Moose in Japan 3

I woke up in the night a few days ago with a massive craving for some good fresh bread, cheddar cheese and Heinz Tomato soup. The realisation that these things wouldn't be so easy to find and would be fairly expensive even if I did find them made me miss home for the first time. I think by the time I go back to the UK I'm going to have a fairly long list of foods which I desperately want to eat.

Today I found a shop that sold baguettes and some European cheese that wasn't ridiculously over-priced so I just had some bread and cheese for lunch. The bread wasn't that great to be honest but I'd been getting kinda sick of eating rice or spaghetti or some kind noodles with every meal so it was nice anyway. The shop also sold a bunch of other western stuff like beer, sauces and meats and stuff. There was also some puff pastry. It was all a little bit more expensive than I would like, but its good to know that next time I have a craving for something familiar I can go there and get some ingredients.

Other than food, I haven't really felt like I miss much about the UK yet; I'm only a few weeks in though so maybe I will in the future. I'm still enjoying exploring Kyoto and looking forward to seeing other places in Japan. I think my Japanese has already started to improve noticeably too which I'm happy about. I think the more I can speak to people here, the less likely I will be to feel lonely or out of place, and so less likely to miss being at home.


The moat surrounding Nijo castle. Nijo castle was cooler than the Imperial palace I think. If I was the emperor I would've lived there instead. Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan before it changed to Tokyo, which is why there are so many big old castles and temples and stuff here.

I want some familiar food.

I've always been a fairly introverted person. I'm typically quiet in unfamiliar situations or around new people. A big part of this is a fear of looking stupid, making mistakes or embarrassing myself in some way. This is something I've been very aware of for years though. When I decided to come Japan I knew that these characteristics are something that I would need to work on in order to get the most of the experience. It would be no good coming to the other side of the world to study a new language if I'm too afraid to even speak to anyone. Not only would I waste my time hiding in my room, I would also not get much Japanese speaking practise.

When I was planning my trip here I started trying to mentally prepare myself by accepting the idea that I'm going to make lots of mistakes, I'm probably going to say lots of stupid shit, and I'm going to embarrass myself on a daily basis. Rather than letting this idea scare me, I tried to accept that this is just a necessary part of doing something new, and definitely a necessary part of learning a new language.

I compared it to practising SC2. If you want to get good you have to practise a lot, and necessarily you will have to lose a lot of games. So before you can get good at winning, you have to get good at losing. As the great philosopher WhiteRa once said:



I think you can apply this to anything difficult in life. Unless you're some kind of prodigy, you're going to suck at anything when you first try it. If you want to get good at anything you have to practise it. Part of practise is failing; so you can find out your weaknesses and fix them. When I'm being too shy and afraid to speak to people in Japanese, I'm basically like those guys who are really into SC2 but have massive ladder anxiety and are too afraid to press the Find Match button.

I learned to accept failure in SC2 by grinding out thousands of ladder games, so I hopefully I can learn to accept embarrassment in social situations by just talking to people. Even if I come out with some incoherent nonsense at first, I can correct it and maybe get it right next time. The more I practise speaking the better I get. I've already noticed that this has started happening as I will speak about a bit in the Learning Progress section.


Temple thing at Heian shrine.

I've also noticed that I'm more easily able to shrug off embarrassments that previously would've haunted me for weeks. I'm saying a lot of dumb stuff, but overall I'm making progress so individual mistakes don't really matter. I'm not completely cured of anxiety though; I still get nervous and sometimes don't try to speak in Japanese when I probably should've had a go. Everything is a work in progress.

Some nonsense about SC2 teaching me life lessons.

In the first week of school I was really struggling to come out with coherent sentences. Even when trying to say fairly basic things I would hesitate a lot, use the wrong grammatical particles and the wrong tenses and stuff. This week I've noticed a significant improvement. Of course I still make lots of mistakes and do hesitate a lot, but the sentence structures feel more natural and when I think of something I want to say I can just say it without having to stop and rearrange the words in my head first.

