Everyday tea ceremonies

Japan is very famous for its hospitality. I'd go as far as saying that once you've experienced Japanese customer service, you can't go back.

This hospitality manifests itself even in an office environment. Back home, people don't enjoy business at the town council for various reasons. There are queues, and employees tend to be unhappy and unhelpful. I'm not sure how much Japanese people enjoy a visit at Town Hall, but the way they are treated is completely different.

Whenever somebody walks into our office, they are greeted with a chorus of KONNICHIWA and immediately are referred to the person in charge of their matter or even straight to the boss. If they feel like they have something to say, the town worker has to sit down with them and pretend to listen to them until they're finished. We have this old crazy in our town who'll come in and just unleash a flow of unrelated and sometimes offensive information at whomever it may concern. Whoever it may concern keeps quiet, nods occasionally and daydreams of tropical beaches and delicious pastry until it's over.

Also, visitors are usually served tea. This is very important, especially in the case of high-ranking visitors. As soon as they sit down they have to be served tea. The serving of the tea usually has to be performed by the lowest-ranking woman in the department, although there are different 'unwritten rules' about this depending on the workplace. As a foreigner (and a low-ranking woman), it is sometimes hard to figure out when you might be expected to serve tea. If you are from the west, it's often safe to ignore the issue and just pretend that you are too unfamiliar with the alien oriental concept of putting hot water into a cup.

However, sometimes you're called out on it. Today we had a group of 35 people from Korea visit our convention centre. I helped with the setup for the meeting - tables, chairs, etc. Then, when everything was done, my boss remarked in horror that the tea had been forgotten. Usually, when we have a group visiting, we get a bunch of plastic bottles filled with green tea from the supermarket and put them on the desks reserved for the visitors - but alas, this time somebody had forgotten.

I was charged with the task of fetching some tea - pronto - and walked the five minutes back to Town Hall where I consulted with our OL (office lady; woman who is very good ad serving tea). She had a look in the fridge and found that all of the little plastic bottles had been used up.
"Oh well, do we have a budget to buy some at the supermarket across the street?" I asked.
"Nah, too complicated," she said and started rummaging for glasses. Glasses.
"Errrr, you wanna carry 35 glasses to the convention centre?" I enquired helplessly.
"Yeah, since there aren't any bottles left over, we'll have to make do with glasses," she said in a matter-of-fact kind of tone.
For a minute I was tempted to ask myself how this was less complicated than just getting a bunch of bottles at the supermarket, but I decided to just suck it up and grab a tray of glasses to carry the five minutes to the convention centre (which has its own supply of glasses, but this was another matter I wasn't going to point out for fear of being called complicated again).

There were four of us now - more having joined in the heroic quest for the Serving of the Tea by their own free choice. Two of us carried glasses, two of us carried iced tea in plastic containers. We set up camp in the convention centre's kitchen, carefully put the tea inside the 35 tiny glasses, put them on 35 tiny bamboo coasters we had especially brought for the purpose and gracefully set them down in front of each and every Korean visitor. Then we packed the whole affair up and trekked back to work.
Two hours later they phoned us to come clean up our glasses and we went through the whole procedure again - backwards.

Yep, hospitality is very important, but you don't wanna be at the wrong end of it.

My country doesn't want me back

Two years ago, when I decided to move to Japan temporarily to improve my Japanese and gain some first work experience, I didn't really prepare for my return just yet. I read up on the possibility that I may not be able to reintegrate into the social system, but I didn't care very much, because I knew that it wouldn't have an impact on my decision to move abroad. „I'll cope“ I thought.

When you open a newspaper or business magazine, chances are you'll see Austrian politicians and business people rave on about the beauty of overseas experience. „We want our young people to boldly venture to new shores, pick up lots of useful skills and then come back to put them to good use in their home country,“ seemed to be the general consensus. Little did I know the system didn't agree.

