of my bowls to see whether I'd eaten it yet. She ran around with napkins when I mistakenly put the fish from the soup into my mouth. It was for seasoning, not eating! That is, it was full of bones. There was no way not to make a mess. Later she said she was happy we had met. I took it as professional happiness, the hostess drumming up business, but in a sort of real way, and very charmingly.

Gosh, it's getting late! I'm supposed to be studying my calculus! Welcome to my Japanese house. Or Western house, as the case may be. It's so Western there's no alcove for sacred or special household objects. It's so Western the cabinets to place the bedding during the day look just like closets, though they are separate from the main closet, so that each bedroom has a small and large closet. But it still has those funny air conditioning/ heating units that only work in one room. They sit high on the wall and you operate them with remote controls.

I live near a kindergarden, which is a nice energy. Also, there are neighborhood chimes, first at 6 in the morning, then at 11, later at 5 in the afternoon. To tell you to get up, go to lunch, knock off work. In a few days I will take a letter and a gift of chocolates to the owner of the house at his place of business, and to my neighbors, entering the neighborhood officially, as it were. But enough!