The range of things I'm capable of saying is still really limited but I'm capable of basic every day conversation now I suppose; talking about things I've done, seen or eaten, or things I'm going to, or want to do. I can ask basic questions of other people and understand their answers as long as they don't speak too fast or using any complex or confusing words or phrases.

Yesterday I ran out of cash. I tried to use one of the ATMs near my house but I couldn't work the thing out. It was like some massive fucking NASA control panel thing with loads of buttons and slots, a phone and a fingerprint scanner attached. I tried putting my card in and the machine just said something in Keigo (formal Japanese) that I didn't really understand and then spat my card back out. In the end I gave up and went to Kyoto station where I found an ATM that had an English option. On my way back from the station I saw one of my class mates; an older guy from Taiwan who recently retired and decided to come to Japan with his wife for a while. They were walking ahead of me and initially I considered hanging back and not saying hi to them because we were about 15 minutes walk from the school and I was worried that it would be awkward because I wouldn't be able to hold a conversation. In the end I manned up and went and spoke to them. It went quite well actually; neither of us are great Japanese speakers but it felt good to be able to speak with someone in Japanese for 15 minutes about a range of topics and manage to explain most of the stuff I wanted to say and understand most of the other person's responses. I suppose it felt kind of like a breakthrough moment; I can't speak any other foreign languages so this was the first time in my life I'd managed to have an extended conversation in a language other than English.


Some cats guarding a temple.

I went out for dinner with a few class mates after school yesterday as well; 3 girls from Taiwan (half of my class is from Taiwan) and a girl from South Korea. Luckily the Taiwanese girls mostly stuck to speaking in Japanese so we could all sort of communicate. We went to a Kyoto-style Wagyu beef restaurant which was really nice. It was a little bit expensive for me, but the food was good. They served a steak with a bowl of rice, a bowl of miso soup and a plate of cabbage. You could get free refills on all the things that weren't beef, as well as free green tea (which is pretty standard in Japanese restaurants I think) so I tried to eat my money's worth.

I didn't really manage to have many successful conversations, but it wasn't awkward because we could just focus on eating if we couldn't think of what to say lol. In the middle of the table there were various spices and sauces you could add to your food, most of which I recognised. I didn't know what one of them was so I asked one of my friends. She tried to answer me in English but said "It's Penis!", which was as funny as it was confusing. She realised why I was laughing and looked embarrassed, and corrected herself; it was ground peanuts.

In the first week I didn't speak to many of my class mates much outside of conversation exercises in class, but now that we all have at least a basic ability to communicate with each other it's quite fun. Everyone seems nice and the fact that I don't share a common language with most of them other than Japanese is good for practise.


If you looked at my other photos you would be forgiven for thinking that Kyoto is just a bunch of temples. Here's a shot of Gojo-dori which is a street near my house. Not so exciting to look at maybe.

I've been getting a little better and more confident at Japanese. Still suck though.

In the last blog I talked about how I was struggling with organising a phone contract and opening a bank account. I've now sort of solved both of those problems. I got a phone contract with freetel; which isn't one of the main Japanese phone companies, and seems to offer a cheaper and more flexible service than the big three (SoftBank, Docomo and au). I got their cheapest smart phone for like £60 and I have a contract which costs about £8 a month. I only have a 1GB data limit and I have to pay 3 yen (lol) to send a text, but I'm not planning to use this thing extensively anyway. I basically just wanted something cheap and functional for emergencies and so I had a phone number to put on official documents like job applications and so I could open a bank account.

At first I was looking at prepaid phones; I thought that it would be cheaper to just get some kind of crappy flip phone and put some credit on it. But it seems like this isn't really a viable option in Japan; the cheapest prepaid phone I could get would cost about the same as the phone + contract that I have now; so I thought I might as well get the smart phone instead. Another good thing about freetel is their contracts don't have early cancellation fees like the ridiculous 2 year minimum contracts from the big three Japanese service providers.