Led by the false belief that moving abroad temporarily would be a good move, I didn't seek employment in Austria after graduation, but invested all my resources into finding a job in Japan ASAP. I found an excellent opportunity in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme and my time abroad turned out everything I and all those enthusiastic Austrian politicians would have wanted it to be. I am now somewhat fluent in Japanese and have gained a lot of insight, flexibility and adaptability, which the international job market seemed so desperately to be in need of.

I enjoyed my time in Japan, but for me it was always clear that I wanted to go back home after two years or so and move on to something else. I started planning my return well in advance – six months in fact – and as my repatriation is drawing closer and closer, I am still none the wiser.

I have been actively looking for jobs in Austria for months and in general, the situation looks more promising than I thought. Still, I know that there may be a couple of months that I will be without a job, as jobs in my field are hard to find. Should something happen to me within these few months, I don't want to be showered in medical bills.

Insurance in Austria is compulsory. Your employer is obliged under law to enroll you into public health insurance. If you should find yourself unemployed for whatever reason, you are enrolled into public health insurance as soon as you file for unemployment. University students have the option to get cheap insurance via their parents; there are options for the self-employed, the part-timer, the stay-at-home-mum, the refugee, the immigrant – you name it. „So why wouldn't there be an option for the repatriate?“ I thought and phoned the employment centre. They informed me that I couldn't get insurance because I hadn't been working in Austria full-time for 18 months at a time and there was no bilateral agreement with Japan which recognised work in Japan.

„Fair enough“, I thought, „I'll just get my own insurance“ and phoned the public health insurance bureau.

„Can do,“ they said. „But since you haven't been working in Austria in the past two years, you'll have to wait for six months for your insurance to come into effect“. This means I will pay €70 a month into the system and should I get ill within the first six months, I will be just as fucked.

They suggested I ring the welfare department to find out if I could apply for public welfare.

So I did. The guy on the other end didn't get me any info at all. He suggested I get a random part-time job – that would allow me to apply for insurance right away. This seems like a splendid idea if you happen to have an uncle who runs his own business and can pretend to be employing you for a couple of months. If you don't – finding a random part-time job while you're still abroad is just as time-consuming as finding a real job while you're still abroad – and, as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather focus on the latter.

Then a loophole appeared! Since I'm under 27, my graduation lies less than 2 years back and my employment in Japan doesn't count as employment, maybe I can get insurance as a dependent via my parents! But before they could confirm it, the office wanted some documents. So I sent a bunch of documents from Japan to Austria and got my dad to run to the public insurance office in his spare time yet again. Once that was done, the same people who had informed him about the loophole a month ago, told my dad that it wasn't possible to get insurance this way after all - because I had been „employed“ in Japan.

Now this completely blew my mind! The employment centre denies me insurance because my employment in Japan doesn't count as employment, the insurance agency denies me insurance because my employment in Japan DOES count as employment.

I am now looking into private insurance. I do not want to file for welfare, because, frankly, I don't need the money (just yet). As such I don't want to take benefits away from people who are entitled to them. All I want is not to be strangled by medical bills at some point during my repatriation, which is a kind of insurance a modern European state should supposedly provide for its citizens – well, nope. If you decide to leave, you can stay right where you are, because Austria sure as hell doesn't want you back. All this „we want returnees to put their news skills to use in their homeland“-crap is uttered just for the sake of the media and to make the country look more international. Everyone deciding to move abroad should be aware of this – don't expect your country to welcome you back with open arms.

I don't regret having gone off to work abroad and I treasure every second I spent in Japan. My decision to move back to Austria wasn't made for financial reasons or because I thought I would find a better job back home. I made the decision for purely personal reasons – because I have a fantastic support network back in „my“ country, fantastic friends and a fantastic family that will always be my home and because I know that on a personal level, all of this is worth investing in. I am aware that things could be much worse. However, maybe those Austrians who are in the whole expatriation thing for the money or the benefits should just take the hint and stay where they are. Returning isn't worth the hassle.

