Theme repeat

I have seen this topic come up on a few gaijin lady's blogs lately, the lovely gem of... Mis-communication! It's so common in international marriages, maybe even more so in those where one spouse is Japanese because lots is unspoken.

We too have our fair share of complete communication fuck ups, all his fault of course. Not really, I sometimes just fuck up and blame communication break down, quite useful at times actually!

Our latest? Paying for our house. We will pay all our house tomorrow, because you know, the price is the same as a new car so with a little help from interest free family loans we can just do it all in one go. The bastard meeting set up to pay it is tomorrow morning, when one of us has to lug 3.5 million yen to the real estate agent. Ryota has an unmissable meeting and hardly any paid leave left, MIL has to work, and our last option, Dog-fucker, who I didn't really trust anyway, has to do her once a week job. Of course, the only one left is me. I also have to work, but my job apparently isn't as important as everyone else's so I have to fuck up my schedule and risk missing Ash's health check in the afternoon for which I'd already changed my schedule once for. It's true, I can ask students to shuffle lesson times, but fuck, I don't want to have to! Anyway, that was the first communication fuck up, I got the vibe through Ryota's language that he was implying my job wasn't important and I was the one who had to take time off. He may have not meant that, but when it's all in Japanese I just assume the worst and get all flighty. This is where the vicious cycle of miscommunication begins, one party gets pissed and then it's all down hill from there.

The next step in our little tiff, after I'd agreed I'd change my morning lessons to go to the meeting was the questions from me on the fucking etiquette I was expected to live up to, for all I fucking know a Buddhist priest may be there to spit three times on our house money or some shit that I will be taken by surprise with. But Ryota assured me I'd just need to hand over the cash, possibly stamp a few forms and then get a big arse receipt, bow lots at everyone in the room and then return a home owner. This makes me nervous, forms and stamps and bowing, it's all so Japanese and something the native speaker would be so much better at, but when I say that, I'm trying to worm my sneaky gaijin arse out of it. OK, partly true, but I think it makes sense for the native speaker to do it. If we were in Australia I would have to deal with that shite, but we're not, so I guess I'm going to have to just suck it up and do it.

So basically Ryota got his panties in a twist because I was claiming to not understand what to do and started up on the "How long have you lived in Japan!?" but when I tried to explain to him that it didn't matter how long I live here, there is some shit that is just better he do, he wasn't having it. And fair play to him, I have lived here 7 years now, and plus, it will be kind of nice to add 'purchasing a house' on my list of things I can do in Japanese!

We have daily episodes of mis-communication too, like today, I mailed him "Sorry, no time to cook, get Hokka Ben tonight OK!" and his reply was: "I'm older. Nori special no rice?" and I was thinking, 'I'm older? Is that some cryptic message that I'm immature... I need to grow up..??' But then I just realised it meant "I'll order." Ahhh yes,  the joys of an international marriage, they never end. Lucky we produce cute kids who can grow up to be Japanese celebrities!

Well obviously the sluts are interesting!

God how many perverts am I going to attract with all the words like "Japanese high school sluts" in here... Oh well, 'Hi Perverts! Sorry, not what you're expecting I'm afraid!'

So last Sunday I mentioned that I was chaperoning Dog-fucker to the apple store to see about her broken microphone on her iphone. As I knew, the service was impeccable and they quickly gave her a new phone no questions asked. I think they know only having one apple store in Kansai means us Hyogo people are going to be already pissed when we get there so they don't even bother giving anyone the fuck around. So I was expecting Dog-fucker to piss me off but actually the day turned out well! Ryota drove us there in record time, Ash was well-behaved, got the phone in enough time to make Thai buffet lunch, pretty much the perfect day really.

If only the fucking little sluts hadn't ruined it for me. I don't really like Japanese hugh school girls to begin with, they're loud, annoying and childish. Well, apart from the ones I teach, they're alright... It depends on the school. Good private school girls are fine, but the coloured-hair, make-up wearing noisy girls opening their legs to most of the prefecture can be exremely annoying but I usually just avoid them unless they are up for some gaijin hunting when I have to engage.

