Room Without a View

One of the few trees outside our apartment on one of the few days that it snows.

It's snowing today in Tokyo. I know what you're thinking... 'snow, big deal.' Actually, I agree. Having grown up in the northeast, where it wasn't uncommon for us to experience copious amounts of snow, the few centimeters Tokyo sees every few years doesn't fill me with delight.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that, after living here for nearly 18 years, some of the shine of seeing snow falling has been revived. In fact, I might even be compelled to go out and walk around for a few minutes in it, take a few pictures, and attempt to wax poetic about the clean, quiet beauty of snow. Actually, that last part is a lie. I don't think I ever do anything poetic.

As some of my more astute readers may have noticed, my posting has become more erratic over the last several days after having been fairly steady for well over a month. This isn't because I have nothing to say but rather because I have no time or energy to say anything. This week, I'm working the equivalent of a full-time schedule (about 36 hours) between telephone testing and teaching privately. This requires me to remain tethered to the phone and remain in the apartment from about 10:00-8:00 for the better part of the work week to either answer the incessantly ringing phone or speak with the students who show up at the door. I spend the time between calls dashing around trying to clean and tidy up the apartment in preparation for the private lessons. It's pretty hectic.

There's no going "over the wall".

Working from home is largely a blessing because I save about an hour and a half a day in commuting time compared to when I worked in an office (though I make a fraction of my former income), but, on days like today, where something atypical is happening and I'm shackled to my living room, it can feel a bit confining. It doesn't help that the view from my living room is relatively bleak and uninteresting. In fact, the wall that separates our apartment building from the house next door gives one a bit of a felling of being incarcerated. I'm sure though that it's a pretty typical view for anyone living in Tokyo on the first or second floor of buildings.

Getting back to the snow though, if you ask Japanese folks who were born and raised in Tokyo if it snows in winter, they always say that it does. Technically, this is correct, but only in that every few years, there appear to be a few days in which a bit of snow falls.

Memories of how often and how much falls appear to be embellished at times. One of my students is 20 years old. That means that I have lived here for all but the first 2 or 3 years of her life and she has lived in an area not too far from me. She told me that it used to snow in Tokyo more when she was a child and she remembers being able to make snowmen. I was here "when (she) was a child" and I can't recall more than one year in which the conditions she mentions occurred and I'm pretty sure that she couldn't have been more than 5 years old at that time. I figure one of us has an altered memory of the way things have been, though I can't say with any certainty that it isn't me. ;-)

At the End of the Tunnel

As the end of August approaches each year, I start thinking that hope that the un-ending muggy and hot weather is at hand. More often than not, relief does not arrive until October but there have been years when the horribleness which is the Japanese summer ends after the first week in September.

I've been checking my weather widget regularly to see what lies ahead. I'm afraid that, more often than not, it's simply wrong. It often predicts rain and no rain comes. I have to give it some credit though. When it's already raining, it does say that there will be rain today.

Anyway, if the widget is to be believed, extended periods of coolness may be right around the corner. After nearly 5 months without an appreciably cool and crisp day, I can't wait.

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On an absolutely unrelated side note, and I mention this here for a bookmark in in my personal history, my successor at my former company unceremoniously quit today. He did not give notice and left my former boss holding the bag on the scheduling and paperwork. This isn't the same as a school where schedules are set a few weeks ahead. At my company, the schedules are set 3 months ahead for hundreds of people so it's no small deal. The work is also relatively complex and training takes awhile before someone can take over.

The only reason this fellow gave was that he just 'couldn't do it anymore'. The job isn't that hard but it is repetitive. The company has kept him on despite angry, inappropriate and foul-mouthed interactions with co-workers, cutting out of work early, goofing off rather visibly during working hours and 3 weeks of his being completely incommunicado while he was in prison. The thanks he gives them is that he bugs out without notice. For me, this means more freelance work though it's hard to say how much right now. The sad thing is that he'll be paid in full up to the moment of his departure and my boss is left scrambling to fill the spot before he departs for Australia on October 7 for a long-planned holiday.

The only "bright" side is that, while in the past my former company has gotten lackluster responses to their job ads, the decaying Nova situation (closing branches and fears that they will go bankrupt initiating a mass ship-jumping at the schools) means they'll probably get a lot of takers. The only question is whether or not those takers will be sincere about doing the job well or simply taking the work as a stop-gap between Nova and their next job.

