Living and Working in Tokyo Part III

Finishing off the series..

5 - Community Centres

Besides exploring different cities and going for hiking trips, my two main hobbies were taking Japanese culinary lessons and playing badminton. From both activities i learned about the amazing community centres in Tokyo.

Residents living Tokyo belong to one of the 23 wards in the city. Each ward has its own community centres, where the facilities can be booked by residents of that ward. I recall there were limitations on the number of guests from other wards that you could bring. For both cooking lessons and badminton, I was lucky enough to find organizers who could host bigger groups.

For the cooking classes, I did a few with Kitchen Nippon. The kitchens were fully equipped with pots, pans, utensils, plates and pots, all in various sizes for different cooking methods and different dishes. Perhaps not a surprise, given how complicated Japanese cooking is (to strive for the perfection) and the amount of side dishes that come with each meal. The only things which the organizer needed to bring in were the ingredients. I thought these were very nice facilities for the residents to host parties, since most people didn’t have big kitchens at home. They were also great for part-time culinary lovers to host classes without putting up the expensive cost for renting their own studio. To see some pictures of these cooking lessons or to check out classes that you can join on your next trip to Japan, check out Kitchen Nippon!

For badminton, if you ever need to look for a group to play badminton with, check out the Tokyo Badcox International Badminton Club. As the name suggests, the group is geared towards expats living in Tokyo. The group has a few stable locations at the ward community centres, and there are different activities for different levels.

Besides the kitchen space and the badminton courts, the community centres were also equipped with libraries and facilities for other sports like swimming and basketball. There were even free Japanese language lessons offered by Shinjuku City. it was great to be a resident of Tokyo!

6 - Other

Here is a collection of little things which made up my experience living and working in Tokyo:

• Convenient stores (Family Mart, 7-Eleven, Lawson, etc) were truly convenient: wide varieties of snacks and food (especially the hot oden during winter times), useful household needs, concert/amusement park ticketing kiosks, ATMs, etc. I could pay all my utility bills in these convenient stores, without having to mail in cheques. One could really live off convenient stores when feeling lazy!

• When dealing with government agencies, they would issue a paper receipt for everything that was done. These receipts were not necessary for reference (i.e. no legal implications), so it was quite a lot of tree killing. From my observations in changing address / reporting lost items to police, I saw many of the information was recorded on paper notebook (maybe translated to computer later?) and some back-end approval had to be physically signed by the authority (with a stamp or hanko 判子), so everything appeared not as advanced as I thought of Japan. Though in the end the work did get done properly, so the workflow was still well organized and efficient. Not too long after I arrived in Japan, I lost my wallet which contained EVERYTHING including the passport. It was a nightmare when I realized I dropped my wallet by accident, but the police located it at a station within hours after reporting it. Also thanks to the honesty of the person who found it!

• I get asked a lot about what it was like to be a female working in Japan. I didn’t feel anything that was different from the North American work culture, largely because my team was 100% expats. However, when I attended a “Women in Leadership: training, I learned that females workers felt inferior to their male counterparts / there were unequal opportunities due to societal behavior expectations. While I couldn’t echo some of the comments, I felt it must be very tough for those working women who couldn’t get their opinions heard or the opportunities which they deserved.

• Minor earthquakes were often. I remember the first night I experienced it, I freaked out and didn’t know what to do since it was before I got the training about earthquake emergencies. Then after a while I got used to it. It is worth noting that all low-rise apartments came with a small ladder for emergency situations so you could evacuate yourself. Also, everyone was supposed to stock food enough for three days. Some stores sold pre-packaged survival kits. Perhaps I didn’t see myself living there for too long, I never managed to get myself any supply for emergency situations.

• There were a lot of delicious food in Japan. After returning from Japan for 3 years now, I realize there are just a few food that I absolutely miss / haven’t found good equivalent in North America: sukiyaki, Japanese fat leeks (negi 葱), raw eggs or tororo (とろろ grated yam) over rice, horumonyaki ( ホルモン焼き, beek or pork offal for bbq) or anything with horumon, Matsuya breakfast sets.

Living and Working in Tokyo Part II

Continuing on what it was like to live and work in Tokyo..

3 - Holidays

The best perk of working in Japan was the number of national holidays I got to enjoy. There was at least one national holiday each month (see 2020 calendar here) so I had the feeling that there was always a holiday coming up! Due to this fact, I found myself more motivated to work as I knew there would be a break shortly.

In addition to the national holidays, I started with 20 vacation days + “free” 5-day consecutive summer leave (basically extra holidays for Obon festival in August). It was truly a working holiday when I was in Tokyo! With what you heard about long working hours in Japan you might be wondering if I got to enjoy these days off? I could only say I was a lucky soul; being a foreigner working in the most foreign team (100% foreigners) in a foreign-owned corporation, I got to unplug completely during all national holidays and personal days off. I was told that the generous national holiday system was meant to encourage/force workers to take time off as people typically don’t take their personal vacation days off. I got to enjoy the benefits of both worlds!

