Exploring Yotsukaido

I know I promised a blog entry over a week ago, but I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be for me to get an internet connection. More on that later; for now, let it suffice that I say it’s a pain. Also, long post ahead. I think you should just expect those from now on. 🙂

Let me start with a followup from my mention of the trash system from last time. At the ALS guest house in Yotsukaido, there are five refuse bins. The “kitchen”/organic/burnable garbage *must* be in a special yellow garbage bag. The other four bins are plastic (except bottles), plastic bottles, cans, and I believe the last one is paper.

Here are the bins and the poster describing the exact details of how you’re supposed to handle different types of trash.

I heard a rumor that they actually need the separate categories not for recycling, but to determine the temperature of the furnace in which the trash is burned, which supposedly explains why the greater Tokyo metropolitan area is so dusty. I sincerely hope they’re recycling it all and not burning it. Enough trash talk, though. (Ha!)

On Sunday, April 14th, Justin Ekins and his wife Misato Morita came out to visit me from Tokyo (Koto City, to be exact). We ate a great pasta lunch at a tiny Italian restaurant on the second floor of a building next to the Yotsukaido station. Here’s a picture of the three of us at lunch.

Then I showed them back to the guest house and walked them over to Ito Yokado, a department store chain in Japan. The parent company is “7+i Holdings”, and if you’re an American looking at the logo, you’ll probably know exactly where the seven comes from.

7+i logo

In case you’re not American or it’s not as clear as I thought, it’s from the “7” in the convenience store name “7-11”. Yes, 7-11 runs a chain of successful department stores in Japan. No, it’s nothing like 7-11 in the states. They sell everything from groceries to house wares to electronics to kimonos, and actually have an indoor playground in the children’s section that includes a balloon pit instead of a ball pit, which I thought was a neat idea.

Here are a couple of pictures of the walk from the guest house to Ito Yokado. The cherry blossoms had just fallen a few days before, and you can see them collecting in drifts along the path. Here’s a shot of the balloon pit.

While we were at Ito Yokado, Justin and Misato helped me order my hanko. A hanko, as I found out over lunch, is a rubber stamp with a cylindrical handle and the owner’s name written in kanji (or katakana, as the case may be) enclosed in a round circle about one centimeter in diameter, always used with red ink. They’re used in Japan in place of a handwritten signature for everything from initialing the employee bathroom cleaning schedule to signing for packages to signatures on legal documents. Justin had some criticisms of the hanko system, and while I could tell that Misato didn’t really disagree with his point of view, she seemed a little more willing to work with the system as it is. She mentioned that some people use knives to purposely put premature wear marks on their hanko to specifically identify them in case there’s ever a dispute over the legality of a “signature”. I suppose that’s about as hard to fake as a handwritten signature elsewhere, but that still doesn’t prevent someone from stealing the physical stamp.

Here’s a shot of my hanko (and free plastic case, replete with red ink pad!). It says “Heddo” written vertically. That’s as close as Japanese gets to my last name.

The next day I spent leisurely wandering around Yotsukaido. While walking around, I spotted someone’s answer to Japan’s dearth of parking spaces. It’s the only one I’ve seen in a private driveway (they’re common in parking lots), and I imagine it’s rather expensive, but I suppose your own parking elevator does double the size of your single-car driveway.

I spent a few hours walking, and while I didn’t know specifically where I was, I wasn’t truly “lost,” as I always felt like I could retrace my steps to get home without difficulty. I ended up walking in a big clockwise circuit around “downtown” Yotsukaido. I use quotes because it’s kind of like saying “downtown Boulder City.” Yes, it’s the center of the local economy, but is it really “downtown”? I really don’t know if anyone will be interested, but while walking around, I spotted a Nissan Stagea (it’s a wagon version of the Skyline, if you know what that is).

Anyway, it was one of those beautifully overcast days, where nothing has a shadow. A very fine rain began falling as I got back to the house, and I opened the sliding door onto the deck, sat in the living room, and ate the lunch I’d bought from a local bakery while watching the traffic pass by. It was one of those truly refreshing moments of solitude, where you feel the tension just drain from your body.

Japan seems to be infatuated with bakeries. They all have variations on a few main themes (standard doughnuts and danishes, hot dog-based breads, prefab sandwiches made from mini-loaves stuffed with sandwich fillings), as well as items unique to each bakery. You have to watch out though, if you don’t like corn or egg salad, because they’ll try and sneak it in there if you’re not expecting it. Seriously, who wants an egg salad sandwich with corn kernels sprinkled on top? Anyway, 90% of the stuff they sell is pretty good, in my humble opinion.

Something else Japan has a lot of is bicycles. Seriously, the country is supersaturated. Near the train station in Yotsukaido, there’s a two-story bicycle parking garage. No joke. I think they use monthly parking decals on the fenders to identify the bikes allowed to park there. But apparently that wasn’t enough space though, because there’s a three story bicycle parking garage right next door. In case you think I’m making this up, here’s a photograph of the two garages, right next to each other.

And in case you don’t believe the light grey building in the background is actually another bicycle parking garage, here’s a shot from inside the second story. Note that each story of the building actually has two levels of bikes, placed and retrieved by the use of ramps that pull out for each bike.

I think that’s it for this entry. Next time, I promise to get to the actual ALS training. I leave you with a snapshot of myself dressed for the first day of training.

さよなら,

– ヘッド