They Scream for Ice Cream

It's been in the mid to high 90's for the past week or so in Tokyo. I guess this is par for the course in August but it never ceases to be an uncomfortable and frustrating experience, particularly when it never cools down at night but remains hot around the clock. This is the sort of weather which causes problems the likes of which I never experienced back home in the summer because things worked differently.

For one thing, water comes out of the tap warm. In fact, it is so warm that washing lettuce in it for salad produces a warm, limp salad unless you toss the leaves back into the fridge to get them cold again. It also causes showers to be almost unbearably hot at the lowest heat setting because the water is entering the heating unit at a warm temperature. Unfortunately, the water isn't quite warm enough to comfortably shower without heating so your options are a painfully cold or a painfully hot shower. Usually I need to sit under the air conditioner at the lowest setting for about 20 minutes to cool down when I take the time to wash my hair as that much exposure to such hot water warms me so much.

This is the sort of weather in which people flock to ice cream shops. In our area, there's only one, Baskin Robbins (known in Japan as "31"). My husband and I go there about once a month in the summer and once every several months during other seasons. The ice cream is very good compared to other offerings in Japan but quite pricey. Most Japanese ice cream tends to be "ice milk" and made with relatively cheap ingredients. Some of it can be pretty good (Morinaga makes a mean vanilla ice cream sandwich but it's hard to find) but, in general, it's rather disappointing though I can't honestly claim to be a Japanese ice cream connoisseur.


A few days ago, my husband was in the mood to take a little sojourn to Baskin Robbins so we hopped on our bikes and braved the sweltering heat. The counter at Baskin Robbins had a parade of little snowmen with surfboards pasted all over it as part of a new promotion for "King plus Kids" scoops. This is a large scoop sold with a much smaller scoop on top of it. I don't believe the point of this is to gobble down copious amounts of ice cream but rather to allow one to enjoy their favorite ice cream in a large scoop size and to sample another flavor in a much smaller size.

If you look at the flavors on the brochure I've scanned in (click to see a legible large size), you can see a lot of the usual flavors from the U.S. have made the transition to Japan but there are some odd ones that you probably won't find back home like matcha (green tea), "musk melon" (cantaloupe) and dainagon azuki (chock full of sweetened red beans). I also would be surprised to find things like "31 love" (lime-colored mint ice cream with lemon marshmallows) and "sweet mariage" (sic) (Chardonnay ice cream with apricot and cherry). I also wonder if the "mango coconapple" is a temporary addition meant to pander to the current mango consumption fad making the rounds in Japan.

Anyway, we picked up a pint each of "chopped chocolate" and caramel ribbon but it was a less than pleasant experience because Baskin Robbins is a magnet for screaming children. It was sufficiently unpleasant that we preferred the 95 degree heat outside to the cool cacophony on the inside while we waited for them to prepare our pints. If you haven't been to Baskin Robbins, they laboriously pack the cartons and weigh them meticulously and that can take a bit of time. I had to wonder if the children carried on so much because of ice cream induced excitement or because high volume clamoring is associated with getting what they want from reluctant parents.

Typhoon-wear

A typhoon has bled over into Tokyo bringing cooler air and constant rain. It's not a really bad typhoon, mind you. The worst one I've ever experienced was the sort that inverted umbrellas and dangerously blows around signs. This is far from one of those.

When I worked in Nishi-Shinjuku, I worked near some of the more well-known skyscrapers including the Nomura Building and it was there that witnessed one of the scariest typhoon-related things I ever saw. The Nomura Building has a metal sculpture near it which is hard to explain the appearance of and impossible to find a picture of on-line (and I don't happen to have one of my own). The best I can say is that it is a couple of huge, thick metal bars (about 2 stories high) which are joined together at one point and rotate when the wind blows.

Under normal circumstances, they may gently roll around. When there's a big typhoon, the bars whip around with sufficient speed and force to make you think there's a serious danger of one twisting off and crushing cars, people, and structures. It's like an ill-placed, artistically-designed windmill. We walked past it to take a co-worker to a restaurant on her last day of work which happened to be a day with a strong typhoon and I was very nervous being anywhere in the vicinity of that thing.

Early on in my employment, I used to ride a bike to work most days. This was before Nishi-Shinjuku Marunouchi line station was built and I was having severe back problems such that I couldn't make the walk from Shinjuku station to my office (about 15 minutes). Riding a bicycle took between 30-40 minutes (one way) which was only slightly longer than taking the train. This offered me both the benefit of sparing my back and of allowing me to keep my monthly train allowance in my pocket rather than spending it on a train pass. For those who don't know, almost all Japanese employers reimburse their employees for public transportation costs to and from their offices. This was also an efficient way of getting some exercise everyday since it used time normally spent standing on the train to good advantage.

