Japan: The Little Differences

"But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It's the little differences. I mean they got the same shit there that they do here, but there it's just a little different."

--Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction

Vincent Vega was right-it's the little differences. He was talking about Europe, but I would describe Japan in exactly the same way. Japan is not as unique as most Americans think it is, but there are a lot of little differences.

The layout of homes is a good example. Everything is there (well, almost everything), but it's slightly different.

The kitchens and bathrooms are familiar, yet somehow very unlike their American counterparts. The ovens, stoves, kitchen sinks, bathtubs, and toilets are very strange and bizarre.

The oven consists of a mail slot-sized drawer that is virtually useless. The Japanese use them to cook fish, but it better be a very small fish. I've yet to use mine in 14 months of living here. One day a few months ago, I was feeling homesick, and I felt a nice thick frozen pizza would help me to forget my loneliness and remind me of home. I used to love Chicago Brothers pizzas until the company that makes them apparently went bankrupt. Unfortunately, the only way I could've baked a pizza in this oven would've been to cook it by the slice. I didn't bother.

My good friend, Sachiko, says that my microwave is really a convection oven as well, and that it can be used to bake things, just like my parents oven back home. I don't believe it. Sachiko wouldn't lie to me, but there must be some mistake or misunderstanding. The microwave couldn't also be a normal, heat-generating oven, could it? I'll have to investigate the device to determine its capabilities.

The toilets, bathtubs, showers, and wash-up basins are in a separate rooms! At first I laughed at this arrangement, but its brilliance was proven to me within a few days of my arrival in Japan. No more long, painful waits for women to play with their hair and faces in the morning when I have to go pee pee. The toilet is always open.

Most Japanese are as completely unaware of American-style bathrooms as we are of theirs. Some of them are really shocked to see an American bathroom. They think it's dirty and unsanitary to have a toilet in the same room as the bathtub and shower.

The convenience stores are identical on the surface, but on close inspection, they too are revealed to be highly alien. There are lots of fish and seafood products and about 20 different kinds of instant noodles. The scary thing is that there are tiny, one-inch long fish with gouged out eyes that are intended to be eaten as a snack, like potato chips or pretzels. I'm told that they are actually sweet, but I'll never know because the sight of sad, eye-less fish bodies makes me sick, so I'll never eat one.

How do they do it anyway? How do they poke out the eyes? It must be hard because they're so small. Does someone have to do it by hand? Or is there a machine that rips the eyes out automatically? The Japanese are so clever!

Kevin brought back some little orange crabs from his New Year's trip. He'd gone to some small island somewhere off the Tokyo coast. The crabs were about an inch in diameter, and they looked horrible.

But maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one who's different. I refused to eat the dirty, insect-like, creatures, but a couple of Nova teachers confessed to trying them. Luckily, I didn't witness that, but I did have the sickening experience of watching a couple of students eat them. I couldn't look, and I didn't look, but unfortunately I could hear the horrifying sounds of my students munching on them. How could anyone eat a crab head, face, pinchers, legs, shell, everything?! Disgusting! I felt ill. I almost puked!

I think if I had a girlfriend that ate such disgusting things, I'd have a problem. How could I kiss her after she'd chewed on an eye-less fish body, or eaten a stinky little orange crab whole? It'd be like letting a dog lick your face after it ate a fly.

I eat beef. Yeah, I know, it's dead cow. I love beef, and I know I eat an animal that had a head and arms and legs and a mommy and daddy that loved it. But I don't eat the whole cow, just a few strips of flesh. And I don't have to stare at an eye-less cow head as I take a bit out of my burger.

The postal system is unique. All the mailmen wear green uniforms and ride little red Honda motorcycles. They work seven days a week, and they seem to make several trips a day to our apartment building, delivering batches of mail.

The TVs themselves are not too different; they even use the same NTSC format we do. But they actually use channels 1-12. It's hard to explain to them that in L.A. we don't use channels 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, and 12.

Of course the food is different, but even franchise food is different. Multi-national fast food places like Domino's, McDonald's, KFC, Shakey's, Wendy's, etc., are different. The Tokyo McDonalds' are actually much better than any I've had for decades in LA.

But not everything is so different. The mass transit is very familiar. The train cars are very similar, probably because all of them are made in Japan. And just like in LA, I can't understand what's being said over the loudspeakers in stations and on trains, or from the passengers. The subway in LA has an intercom that drivers seem to place in their mouths as they speak. Not that I could understand what they say most of the time anyway-so many of them are foreigners. It's probably easier for me to understand clear Japanese spoken by native Japanese than it is for me to understand broken English coming over a scratchy loudspeaker. The signs and maps in Japan's train stations would be much, much better than their LA counterparts if they didn't use mostly Chinese characters.