So Sunday morning I went out on my bike with Ash for a 100 yen store mission. The big store is about a 25 minute bike ride away and we were leaving for the apple store so I had to make that ride 20 minutes and get in and out of there quickly to keep our schedule. I love schedules, hate breaking them, love making and keeping them. So nothing was getting in my way. Well, nothing except the gaggle of fucking high school girls with skirts so short I could see what they'd had for breakfast.

I'll try and explain the situation but it's a bit hard to imagine... So there's a big road, like a highway, with traffic whizzing along in both lanes. I was travelling along that road (on the footpath) and along that road are side streets. I crossed the intersections with pretty much no problem until I came to one side street where the group of sluts were gathered chatting loudly and (no shit) putting on make-up on their bikes waiting to cross the big bastard road. Now if they'd just lined up 2 by 2 there would have been room for bikes to cross the small road, but no, they were gathered so that they  were completely blocking the path. I was about to ring my bell when an old man coming the other way rang his. Once nicely, pause, twice nicely, pause, again twice. These fucking rude little bitches looked at him and ignored him, didn't move. What the fuck?! Respect your fucking elders much? Wow, I sound really old but it fucks me off now I'm old enough to be pissed off at high schoolers. The old man gave a look of desperation and stopped his bike but I wasn't stopping, my precious schedule was at stake. So I said in Japanese "Move!" and then in English "for fuck's sake!" just because there's nothing that feels quite as good in Japanese.

They swirled their primped little heads around, they'd been watching and ignoring the old man and hadn't noticed me coming but still didn't move, so I slammed on the brakes and again said "Move! What you hard of hearing or something?!" with "stupid cunts" tacked on in English, again,purely for my benefit.
They looked a bit bewildered and finally one girl moved about an inch back but still not enough for me to get past so I moved forward with my massive electric bicycle, slamming the front wheel into hers muttering obscenities in English until she moved. They were silent, exchanging giggles and glances until I was far enough away looking furiously at my watch to see how far behind I was on my schedule, but I did hear faint screeches of "Annoying foreigner go home!" when the little pussy bitches were sure I wouldn't come back. Honestly if I wasn't so rushed, I would have, they really fucking annoyed me or some reason. Probably because old men are usually really rude on bicycles here but the old man who was blocked like me was actually really nice, just rang his bell and didn't say anything. If he disrespected them then fair enough but he totally didn't, they just had no regard for him, or me, or anyone but themselves. Youngens today!

It's the first time it's actually happened to me but the in-laws assured me it's a growing trend in kids today in Japan. Sad really, in a society that is built on respect for elders.

OK read that over and my explaination was crap, so I drew a diagram!

Wow, it's really bad, probably doesn't help with anything at all except for showing how crap I am at drawing!
Anyway, point is, they really pissed me off, blocking the way is just bad manners to me, especially on purpose.
So have you ever been in this type of situation?? Am I an old fart for being pissed??

P.S. My spell check isn't working! Dear God please forgive me for the typos, it was in between lessons!

OK last one!!

Sorry, but the mystery car park is just intriguing me!

Today they all showed up again, and as I taught kiddy after kiddy they all stood there with their sticks. Sticks and no cars. No people. No circus. Nothing even close to exciting! I was tempted to go and ask them what the fuck was actually going on but I thought it might be a bit weird.

So this was them this arvo...



And then after all that, they started packing up their little tent to go home... It's all over. What the fuck?!



And THEN! Fucking comedy of errors, the truck got bogged and the dipshit driving the truck panicked and just kept getting himself bogged deeper by accelerating despite the wheels just spinning deeper into the mud. I know absolutely nothing about cars/off-road driving/getting bogged, but I know not to do that shit! I was quite amused from my little vantage point anyway!

OK, this will be the last post on the mystery car park, I promise. I have rants backed up about arguments with slutty AKB wannabe high school girls I had a run-in with last weekend. Will write properly soon!

Proving my guard man point...?