There were, of course, disadvantages. For one, there is an absolutely epic pair of hills culminating in a deep valley just before entering Nishi-Shinjuku so you get to go up one coming and going. If you want to bike up it, you have to have extremely strong muscles (and knees) or you have to work up a head of steam coming down the first one to give you momentum to get up the other. This being Tokyo, that is not something one can do safely or well. The sidewalks are crammed with people who will do anything to avoid walking in a straight line or look where they are going. It is essential if one is a pedestrian in Tokyo that one take all necessary precautions to avoid awareness of one's surroundings at all times.

Given the sidewalk conditions, you can't really go barreling down one huge hill to get momentum to go up the next unless you don't mind crippling or maiming meandering pedestrians along the way. Also, ultimately, if you get up a good head of steam and are making great progress up the hill, someone will dreamily zig-zag in front of you forcing you to stop dead so there's no point in even getting your hopes up. Usually, I'd pedal 1/3-2/3 of the way up and walk the bike the rest of the way.

Beyond the shooting gallery experience of biking to work, the main downfall was the weather. During my first summer of riding in, the summer was excessively long and brutally hot with temperatures reading 100 degrees or more. Inevitably, there were also rainy days and typhoons. To cope with this, I shopped around for rain gear. Most Japanese people wear a suit with pants and a jacket. In fact, my company had such a suit which the office girls donned to ride the company bicycle to the post office on rainy days. It was a hideous thing that they all hated because it was ancient, over-sized (it was clearly designed for men) and dirty yellow.

My boss used to ride a scooter to work on Saturdays back then and he also wore one of these. He told me that such suits were hot and time-consuming to put on so I didn't want to go that route. I found the Moschino rain poncho pictured above at Odakyu department store many years ago. It served me very well because it is long enough to cover my legs but the fact that it's open at the bottom means you don't get really hot in it. One can also put it on very quickly. The only problem is that it has an inane smiley face on the back. I guess that it might send the message that it may be raining but I can still smile.

Eventually, I had to give up riding my bike to work because my knees started to trouble me. Also, a station opened up within 4 minutes of my office after several years so I could handle the shorter walk. My old poncho still sees some use though on those rare days when there's a typhoon and I have to go out somewhere on the bike (like today). My husband even wears it on occasion when he's in a situation where struggling to ride and carry an umbrella at the same time is out of the question. Given the choice of looking goofy or staying dry, we'll both opt for being dry.

Oppression

I'm getting tired of this thing coming up looking like a near-win on a slot machine.

There's a typhoon in the air and the air is oppressively humid today. If you could see the water molecules hanging in the air, the world around you would be a nearly opaque cube and you'd be the fly stuck in the middle. When the weather is like this, it feels like the gravity has been turned up and you just don't want to move. It's depressingly gray and it causes one to have the tendency to be crabby for no explicable reason.

After days of rain predictions and holding back on washing clothes, I had to do some laundry and hang it inside today but it's not getting any drier. In fact, the carpet in the room that it's hanging in actually feels moist when I step on it. It is as if the added moisture released from the clothing has joined forces with the ambient humidity and actually caused it to finely rain on the floor. The room also has the type of smell you associate with a laundromat...as if the smell of clean but wet clothes being dried has permeated the air for so long that the scent has penetrated every wall and floor.

One of my students is off to Syria for a few weeks and he told me that he'd rather be there in dry over 100-degree heat than here in 80-degree weather because the moisture soup makes it incredibly uncomfortable here. This is a student who hates hot weather and comes to every lesson dripping with sweat. You know it's got to be bad when someone who loves the cold weather would rather be 20 degrees hotter and dry than endure this humidity.

I know they're an environmental scourge but I'm immensely grateful for air conditioning when it gets like this.

Middle-Aged Man Winter

If places that have a proper winter are visited by "old man winter", Tokyo is visited by the much less crotchety and severe "middle-aged man winter." Winter here is relatively mild and it also came very late this year. It usually snows no more than 4 days per season, and sometimes not at all. The high temperatures tend to run between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the lows between 30 and 40. It stayed comfortable without the use of heating up until about this week when the temperatures finally started to fall regularly into the low 60's.

Each year, my husband and I do our best to endure the temperature changes for as long as possible before kicking in with the cooling and heating. In the winter, this is far easier than in the summer for a variety of reasons. For starters, my husband and I are both more sensitive to heat than to cold. In my case, this makes sense since I grew up in the northeastern part of the U.S. where winter is long, dangerous and freezing cold. My husband is just one of those people who heats up fast and stays hot.

