My driver wasn’t very chatty so I decided not to push conversation. I was tired from the flight and was grateful of the rest anyway. The Corrs’ Breathless was playing when I got into the car and it took me a minute to realise that he wasn’t messing with me and that this was actually Japanese radio: he didn’t even know I was Irish anyway. The countryside from Nagoya to Okazaki was so beautiful. We passed through countless small towns, passed some small paddy fields, the odd bon-fire, electrical lines stretched off in every direction, the roads were, as expected, incredibly clean and well-maintained. It struck me how artificial Japan is. Not in a negative sense, but how everything you can see has been transformed by humans. Coming from the airport, to whatever bridge it was we first crossed, all the roads were elevated. I found 2 roads on the ground when I looked for them, but all others were suspended. Everywhere I looked, most of what I was looking at was man-made. You might get images of New York or some depressing soviet architecture but it’s not like that at all. Not that it’s any less artificial, but it just seems like more work has gone into design than you’d expect. I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though how artificial everything is, the amount of work put into that transformation is so high that it’s actually quite beautiful.
I didn’t realise how big Okazaki was until I was in the car for about 10 or 15 minutes looking at buildings with Okazaki written on them before we finally arrived. The population is over 350,000 which puts it at about 85% bigger than Cork and about 7 times bigger than Limerick if we’re talking about the city alone and still almost 5 times bigger if suburbs are included. It’s beautiful though, in its normality. There’s nothing special about this city at all: just a normal Japanese city with normal Japanese people. That’s what I love about it.
I arrived at Yamasa and got my accommodation sorted out. I was dropped off by my driver who turned on my electricity and wished me luck. It took a big longer than I expected to get from the school to my residence but I think he must have driven the long way around because I can walk to the school in 15 minutes from here, if the traffic lights are with me. I have to cross 2 lights at a junction and it can take about 5 minutes to do that. You begin to miss jay-walking after living in Limerick so long. You don’t miss the filth though. I haven’t seen any chewing gum on the footpath and the roads are so well maintained it’s as though they’ve all been laid down in the last fortnight. The footpaths are a bit scary though, in that they don’t really exist. Every road has a white line of paint at the side and you walk or cycle in there. I don’t know if they’re actually cycle-lanes or what, but that’s the only option. Cars are all very new. I saw a Starlet yesterday and it’s the oldest car I’ve seen yet. I can’t read number plates here but it looked about 10 years old. All other cars look about 3 years old at worst, and I haven’t seen a dirty one. I suppose the roads are all so clean that you just don’t get much muck. The cars are all sparkling clean too. All meaning literally all: every single car on the road.
The internet is pretty snappy in the room and a long ethernet cable was left here. I couldn’t send email though, so I went to the main building and asked to speak to the administrator and got Declan Murphy. I explained that port 25 appeared to be blocked and advised he check the firewall rules. He found out that the ISP is filtering port 25, because there was lots of spam being sent. Hmm… an ISP that solves a spam problem by disabling email… Anyway, I was told to use port 587 instead of 25 for email and Gmail is my only SMTP server which supports that, and that rewrites my emails to be from my gmail account so that’s no good. I just set up an SSH tunnel on my laptop to Skynet‘s mail server in the end.
The staff at the school told me that I have an exam at 9am on Monday morning to evaluate my level of Japanese. I’m quite looking forward to this as I was told it should be able 2 hours long and I’ll do reading, writing and speaking evaluations. The only thing I’m going to be annoyed about is when I forget how to write kanji during the written, even though I know well I’ve studied them. Reading and speaking will of course present problems, but also provide lots of opportunity for learning.
I also asked about a mobile phone. In Japan, they’re generally one to two year contract bill-phones, which is no good to me. I was given directions to City Hall and I’ll go there on Monday when they’re open to get my Alien Registration Card and then I can get a phone. I’ve been told I can get ones without that long contract but I’ll have to ask someone about them in a shop. I’ll also evaluate the option of buying out of the contract. It might be worth it if the short-term phones are much more expensive (free email all the time would easily save me about €200 so if that’s not available on short-term and the buyout is about €100…).
I met Nicholas when asking about the phone in the building. He’s a guy I met on Facebook who saw that I was going to Yamasa at the same time. I didn’t get much of a chance to speak to him but he’s the only other student I know right now so we can meet again on Tuesday when he’s back from his weekend trip. He’s in Residence U which is about 600m away.
Next up: exploration of Okazaki!
