Blue sky from the apartment

Christmas Day in Harajuku

Christmas in the most consumer orientated city in the world.  The entire city is actually really well done up for the holidays, with trees strung with lights everywhere and plenty of small streets having huge light banners strung from poles, but it is more of a year end celebration than Christmas as it is a Buddhist country.  As such, shopping wasn't really any more crowded than usual and we were able to get in for dinner at Gonpachi, although that was probably more due to Mark being a regular there than lack of a crowd.

In retrospect, this picture has very little to offer other than being another in my never ending series of random street shots.  Too late to retake it now!

Tokyo customs

The iPhone doesn't take the best pictures at night, but luckily Tokyo streets are pretty much daylight bright most hours.  I see this scooter all the time near our serviced apartment, and despite looking like it sits directly on the ground it must move because it's not always there.  There is a restaurant right next to where it is always parked, so I'd assume he/she works there.

This type of scooter is super popular around here, and they almost all have at least a modified exhaust.  When they travel in packs, it's almost like there is a biker gang tearing down the street on Harleys with the way the exhaust noise reverbs off the buildings.  Most are no where near as custom as this guy though, with his purple flame over metallic silver paint, 8ft of exhaust tubing, and overstuffed vinyl seat.  The rear fender on this thing looks like it probably drags on the ground 90% of the time the bike is moving.

BFFs

The boy's BFF is visiting this week, just in time to help keep his Christmas from being a massive mess.  We move into our permanent apartment just two days before Christmas, and it is going to be completely empty other than our bed and a few little things we pick up here and there.  The bulk of our stuff doesn't arrive until January 9th, and I don't think we will have time to get a Christmas tree, so without friends in town it would be a very barren Christmas.

Now if only they lived in Tokyo instead of Hong Kong, we would be set.

Holiday cheer in small places

We had a going away/welcome/holiday party for our team last night in a restaurant on the 8th floor of a tiny buiding in Shibuya. What you can see in the picture is the entire place. I don't know how we found it even after we knew where we were going since I couldn't see a sign at all outside, and I've already mentioned how helpful Japanese addresses are.

I can't wait to head out to the bar district that has 200 bars in 2 square kilometers, most with a standing room capacity of 5 or 6 people.  This is one of the things I moved here to experience.

Float like a Cadillac

The last few days have been a constant stream of recycled SuperGT races on one of the Japanese sports channels, going through the entire 2008 season.  If the boy has been asleep or otherwise distracted, I've been watching GT-Rs and NSXs banging the crap out of each other with pure glee.

I think anyone that has raced always wants their kids to be hot to trying it out, but the boy has never really shown more than a passing interest outside of the movie Cars.  We went to Eastern Creek Raceway once when mommy was busy for the day and he seemed entertained by the motorycles and shifter karts, but he generally doesn't care that much unless it is me playing Gran Turismo.  But yesterday, we hit paydirt:

The Lightning McQueen MR-S fielded by apr in the GT300 class.  We are now having discussions about how he can't have his own race car until he is 15 years old, which must seem like a really, really long time because he tried to casually drop it to 11 last night to see if I would notice.

More random street scenes

I can't help that I am completely fascinated by streets in Asia.  I love the narrow back alleys with no names, the cars rolling through at pedestrian speed to match the flow of foot traffic, and the corners so tight that you need convex mirrors mounted on poles so you can see oncoming vehicles while making your three point right turn.  I also find the lack of street names and addresses charming, especially since I don't drive and have only rarely actually needed to find anything by myself so far.

This is a street kind of close to where our new apartment is going to be, since we are not going to end up taking the tower apartment near the harbor.

At the exact opposite end of the spectrum from the 1 lane back alley ... the main Ginza strip at night.  It's basically 5th Avenue in Tokyo, with Bentleys and Rolls double parked while Ferraris slink by.

The tower apartment ... I think that if we were Japanese, we probably would be moving in there.  Because we are not, the owner of the development, the Mitsui Corp., kept adding new stipulations to the lease.  The demand for two months key money was bad enough, but then they tossed on, after a lease contract had already been delivered to my company, that they also wanted us to prepay rent for January, February and March because we didn't already have direct debit bank payments set up.  This is with a major, international corporation as my guarantor, and they essentially wanted 9 months rent in advance (2 months key money which we would never get back as it is a gift to the landlord for allowing you to rent their apartment, 3 months security deposit that Japanese landlords apparently try everything they can to keep for the smallest bit of wear and tear, 3 months rent in advance plus the rent for the rest of December after the lease is signed, and finally 1 months rent as a fee to the agent).

