A big day!

Today I actually ventured out of the house before 2:00. Success! I went to the Kanagawa ward registration office to get my gaijin (foreigner) card. As I mentioned in the last post, everyone foreigner living in Japan has to get this card and carry it around all the time. Anyway, the quest for the gaijin card started with needing to take photos. I had asked both Aki and my friend Ben (lived in Japan last year) where one took such photos and was told, with some slightly frustrating vagueness, "oh, at a photo booth, maybe around the train station?" According to Wikipedia, Japan is one of three countries in the world with a "major infrastructure of photo booths." The others, in case you are wondering, are the UK and France. Anyway, apparently this major infrastructure of photos booths is everywhere except where you are actually looking for one. After about twenty minutes of prowling the sidestreets around Yokohama station, I found one. Then of course, in Japanese fashion, it was highly efficient and well designed. I was able to set it to be in English, you can pick from a vareity of sizes depending on what you need the photos for (visa, passport, license etc), you can retake the photo if you don't like it (and there's a mirror where the lens is so you can see what you look like), after its taken you get the center it so that your face is framed correctly, and then the photos print in about 15 seconds. And they actually came out well! Way better than my corpse-like passport or my serial killer driver's license (one good thing about this gaijin card is that I have something else to use as ID). Way better than Walgreens, and cheaper, and faster . . . should I be surprised that Japan has managed, yet again, to make something convenient and efficient?

Anyway, then I went to the ward office (which was quite easy to find) and registered for the card, which just meant filling out a form. Then I went upstairs to register for health insurance (if you have a year-long visa, you are eligible to register for the National Health Insurance Program). This was a more dicey proposition. At the gaijin card counter, there was some English, since it's for foreigners. The Health Insurance counter was all Japanese and there were two different sections to choose from. At first it wasn't clear to me which window I should go to, but then I noticed that it was all elderly people waiting at one window so I figured that was not the window for me. I am so smart! The registration was almost laughable. No physical or anything, just fill out a form (with just your name and address) and boom, you have health insurance. The premium is somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 a year. Another thing that Japan does better than the U.S.

Hasn't this been a thrilling day thus far? The joys of bureaucracy. THEN I headed off to Ikea in search of a lamp. And what do you know, Ikea in Japan is . . . exactly the same as Ikea in the U.S. except perhaps filled with more screaming children. Anyway, I was reminded that while Ikea has very cheap lamps, they are running a racket on their lightbulbs. Seriously, the lamp was like $6 but the lightbulbs were like $15. I am on to you Ikea! It's a simple lamp, but I like it better than just having the overhead light on, plus now I can read in bed at night. So it's a nice little addition to the room. I also got a storage box to put books in and to put my computer on, so that there is more space on the table by the bed.

After all this hard work (in the rain!), I decided it was time to come home, sit around, and watch Project Runway on youtube. This season is meh. I also watched some Democratic Convention. Liked both Bill Clinton (really nice job drawing a contrast between Repubs and Dems) and Joe Biden. I am sad about not being in the U.S. for this election - I will be voting from afar, but it's really not the same. I have also dedicated considerable time over the last day and a half to trying to figure out my cell phone (keitai). At first I was uttery mystified by it. I mean, the phone is in english, but for the life of me, I could not find the "back" key, so I kept going into different menus and getting stuck (and then it would ask me if I want to cancel things and it would change settings and I was like WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?) Finally, with Aki's help, I had a breakthrough. But now it's just sad because I don't have anyone in Japan to call me on the phone. Calling Japanese cell phones through skype and jajah is fairly expensive (15 c/minute) and it's more cost effective for me to call American landlines through my computer. Moral of this story: I need to make some friends. Good thing the program starts on Monday! Though that does give me something to look forward to, rather than just dreading the placement test.

Okay, due to the rain and the boring errand running, there was no picture taking. But I realized that I have a whole trove of Japan pictures from last summer that have not been shared. Smoking is still fairly prevalent in Japan, though its increasingly restricted and there are signs about why you should stop (I was reminded of this topic by reading David Sedaris' new book in which he moves to Tokyo for a few months and quits smoking). Anyway, these signs are not like "You will die from lung cancer if you smoke." Rather, they try to approach the subject with dare I say wit? Or perhaps just an odd sense of humor? Anyway, they amuse me. I do feel like the message is mixed here though. Shouldn't the villain be smoking, not the hero? Don't they know that only the evil people smoke?? I guess it was different in the "old movies." Perhaps I just don't get it . . . .