Ginkakuji, which is another famous temple in Kyoto.

I got a hanko (name stamp/seal which is commonly used in Japan instead of a signature) made for about £20. Japanese family names are usually represented with 2 kanji (chinese characters) so hankos are quite small since they only need to accomodate 2 characters. My family name is fairly long so it wouldn't fit so I just have a stamp that says アダム (ADAMU) which is how my first name is written in Japanese.

Armed with a phone number and a hanko I went to the bank and opened an account. I chose Shinsei Bank because they have an English website and English online banking. So I was able to read all of the terms and conditions online before I went into the bank. The lady also gave me a load of documents written in English which was nice. She didn't speak English though so as she was going through it all she was speaking Japanese.

I can understand a little Japanese but I'm no where near good enough to understand someone explaining the terms and conditions on a bank account. Because I'd already read them online and didn't feel like spending all day at the bank I just nodded my head and occasionally said わかりました (wakarimashita - "understood") or そうですか (soudesuka - sort of like "that's right" or "is that so?" or something like that). I had no idea what she was saying most of the time but she seemed satisfied with my responses lol. I then filled in my details on the form she gave me which went ok.


This is display food made out of plastic. It's common in Japan for restaurants to have plastic models of the food they serve in the front window. Sometimes it looks really realistic, if a bit shiny.

Then I tried to use my new ADAMU stamp but failed hard. I hadn't pressed down hard enough and only half the stamp came out; it was also sideways. The bank lady sort of laughed with a "gahhh dumb gaijin" kind of expression on her face and had to go and print out another form for me to stamp. While she was printing it out I made analysis game and continued to play try to fix it. I corrected the way I was holding the hanko so it would come out the right way and resolved to press down harder next time. The second attempt went much better and I successfully opened a bank account and left (GG). I'm still waiting for them to send me my new cash card in the post though; it should come some time next week hopefully.

Now that I have a phone and bank account, the next stage of my plan is to find a part-time job. I think English teaching is my best bet because of my still-shitty Japanese. My house-mate is an English teacher and he recommended me the company he works for; he said they let him choose his hours every week which sounds nice; my gf also said that that company is a good well known company. I also saw another job advert online for another English teaching company which wants part time teachers for evenings/weekends which would work out ok for me because I'm only at school until 5pm. My student Visa allows me to work up to 28 hours a week (as long as I'm not doing anything related to sex work or gambling), so I think I've got everything I need to start sending out applications.

I got a phone and opened a bank account.

In Japan, the first week of May is called 'Golden Week'. This is because there are 3 back-to-back national holidays. On this year those days are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (or maybe they are every year? I dunno). This means that including the previous weekend, most people will have 5 days off work/school; including me. Japanese people work ridiculously hard so 5 whole days off is a massive deal to most people I think.

My girlfriend lives in Tokyo, and I've never been to Tokyo so I thought this would be a good chance to go visit her. The Shinkansen (bullet train) from Kyoto to Tokyo only takes 2 hours, but it is also ridiculously expensive. A flight would be just as expensive and take way longer because I would have to get from Kyoto to Osaka airport and then do all the usual airport bullshit before landing in Haneda airport in Tokyo no where near my girlfriend's house. The cheapest and best option seemed like a night bus; it takes like 8 hours but leaves around midnight and arrives in Tokyo in the morning. This would mean I could leave on Friday night after school and arrive in Tokyo on Saturday morning with 5 whole days to spend.

Unfortunately I wasn't very quick to come up with this plan, and lots of people had clearly already had a similar idea. Lots of the buses were already fully booked, and most of the remaining cheapest ones had no toilet. My girlfriend says they do stop once half way and let you go to the toilet, but I don't exactly have the largest bladder in the world, and having to hold it in for 4 hours sounds awful. So I decided to spend slightly more money and get a bus with a toilet.