End result is we are not taking that apartment.  Even if they exchange rate were not horrid at the moment and I had $25k sitting around to dump into the apartment off the bat, I wouldn't.  Instead, we will move our to Setagaya-ku, which is about 15 minutes west of my work by train, and the area everyone in my office suggested we move.  Zoom in on where the map is centered, and that (I think) is the apartment, on the back corner of that corner apartment building.  Unlike the inner city buildings, it's not 50 stories high, but neither are any of the buildings around it.  We will be on the 5th floor, so the view from our balcony will be of endless rooftops around us.  Kind of cool, in a much different way than the skyscraper.

View Larger Map

The boy and his iPhone

My real estate agent made the Denny's of Japan sound vastly different from the reheated grease served in the US, so we decided to give it a try.  The boy was kept entertained watching Incredibles on Jae's new iPhone.

The verdict?  It's no where near as bad, but it is still a cheap chain restaurant serving dull versions of standard food.

Emigration, naturalisation, and being tracked

Aside from driving down tiny alleys to look at a dozen apartments, and one trip under an overpass only 1.5m high (so low that guys on bicycles have to stoop to ride through it), I've been doing some of the naturalising steps that come with moving to any new country, and some that are very specific to Japan.

First things first, I went to the Shibuya City Office to register as a legal alien.  In addition to the fingerprinting and photo that go along with any foreign visitor entering Japan, if you're going to be here for more than 90 days you need to register.  You take two passport photos and head on down with your passport/visa to the local ward office where you will go through one of the most orderly processes I have ever seen.

In Shibuya, it was almost insanely scripted.  Walk into the building, stop at the information desk to find out where you are supposed to go.  I could plainly see where to go by virtue of there being a big English sign pointing registrants to the second floor, but I was still directed to stop and ask the lady to point out that sign to me.  Then I went upstairs, where I had to stop at another completely redundant information desk.  Right, follow the sign, got it.  The room looked like the DMV/RTA, so I was expecting the worst, especially when I had to take a number for service.  I pop around the corner to the registration desk and there is no one there waiting, so I get called immediately.  I think they just waited for me to walk up so they could change the number board and direct me to a seat.  Fill out a few bits of paperwork, answer a few questions and it's time for her to process the registration, which means I need to get up and walk three feet behind me to sit in the waiting area while she sits 10ft away entering all my information into the system.  Not 2 minutes pass before I am called back to the desk to read/sign my registration, and then I get to go back to the waiting area, 3ft away, so she can go make me two copies of my registration.  After she has printed those out, she calls me back, again, and explains how I need to return to the office sometime during a window 12 to 16 days from that day to pick up my official registration card.  I then need to carry this card with me at all times, and can be stopped and asked for it by a police officer for no reason other than to check that I am in the country legally.  I also need to notify the city within 14 days when I move, just so they know where to find me in a national emergency, I suppose.

I also created an inkan, with our admin/translators help.  The inkan is basically used in place of signatures in Japan.  Every one of them is hand carved and thus unique, and must be registered with your local ward (luckily right next to the alien registration station, so maybe this time I can dodge the information desks).  You can do them in Roman characters, or you can translate your name into kanji and pick a sweet ass stylised option for displaying it.  I ended up picking 努瑠土, which phonetically translates to Dold, and is the characters for 'exertion', 'lapis', and 'earth'.  When I go to pick up my alien card, I'll register the inkan and be one step closer to naturalisation.

Finding a shoebox in Tokyo

All day last Saturday was spent driving around Tokyo with two real estate agents, inspecting a list of properties that roughly met some initial guidelines we had given the relocation company.  The choice was difficult to make without Jae here, but a full day of driving, stopping at an apartment, shoes off, wander around taking photos, shoes on, back into the car ... that was 100 times easier without a 3 year old hanging around.

With typical Japanese promptness, the first agent picked me up at 930am, and dropped me off at 12:40pm, apologising profusely for running 10 minutes late.  At this point I had 20 minutes until the second agent came to collect me and spent most of it feeling like I was going to throw up at the thought of not finding anything that would suit our needs.  We had looked at 6 or 7 places, and while I knew going in that compromises would have to be made, especially for size, there weren't really any of them that I thought we would be happy in.  They were all either too small (even with expectations of living tight), too old, too dark from being buried on the bottom floor in between 10 story buildings, oppressively expensive even for Tokyo, or just so inconvenient for me to ask Jae to live in with no real grocery stores or play areas for Nevan near by.  I was starting to think that I was going to be in serious trouble, either with Jae for taking a place that just wouldn't do, or with the company for having to extend our stay in temporary housing.