Another phenomena that can be observed in both countries is the annoying roommate. Even Japanese roommates can be hard to live with. Normally, the Japanese are a very polite, reserved people. They try to avoid conflict and confrontation, so roommates are slightly less annoying in Japan. But they aren't perfect.

My roommate Taro is a very friendly guy. He comes from Osaka where people are said to be very friendly and colorful. Taro likes to drink hard liquor. He often poisons the bathroom with his noxious body fluids. For hours, no one can enter without retching. Taro's breath after a night of drinking is a mixture of paint thinner, formaldehyde, and rotting-corpse. It must be highly flammable. He's also a smoker, so I'm surprised that after one of his many long, all-night, liquor binges he hasn't lit up a cigarette only to have his head burst into a huge fireball; he's been very lucky! Taro's breath carries the stink of death, and it ravages my lungs, nose, and soul like toxic waste, but the worst is yet to come.

Next he heads to the adjacent basin sink-room. He grabs his face and bends over the sink hacking up and spitting out a green slime-like substance; it's like a cat spitting out a fur ball. It sounds like he's choking on a chicken bone, and it must look like a huge, slimy aborted alien fetus coming out of its alien womb, but I wouldn't know for sure because I'm too scared to look. I just mentally rope off the whole region with yellow caution tape and avoid the area until someone detoxifies it.

Back at the toilet things are pretty ugly even after drunken Taro staggers back to his bed. The death-stench abates slightly after a few short hours, but there's usually a little piss that didn't quite make it into the toilet bowl. A few drops, or maybe even a little puddle for us to enjoy. If I move too quickly to carefully mop it up in the middle of the night, he'll usually make more little yellow ponds before sunrise.

He pisses with the pinpoint accuracy of a guy trying to fill a glass with water from a fire hose.

December 30, 2002

Japan: The Little Differences

"But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It's the little differences. I mean they got the same shit there that they do here, but there it's just a little different."

--Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction

Vincent Vega was right-it's the little differences. He was talking about Europe, but I would describe Japan in exactly the same way. Japan is not as unique as most Americans think it is, but there are a lot of little differences.

The layout of homes is a good example. Everything is there (well, almost everything), but it's slightly different.

The kitchens and bathrooms are familiar, yet somehow very unlike their American counterparts. The ovens, stoves, kitchen sinks, bathtubs, and toilets are very strange and bizarre.

The oven consists of a mail slot-sized drawer that is virtually useless. The Japanese use them to cook fish, but it better be a very small fish. I've yet to use mine in 14 months of living here. One day a few months ago, I was feeling homesick, and I felt a nice thick frozen pizza would help me to forget my loneliness and remind me of home. I used to love Chicago Brothers pizzas until the company that makes them apparently went bankrupt. Unfortunately, the only way I could've baked a pizza in this oven would've been to cook it by the slice. I didn't bother.

My good friend, Sachiko, says that my microwave is really a convection oven as well, and that it can be used to bake things, just like my parents oven back home. I don't believe it. Sachiko wouldn't lie to me, but there must be some mistake or misunderstanding. The microwave couldn't also be a normal, heat-generating oven, could it? I'll have to investigate the device to determine its capabilities.

The toilets, bathtubs, showers, and wash-up basins are in a separate rooms! At first I laughed at this arrangement, but its brilliance was proven to me within a few days of my arrival in Japan. No more long, painful waits for women to play with their hair and faces in the morning when I have to go pee pee. The toilet is always open.

Most Japanese are as completely unaware of American-style bathrooms as we are of theirs. Some of them are really shocked to see an American bathroom. They think it's dirty and unsanitary to have a toilet in the same room as the bathtub and shower.

The convenience stores are identical on the surface, but on close inspection, they too are revealed to be highly alien. There are lots of fish and seafood products and about 20 different kinds of instant noodles. The scary thing is that there are tiny, one-inch long fish with gouged out eyes that are intended to be eaten as a snack, like potato chips or pretzels. I'm told that they are actually sweet, but I'll never know because the sight of sad, eye-less fish bodies makes me sick, so I'll never eat one.

