Where Everybody's Crazy

Through my various trips to Japan, I'm now aware of most of the things which catch out the unwary foreigner. Things like the stealth public holiday, where you go into work and wonder why you're the only person there. But this is my first New Year in Japan, and it's completely got me.

The first hint that something was not right came on New Year's Day, when after our church service someone said to me "Have you got enough food in?" We had a severe blizzard on New Year's Day, but I didn't think I was going to be cut off. I live five minute's walk from the supermarket, for heaven's sake.

New Year's Day was deadly quiet, what with the snow and with everyone celebrating at home with their families. And yesterday was very quiet as well, but fair enough. I stayed at home and relaxed.

And now it's the third, and I'm fed up of sitting at home relaxing. I got stuff to do. The snow has gone now, but the city is still deadly quiet. All the banks and post offices are shut, and I have a grand total of 90 yen to my name. Not that there's anywhere open that I could spend it - the tourist shops are open because, as always, we have coachloads and coachloads of visitors, but everything else is shut. Now I see why I needed enough food in. (I have, thankfully.)

Will normal service return tomorrow? Or will this country lay dead until next Monday? And what on earth is everyone doing for all this time?

Friday was a very joyful day. In the morning, I was doing a visit to a local primary school as part of their "world festival" - the school had rounded up a few likely foreigners, and we had to give a short presentation on our home countries and then a thirty-minute activity. I got the kids doing the London Bridge nursery rhyme and game, and while it was a bit slow to start, they got there in the end.

It was my first time in a Japanese primary school. I was very impressed by the school and the way the kids were encouraged to take initiative and responsibility. Each guest had a "host" who took us around and showed us the activities that were going on in the various classrooms. One of those activities was a room where the children were giving presentations to the visitors (us guests and their parents) about the countries the guests had come from. I was also very impressed that all the kids already knew our names, as photos, names, and greeting phrases in each of our languages had been put up around the school for the past month. And as I joined one of the classes for lunch in their classroom, they were asking interested and intelligent questions of me. It was a lot of fun!

After lunch, we all headed off back to the train station, and I got a lift from there to Linea, one of the many wedding chapels in the area, where I pretended to be a foreign vicar. Thankfully I have some experience in my role, and was able to conduct myself reasonably well. There's a trend here in Japan for Christian-style wedding ceremonies, in purpose-built wedding chapels. Usually they're in a hotel, but this was just a wedding chapel/reception place. To complete the stereotypical picture of the Holywood wedding, you need a Western vicar to perform the ceremony. Their usual Western vicar - my boss - is currently out of the country, so they asked me to do one. It's a civil ceremony with a Christian theme, so the "vicar" doesn't need to be ordained, and so this is a good line of work for out-of-work actors who are passing through Japan and jobbing English teachers. That said, the company which contracted me is a Christian business which only employs missionaries or Japanese pastors.

I don't particularly want to get into this as a regular thing, not that I have the time, but it was fun. You have to not let on to the bride and groom that it's your first time, so I tried to look confident and authoritative even though I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I'd got a very well documented script that my boss uses, but until you're actually there doing it some of the details are always going to be hazy. Thankfully the staff at the hall were very helpful - if a little stern for my liking with the obviously terrified groom - and took charge of the rehearsal. I fumbled a few things in the rehearsal out of nerves, but in the actual ceremony I think everything went off OK. My own voice was a bit too stern for that happy occasion at times, though! It's hard to do solemn and caring at the same time.

Because it was my first time and because the staff took over, I didn't get much time with the bride and groom. I did manage to say a few reassuring words beforehand, but the vicar is not invited to the reception and is expected to disappear pretty much straight after the ceremony. But - although I hate to admit it - I really just wanted to do it for the experience. And the experience is still doing my head in - the thought that somewhere in Japan there's now a couple who have started out their married life together because I so proclaimed it. And if I don't do any more, then, well, that'll be even more special.

And to cap it all, just before I started the ceremony, I got a phone call on my mobile. I was swearing and cursing and trying to get rid of it, and ended up taking it. "This is the police; we've found your stolen bike. Come and pick it up today!" Result!

One of the things that happens when foreigners live for a country in a while is that they come across things that they don't understand. They then make a guess at interpreting what they see. Then, unless they're corrected, they continue to believe this guess and it eventually becomes received wisdom. When you've got a community of such foreigners, such as a mission field, the received wisdom can be passed down the generations. And all the time it can be completely and utterly wrong.

I remember when I first came to Japan. It was around the time of the O-Bon festival of the dead, when the spirits of the dead come back to visit. I noticed that a number of houses had bottles of water lined up outside them. Aha, must be so that the spirits can have a drink while they visit.

Now I live here, I noticed that the bottles are not just there for O-Bon, they're there all year round. I asked another missionary about it. "It's to ward off evil spirits," they said. Well, OK, something to do with spirits visiting, anyway.

Today I was talking with my language teacher about this, and asking him whether it was to do with welcoming spirits or warding them off. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. "Well, it's something to do with warding them off..." he said.

Turns out it's nothing to do with religion at all. It's about cats. People don't want cats peeing in front of their houses, so they put out bottles full of water. The water reflects the light of the sun, which blinds the cats and scares them away.

And then he told me about another one which does mix religion and pragmatism. Occasionally in Kyoto you will see, stuck into the walls of a house, little Shinto torii gates, like this:

Torii act as the gateway between the sacred and the secular worlds. They symbolise "there is a god enshrined here". I have a mental image of missionaries wandering around Kyoto doing prayer ministry and casting out the evil spirits from these gates in the walls. I am absolutely sure this has happened.

