Report from Greater Tokyo

I'm about to enter my career as a financial planner. Now, if you have 200,000 yen or more (about GBP 1000, or USD 1900) that you'd like me to invest for you, step right this way... Of course, if you'd rather wait to see how good I am, that's fine too.

The archives should be working again. For some reason, the xml upload was over-writing the archives with an xml version of the archive, one that wasn't really machine-readable.

Update on the job hunt...

The Nerima eikaiwa job fell through. Which is just as well, as I didn't really want it anyway. they barely paid enough to live in that area. And to be fair, it is a really nice area. Should I stick around in Tokyo, I think I'll move there. It being the setting for the manga that got me interested in Japan in the first place has nothing to do with it. I like that neighbourhood, that's all.

There's a couple of others I wouldn't mind doing, but unfortunately they haven't got back to me yet. They include an eikaiwa job on a small island in the middle of the ocean a quarter of the way out towards Taiwan, and an admin job at a university in the middle of the mainland.

I'm contemplating buying a franchise with a certain language school, but I have heard some bad rumours about them, so I'm going to have to ask them about that. It seems a little uncertain.

And the big one right now is a financial planner in Shinjuku, the heart of Tokyo. In silly terms, the job involves lots of silly little numbers, playing around with an almost game-like interface on the Internet, using other peoples' money (that neither I nor they really have), to buy and sell more money. Described like that, it sounds really dodgy, but the numbers add up.

This finance job looks about as hard as telling the time (okay, trivially harder), has potential for ridiculous levels of income, keeps me not only in Japan, but forces me to be in the very heart of Tokyo social life, and yet I'm not sure if I want it.

Huh?

Yes. it is public dithering time. Despite the fact that this job on paper is silly money, there is also the fact that, unlike teaching or social work or even an admin job in a company that repairs train tracks, there is no reasonable way I can pretend my work gives something to the community. And that to me is kind of important. On the other hand, I could imagine that my few years of teaching has given enough back to the general community, and it is high time to start doing work for me rather than for others.

More news as it happens... from the Vacillator!

Also in the news, unless some other leads start looking up, I may be about to begin my career as a big city investor and financial advisor in the foreign exchange market. Oh dear.

We just had five earthquakes in a row! All around 6 on the Richter scale, within a 2 hour period. The first couple I was on a train and didn't notice, and wouldn't have if the train hadn't stopped moving for a while (standard safety precaution). The last couple, I was sitting at home hiding next to (NOT under) my desk.

Some of you may know I'm in the job market right now, thanks to an early Christmas present from my present employer. So I've been firing off my CV to anyone and anything I am vaguely qualified for.

I just got a reply from one that wants to interview me. So I re-read the advert. It was one of those that I didn't really consider anything more than a long shot, yet they seem interested enough to at least interview. And one line got me hyper ventilating. The pay is slightly under twice anything I have ever had before. Wish me luck on this one guys.

Oh, and the interview last Friday in Tokyo was a bit of a washout. Nerima is a lovely area, and also coincidentally the area that drew me to Japan in the first place (it is the setting for a certain manga). But the job itself is low pay, morning and evening shifts, and they won't even act as a guarantor when searching for an apartment, which is as good as saying that I don't have a regular income.

The average delay on the Toukaidou Shinkansen line is 10 seconds.

Network Southeast, shortly after the asset-stripping sale of British Rail, claimed in large letters that - give or take a percentage point or two - over 90% of their trains arrived on time. In this context, "on time" means less than ten minutes late, and that the figures excluded "exceptional" delays, such as those due to the weather!

The student has become the master.

Japanese people delight in saying certain things about Japan that foreigners are supposed to find interesting. Japanese people have short tongues and long intestines (or is it long tongues and short intestines?) Japan has four seasons. Japanese people love nature. Yawn. Boring. We don't care.

But today I learnt something interesting. As every cow and chicken throughout the land knows, Japanese books are written back to front from a Western point of view. That is an interesting point. It's also a point of difference that no one in Japan finds interesting at all. And even more interesting still, Japanese has no word to describe this difference.

The tail is also white, as they say in Japan.

This is a story about the part of Japan that I had always wanted to find while here, but sadly haven't, and probably never will. It isn't my own story.

I had planned to go to an Oktoberfest party at a microbrewery in my ken, but an oncoming typhoon put that plan to rest, so I opted for my alternate plan which was to meet a girl I met in a bar last week a bar of her choosing. It turned out to be the bar where she works and she was on shift. Feeling dejected, I left and ambled down the street to my usual haunts. A quick peek in the door revealed what I suspected but had hoped to avoid, the usual suspects in their usual seats, talking about the usual thing. Not that they are bad people, but the same conversation with the same people in the same small town for 3 years in a row gets a bit taxing.

Now thoroughly depressed yet not wanting to return to my apartment, I began to wander the streets. I passed by a pathetic mom and pop ramen shop that I'd passed by a 1000 times before. It's the kind of hole in the wall that can't even afford the plastic display dishes for the front window, instead relying photos of dishes that are so sun faded as to be unrecognizable. However, this time, there was a large wooden half keg with a charcoal brazier under a pot of water steaming some manju. Now, I'm on the Zone diet, so the idea of a meat filled rice flour pastry is about the worst possible dish you can imagine, but the craving overcame my resolve and I stuck my head into the place to order two.

Your stereotypical small-town restaurateur oyaji came bustling out, replete with the required uniform consisting of a dirty white T-shirt, a towel around his head, loose navy blue pants, white rubber boots and several missing teeth. His overly enthusiastic greeting which smacked slightly of desperation would have usually got on my nerves but something about the wooden keg and the hand drawn wooden slats serving as a menu appealed to me at the moment, so I went into the restaurant.

The place had zero ambiance, just a bunch of stained formica tables and kitchen chairs and a low wooden counter around the kitchen, faded posters depicting girls in bikinis holding up huge mugs of Asahi and the ubiquitous TV above the bar. I felt that perhaps I'd made yet another mistake in entering but the owner turned out to be quite pleasant to talk to. He asked a lot of questions, but they seemed to spring from not only ignorance, but an honest desire to learn. Rather than the usual " You can use chopsticks? Amazing!" or " Your country has 4 seasons too? Unbelievable!", he would ask things like "Do you know that traditionally manju is only served in the fall? Does your country have any seasonal foods or harvest festivals?" I replied that traditionally, such things were quite important, but these days, not much attention is paid and how I really missed the apple harvest and simple things like tasting the various apple pie and apple turnover recipes. He said he felt the same about manju and how he made all his by hand and would only make niku manju or anko manju. He didn't see anything wrong with newer flavours like pizzaman or curryman, but that he felt you could get that at any convenience store. We shared a few bottles of beer and some shochu over manju and I really felt for the guy. Here he was trying to preserve something special and unique about Japan, even something as simple as the autumn manju, and the only customer he had all night was a white guy from Canada.

Kind of sad in a way, but at the same time, I ended up feeling a lot better and happier about my little inaka town.

And this time I was sitting right on top of it too! 5.8 on the Richter scale. That makes three significant quakes in the last month. Is Godzilla waking from his slumber or something?

There are some pigeons that frequently flit around my apartment building. For the last couple of weeks, I have been doing my best to scare them away every time I hear them, as I have no particular love of cleaning up pigeon crap. I decided when I moved in that the rear balcony would be best abandoned, caked as it is under an inch or five of crap.

Yesterday I discovered that a mating pair has laid eggs on my balcony. I don't think I am quite heartless enough to evict them at this stage. I'm not really into killing babies.