I've met my girlfriend's mum before when she came to the UK for my girlfriend's graduation. We got on ok, and I think she likes me which is good. I was still surprised though when she offered to pay for my bus. I tried to be polite a bit and protest that she shouldn't spend so much money on me, but realistically I'm kinda struggling with money until I can find a part time job and this would be a huge help, so I didn't protest too much.


It's common to see people wearing Kimonos around Kyoto. These people are mostly tourists who have rented them out for the day though. Japanese people don't wear them normally, except maybe for special occasions.

I think another reason that her mum has gone to all this effort to help me is that when my girlfriend was in the UK, my family looked after her a bit. She came to stay at our house 2 Christmases in a row, staying for about a week each time. My parents also lent her a bike, and I suppose paid for various meals and stuff for her when we went out for dinner. I think my girlfriend's mum feels like she has to repay my family by doing similar things for me while I'm in Japan. I hope it's not just out of a sense of debt though; I don't really feel like I've done anything to deserve it.

The original plan was that I would stay at my girlfriend's family's house. I felt a little uncomfortable about this though. Partly because I haven't met the rest of my girlfriend's family before, and partly because my girlfriend's family's house is a temple. Her dad is a Buddhist priest and they live in the temple that he looks after. That is really cool, but also a little intimidating. I don't really know much about Buddhism and I've never met her dad. I can't help wonder what he thinks about his daughter dating a foreigner.

In the end they apologised and said I shouldn't stay at their house after all. They said that they were worried about what the neighbours might think. All the local people's ancestors bones are buried there, and they thought that some people might be unhappy about some strange man staying there. I'm completely fine with this, and to be honest more comfortable staying in a hotel. My girlfriend also said "It's not about your race"; before she said that I hadn't considered that it might be; but after she said that I became suspicious that it might be lol. Either way it's not a huge deal with me. Also to apologise, her mum said she would pay for my hotel. I protested a bit again because now they really are spending a lot of money on me, but once again I accepted because it will be a massive help financially.

So I've basically got a free trip to Tokyo which is awesome. I'm going to be on my best behaviour and try to make a good impression on the rest of my girlfriend's family as well.

I'm going to visit Tokyo soon. I'm going to meet my girlfriends family probably. They live in a temple.

Last night I went to a Karaoke bar with some people from school and also a few Japanese people. I'm not at all comfortable singing but I thought it would be fun to go along and get to know some people anyway. Karaoke bars seem to be really popular in many parts of Asia, Japan included. If you've never been to one, the basic idea is that you hire out a private room which comes with a TV screen, a sound system, some mics and fairly large selection of songs you can play. You can order food and drinks to your room as well.

We paid for the most expensive option for some reason. Basically it meant that we could drink as much as we wanted of any type of drink on the menu for 3 hours. I started writing some thing about the problems with British culture and laws and comparisons to drinking in Japan, but it was a load of bullshit so I deleted it. The short version is that I got quite drunk and am now quite hung over.

The karaoke room came with several tablets. One of them allowed you to select which songs you wanted to play. It had a pretty big selection and the lyrics were available in multiple languages which was helpful because most of the people there only speak pretty basic Japanese. The other tablets had the menu on them and let you select which things you wanted to order. After you pressed send I guess it sends your request through to the bar who send someone over to your room with the drinks. Since I could just sit there ordering drinks without having to move, and the drinks didn't cost me anything extra, I ended up ordering quite a few. At least I got my money's worth I guess. Also being kinda drunk helped me get over my awkwardness and join in singing.


A garden in the Imperial Palace. It looks really peaceful in this photo, but there were actually thousands of tourists walking around. This is one of the few photos I managed to get that didn't have random people in.

Anyway it was quite fun and I made some new friends. My usual hangover cure is a fry up and a cup of tea. However I can't get most of the ingredients here There's no bacon or baked beans. You can buy cans of baked beans on amazon.jp, but it costs like 800 yen for 2, which means I would be paying like £3 for a can of beans. Might get some anyway. I think it's possible to find bacon if I look hard enough too, but it won't be cheap.

I don't like singing, but Karaoke bars are pretty cool.