But again this is nothing to do with religion. It's once again to do with peeing. Drunk people pee against walls. But even drunk people have reservations about peeing on something that appears to be sacred, even if actually it isn't.

Culture is a really complicated thing. For those of us who don't completely comprehend a culture, we can jump to some fantastic conclusions, especially where religion appears to be involved and we get all touchy about stuff. I bet we probably teach new Christians to avoid stuff that's completely innocuous, because some missionary fifty years ago got the wrong end of the stick and nobody ever checked it out. So whenever a missionary tells me something about a peculiar Japanese religious practice, I'm not going to trust them. I'm going to go and actually ask a Japanese about it. Odds are good it's actually something to do with peeing.

So, my local police have put it upon themselves to form an anti-foreigner brigade. I wish I was joking. They've announced the formation of a "来日外国人対策支援チーム" - which translates as "Japanese-resident foreigner countermeasures support team".

Countermeasures, eh? Will they be dropping chaff every time I walk around the neighbourhood?

I said I'd write about banks. The banking system here is interesting - in some ways it's quite advanced, and in many, many others it's way behind the UK banks. Which is saying something.

First, the good parts - you can pay money into an ATM. Even coins. I've started dumping all my change back into an ATM at the end of the day, when I remember, to help me save money. You can also feed a bill into an ATM and it will pay the bill and print you out a receipt. You can transfer money using an ATM.

But the ATM will close at 9pm. Or earlier. I don't know why this is, as I can't see any sensible commentary about it, just depressed and cynical expats.

International transfers, foreign cheques, any kind of international banking - if you haven't got a Citibank account, just give up. If you have, prepare for extortionate charges. Last time I needed to do an international transfer, I did it by withdrawing 2000 pounds worth of cash at the airport ATM and getting on the plane with it.

On Monday, I went into the bank to try to recover a long dormant account. So I went in without a cash card or bank book, without knowing the account number, and only having the sketchiest idea of the account's branch. Add onto this the fact that the account was registered to an address I haven't lived in for seven years, and that the last time I used the account, it was actually with another bank which has since been taken over. I knew I was in for the long haul.

An hour of sitting around, and the clerk calls me over. "We've found your account, sir, and changed the address and will be sending you a new passbook. There's just one problem."

Uhoh.

"You filled in all the forms today as 'Simon Cozens'. Unfortunately, your account is registered to 'SIMON COZENS', which is why it took so long to find it. Could you fill in the forms again, using upper case this time?"

So this week is O-Bon, the Buddhist festival of the dead. And so last night I went over to the main Shinto shrine (yes, you work that one out...) to see their "ten thousand lantern festival".

Now I said that O-bon is the Buddhist festival of the dead. Strictly speaking, that's what it used to be. Just like Christmas used to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus and is now a commercial festival, O-bon is an excuse for the family to get together on hot summer evenings and play games and eat ice and dance the night away. So part of the celebrations involved a dancing competition, which some people took surprisingly seriously:

As well as prizes for the dancing, there were raffle prizes, some of which were quite bizarre. (I think someone was sent down to the hundred-yen shop with orders to get a bunch of prizes...)

The dance basically involves walking around a central tower, making turns and hand gestures, while one person on the tower beats a drum and another sings folk songs; some of which have vague religious significance, and some of which are just the singer freestyling about whatever comes into his head. (There was one really weird one about spending too much time with horses and giving horse germs to all the family...)

And of course, there's always one:

He won a prize for trying. Of course he did. I don't think anyone didn't see that coming. :)

I didn't dance, because I'm a good missionary and wouldn't be seen involving myself in a pagan ritual. And because it was hot.

See, I don't consider o-bon dancing to be a religiously significant event. Now of course I know others do, and so I wouldn't get involved even if I wanted to, but I think they are more concerned with what it used to mean, not what it means now. Just as I can't approve of Christmas being an orgy of commercialism because what it originally meant makes it OK, I can't disapprove of a good chance for the family to get together and have a dance because what it originally meant makes it bad.

So everyone knows about the drinks vending machines all over the place in Japan. And a lot of people know about the beer vending machines. And some people know about the pornography vending machines. Some may even have guessed that there'd be, say, battery vending machines on the streets. And ice cream.

The other day I was just thinking, "I really wish there were milk vending machines." Tonight, while cycling randomly back from my bath, I did indeed find a milk vending machine! Now I know where to go when I run out of milk at 2am!

Look at some photos instead.

We had two days of junior school camp this week, and one day of "international contact camp". Then tonight, the Nagahama lantern festival:

Three sermons in two days coming up this weekend. I don't feel appreciated.

I was randomly flicking through the Proceedings of the Japan Academy - you know, the way people do - and found an article called "Adult Guardian System and Protection of the Elderly." It quotes a recent senryuu poem by someone called "Kano" as a suggestion to the aging population problem:

年寄りは　死んで下さい　国のため

"Old people! Please die. For the sake of the country."

21% of the population of Japan is elderly, with 65% paying for their upkeep. Soon it's going to be 2 dependents for every three workers. Since this isn't a particularly great way to have a working economy, the Japanese national budget is going to try to have to control its spending on social welfare. And then those old people may have to die off - for the sake of the country.

Would you eat in a place with this name?

Update: Apparently this one is well known.