Roadtrip to Nemuro

Last weekend, a friend and I thought we'd go for a little road trip to the Nemuro - Japan's easternmost city. And by little I mean 10 hours.
We set off around 2 p.m.. This is what the area around Niseko (SW Hokkaido) looks like in spring:

We took a well-known route towards New Chitose airport, passing Lake Shikotsu on the way. It was a beautiful day.

Then we drove past Tomakomai in the south-east. The terrain was getting flatter and we were driving on an expressway, but there were some interesting sights including wildlife:

These jump in front of trains a lot

Interesting place names:

And remarkable architecture:

Hokkaido is a really big place and it's fascinating how often the landscape changes. We drove past lush rice paddies:

And crossed a mountain pass:

On the way there was a huge bear statue reminding us to wear our seat belts. Because we all know what happens to little bears that forget to wear their seat belts, right? Or do we?

We stopped for dinner in the eastern town of Obihiro after a five hour drive. At 7 p.m. we were only at the half-way point! Obihiro is famous for buta-don - rice topped with pork - so of course we had to try it!

Obihiro turned out to be quite a pleasant city. Very clean and well taken care of with plenty of entertainment opportunities. But it was getting dark and we had another five hours to go, so we decided to leave for Nemuro ASAP. The rest of the way we covered in darkness, so I passed my time taking pictures of everyone's favourite convenience store - Seicomart. I think we passed a good 20 between Obihiro and Nemuro, but I'll give you only a sample picture.

We reached our destination around 00:30 a.m. and fell straight into bed. Even though I hadn't been driving, my brain was pretty much melted.

The next day we set out to explore Nemuro, guided by the two friendly local ALTs.

Pretty much all of Japan is very mountainous, but as soon as you enter the peninsula on which Nemuro lies, it's as if the mountains are deflating - it's completely flat. The peninsula is covered in dwarf bamboo with the occasional forest of wind-beaten trees in between and there is a lot of flat marsh land. 

We had the most delicious sushi at Hanamaru - a famous conveyor belt style sushi restaurants and then headed out to see the main attraction of Nemuro - the Northern Territories. These are a chain of four islands that used to belong to Japan, but fell to Russia. Ever since, the movement to claim them back for Japan has been alive and well - there even is a national "Give Us Back the Northern Territories" day on which demonstrations and rallies are held. But in Nemuro, every 100 metres or so signs remind you of the eternal injustice:

Since there are lots of Russians in eastern Hokkaido, a lot of traffic signs are in Russian. However, the protest signs are only in Japanese. How are the Russians supposed to get the hint?

 There is a monument and even a museum dedicated to the Northern Territories and the reasons why they should be given back to Japan.

This is the monument:

And this the museum

Amazing wildlife on the Northern Territories

Unfortunately you couldn't see the islands that day because they were hidden in the fog, but there is a map painted on the asphalt which shows you were they're supposed to be (the closest one is only 13 km from mainland Hokkaido)

Afterwards, we headed to Cape Nosappo, the easternmost publicly accessible point of Hokkaido. (Theoretically, the political islands would be the easternmost, but you can't enter them without a Russian visa, so I guess it's close enough).

After coffee and cake at a lovely Canadian-themed cafe, we headed towards Kuruma Ishi ("Wheel rock"), an interesting rock formation off the coast of Nemuro. There's also a lighthouse there:

Kuruma Ishi. It's called "Wheel Rock" because it's shaped like a wheel. The shape is entirely natural.

The sea was wild that day and there was some pretty dramatic cliff scenery there as well that eerily reminded me of Scotland. Pity the cliffs didn't have any sheep on them.

We spent a fun evening with good food, friends and karaoke and headed out early the next day to catch one in a series of four trains back to Niseko. The train journey didn't differ much from the road journey in terms of duration - both take approximately ten hours including stopovers and all. 

Since Nemuro is the easternmost stop in Hokkaido, there is only one train line and one platform.  The local train had a colourful Lupin III design, because the creator of the series was born in the area.

