My new life in Japan – Adapting to country life

Early Mornings

During the first few months of my new life in Japan, they were constructing a building opposite my apartment block. However, it wasn’t the sound of hammering or heavy vehicles moving around that would wake me up. It was the early morning calisthenics. Music would be played on a loud speaker and all the workers would take part in a stretching routine, along with counting and numerous enthusiastic grunts and shouts. The first time it happened, I had no idea that this was a common start to the day for many Japanese workers across the country.

The importance of greetings

One day I was called into the town hall by my supervisor. I was seated and told that some local residents had called in to complain about me. Apparently I wasn’t greeting people in the street when I ran into them.

I am from the UK, where culturally we don’t tend to talk to strangers unless there is a specific circumstance that warrants it. These would be things like complaining about the weather or a late train or apologizing for something or other.. Other common examples would be meeting a fellow dog walker or hiker, or being in a pub. You would never walk in my hometown and say hello to random people you pass on the street. Moreover, I had even been taught to avoid contact with strangers as a single female. Teachers told us to walk on the side of the road that faced oncoming traffic. They instructed us to keep our heads high and walk at a brisk pace in order to exude confidence. In addition, if anyone made us feel uncomfortable, we should cross the road and avoid them as far as possible.

That wasn’t the case in Hino though. From now on I was instructed to greet without fail every single person I ran into.

Disposing of trash

In order to dispose of trash, you had to buy special trash bags from the supermarket. There were different ones for burnable, recyclable and non-burnable rubbish. It was all quite complicated to be honest. I also had to write my name on my trash bags and woe betide me if it was discovered I had thrown something out in the wrong bag on the wrong day! Yes, people actually zealously checked.

One time I went away on a two week trip to Vietnam. I left the day before trash collecting day. So, rather than leave the small amount of rubbish I had in my apartment to rot for two weeks, or risk throwing my trash out too early and get in trouble for that, I made the decision to take it with me to the station and throw it out there. It was about half a carrier bag’s worth of rubbish.

After my trip, I was once again called into the town hall. The lady who worked in the kiosk at the station had called to complain about me. I was instructed that under no circumstances was I ever to throw my rubbish away at the station again. It has been a running joke at the local eatery I frequented ever since.

My welcome party

A couple of weeks after I arrived I was given an official welcome party which the town mayor also attended. I was seated next to him at the head of the table. He didn’t speak any English and I barely spoke Japanese. With not much else to bond us we started knocking back the beers.

After a while a dish was brought out and I was instructed to try some of it by the mayor himself. I took one look at it and my stomach lurched. It was some kind of raw meat, dripping in blood. I have never really been a big meat eater and am one of those Brits who likes to burn things to a crisp at barbecues. So I initially refused. Unfortunately the mayor was very insistent.

The English teacher cheerfully informed me it was wild boar. Can’t say that did an awful lot to make it seem more palatable. However, I was intensely conscious of my role there as some kind of young ambassador for my country. I decided to ‘take one for the team’ so to speak. I downed what was left in my beer glass and nervously took the smallest morsel I could possibly pick out with my chopsticks and brought it to my mouth.

How was it? Well, it’s not something I would choose again, let’s put it like that. At least the mayor seemed pleased though.

Eating out

My main goal for coming to Japan was to learn Japanese. Therefore, it made sense to me to go out as much as possible. There is only so much you can learn sitting alone in an apartment. Since I was quite shy and self-conscious about standing out like a sore thumb, eating out for me also involved copious amounts of alcohol.

I had no idea how to read anything really at first. I would just allow the staff to pick something for me. In bigger cities in Japan, menus often have pictures and so it’s often fairly easy to choose something to eat. However, that was not the case in Hino. I learned to speak much faster than I learned to read, so it was much simpler to just say something like, can I have a chicken dish today and cross my fingers for something edible.

Meeting people

The good thing about eating out alone was that people would often come up and talk to me. Most times I would end up being invited over to a group’s table or getting drinks or dishes bought for me at the counter. I was frequently invited to karaoke afterwards too. It was an excellent way to learn the language. I used to carry around a little notebook and write down new words as I encountered them. I would also use it to draw in when trying to communicate with people, especially during the first year.