The second agent must have been sitting outside the apartment literally waiting for the clock to hit 1pm because she called me on the tick and off we went.  The first guy was nice but a bit like you'd find any other real estate agent in the world.  The second agent was actually just nice, and a had a funny mean streak making fun of real estate agents who need a GPS in order to find their way around Tokyo.  This girl was the driving equivalent of Rain Man, turning down 1 lane alleys so narrow she needed to do a 3 point turn to make the corner, cutting through wards to avoid traffic on the main routes that had led the first agent to being late getting me home, and every once in a while she would stop talking, start counting out something on her fingers and mumbling in Japanese before setting off again with the most polite driving I've ever seen.  I wouldn't have been able to find most of these places with a GPS and a sherpa guiding the way seeing as how there are no real addresses in Tokyo, just building names and block numbers, and street names are very rarely posted even in Japanese except for on the main boulevards.

She had way more interesting places to show me, and more that were actually in our price range.  As the cost of schools and regular expenses began to mount in our planning for Tokyo, as well as the housing depression in the US meaning I will have to keep paying the mortgage there as well, our price bracket had dropped several times.  The other agent had places all the way from our original price down to our new limit, but I actually went into the second round of apartments feeling like I could afford them.  After the morning session, I had narrowed down our original list of a half dozen areas to just two main wards, Setagaya-ku and Minato-ku.  Luckily, 6 of the 7 places she had queued up were in those two areas and we managed to see them all.

Setagaya-ku was the popular choice around the office.  My boss and one of the other managers on the team live in Setagaya or close by, its quiet and apparently really good for families, popular with expats who want to get out a little bit more into a Tokyo beyond the skyscrapers, and very representative of a normal Japanese ward.  It is mostly 2 and 3 story buildings, with very few buildings that are even 10 stories tall.  The streets are small, the train line central to town, and I thought it was excellently cute.  I saw one place that was a serious contender, taking a ton of pictures of every apartment even if I didn't like it, just to be polite to the agent.

Minato-ku is more what most people probably think of when they picture living in Japan.  50 story apartment buildings with the most modern fittings you can imagine, each complex with its own grocery store, gym, movie room, and pool.  It's also more expensive, not as endearing in a little back alley Tokyo kind of way, and more expensive.  The convenience factor for my commute is about the same between the two, but for Jae, Minato-ku is just more ideal as we wouldn't need a car, schools are pretty close by, and there is a little play area next door for Nevan.  We had looked at two apartments already, where I was dutifully taking pictures, when we walked into a corner unit on the 26th floor of Bloom Tower on Shibaura Island.  The apartment is small, the walls in the living room are a strange yellow-orange color, it's at the very top end of our price range, but good lord the view.  It looks out over Tokyo Harbor, with the entire Rainbow Bridge in view from the living room, master bedroom, and bathroom.  It's the kind of view that totally made me forget to look at practical things, or take pictures so Jae can see it.  So, yeah ... that's the one we applied for.

Further afield

Monday was Japanese Labor Day, so I took the opportunity to try out the subway system a day early so that I wouldn't do my aimless wandering trying to find my station during commute times.  I also needed to find a store that sold wrapping paper or gift bags so I could prepare the small presents I'd picked up in duty free for my co-workers.  I got directions from the front desk of our apartment on how to get to the subway station and set off, emboldened by my inability to get lost the day before.

The subway entrances are all clearly marked, so finding that wasn't a problem.  I was slightly stymied in my first attempt to get a PasMo card (rechargeable subway/rail ticket), thinking I had misunderstood the limited English signage, but it turns out that the machine I chose was just out of the actual cards at that moment.  160円 later and I was in Shibuya.  Blind luck had led me to get on the train at exactly the right spot, so when I exited there was a stationary store directly in front of me so I got the gift bag purchases out of the way with no hassle.

From there, I just picked one of the many, many exits from the station and once again was rewarded with blind, stupid luck, coming out to look directly at the Cerulean Tower standing in the distance.  I climbed one of the pedestrian overpasses to head towards the office, but had to stop to take some video of the intersection.

Yeah, once again, I'm not sure why I am so fascinated by Japanese intersections.  After hanging out on the overpass for a bit like some kind of weirdo, I walked up to the office.

This is the side of the building that the lunch room and the bathrooms look out from, the bathrooms having actually a pretty nice view that you unfortunately can't enjoy at the same time as the heated toilet seats, at least not with any social discretion.