New Year is the most important holiday of the year. Despite the Chinese influence in its culture and language, Japan does not celebrate the Lunar calendar New Year as observed in the Chinese tradition. It has adopted the New Year of Georgian calendar since the since the Meiji Restoration. However, the way the New Year is celebrated is still tied to the Chinese tradition: visiting local shrines, children receiving otoshidama (お年玉; the Japanese equivalent of red envelopes/luck money), family gathering, Jinjitsu (人日, "Human Day") coinciding with a similar observation in Lunar calendar, etc. These traditions and celebrations are ways of wishing a wonderful year to come, particularly for ensuring health and prosperity.

Besides the New Year, the three most important holiday periods (i.e. travel peak seasons) are the Golden Week, Obon festival and the Silver Week, which are string of holidays occurring in May/August/September respectively. Golden Week consists of four holidays within 7 days, it basically means a week off if you take one personal vacation day. The Obon holidays would be a week off as well with the consecutive summer leave offered by some companies. Silver Week is typically a 4-day long week but it becomes a “mega” 5-day holiday when there’s a workday sandwiched between the Respect for the Aged Day (a set date) and the Autumn Equinox (not a set date and tied to astronomical observations each year). I was in Tokyo in 2015 during which the Silver Week was a 5-day holiday!

Easter/Halloween/Christmas are also celebrated (not observed) in Japan. Throughout the year, there is always something themed for the seasonal celebrations. All the plum flowers/sakura/fireworks/illuminations/etc seasons attract tons of tourists to Japan. All things the Japanese way were prettier and cuter and it was fun to go shopping during those holiday periods! In a way, it is a way of boosting tourism.

4 - Hiking

70% of Japan is mountainous, so there’s plenty of hiking opportunities. Besides the generous national holidays system, hiking is the main reason why I miss Japan so much.

What I liked about hiking in Japan was that:

• A lot of the hiking trailheads were accessible by public transportation so it was easy to go on a hiking trip.

• There were so many options for different levels. Just within Tokyo, Takaosan (高尾山) would be a touristy spot that was less about exercising but more for a relaxing outing and to see Mount Fuji (富士山 Fujisan) from afar, while Mount Fuji would be on the other extreme for a long hike. In between, there were many many options depending how hard-core you would like to go. No more excuses to get close to the nature!

• I loved bringing O-nigiri (お握り; rice balls wrapped in sesame) as lunch for the hike. These O-nigiri were sold in all convenient stores and definitely were the best convenient food in my opinion. On the convenience of food options, the Ekiben (駅弁, bento boxes for rail rides, sold in train stations) makes it easy to go on hiking trips as you can just grab yummy food on the go.

• Lastly, all my hikes ended in Onsen (温泉 hotspring). Simply luxury.

Through my encounter with mountain-lovers, I found out that many Japanese mountaineers look to the list outlined in “One Hundred Mountains of Japan” (日本百名山 Nihon Hyakumeizan) for hiking goals. Unfortunately I didn’t stay long enough to become more connected to the hiking tradition.

Living and Working in Tokyo Part I

My work experience in Tokyo was definitely the most unforgettable out of all my adventures to date. Like many other expats in Japan, my decision to relocate to Japan was tied to animes. The world I saw through the Japanese animes, particularly Doraemon and Chūka Ichiban, appeared super fascinating so I always wanted to see what it is like in Japan. When the opportunity to work in Tokyo came along I just went for it, without doing much research and just packed up two suitcases when it was time to go. The short 14-month stay turned out to be loaded with many new discoveries and fond memories.

If you haven’t came across fun facts about Japan, this blog is a condensed and entertaining read for learning some of the odd things about Japan. Instead of writing about all the amusing moments I experienced, I am going to focus on sharing about what it was like to live and work in Tokyo.

Part I - Language and Housing

Part II - Holidays and Hiking

Part III - Community Centres and Other

1 - Language

It is true that majority of the Japanese population doesn’t speak/understand English. I was lucky as my Chinese background enabled me to get by easily without even learning Japanese before I went to Tokyo. I got lost when trying to find my corporate housing upon arrival, but was able to ask a store owner to lend me their telephone to contact coworkers by writing down “電話” which is the Chinese Kanji in the Japanese system for telephone. Then, throughout my stay in Tokyo, I found I could understand at least 50% of advertisements/documents and guessed the rest. The only headache for me was conversational Japanese.

To establish my residency in Tokyo at the beginning, I didn’t need to speak Japanese for the most part. Conveniently there was a foreigner version of everything: there was the Shinsei bank for getting a bank account, there were English-speaking housing agents for finding rental apartments and helping through contract singing, and there were English support when dealing with the government agencies.

Then, for navigation, there was English labeling in all subway maps and street signs so getting around was relatively easy. Thanks to Google Map, I didn’t need to know how to ask for directions. Due to this convenience, I never managed to pick up all the Japanese words for asking for directions. From what I could recall, navigating in the rural area was also easy with Google Map.

