Random thoughts on summer in Japan

How do you know you are living in Japan? Well, besides the heat and humidity, it's usually the things that you scratch your head over that makes you think, "Damn, I'm living in a foreign country." Here's a list of random thoughts:

1. Oldest son's preschool/daycare sent him home with a big bag of fireworks and the admonition that fireworks should only be done with an adult present. Gee, you think 1000 degree sparklers are a good idea for a 5 year old? What's next, send him home with a machete and instructions that it should only be used on weeds?

2. I know it's hot, but does everyone need to wear long sleeves and ugly hats? Of course, this only applies to adults. My oldest is the color of leather since his preschool has a wading pool and doesn't believe in sunscreen.

3. Why are vegetables so cheap and why is fruit so g-damn expensive? I've taken to shopping the discount bin for lightly bruised fruit. I've scored apples, peaches, nectarines, grapes, cherries, and kiwi with this method. Thank god for the Japanese obsession with perfect, unblemished fruit. I'll take the cheap, ugly ones any day.

4. Speaking of fruit, there is only one thing worse than a fruit fly infestation. That would be a fruit fly MAGGOT infestation. Truly disgusting. I'm now emptying the raw trash more often.

5. Ah yes, trash. I'm so sick and f-king tired of sorting my trash by the ten thousand inscrutable rules. Example, plastic goes in a yellow trash bag, unless it's blue bag OTHER PLASTIC. And what is other plastic? Well..... Toothbrushes, tupperware, plastic models. Clear as mud, eh? Oh, but don't put PET plastic bottles (coke bottles, etc.) in either of those, they go in a separate green bag. Same green bag is used for glass bottles, but you can't mix them. But you can mix glass and steel cans. Now you know why my husband puts plastic things in the raw garbage (clear bag) and says, "I lived in America, screw this."

6. Cicada. Most annoying noisy bug on earth. Why do Japanese children like to catch them? Oh wait, it's to make them screech even more. Now there's a hobby guaranteed to set a parent on edge. (See picture of oldest son with cicada on soccer ball above. Cicada died a ball-related death only minutes later...)

Okay, I should make a list of ten, but BeanPasteHead Man is over and my boys will start beating themselves up any moment now.

Hotter than the hinges of Hades...

I really don't enjoy the summers in Japan. It's currently 89 outside and the humidity is something like 85%. There is a nice smog-filled breeze blowing from the inland sea, but it still doesn't solve things like my mildewing leather shoes in our shoe cabinet. (Yes, I know there are dehumidifier packs, I'm just too lazy to buy them.)

Combine the heat and humidity with a cranky 21 month old who has a sprained ankle, and you'll realize why Spike Lee made a movie about a heat wave sending people to the edges of insanity. Tak not only can't walk, but he also had a fever and herpangina earlier this week, so it's been a really restful week in our house.

Did I mention that Monday was a holiday here, but my husband's company makes everyone work the following Saturday after a Monday holiday? Bastards. Oh well, at least he comes home around 6:00 p.m. when he works Saturdays. Yippee.

In an effort not to be 100% negative, I will end my post with one positive about Japan. Japanese tomatoes are fabulous and really inexpensive. The cucumbers are pretty good too.

Screw-top wine

I'm drinking a glass of Chilean screw-top wine purchased from Max Value supermarket. It's almost 7:00 p.m., my mother-in-law is making dinner, the kids are watching Anpanman and the hubby is still trapped at work for at least another hour.

What does this have to do with anything? Nothing really, but I'm listening to the bread truck outside our building with its catchy jingle of "come buy delicious bread from the yellow truck" and I'm not rushing outside. Although part of me is curious and I just want to buy a loaf for the hell of it. Instead, I savor my slightly astringent 680 yen bottle of wine and try to remember that screw-top is not synonymous with bad wine. It's apparently all the vogue these days. Except that in Japan, it serves a more practical purpose since most people don't own a corkscrew.

I'm not really a wine snob, but it's rather sad that I drink my wine alone these days. My in-laws won't drink any wine unless it's sickly sweet. My husband doesn't drink at all since he's usually too tired to drink. And none of my friends can come over for a glass of wine since they can't drive afterward. Besides that, none of my Japanese friends are really the wine drinking kind. They are more of the grain alcohol spritzer type.