Having accomplished all of my immediate needs (gift wrapping, making myself feel better by preparing to avoid getting completely lost on the way to my first day of work), I just wandered around Shibuya for a while.

This is the famous Shibuya crossing from basically every American film set in Japan.  I've been shooting all of these videos on the little flip video camera I won at the last poker tournament in Sydney, which makes for handy footage, if not slightly less impressive than you would see in a real movie.  The crossing is actually really impressive in person, even though there were hardly anywhere near as many people in it than there are on a busy day.

Pac Man guards the entrance to an alley featuring what appears to be a gentlemens club, judging by the signage.  I did not go in to investigate ... it was too early in the day and they looked closed.

The little pink building on the left side of the street is only about 3m wide and contains a condom shop, two or three clothing vendors selling different types of crap, and a Brazilian tattoo parlor on the top floor.  Across the street is a pachinko parlor with the requisite hawker outside yelling about loose slots, etc.

I was starting to get hungry at this point, but instead of eating some place in Shibuya, I decided to take the subway back out to Ueno, where I had spent a large portion of my time on my last visit to Japan a decade+ ago.  Ueno is home to tons of motorcycle dealers, some of them operating out of a storefront so small they basically have a desk and nothing else, with all of their bikes parked on the sidewalk out front.  I ended up heading to a sushi bar that I had eaten in last time I was here and enjoyed my first real Japanese meal in a Japanese restaurant since I arrived.

Feet on the ground

I finally arrived Sunday morning ... and it kind of freaked me out.  For the first day that I was in Tokyo, I really didn't leave the apartment.  The concept of going outside, into an environment where I would be totally lost and unable to talk to anyone was a little but overwhelming.  Moving to Sydney was a lark, but this is a real foreign country and it does not cater to English speakers.  Other than the subway system and some of the most major streets, there is no English signage, which means taking that interesting looking turn down a smaller street can realistically lead to being completely and totally lost.

Finally, after hiding in a video game for a few hours and some gentle chiding from the wife, I wandered out on to the street.  I went out the backdoor of our apartment complex (ours is the one with the little red dot on it, in the middle of the map, and our apartment is at the far left hand side of the building) on to a little 1.5 lane alley.

This is a pretty boring video of it since I tend to leave a bit earlier than the average salaryman, apparently, so the street is deserted at this time in the morning.  This also means that I have not yet experienced the Japanese subway crush, but it's coming.  When I stepped out on to the street, there were a ton of people streaming along, moving to the side if a car or van drove past.  I'm not sure where they were all going since it was a Sunday, but I hopped in to the flow and just followed them down the street.

That took me out, after a turn that I carefully tried to remember so that if I needed to come back the other direction I wouldn't miss it, to Aoyama-dori.  From there, I basically just picked a direction and wandered around for a while.

For some reason, I am fascinated by intersections in Japan.  This one isn't even that exciting, although if you were to walk in this direction for a kilometer or so you would eventually arrive at Shibuya station and then the office.

The Prada building which, once again, I found less interesting than the street.  There was a snooty party going on there that evening, with massive sumo bodyguards out front that I decided probably did not want to be filmed.

After making this stunning contribution to the world of urban filming, I wandered around for a little bit looking for something to eat.  I will admit, ashamedly, that I chickened out and went for McDonalds, where I could point and order by number.  But, I at least ate there instead of scurrying back to my apartment, enjoying the smoke filled atmosphere while all the Japanese people inside laughed at the white guy who travels half way across the globe to a land of intensely great food ... to eat at McDonalds.

no one can hear you scream

It makes me cringe when people emote in their blogs.  If someone wouldn't understand that you were grinning when you wrote it without the added *grin* /grin (grins evily), then it probably needs to be re-written.

physically gifted, mentally retarded

I'm looking forward to Japanese baseball, not in the smallest part because I can watch it and have absolutely no idea what the announcers are saying.  Down by 4 runs, leading off the 7th inning in game 3 of the  American League Division Series, and Harold Reynolds thinks you should bunt, to 'spark the bench up'.  Yes, I would prefer to not understand what he was saying only because of a language barrier.

Marinerds has been whetting my appetite for Japanese baseball, especially of late with her photos of the retirement game for Kazuhiro Kiyohara, 5th on their all time homeruns list.  There's nothing wrong with a bunch of grown men hugging and crying when one retires, and the flowers are a nice touch.

Some ideas are best expressed through ...

interpretive dance.  It's hard to accurately describe all the things I will miss about Australia, but this delicate, thought provoking display of artistic impression  helps bring it all in to perspective.

It would be more moving if we weren't all laughing so hard that you can't hear the music.