The only instance where I really needed to be able to read and speak in Japanese was in restaurants, particularly the ones outside of touristy areas. I lived in a neighbourhood with family run restaurants and the owners were older Japanese who didn’t know English. I had to know all the Japanese food and ingredient names to be able to order things I wanted in those restaurants. It wasn’t an easy journey, because there were just so much more food varieties in Japan compared to the what I had in Canada/America. Thanks to my passion for cooking and eating, I was very motivated to pick up the food part of the Japanese language and managed to become fluent in ordering within a month. For those of you planning to visit Japan, I definitely recommend learning your food language before going so you can dine in the more local restaurants!

Some tips about picking up Japanese:

1. Learning Hiragana and Katakana is the fundamental step before you can go anywhere with the language. It is all about memorization. To facilitate the learning for those who knows Chinese already, this chart is super useful. It turns out the Hiragana and Katakana are both derived from Chinese Kanji. I was quite amazed when I stumbled upon the chart. It allowed me to memorize the two systems within a day!

2. i found Katakana was more common in the touristy areas. For one thing, it is used to spell out a lot of the foreign influence food items such as “ice Cream” and “Hamburger” on the menu (basically Katakana is used to spell out anything foreign that can’t be written in Kanji, which is equivalent to saying non-Chinese foreign influences). For another, Katakana is used in a lot of advertisements/banners/posters to cater to foreigners. So, learn your Katakana first if you have to pick! I found it fun to learn words written in Katakana, because they were based on the language where the item was from so I learned about origin of various things. For example, the Japanese word randoseru (ランドセル), which is the boxy and sturdy leather backpack that is carried by all school kids, comes from the Dutch word “ransel” which means backpack.

3. I recommend the app “JapanesePod101” for learning the conversational Japanese that’s applicable to everyday life. I had a private tutor for weekly lessons after work hours and we followed a structured syllabus based on the popular book “Minna no Nihongo”, but I found it was quite difficult to memorize all the grammar. The podcast lessons focus less on grammar, instead these allow you to learn useful phases for different given situations. These lessons would be a quick way to pick up some Japanese for everyday encountering. The podcast format makes it a fun thing to do on the road as well. However, if you would like to pass the Japanese proficiency tests eventually then I still recommend a formal structure program.

2 - Housing

Yes, living spaces were tiny in Japan. When I was given options for corporate housing, despite the total area was small (between 18m2 to 21m2) the pictures online didn’t look that bad. It was only when I arrived at the actual apartment, I realized how small it was! The ~20m2 space contained a full bathroom, a kitchenette and a bedroom with a desk and a TV. I barely had space to move around after I opened up my two suitcases!

When I looked for my own place, I “upgraded” to 36m2 already but it was still a downsize compared to what I had prior to Tokyo. However, I did realize I had been taking space for granted. The apartment was small but fully functional (绝对的麻雀虽小五脏俱全). Storage space was plenty thanks to the neat layout. I learned to limit myself on buying useless things for the smaller space, just like the “Danshari (斷捨離)” concept introduced by Marie Kondo. I was once able to host a group of 5 friends visiting from abroad in my tiny apartment! Where there’s a will there’s a way…

As a foreigner working in Japan, it wasn’t easy to find a rental apartment. A lot of landlords specified not renting to non-citizens. I had a rental agent focusing on finding foreigner-friendly apartments. The lease structure was very similar to renting in the U.S., one month rent as commission, key deposits, plus first and last month rent up-front. There was one extra requirement for foreigners: a co-signer / guarantor. Gladly the admin in my team was willing to serve as a guarantor. I imagine she had to do it for every foreigner joining. I was not sure how other foreigners could find someone who would be willing to serve as a guarantor when they were new to the counter.

When I moved in to the new apartment, I was part of a “furniture transfer” tradition that ran within my company. There was a constant turnover of foreigners in the company, people leaving would be passing on furniture to people joining. I got my whole house of furniture from an ex-worker who was returning home just at the time as I was moving in. Luckily I was able to fit everything into my own home. To get furniture in Japan, Nitori, the Japanese version of IKEA, would be a very good option, affordable yet still good quality. Even the Japanese versions of dollar stores, such as Daiso and Seria, are good options for finding quality kitchenware/homeware for your rental home. When you buy furniture, be mindful of hefty fees when you would need to pay for disposing furniture, either through local disposal office or private service. I tried selling some items online when I had to leave Tokyo, it wasn’t easy due to most people didn’t drive cars so no one was willing to pick up furniture. Again, think Danshari!

I was overall quite happy about the living conditions in Tokyo. It was only expensive on a per footage basis, otherwise the rent was actually more affordable as a proportion of income. The only thing I had to get used to was garbage sorting. The categorization was very strict and there were different collection days for different types of garbage. For a small living space, imagine setting different garbage up for different things, and imaging leaving garbage sit there for one more week if you missed the collection day. It was the biggest headache living in Tokyo! Some landlords would check whether the residents follow the rules. In the corporate housing, I received a building-wide warning letter about garbage not disposed according to rules once!