This is one of the smaller train stations on the peninsula:

We had a one-hour stopover in Kushiro - a large-ish fishing town in eastern Hokkaido, which is most famous for being the gateway to Lake Akan and Kushiro-shitsugen national park. Unfortunately we didn't have time to look at either of these places, but we took two steps outside the station building, just to be driven back in by the rain and the cold.

This touristy train with wood-finish goes to the national park though:

And this is the Kushiro station area

Eight hours later and after two more stopovers in Sapporo and Otaru we were finally back home in Niseko. I bet the station attendant hasn't seen such an epic train ticket in a long time:

Nemuro to Niseko - hell yeah

As a souvenir I brought back my very own "Give Us Back The Northern Territories" coffee mug. It'll be added to my ever-growing selection of the weirdest gifts from around the world ;)

Secret Gion

The other day I went to Kyoto with three colleagues from work to look at Miyako Odori.

This is a spring festival in Kyoto's geisha district Gion and translates as "Dances of the Old Capital". For about a month, Gion's Maiko (apprentice geisha - people in Kyoto generally say Maiko-san) and Geiko (Kyoto term for "geisha") give a seasonal dance performance - three times a day. While this must be pretty exhausting for them, for foreigners it is a brilliant opportunity to experience this aspect of Japanese culture in an uncomplicated and comparatively inexpensive way.

Gion was extremely busy during the festival. The narrow streets were packed with local and foreign tourists and policemen who tried to keep them in line. Still, I could not help but notice again how pretty this distirct is. Gion easily is one of the most beautiful and most "Asian" looking urban landscapes in all of Japan. Everything is kept looking traditional so in some areas you might forget you're actually living in the 21st century - others are as touristy as it gets though. Still, since the narrow alleys are lined with little ochaya (tea houses) that are closed to general visitors, no matter how often you visit, you always feel that the "real" Gion is happening behind closed doors.

We arrived at the theatre an hour early. My colleague had booked a "tea ceremony combination ticket" for Miyako Odori, so before we entered the hall we got served tea and mochi by a Maiko-san along with about 40 other people. Not exactly a tea ceremony and more than a tad touristy, but I got swept along by everybody's enthusiasm.



The dance performance consists of various parts, each expressing a different season. So the props and dancer's costumes change accordingly. All dances tell a story from popular Japanese folklore. All parts are played by women (as opposed to Kabuki or Noh where all parts are played by men).
Taking pictures during the dance performance was prohibited but you can check out official photos here:
http://www.miyako-odori.jp/odori_en.html


We left Gion after the performance to refresh and have dinner and came back in the evening. The tourists had all but gone. The doors were still closed.
My colleague had a contact at one of the nomiyas (drinkeries) that usually deny entry to first-timers and are accessible only via introduction by an existing customer. He rang at one of the tiny-looking wooden doors at the side of the alley. The shop had no advertising, no menu propped up, only the name of the Geiko in residence was written above the door. The door was opened and we were greeted by the kimono-clad okaasan ("Mum")  and led into an unexpectedly spacious and modern interior.
From outside the house had looked tiny, but entering it was like entering a cave. The place looked like a very stylish Japanese-style snack bar, but the seediness usually characteristic of such establishments was missing. The furnishing was very sleek and modern and all seats overlooked a tiny Japanese garden through a huge glass window. Just looking at the place was relaxing - it got even more so once the expensive whiskey started rolling in.

Entering this hidden part of Japan was like entering a parallel universe. The customers frequenting the place were all local "characters". Artists, CEOs and their foreign business partners, would-be TV personalities et. al toasted each other and handed out business cards. Some of them were accompanied by a Maiko or Geiko who bowed down deeply before their more senior peers and addressed them as "big sister" but demonstrated a no-nonsense attitude when it came to their clients. The host and hostess were dressed in kimonos and, like the Maiko, spoke exclusively in Kyoto dialect. The room was filled with soft Japanese vocal music.