Sorry to keep banging on about this, but a perfect example of a waste of very good, hard-working guard men today outside my school.

They've made a car park, and when I saw the tent and sign going up I thought there was something big going on, there isn't much need for makeshift carparks around here, but I thought there might be some kind of meeting at the community centre next door or something, but this was the car park in the morning...

Can you see all those green blobs?? They are the men who were getting paid to wave red sticks around to direct the thousands of cars that were surely going to pile in, what with all those guard men and stuff. However, I taught lesson after lesson and the great stampede of cars was never to arrive, yet the men sat around twiddling their thumbs, re-arranging cones, and generally tried to look busy, which is pretty damn hard in a massive field with one car...

Then this afternoon, just to prove I wasn't lying, the green blobs were getting restless, talking to each other, about the fact they were getting paid to do absolutely nothing no doubt.

And just now... After a hard day's work, the green blobs have gone home. No cars. No massive event. I have NO idea what the point of today was. Maybe I'll eat my words and today was a trial run for the 50 million cars that will be packed in there tomorrow. This is the useless guard men I'm talking about. And it's not even their fault, someone has obviously told them to go there, at someone's expense. If it's not mine I don't really give a flying fuck, but if this was a city event then my tax yen is paying their salaries?! What a waste!

The saddest of them all...

There are many sad jobs in Japan: The over-worked salary-man going home at ridiculous hours only to dejectedly discover his wife and kids long asleep, the frustrated office lady who may just one day snap and pour boiling hot tea over her male colleagues. Not that many people could say they are ecstatic in their job, it's part of Japan's working culture, people are miserable, it shows how hard they are working after all. But I think the saddest job of all, is the guard man. I mean, security guards in most countries are seen as pretty lowly type jobs, but in Japan, the guard man has hit rock bottom. They are generally the same type, old, over 50, probably been retrenched just those few years too early and have no other option than to do the work. They can be bossy, probably bitter with the fact that they are the saddest form of human being within a 1km radius. And often they are totally unnecessary, people ignore them and depending on how big their big red flashing stick is, there's nothing they can do about being at the bottom of the food chain. No respect. No dignity. That, is the Japanese guard man.

But before we feel too sorry for them, we have to look at the up side, they get paid for doing a job that a sign could do. Fair enough it's minimum wage, and the Winter and Summer must be gruelling, but Spring and Autumn must be bearable?? OK then, there really aren't too many plus'...

I didn't think it was possible to have a level of sadness within the guard man ranks, but on the weekend I met him, the saddest guard man of all. I felt so bad for him I almost went back and told him not to give up on his life...
We pulled in to the popular cake shop on Sunday afternoon, the place wasn't that busy, but sad guard man was still there, waving his red stick for Ryota to go in the furthest entrance, Ryota, because he's an arsehole in general, ignored the guard man, and went in the closest one, pulling in to a space close to the door with such precision that it must have made the guard man feel even more insignificant. As we clambered out of the car with high hopes of yummy cake and hot coffee to warm us up, we spied two cats, to which of course Ashton and I had to pet and Ryota had to drag me away for fear I would adopt them and smuggle them into my bag. Now guard men rarely interact with customers unless it's direction related, but I noticed the guard man watching Ashton and I intently as we talked to the cats. I noticed, but just assumed it was because we were quite randomly talking to two stray cats in a busy car park, I paid no attention, nobody ever does.

After we'd spent enough time orgasming over fresh cream and apple pies with piping hot coffee, we once again braved the windy car park, rushing to bundle up inside our little car, when we were intercepted. I'd gone ahead of Ryota and suddenly the guard man was there, asking me what country I was from. "Ohh, ummm, Australia.." I'd hesitated because a guard man has never tried to make contact with me, he must have taken my hesitation as lack of language skills because he spoke quite slowly from that point, not that I minded, made a nice change! He then looked at Ashton and inquired his age and how cute he was, how lucky he was to speak 2 languages. Ash was looking under the cars for the cats so I felt a little awkward, where was the guard man going with this conversation? Was it OK to just excuse myself and go get my kid before he got run over?
He sensed my awkwardness because he felt the need to explain that his ex-wife was from New Zealand. I then understood why he'd taken such an interest, so I made small talk with him until a look of sheer pain and regret washed over his tired, wrinkled face and he said. "She left though... She went back, and I... don't know..."