Beyond that though, it's far easier to dress to warm oneself up than to strip off enough to cool down. There's only so much you can take off but it's easy to pile on layers of clothes to stay warm, especially when the temperatures are no worse than those you get in Tokyo. I usually get by for as long as possible with a sweater and a blanket for my legs when I'm at the computer. This pretty much sees me through anything down to about 60-62 degrees, particularly if I make an effort to get up and do fairly physically demanding housework at regular intervals.

Having grown up in Pennsylvania where the winters require you to save up enough during the rest of the year so you can afford to pay for heating oil during the winter, I'm used to the idea of setting the thermostat low and putting up with the cold as much as possible. In my family's case, they also have adapted by using a wood burning stove to diminish the amount of expensive fuel they need every winter. It's a bonus that growing up conditioned not to use heat when you can avoid it spares the environment as well as reduces the gas bill.

Unfortunately, it became clear to me this week as I became uncomfortably cold while teaching lessons (in which I can neither use a blanket nor get up and walk around to kick up my metabolism) that I was going to have to give in and drag out our heater for the sake of my students if nothing else. The heater we use was actually purchased second-hand from my brother-in-law who recently blogged about his purchase of a new heater. It's my guess that he wouldn't need one now if we hadn't bought his venerable gas heater when he had to give it up over a decade ago when he left Japan to return to the U.S. for his Masters degree.

While this heater is quite effective, it's at least somewhat dangerous when you have to place it in areas which require you to step over it to get to other rooms. The wire guard on the front of it is bent up a bit because I once fell backwards on it when I was pulling laundry (that was hung on the balcony to dry) into the apartment and forgot it was there. As I backed into the bedroom with a huge pile of clothes in my arms, I tripped over it and landed with my leg firmly on top of it. Fortunately, it was on at a half intensity setting so the flame wasn't very high and I didn't get burned. I decided from then on never to retrieve anything from the balcony with the heater on.

Having rearranged the furniture since that incident, the heater is no longer in a place where one is likely to fall over it but it is incredibly close to the bed where there is a danger of blankets falling on it while one is sleeping. That means we can never leave it on at night but that's okay since it just encourages us to snuggle under the blankets for warmth at night.

Update: With what I felt was a great deal of kind consideration for my well-being, Roy mentioned in the comments section that old gas heaters may be at risk for leaking toxic gasses so I contacted Tokyo Gas about checking our heater. I was told that ours isn't really old enough to be a problem and that they could come and check anyway for 2,000 yen but it probably wasn't necessary unless we smelled something wrong or we started having headaches when we used it. Phew!

Japan Has 4 Seasons

Any time the topic of the weather is initially broached with students, they will earnestly tell you "Japan has 4 seasons." They tell you this as if this is a unique and wondrous situation which you, wherever you happen to have come from, probably have not experienced.

I'm puzzled as to where this misperception that Japan is a rare example of a country with 4 distinct seasonal patterns comes from for a couple of reasons. First of all, Japan is a small country but it's rather long and the weather is not uniformly similar from the north to the south. Hokkaido has rather different weather than Tokyo or Hiroshima so you can't really talk about the weather of Japan as if it were all the same.

Where I grew up (Pennsylvania), we actually did have 4 distinct weather patterns in each season. In fact, we had the kind of seasonal weather that you see illustrated on Christmas tins, greeting cards, and books to give one a feel for each season. Winter is cold and snowy. Spring is warm, rainy at times, and sees flowers open up. Summer is hot. Autumn is cool, windy and full of colorful leaves. That's 4 distinct seasons.

If Tokyo has 4 seasons, they are fall, rainy season, summer, and typhoon season. The winter is incredibly mild and usually sees no more than 4 days of small amounts of snow, if that. The summer is very long and usually uncomfortably humid. Spring and fall, if you gauge them by the weather and not the calendar, last about 2 weeks each. Right now, we're in the throes of typhoon season.

During this time, the weather changes rather dramatically as the typhoons pull either hot or cold air into the area. Today is 7 degrees warmer than yesterday. Last week during the previous typhoon, the weather dropped about 10 degrees when a typhoon blew in.

One thing we see happen as a result of the intense humidity during the rainy season and typhoon seasons is the paper on the doors between the living room and bedroom ripples and bubbles up from the humidity (normally, the paper is smooth). The picture at the top shows the effect. I'm pretty sure that this probably isn't good for (cheap) building materials and contributes to some of the general deterioration you see after a short time in an apartment.