This weekend I was able to take advantage of my Christmas present for 2009. Long time readers of this blog, especially my one trusty reader, may recall that I had a gas leak in my home in the US and spent much of my Christmas vacation back in the States getting it repaired. And of course I was gasless, heatless, dryerless, hot waterless and so on. Part of the plan at Christmas was my gift – a stay at The Ritz-Carlton Marina Del Rey. Nice. With all that was going on though, it was just too much to try to do. Part of the experience was to get away, enjoy the “hotel within the hotel” of the club lounge where “ladies and gentlemen serve ladies and gentlemen.” If I was running back and forth to home checking up on the plumber and using The Ritz-Carlton as a shower and a heated room only, the intent of the gift would surely be missed. So instead, we canceled and vowed to hit some place here in Asia, perhaps Hong Kong.

This weekend was a 東京事変 (Tokyo Jihen) concert in Osaka. It is fronted by Shiina Ringo, who put on an excellent show in 2008. Since we were going to the show, this was a great weekend to take advantage of The Ritz-Carlton Osaka. We could stay there, enjoy all the presentations of the Club Lounge (including way too much champagne and other alcohol), and see the concert.

The trip started rather ominously as Tomo forgot the concert tickets at home, and had to cancel his flight to Osaka to go back home and pick up the tickets. Oops. Thankfully, he caught the bullet train, I met up with him in Nagoya, and we headed to Osaka. We were only a few hours behind schedule.

The Ritz-Carlton Osaka is very nice, but it has an almost over-the-top “English charm” feel to it. They managed to pull it off though, and it didn’t feel too heavy.

The service was impeccable, and the staff very friendly. When we were showed to the room, the hostess broke out of character with excitement when we said we were seeing 東京事変. It was really very cute. She said she was so excited in gave her goosebumps.

We were able to get late checkout today, shifting from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm. That makes a big difference as we wanted to use all of the facilities the hotel had to offer, including the gym and the pool. We donned our “workout clothes” and headed to the gym. We were intercepted at the door and questioned whether we had “indoor shoes” on. Uh oh. No, we didn’t bring our indoor shoes so we were not allowed entrance to the workout equipment. Yes, this is a particularly Japanese custom. Remember when you couldn’t wear “street shoes” on your wooden gym floor in junior high school or high school? At least I couldn’t. Well, imagine the same rules in a carpeted workout area full of robust equipment. That’s Japan! It made me so frustrated – I just wanted to work up a really good sweat on a nice exercise bike. I currently do not OWN a pair of indoor exercise shoes, so it looks like the next time we stay at a nice hotel we’ll have to call ahead to see if the gym requires indoor shoes or not. When we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Tokyo, THEY let us wear our outdoor shoes. Maybe they just didn’t catch us in time.

They gave me a swim cap (swim caps are required at almost all pools in Japan), made us take off our shoes, and allowed us to swim. I’m a really bad swimmer, so I did some laps in a 20 meter pool and called it a day. Tomo, who is a swimmer, got in a kilometer. I wish I enjoyed swimming. At least they let me swim in my board shorts and didn’t require a Speedo. Not that there’s anything wrong with a Speedo, I just didn’t have one.

Japan travel hint – if you are traveling in Japan and staying in nice hotels with fitness centers, don’t forget your swim cap and your indoor shoes! Of course, tattoos are grounds for denying service. But I knew that.
 

And now, after a rather long hiatus from Japanese class, I have homework hanging over me that I haven’t begun to even think about. Sigh.

I was thankfully reunited with my passport today after having to relinquish it for a visa application for China. While perusing the interwebs, I found this interesting article about ex-pats converting to ex’s.

For U.S. citizens, cutting ties with their native land is a drastic and irrevocable step. But as Overseas American Week, a lobbying effort by expatriate-advocacy groups, convenes in Washington this week, it’s one that an increasing number of American expats are willing to take. According to government records, 502 expatriates renounced U.S. citizenship or permanent residency in the fourth quarter of 2009 — more than double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. And these figures don’t include the hundreds — some experts say thousands — of applications languishing in various U.S. consulates and embassies around the world, waiting to be processed. While a small number of Americans hand in their passports each year for political reasons, the new surge in permanent expatriations is mainly because of taxes.

- Time Magazine, HELENA BACHMANN / GENEVA

I’m certainly not close to giving up my US passport, especially since I would be without a country if I did that. I’m lucky that I don’t have to worry about my taxes as part of my ex-pat package. But if I was in a country for 10 or 20 years, and had gone “local hire” and planned to retire in that country, what would I do?

I try to keep my blog light and more focused on the quirky or quirkily mundane rather than the issues that face expatriates that are more serious, or at least amplified because we are away from our usual surroundings. But that is part of the experience over here, and while I am not going to dwell on the “downers” it is important balance if I’m trying to explain my life here.