I stood rooted to the spot, frantically searching for the words, in either language, to respond, but all I could come up with was the very convenient Japanese phrase of "Ohh, I see..." Ryota then came over and started bowing, wondering why I was engaging in conversation with a lowly guard man, and I said good bye, and for some reason I said thank you, it's a strange habit I've picked up from being in Japan, but I panicked and didn't know what else to say to him, his shoulders were flat, his red stick lay limp at his side as cars piled in to the car park. I really think seeing our family hit a nerve and he was genuinely sad.

So this may be the saddest man in Japan, he had a foreign wife and she took off and left him. Later, Ryota said he feels that will be his future, he'll quit his job but fail so will be forced to be a guard man and I'll up and leave him in disgust. Who knows, maybe that will happen. I told Ryota to at least stand tall in his failure, nobody likes a guard man to be even more pathetic than he has to be!

Influenza vs. A little cunting piece of paper.

I'm honestly not sure which one is worse.

So the dreaded influenza has been going around kindy, our friends, and our family, so it was really only a matter of time before my little germ vacuum sucked up enough lurgy to bring his immune system down. And down it came crashing. The worst was a 40 degree fever at it's peak, he was pretty much unconcious at that time, poor little fella. But after pumping him with meds and lots of cuddles, he was actually back to his rat bag self by the end of the scary fever day.

But this is not an update on the colour of my child's snot. It's a rant about Japan and it's love for little pieces of paper with little red stamps on them.

Ash got sick on Tuesday, and the Doc said 2 days after his fever had gone (Tuesday night) he was safe to go back to kindy. Nobody mentioned pieces of paper to me either. So we kept him at home on Tuesday, when I cancelled my classes, Wednesday, when I shuffled classes and switched between MIL, and Thursday, which is my quietest day and MIL was also home. We would have kept him home Friday, but every one of us had to work, me: 9am-8pm, MIL: 1pm-9pm, Dog-fucker (yes her once every two weeks job HAD to fall on the day I needed to use her): 9am-4pm. In desperate times we'd usually use BIL, but he's fucked off to Australia for a working holiday so that option was out too. The only one left was Grandma, who is still genki, but 85 this year, so not the ideal baby sitter. Ryota had called the kindy on Thursday morning and they hadn't mentioned anything about bits of fucking paper either so since Ash was within the safe bracket the Doc had told us, and we had no other option, I took Ash to kindy.

As soon as I got there I was ambushed at the door to see if I had the piece of paper saying that Ash wasn't going to infect every other rug rat who licked the same toy as him. I was instantly pissed, already late and just happened to get the most genki old lady teacher at the kindy, so it was hard to get angry at her. I told her that nobody could watch him today and all she could do was bow profusely and usher me further out the door, so I told her off for not telling Ryota we needed the fucking paper on the phone the day before and stormed out. Maybe everyone knows about the magical piece of paper, but this has taught me to just not tell the kindy next time Ash has an infectious disease.

So that led to the problem of how to get the paper signed before Monday when we would have the same problem. Friday was out for everyone, and I work Saturday, so I had to GASP! SHOCK HORROR! ask Ryota to take him to the Docs by themselves today. Honestly, it seems like a simple task, but Ryota is such a fucking drama queen when it comes to doing anything with Ash on his own it's ridiculous. And totally not worth the fuss he makes about it, I shit you not, he called me at least 4 times, "Where are his gloves??" "Where is the kindy bag??" "Should I take nappies??" "Can you come pick us up if he cries??"
Ummmm, fucking deal with it!!! Although I'm glad he took him, it wasn't as painful as he'd thought it was going to be, which may encourage him to do it more often...