After this enchanting albeit expensive evening I stumbled out into a real-world taxi feeling puzzled and a little bit embarrassed. Just when you think you know Japan you come across new worlds you need to make sense of all over again.

Moving desks around

人事異動 (jinji ido), or job rotation is a pretty big thing in Japan. Every year on April 1st about a third of the staff in my office gets transferred to another department. It can hit basically everyone without warning, even though you can put in requests beforehand. This happens in most major Japanese companies and organisations, apparently because the system of lifetime employment is still pretty wide spread in Japan and so they want their employees to "experience as many aspects of the company as possible while at the same time preventing corruption" (and - most handily - radical labour activism). So by the time you become the big boss, or in our case, mayor, you'll know your organisation inside out. An added effect is of course, that it keeps people from going stark raving mad. Let's be honest, who wants to be stuck filing invoices for 40 years? Everyone likes a bit of variety.

The problem that comes with variety, though, is that there is a lack of specialized personnel under 60 years old that hasn't been hired for specialized purposes. In some cases, this isn't much of a problem, as the bureaucratic processes remain the same for the whole organisation, but it could easily happen, for example, that the IT guy gets transferred to water works and replaced by a person from the school lunch centre. So for a while you'll be having your firewalls fixed and servers cleaned up by somebody who feels more comfortable ordering the right amount of sandwiches at the right time. They might become reasonably good at their new role after a while, but it feels like this process is just wasting a lot of productivity. Especially since EVERYBODY gets moved at the same time and the place is in a state of disorientation for a couple of weeks.

All in all, jinji ido is a pretty mysterious process and who gets moved where isn't announced until one week before the actual move. In our tiny town, people can't usually be moved any further than a few blocks away, but some companies transfer their employees seemingly randomly all over the country or even to offices overseas. Teachers as a rule get transferred within their prefecture, so in the case of Hokkaido, which is huge, you might get moved to the middle of nowhere a 16 hours drive away. There are different kinds of contracts specifying the extent to which you qualify for transfers, so I guess people know what they are getting themselves into, but a few still freak out about it a fair bit, especially with all the nerve-wrecking secrecy involved.

As the office foreigner, I tend to freak out about it too, to be honest. Finally you've ended up with a batch of people who know you well enough to actually trust you a little bit and then from one day to another you might get thrown right back to the "you're really good with chopsticks" (but useless with everything else) level. On the other hand, if you loathe your work environment, there's always a chance unpleasant individuals will be moved out of your sight soon.

Anyway, since all Japanese government office operate on a hierarchically structured open office plan (I may write an entry about this one day), there's usually a fair amount of desk shuffling to be done before the new people arrive. I landed a new chair this year though, so I guess it's not all bad.

Wake up call

I haven't written a blog entry in over a year! I'm truly devastated!
I guess that's what happens to everyone once the excitement wears off. Things just don't seem good enough to write about anymore, even though they are. Everything is, but we forget sometimes.
I've enjoyed reading over my old entries though. Everything's become so normal now, it's good to be confronted with one's own initial sense of wonder. And the thing is, I want it back. Basically, one year of blog entries is enough in terms of novelty. Things have inevitably settled into a rhythm and all the little events and rituals that seemed so enchanting to me at first have become commonplace. Everything's repeated itself in a yearly cycle. When people ask me what I found strange about Japan when I first arrived, I can't answer them. The only things that come to mind are the things that I found strange about my own culture when visiting. In Japan, everything's just normal. Going to work, coming home - because that's what it is now - and engaging in activities that might seem mind-boggling to new arrivals, but to me are just life. It's a frightening reality to wake up to - finding that you've changed so much without noticing - and with no documentation to remind you of how and when it happened.

The thing is though, I have decided to leave in August. I had my reasons and I still believe in them enough not to pull out of my decision, but I have also realized how much I am going to miss this place and I'm desperately trying to retrieve the memories that I have made during these two years when I was feeling too jaded to notice my own progress. Now that I am leaving, I feel that I haven't given this place and all the wonderful people living in it enough credit. So in my last four months in Japan I will try and make this blog a little monument to them - please call me up on it!