The past couple of weeks have been very difficult. I found out my boss was leaving sooner than I thought and I was working really long hours trying to resolve various issues, and I really didn’t have an option to not work those hours. However, far worse than those complaints is that last weekend one of our expatriate colleague’s children died suddenly.

Certainly in any small office, friendships develop and people in the office care for one another. In an expatriate office, we of course care a lot for each other. But everyone in the office somehow seems a little more like family than when I am in the office in the States. Here in Nagoya, we are all thrown in to this big mélange of new experiences, confusion of how to do some of the simplest things, uncertainty as to the duration of our assignments, and even uncertainty in what our roles are. Although we don’t socialize that much since everyone does have their life here, we do some important things as a group and with families. For example, we do a major community event in May, we have a group Thanksgiving dinner, we had a bowling party / food drive, we sponsor orphans at Christmas time, we have 忘年会 (bounenkai – forget-the-year party), 新年会 (shinnenkai - New Year party), and simple 飲み会 (nomikai - drinking party). We’ve even as a group ended up at a hole-in-the-wall bar and taken over the karaoke machine. My point is we pull together, know each other’s families, and look out for each other.

One of the things I’ve always worried about as an expat is something happening to my family in the States, or something happening to me while I am here. Several members of our team have lost parents or grandparents and have had to travel back to the States. Other colleagues have been traveling back because of parents that are ill. Although I live a long distance from my family when I’m in the States, the distance isn’t so great. Living across an ocean makes the distance feel very far.

Medical care is hard enough to navigate in the US – I can’t imagine what it would be like here to really get what you needed. One time when I had strep throat, I got these pills that looked like children’s aspirin and had to take them forever. It took a long time to remotely start to feel better. How I longed for a Zithromax 3-pack (mind you, I am not an antibiotic pill popper – I can only remember these two cases of antibiotics in the past 10 years. The Zithromax wiped out a case of pneumonia I had picked up after traveling LA – Hong Kong – Kuala Lumper – Tokyo – LA in less than one week).

So of course the death of our colleague’s child was shocking. Without going in to too much detail, the Nagoya media speculate that he died due to complications of H1N1. That can’t really be confirmed though, but his death was sudden and unexpected, and he did test positive for H1N1. He was 4 years old. Many of my colleagues have young children of their own with them in Nagoya, and this news was particularly difficult for them. Fortunately, our company has a program to assist employees in these situations and an American counselor residing in Fukuoka was dispatched to Nagoya to talk to our team.

Over 75 families attended the wake (otsuya - お通夜) on Tuesday night. There was a Buddhist prayer from in the home of my colleague and then a viewing / wake, still in the home. My colleague is Japanese-American and his wife is Japanese, so they had a more traditional Japanese wake than a western wake. Almost everyone from the office went. There’s a lot of mixed information out there surrounding otsuya, so for once I’m not going to make a link. If you are curious, you can do the research on your own.

Once again, I’m not going to dwell on the serious difficulties we face at times as expatriates. My next entry will be frivolous and lighthearted. There is no way that I know to seque from this topic to any other topic, so forgive me in advance.

It seems Japan is now importing mechanical labor. Take a look at this mechanical flagman compared to the other one here. Doesn’t this guy seem a LOT whiter?

This morning I was awakened by blaring loudspeakers. The hate buses were out again. This is pretty typical on the weekend – getting woken up by loudspeakers spewing hate. I’m able to go back to sleep though. What’s amazing though is that I am on the 6th floor, face a side street, have my windows closed, yet the speakers on the buses on the main thoroughfare are so loud that I am able to hear them.

As I was doing my homework at my lokale (my local Starbucks), the buses appeared on the street again, turning from on of the main streets to another mains treet. My local Starbucks is on the corner of Sakuradori and Otsudori and those are two of the main streets in Nagoya. Today was amazing, though. All the variety of hate buses that I have seen were able to congregate and make a hate parade. It reminds me of the time I was teargassed in Zurich when the anarchists appeared to unite for the day (isn’t that contradictory?) to protest the right wing candidate Blocher, which also resulted in a counter-demonstration from a more liberal party. I walked into a cloud of teargas as I was exiting the train station, much to my surprise.

I understand enough Japanese to know that the buses are not blaring words of acceptance and tolerance. There are lots of references in the rhetoric to foreigners and the buses fly the military flag of Japan. The hate buses bother me, and I can’t imagine that something similar being tolerated in the US and in Europe. Then again, in general I am part of the majority in the US and probably less sensitive there. And certainly in the US, we’ve had plenty of demonstrations expressing opinions of inequality and intolerance (read about California’s Proposition 8).

I always feel targeted when I am out walking and the hate buses roll by. I try to make eye contact with the people in the buses, I’m not sure why. I will not be intimidated by their volume. I pay taxes, I pay rent, I purchase products from their stores, I travel on their trains, and I don’t take a penny from their companies. I wonder what they will think as the Japanese population continues to decrease and their relevance is diminished? Probably that is OK – I think the whole idea is about isolation anyway.