So we have this fucking bit of paper, and if the kindy gives me shit on Monday, there will be blood spatters over someone's sickly pink kindy-teacher apron.

I'm taking Dog-fucker into Osaka tomorrow to the apple store to get her phone fixed tomorrow because she doesn't know where it is and is scared to go by herself, how the fuck does the foreign know more about this than she does?! I'm sure that it will take the whole day AND a fucking lunch, so lots of time for her to be racist/annoying/fuck a random passing dog/piss me off in general.

 Poor little bugger

 Fucking insanely hot

 At the hospital, still holding his lizard... weirdo.

In genkier times

Buying imposter

Just a warning: This will be in no way informative, totally refer to the Salaryman for his series on buying a house in Japan, I am buying a house, but it doesn't really count in my opinion...

So when I first got knocked up and Ryota refused to stay in my beloved Osaka, we were really in a bind as to where to live. We wanted near the in-laws, (easy baby palming) not too country, (errr, fuck that!) and not too city (his choice not mine, I'm totally a city girl). So when we were sitting at the in-laws' thinking about where we should live, we were actually staring at a vacant house directly across from the in-laws', until it dawned on someone that it was the perfect place for us to live, and may be cheaper, seeing as though the owners were previous neighbours of the in-laws. And the wheels were all set in motion, to my disgust, we were living 2 steps away from the in-laws, in a place that required more than walking to get to a station, and that had a rice field right down the road. I believe I got royally screwed on our living arrangement compromise, but for 30,000 yen a month and with Ryota's promises of new walls and floors ringing in my ears, I really couldn't refuse. As it's turned out, it has been a pretty good place to live, of course I'd love to put a few more metres between me and the dog-fucker, but it really is a small sacrifice for the amount of times I've dumped my darling son there, I don't even have to dump him anymore, I just tell him to bugger of and he toddles off on his own.

So at the start of this year, our 3 year contract was up for renting the house, the owners were happy for us to keep renting, but I threw the idea out that if the owners were willing, we might be interested in buying it, not because it's my dream house, but because I fucking despise paying rent, the waste just annoys me. And the owners were open to this idea and had the property valued. Now the house is worth shit. Less than shit, it's just in the way. Over 40 years old and already been through a big earthquake in Japan literally leaves you with zero value, so it was the land price only, and based on size, surrounding properties that had sold, and a bit of bullshit from the real estate agent, it was valued at about 6.5 million yen (About $68,000??) So cheap by most standards, but still not cheap enough for us, unless it was dirt cheap I didn't want it, I was afraid I'd get lazy and never re-build or buy another house if it was too expensive, so when this figure was put forward, MIL and I ummed and ahh-ed and sucked air through our teeth exclaiming almost to ourselves that it was 'a little more than we wanted to pay' as the very Japanese-style negotiations began. It was at this point, as we were all seated on our feet Japanese style drinking tea, that Ryota came home from work: Dirty, red faced and stinking of sweat. He hadn't known the negotiations were going on that day and said "It's fucking cold!" as he walked in to see the thin little real estate agent wide-eyed and staring at the big, dirty man spouting filthy English. After Ryota apologised for his less than classy entrance, I thought he might redeem himself, but he took one look at the offer that had been put forward and said "Are you kidding?? We'll pay 3 million, that's it!"

After all mine and MIL's efforts at being totally Japanese, the actual Japanese man bustles in and demands half the price. And fuck me, they agreed! So we will buy our house for 3.5 million yen with all legal fees included. Pretty damn good considering we were looking at paying about the same for a new car this year! We figure even if we go back to Australia, it can be a base, we'll have it paid off within 5 years so then we can either bugger off to Australia, or tear down the house and build a new one if we will stay in Japan forever. I think this is a good in between for us, I'd love a new house, but with property pretty much never gaining value in Japan, it would mean a life-sentence to stay in Japan, and honestly, even the thought of that suffocates me.

I took out our life savings today and Ryota is off to pay the deposit tonight, despite having a man-cold that he has self-diagnosed as the flu the big twat. I hope we've made the right decision!