By the time I was in my third year I found my niche with a group of local people, many of whom, like me, hadn’t actually been born and raised in Hino. Our main commonality was that we all enjoyed drinking. We would talk about every topic under the sun, often coming up with solutions to the world’s problems in the process. Being in my early twenties, I was the youngest there by far, but age didn’t matter. They became good friends and we still meet up now when I go back to visit.

Shopping

I remember the first time I went to the supermarket alone. It took me over an hour to get one carrier bag’s worth of shopping. Many things are packaged completely differently than they are back home, so it took a while to work out what was what. I remember buying a lovely looking pack of what I thought was salad of some sort, only to discover on tasting it that it was pickles.

Back home, my family would often do a weekly shop. Now, however, I found myself going to to the supermarket almost daily to get what I needed. The shopping carts were small, plus I had to carry everything home on my bike. There wasn’t an awful lot of variety either. However, I had school lunches and I usually ate out in the evening at least four times a week, so it wasn’t a huge deal.

Bugs

I quickly learned that country living meant bugs were just a fact of life. I cannot even begin to describe to you the sheer volume of insects that would assemble around street lamps or vending machines in the middle of summer.

One of the worst, even more so than the obvious things like cockroaches, were the stink bugs. In autumn and winter they would flock indoors and I’d sometimes be faced with removing several daily from my apartment. The way they are dealt with in Hino, is you wrap them up in masking (brown) tape and then throw them away. Squishing these critters is not advisable unless you are a fan of horrible smells being ingrained into your tatami mats.

I became an expert. The trick is to get the sticky plastic looking tape that rips easily without scissors and gently wrap them up, before they can panic and release their wrath. The tape seals them and their aroma perfectly inside. It was quite common to see sticky brown tape left out for this purpose in most places I went.

Just when you thought the stink bugs were bad…

I was sleeping peacefully one morning, when I felt a tickle on my arm, inside my futon. At first I was only barely aware of it, but as I became more alert it became a definite unpleasant sensation. Then I saw it! A mukade, a Japanese centipede. Panicked I thrust out my arm and it flew off and hit the wall. Relieved I had avoided a bite from the infamous poisonous creature, my next task was then to catch it and get rid of it, for I doubted I would ever sleep again knowing that thing was loose in the room.

It was fast. Seeing no option, I squatted at it with something or other and squished it to death. I don’t highly recommend this approach, for they aren’t small and they do create considerable mess.

Later when recounting my near miss to my local friends, I got instructions on how to deal with them Hino-style: Grab them with cooking chopsticks and burn them on the naked flame of a gas stove.

Winter

Being near the coast of the Sea of Japan and inland nestled amongst mountains at the back of Daisen, Hino gets a fair amount of snow. There is no central heating like back home in England, (although I hear they have it up in Hokkaido). As soon as the evenings started getting cooler, I discovered the kerosene heater. I had to buy fuel for this from the local garage, which luckily did home deliveries.

The heaters are quite effective at heating up the room, but the drawback is they spew out poisonous fumes. Therefore you have to keep your home well ventilated. It’s also advisable to switch them off while sleeping. One very cool function they have is that they will automatically switch off in the case of an earthquake, or simply being knocked over. Since they are a huge fire risk in such cases, that makes a lot of sense.

Thanks to the thin walls and lack of double glazing or insulation, I would wake to temperatures no different to those outside. In fact, I would argue that my apartment might have been colder. I would set my alarm a good twenty minutes before I needed to move and gingerly reach out and switch on the heater to warm the place up before leaving my futon.

Another problem with these heaters is they only heat one room at a time. I ended up buying a second one for the bath and utility area so I wouldn’t freeze when coming out of the shower and getting dressed. I would literally stand over it, legs apart as I changed into my clothes. Temperatures in winter in Hino were often well below freezing.

Not all bad

Despite the challenges, as I said in my first post on my new life in Japan I fell in love with my new home. It was a breathtakingly beautiful area, with some of the kindest most genuine people I have ever met in my life. I feel truly blessed and lucky to have been placed in Hino. I know I will never forget this place, as long as I live.