Andrew + Japan = Awesome

I’ve been here for four days now, and in that time I’ve seen a lot, but there is still so much more, Japan is full of really big places, and I’m limited by the fact I have to walk everywhere, and further limited to visiting places that are geographically close to a train station or bus stop.

Anyway, this is another long post, so click through to read it.

We arrived at our apartments on Wednesday around lunchtime and met our new flatmates. I’m living with Brian who’s from the UK, Neil is living with an American and someone else from the UK. Once we had settled in a little, we weren’t too tired so we decided to do a little bit of exploring.

We ended up at Kippy Mall, which is right on the other side of the railway station. It has six levels of shops, the ground floor is a supermarket, and the other five are almost universally filled with womans clothes. Not the most exciting mall.

On Thursday morning we had to go down to the Sanda city office and register as Aliens. There was a nice guy there who spoke english, so he helped us fill out all the forms. We forgot our address, but he had a map of the city and we showed him where we were, so that ended well. We have to wait a month until we can pick up our alien registration cards that we have to carry everywhere with us.

After that we decided we would go into Osaka, with the goal of buying a mobile phone, opening a bank account, and buying a camera for myself. We were going to go alone, luckily Neil’s flatmate Luke offered to come along for the day since it was his day off. I say luckily because I honestly don’t think we could have found our way through Osaka train station without him. We would have been able to get out, but finding the right train track to come back to Sanda would have been troublesome.

We had Subway for lunch in Osaka, much the same as back home, except they call the two sizes 15cm and 30cm, as opposed to a 6 inch and a foot long. We learnt that lots of Japanese words, in particular the words that the Japanese borrow from other languages sound a lot like the english words. So if you want Tomato and Lettuce on your sub, you can just say Tomato and Lettuce, and they sound close enough to the japanese words that the person understands what you want. Apart from that the answer to every question is a smile and a nod.

After lunch we went to Yodobashi Camera, which despite its name sells almost everything electronic. The first thing we found was the cellphones. There are three major cellphone companies in Japan, and prepay is’nt very popular. All the phones come with plans, and when you get a plan you can get most of the phone for very cheap or sometimes even free. I found a phone I liked at DoCoMo, and we were about to buy it when we found out that DoCoMo would not accept my certificate of alien registration, they only accept the cards, which I have to wait a month until I get. So we went and talked to Softbank (who used to be Vodafone). They would accept our certificates, and all their phones were free with a plan, but you had to sign up for 24 months. That was something we had been told to expect, but we were told that cancellation fees were normally pretty nominal. At Softbank if you cancel a plan you pay 2200 yen for every month of the plan remaining, so that was a no go. Then we went to au who would accept our certificates, but stock very few bilingual phones, and the ones they do stock are unwieldy and ugly. So that was also a no go. I’m waiting until I get my alien card, and then I’ll get a DoCoMo phone.

So since phones were out of the picture, we went upstairs to the camera section. There were loads of cameras to choose from, but I’m somewhat fussy with what I wanted. I needed the zoom to not be in a dumb place, and I wanted a nice easy way to change shooting modes (which normally means that its not a dial). Pentax is a brand that I know is very good for both of these things, so I ended up with a nice blue Pentax camera.

By this time it was nearly 4pm, and we decided to start heading back. We checked out a few smaller phone shops in the mall underneath the railway station, and they told us the same things as Yodobashi camera. We got back on the train and came back to Sanda. That night we tagged along with Luke to Japanese lessons at the local community center, we learnt how to count, and tell the time, but now I can only remember some of it. It was fun though.

On Friday we had to set up our bank accounts, we went to a bank Luke told us about which has a branch here in Sanda, Takarazuka, and Flower Town, which are the three important places for us. The banks here are totally different to banks in NZ, we walked in and there was maybe six ATMs near the door, then there were three guys greeting and directing people. We asked them for someone who spoke english, and we ended up with a nice girl who took us through the signing up process. The banks dont have tellers like we do in NZ, every “teller” has a desk and the customers sit down to deal with them. You also dont have to queue up, when you get there you take a ticket out of a machine, and take a seat and wait for your number to appear on the screen telling you which teller to go to. It’s a good system.

After we got our bank accounts we decided we would go to Aeon, which is a big mall we were told about. But we had to catch a bus there, and nobody told us how buses work here. We watched some people get on, but you get on the back door of the buses and nobody appeared to pay, so instead we decided to go to Flower Town to see where I’ll be working. Except we didn’t get there. We got on the right train, but totally missed the stop, so we ended up in Woody Town instead.

Woody Town is the end of the train line in that direction, and is still part of Sanda. Woody Town has a very nice train station, but also a mall that is much larger than Kippy Mall. It also has a Warner Bros movie theatre.

On Saturday we decided to go back to Aeon, since we had been told by one of Neils flatmates that you pay at the end of a bus journey. Its a pseudo honesty system here, you dont get a ticket, you just put money in a box at the end and it falls onto a conveyor belt that goes past the driver. If you were fast enough you could short pay and run off, but that would bring great shame on your family.

Aeon is a gigantic mall. We had McDonalds for lunch and then looked around the place. It’s got three levels with all types of shops in it. It also has a very large amusement arcade. The Arcades we’ve seen aren’t at all like Time Out, there are very few actual video games in them. Almost all the games are claw games, other games that let you win prizes, or the pseudo gambling games where you put in tokens and more tokens fall out.

While we were waiting for the bus to come back we went for a walk around the mall. Outside the mall were these pretty flowers, including this one flower which has a remarkable resemblance to Two Face.

Saturday night we went out to dinner with a bunch of people who work at Flower Town (and live in Shinwa Heights). It gave us a chance to meet some new people, and even one of the Japanese staff from Flower Town. They were all really nice and we went to an Izukaya (which may not be spelt correctly). We sat around tables with a hot plate in the middle of them and ordered dishes that cost a few dollars each, and then shared whatever came. We had some really nice things, including garlic octopus which I was hesitant about, but it tasted really good. After dinner we went a little further down the road from us to a Karaoke place, where we rented a room for two hours. The place had a large selection of English songs, which surprised me a little. It was a good night and we got to meet new people, which is always good.