Odds and ends

As we settle in, I find myself noting interesting (to me, anyway) differences between Japan and the US. I also realize there have been a number of posts that mentioned describing things in more detail in “another post.” So I figured I’d take an opportunity to tie up the loose ends and talk about random things for a bit.

Online shopping

While we’ve been able to acquire most of the things we enjoyed in our lives in Oakland, some things have been tougher to find than others. Some sites won’t ship to Japan, and others do, but we get hit with high shipping charges, import fees, or both. I shipped 2 monitors from New York for my home office and had to pay the delivery person $50 at the door for the import fee—something I wasn’t exactly expecting when I opened the door.

The two biggest options for shopping are Amazon Japan and Rakuten. The former is pretty good, but has come up short in a number of instances, or has offered us crappy off-brand variants of our choices. It’s also a bit difficult translating common English terms into Japanese terms. For example, a surge protector is generally called a “tap.”

Amazon’s pretty good, because its interface is familiar. Rakuten seems to have more on offer, but is generally horrible to navigate. You end up viewing what amounts to an ad for the seller of the item, scrolling one or two page lengths down the page to even find what item you’re looking for. To me, it doesn’t make sense, but based on the types of Japanese web sites I’ve used, overloading people with information seems… normal. Even expected. Not a fan.

I’ve also had the bizarre situation where shipping the exact item from America is cheaper than buying it in Japan. Case in point: SodaStream has an official website in Japan, and you can buy them at a variety of department stores… for $200. The equivalent item, shipped from Amazon US, including import and shipping fees, came out to about $120. This isn’t always the case, and there are reasons I choose Amazon Japan vs. US (e.g., shipping times), but I thought it was weird.

GU self checkout

Still shopping-related, Uniqlo has a store out here called “GU.” It’s sorta like Old Navy to Uniqlo’s Gap. We went there a couple of times when we were trying to load up on base layers for the upcoming winter and their self-checkout system blew my mind. The kiosks look mostly similar to those you’d find at Home Depot or a supermarket with one notable exception: Instead of doing your best impression of a checker and laboriously scanning every item, you simply open a cubby door under the screen, put in your shopping basket, and close the door. A few seconds later, the screen lists all of your items, having scanned them all via RFIDs in their tags. You can see a video of someone using it here. The future!

Cafes

Back home, I enjoyed going to Blue Bottle early on the weekends to pick up a pair of coffees, and maybe a waffle for Seri and me. Imagine my surprise finding out that cafes don’t generally open until 10 or 11am. That’s nearly noon! Not only that, but a lot of cafes out here allow smoking, so it can be tough to stick around and enjoy a cup without the residual smell. We visited a cafe near our house hoping to try their coffee (we’d been looking for a new supplier) and order lunch but the entire place was thick with smoke from just a couple of people.

Smoking

On that note, smoking is still a very regular thing out here. Sometimes restaurants will have dedicated smoking sections or rooms, but when it comes to yakitori or other nightlife-oriented shops, there’s generally going to be smoke in the air. We’ve been to sushi restaurants in the past that allowed smoking, and it tended to detract from the taste of the food, sadly. Just a part of life over here. Vaping and other hybrid e-cigarette manufacturers like IQOS which produce less or no smoke are gaining in popularity, but people still love their traditional cigarettes.

Gas stations

Gas stations out here are almost all full-service. Maybe they all are, I’m not sure. I’ve never seen a self-service station. The attendants are almost always cheerful and speedy. Some stations also provide rags you can use to wipe down the interior of your car. Dusting your dashboard, doors, and console every time you fill up seems like a lot more love than most cars in the US get. And since you’re not filling up, it’s not like you’re really doing much else anyhow. Maybe Candy Crush, or reading this blog, who knows.

Waste

There’s a ton of waste over here. Store clerks like bagging everything, sometimes individually wrapping items before putting another bag around them. The tradeoff is that they generally do a very good job of wrapping things, so it’s hard to hate it, until you consider trash day. See, out here, there are 4 different trash days. In different municipalities this is different, but in Hakodate, we have these four categories:

• Burnables: Your basic trash. Food scraps, paper, cardboard, etc. They pick this up on Tuesdays and Fridays, since it’s the most common form of trash.
• Unburnables: Metal, mostly. There isn’t much of this, unless you use a bunch of butane canisters for portable stoves. This gets collected every second Wednesday.
• Plastics: This is probably the most annoying category. When you buy meat, the styrofoam tray needs to be put in here. But not before it’s washed. The same goes for any kind of plastic drink container. While the container itself goes in yet another bin, the wrapper has to be removed from the container and put in this bin. It’s an annoying process that you have to do too often. Fortunately, this gets picked up weekly so it doesn’t get too out of hand.
• PET, aluminum, and glass: The last category is basically for drink bottles, cans, and any other plastic liquid container. You’re supposed to rinse the bottles before you put them in here, too, which can get tedious. This gets picked up on the alternate Wednesday from the unburnables.

All told, it’s a lot to consider versus just “trash day” in Oakland. A couple of things I enjoy, though, are that there are dedicated cages into which we put our trash on the street. There’s no hassle of lugging big bins into and out of the yard; you just dump your trash in your bin on the street and it gets taken away. Also, while the concept of a bulky pickup doesn’t really exist, you can go to the local convenience store and pay $0.80 to get a sticker for a larger item. You put the sticker on the item and place it next to the bins and poof, no more piece of furniture or rug or whatever. Cheap and easy!

It’s hard to think about at times, though. A few weeks ago, we were watching Japanese TV and a politician tried to lobby for getting rid of the exorbitant amount of paper used by the government. Though his tactics were a bit extreme—he literally ripped a stack of paper from the hands of a colleague in protest—it highlighted the fact that things change extremely slowly over here, and bureaucracy is king. The government uses paper because they’ve always used paper, and why change what works? The environment? Pfft. I had a woman at the ANA airline gate scan the boarding pass QR code on my phone, print a receipt that… I boarded?… and hand it to me. Thanks. I guess I’ll just throw this away.

One related downside of the trash system is the lack catch-all paper recycling: everything paper-related in the “burnables” bin just gets… burned. What’s more, if you actually manage to go to a recycling center, they’ll only accept cardboard, not paper. Help me help you, Japan.

Medical care

Japan has a national healthcare system. You pay a monthly fee based on your income, and medical expenses are pretty cheap. Seri has insurance as a citizen, but I’m still working on getting mine. Once I become a foreign resident, I’ll be able to apply.

A couple of months ago, I got a stye in my eye. I get them sometimes and they’re annoying, but there was a bump on my upper eyelid so I wanted to get it checked out. Fortunately it ended up being nothing to worry about, but I wanted to get it checked anyway. The first thing I noticed when we got to the eye clinic is that they make you take off your shoes, and give you slippers in return. When my name was called, to my surprise, the doctor spoke English with a British accent. Maybe he studied abroad? He gave me a prescription for some eye drops, antibiotics, and ointment, and sent me on my way.

Now, remember that I have no insurance, and effectively did a drop-in visit to a specialist. I braced for the worst, but the bill (including meds) was… about $70. I’ve gone to a couple of follow-up appointments to refill prescriptions and check on it, and the bills have been about $30 each time. I expect the charges to be even cheaper once I get my insurance card. What a country!

So there you go. Lots of little odds and ends since we’ve been here. There are myriad more, and I’m hoping to talk more about them as I think of them or discover them. Sorry for the lack of photos this time around, but there will be more next time. Hope you’re all doing well!