I drank the three bottles of decent wine that I bought at Costco last month, so now I'm stuck with screw-tops. Yeah, in this case, screw-top means mediocre wine.

Pinworms

My 4 year-old's preschool sent everyone home with a pinworm collection kit. Oh joy. I realize that preschoolers are not the cleanliest of creatures, but does the school really have to make all the parents check their child's intestinal tract for microscopic parasites?

I don't really mind the fact that they check my child's weight and height once a month. I actually welcome the visit from the dentist, since I'm hoping it will convince some of the snaggly-toothed kids to brush their teeth. But I rather resent having to collect samples of fecal matter. Over two days, no less. Ugh.

I think this is where I hand the kit to my husband and tell him that I can't read the instructions. I know, it's really not fair to play the "dumb gaijin"card, but if I screw it up, I will have to do it all over again. Better to let the native speaker do it right the first time.

Life at a different angle.

One of the few incontrovertible facts of life is that the sun sets in the west. Having lived in Seattle, with its convenient grid of N-S-E-W streets, I was used to the sun rising in my bedroom and setting in my family room.

That is not the case here in St. Honore Nibankan condominiums. The condo faces the sea, but dammit, the sun seems to set in the southwest. By the end of the day, it's beyond my in-laws balcony and I'm feeling the laundry to see if it actually dried in the pre-rainy season sunshine.

It bothers me, the sun's lack of respect for my sense of order. Instead of a diagonal sliver of sun coming across my bedroom, I want the full-on retina burn that only direct sunlight can give. (Oh, and our bedroom is a BED Room now. We have a bed! Woo hoo!) Also, I resent the perpetually hazy, indirect sunlight that never makes it into my family room. Perhaps I will change my mind during the long, hot days of Japanese summer.

I'm not sure why Japan is the land of the rising sun and why the flag reflects that. Maybe no one could figure out where it sets in the this curvaceous mountainous country, so that's why it's always rising...

Nothing in particular...

I don't really have anything to write about. It's late, I'm tired. There's a sink full of dirty dishes and writing is more avoidance than anything else. I've already checked the yahoo group I belong to for foreign women married to Japanese men. Nothing new, just a discussion of favorite TV shows and which hospitals allow pain relief while giving birth. (Note to self: do not give birth in Japan. No wonder the birthrate is so low. Pain makes you bond with your baby? Puh-leeze!)

I could clean off my desk since it is piled high with crayons, cellphone bills, teaching materials, glue sticks and preschool info (all in Japanese, argh, where is my kanji dictionary? what the hell does that character mean?) We are having house guests next week and my house looks like the rubbish monster urped all over it. (See the previous post about my built-in babysitter being gone all this week. No babysitter=Hellhole of a condo)

So tomorrow I'm planning more avoidance. I'm going to a flea market and an arts and crafts fair in the same morning. Because nothing cleans your house like bringing in a load of more crap.

All right, I'm going to wash dishes and go to bed.

The importance of having an 'out'

I realized as I was washing dishes just now, how important it is to always have an "out." Kind of like the first year of my marriage. I think K and I joked about divorce pretty much every week or so. It wasn't that we were unhappy, it was just that we needed to know we could still return to our single lives even if that wasn't really the case.

The last 9 months have been weird. We sold off our possessions, rented out our house, committed to a new life and, for my husband, a new job. When things have been at their worst, we have joked that we can kick out our tenants and K could get a new job back in the U.S. The truth is, we have so deeply entrenched ourselves here, that it seems highly unlikely that we'd do that now. How deeply, you ask? Gee, we now have two Japanese mortgages, one of which is for my in-laws who live next door. My kids are so bonded with their grandparents that my mother-in-law doesn't want to go away next week because she'd miss her youngest grandson too much. Mind you, she's only going away for 5 days to Fukuoka which is less than 3 hours away. I have two aunts-in-law who have no grandkids of their own and view my kids as their own grandkids. For mother's day, I bought 3 presents, and my mother isn't even alive.

So, for my mental health, I believe that I could pick up and move on at any moment. It's the escape valve of my ego-driven, angst-ridden pressure cooker of a mind. And while I'm plotting all of my life scenarios in my pink rubber gloves, I realize that all I really want these days is a dishwasher. And maybe now I should go get the littlest one from Grandma's condo, since I let him fall asleep there tonight.