How do they do it anyway? How do they poke out the eyes? It must be hard because they're so small. Does someone have to do it by hand? Or is there a machine that rips the eyes out automatically? The Japanese are so clever!

Kevin brought back some little orange crabs from his New Year's trip. He'd gone to some small island somewhere off the Tokyo coast. The crabs were about an inch in diameter, and they looked horrible.

But maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one who's different. I refused to eat the dirty, insect-like, creatures, but a couple of Nova teachers confessed to trying them. Luckily, I didn't witness that, but I did have the sickening experience of watching a couple of students eat them. I couldn't look, and I didn't look, but unfortunately I could hear the horrifying sounds of my students munching on them. How could anyone eat a crab head, face, pinchers, legs, shell, everything?! Disgusting! I felt ill. I almost puked!

I think if I had a girlfriend that ate such disgusting things, I'd have a problem. How could I kiss her after she'd chewed on an eye-less fish body, or eaten a stinky little orange crab whole? It'd be like letting a dog lick your face after it ate a fly.

I eat beef. Yeah, I know, it's dead cow. I love beef, and I know I eat an animal that had a head and arms and legs and a mommy and daddy that loved it. But I don't eat the whole cow, just a few strips of flesh. And I don't have to stare at an eye-less cow head as I take a bit out of my burger.

The postal system is unique. All the mailmen wear green uniforms and ride little red Honda motorcycles. They work seven days a week, and they seem to make several trips a day to our apartment building, delivering batches of mail.

The TVs themselves are not too different; they even use the same NTSC format we do. But they actually use channels 1-12. It's hard to explain to them that in L.A. we don't use channels 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, and 12.

Of course the food is different, but even franchise food is different. Multi-national fast food places like Domino's, McDonald's, KFC, Shakey's, Wendy's, etc., are different. The Tokyo McDonalds' are actually much better than any I've had for decades in LA.

But not everything is so different. The mass transit is very familiar. The train cars are very similar, probably because all of them are made in Japan. And just like in LA, I can't understand what's being said over the loudspeakers in stations and on trains, or from the passengers. The subway in LA has an intercom that drivers seem to place in their mouths as they speak. Not that I could understand what they say most of the time anyway-so many of them are foreigners. It's probably easier for me to understand clear Japanese spoken by native Japanese than it is for me to understand broken English coming over a scratchy loudspeaker. The signs and maps in Japan's train stations would be much, much better than their LA counterparts if they didn't use mostly Chinese characters.

Some things are the same everywhere in every country and culture. In LA, I had the extremely disgusting experience of occasionally living with roommates that couldn't manage to properly use the toilet. I still have terrifying flashbacks of Grandpa Andrade's use of the bathroom waste baskets. Don't they teach people how to properly use a toilet in Latin America? No, you don't wipe away your filthy, stinky, bacteria-infested excrement and then throw it in the waste basket; that's wrong!

The Japanese are a very polite, reserved people. They try to avoid conflict and confrontation, so roommates are slightly less annoying in Japan. But they aren't perfect.

My roommate Taro is a very friendly guy. He comes from Osaka where people are said to be very friendly and colorful. Taro likes to drink hard liquor. He often poisons the bathroom with his noxious body fluids. For hours, no one can enter without retching. Taro's breath after a night of drinking is a mixture of shit, paint thinner, formaldehyde, and rotting-corpse. It must be highly flammable. He's also a smoker, so I'm surprised that after one of his many long, all-night, liquor binges he hasn't lit up a cigarette only to have his head burst into a huge fireball; he's been very lucky! Taro's breath carries the stink of death, and it ravages my lungs, nose, and soul like toxic waste, but the worst is yet to come.

Next he heads to the adjacent basin sink-room. He grabs his face and bends over the sink hacking up and spitting out a green slime-like substance; it's like a cat spitting out a fur ball. It sounds like he's choking on a chicken bone, and it must look like a huge, slimy aborted alien fetus coming out of its alien womb, but I wouldn't know for sure because I'm too scared to look. I just mentally rope off the whole region with yellow caution tape and avoid the area until someone detoxifies it.

Back at the toilet things are pretty ugly even after drunken Taro staggers back to his bed. The death-stench abates slightly after a few short hours, but there's usually a little piss that didn't quite make it into the toilet bowl. A few drops, or maybe even a little puddle for us to enjoy. If I move too quickly to carefully mop it up in the middle of the night, he'll usually make more little yellow ponds before sunrise.

He pisses with the pinpoint accuracy of a guy trying to fill a glass with water from a fire hose.