Shiinikku Doraibu!

Scenic drive. I'm not sure if I just coined this piece of Japlish myself or if I actually picked it up in a tourist pamphlet, but it is a well-known fact that doraibu are right up there with popular weekend activities in Japan. Sometimes it's nice to get away and go off to discover new places you haven't been to, so last weekend, my friend and I decided to spend the weekend at an onsen hotel at Lake Toya, but the spa holiday turned into a series of explorations!

On the way to the hotel we stopped by a Canadian- themed restaurant, which had been recommended to us by a Japanese friend. The interior was very "Western", but like most places with a western feel to them, extremely overladen with wood sculptures, paintings, porcelain and rustic decorations. If you see a picture or the Canadian-style restaurant, you immediately can tell it's got to be in Japan, even though the decoration  is Western. Still, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I like the care and attention to detail, with which these theme restaurants are often constructed. Everything looks kinda random, but you know that probably a lot of planning has gone into it. Plus the food was delicious and the view of the lake epic

The same was true for our hotel room, which overlooked Lake Toya.

  The hotel's hot spring did too. It's a sight you can't take your eyes off. We stayed at Toya Sun Palace hotel, which has a great onsen and amazing food, but is also very family friendly. That means, it is swarming with children and you sometimes end up feeling a little out of place as a lone traveller. As we were also the only foreign-looking foreigners staying at the hotel (there were plenty of Asian tourists there though), this feeling manifested itself very strongly. It was very relaxing regardless. I even got a foot massage (painful but it worked) and there was super mario in the rooms!!

Outside the hotel you could admire some illuminations. To me the whole concept of looking at a collection of light bulbs was relatively new. Sure enough, around Christmas there are plenty of illuminations installed in every major Austrian city, but people rarely see them as a major tourist attraction. On the contrary, they complain on how kitschy and energy-wasting they are, so it was interesting to see how people around here travel to different places just to see the illuminations. The illuminations at the hotel were quite impressive though, if very random at times (see rabbit on the right) and accompanied by very creepy music which was probably intended to heighten the atmosphere.

The next day we decided to take a detour via Muroran, because I had heard that it had a very nice bay. Muroran is by the East coast of Hokkaido, about an hour North of Lake Toya. I expected an atmospheric harbour town such as Hakodate or Otaru, but the town's silhouette turned out to be dominated by oil refineries and steel works. It was shockingly reminiscent of 19th century Liverpool or some place. When we drive further into town, we found it pretty desolate. Nobody was out on the streets and a lot of the shops and restaurants seemed to have shut down permanently. That's a great shame, because if you drive higher up the hills surrounding the bay, you have a fantastic view of the natural harbour that is Muroran. I can easily imagine a lot of people wanting to go there if not the factories and steel works would ruin the picture (and air). That's some pretty bad town planning right there.

Muroran seen from the other side.

Ironically, I looked through a Hokkaido tourism magazine at work the day after, which featured a six page special on Muroran's night view. "Night views"  are quite popular in Japan and there's even a ranking of which towns have the best ones (Hakodate is number one btw.). You typically go to the place, climb a viewing platform located on a mountain, hill or high building, take a picture of the "night view" and then go enjoy some local specialty (these were naturally listed in the magazine as well). Now what was new to me was that the article wasn't endorsing Muroran's normal night view, but it's "industrial night view". In other words, people should visit Muroran and look at its factories when it's dark. The article said something like. "When the refinery's safety lights come on, they illuminate the night like a thousand precious stones." I can't deny the eerie attraction of an illuminated oil refinery, but making "industrial illuminations" a selling point? We'll see if it works. Notable was, however, that the article didn't feature a single picture of Muroran by day. It did, however, feature a list of Japan's most spectacular "industrial night views". Kitakyushu further down south came in second, number three I couldn't read the kanji for, I'm very sorry.