When in my apartment, I can tell immediately when there’s an earthquake, because my wardrobe squeaks. “Surely you can tell that your building is shaking without using a wardrobe-seismometer,” you ask? After enough earthquakes in a short period of time, you begin to think things are shaking when they really aren’t.

Sometimes people around me will ask me if I felt an earthquake, and this is one way of confirming. Another way is to turn on the TV and watch for an earthquake alert, which always appears on the top of the screen and is usually accompanied by some details about it if on NHK. Another common way is to locate a hanging object away from draughts and check if it is swinging. Cords hanging from ceiling lights are great for this.

I have never seen a Japanese person show that they are afraid during an earthquake. They usually show smile and comment that “it’s shaking.” I have been told that this is just because they are used to earthquakes, but many foreigners who have lived here for a long time never get used to them, and after such horrific earthquakes such as the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 one would think that they would be quite frightening for the Japanese who remember these events.

I submit that keeping a brave face is an important part of Japanese society. If people are whinging and moaning, it brings the group down. NHK doesn’t have their own version of RTÉ Liveline here. That’s not to say that there is no whinging in Japan, but one thing that struck me about much of the video footage on TV over the last couple of weeks is the use of the word genki (元気).

Many buildings were painted with SOS messages on their rooftops, and these messages were accompanied by a list of what was needed (for example, “water”), and most visibly, the word genki in big letters. Evacuees living at sports centres and schools say that they are genki, and offer the best smiles they can muster while listing off what supplies they need. A group of people are rescued by the SDF and climb off the back of a Chinook helicopter, and a teenager from the group walks up to a camera and gives a two thumbs up to the camera: he is telling the world that he is genki.

The word is hard to translate directly into English, because it has so many meanings, but generally means “in good form.” These people are asking for help, but while doing so they are telling people that they are in good form. You may have seen the news about the eighty year old woman and sixteen year old boy who were recently rescued. The sixteen year old boy appeared on TV very shortly after his rescue. I thought this was very sudden, but Japanese friends told me that the father surely allowed TV crews to interview the boy from his hospital bed to tell the world that he is genki, and sorry for any worry that was caused while the boy was missing.

With everyone in the group, especially those who are going through very difficult circumstances, telling everyone else that they are in good form an attitude of optimism seems to come about very quickly. As I have said previously, the foreigners here seemed to be the only ones panicking, and especially those who do not have the benefit of understanding Japanese and therefore missing out on these positive messages from survivors, be it through messages on rooftops, when climbing off a rescue helicopter, or from their hospital beds.

There are tens of thousands of people having the worst time of their lives right now, but they are doing an amazing job of keeping positive. I hope I can learn to be like this too, and I think I am getting better at it little by little with every aftershock.

The day started with news of the US suddenly rejecting the Japanese government’s advice and telling their citizens to keep at least 80km from the plant, instead of the Japanese number of 30km. At the same time, the UK was telling their citizens to escape Tokyo, apparently, and The Sun came up with the headline “GET OUT OF TOKYO NOW”, accompanied by a photo taken many hundreds of kilometres from Tokyo.

Having dealt with shoddy news coverage over the last few days I decided to research this a little more, and it turns out that the 80km zone recommended by the US is standard practice for US nuclear safety code. They were just advising their citizens to follow US codes instead of Japanese codes. The UK announcement was quickly updated to explicitly say that their previous assessment of the situation was not changing: there is no danger to Tokyo. However, there is a shortage of gasoline and supplies are still not at 100%, so they issued advice similar to the Irish government: it is best to stay out of Tokyo unless you need to be there. That sounds reasonable.

Today I saw a lot of conversation on Twitter about making Walls of Shame for journalists being irresponsible in their reporting. Many people here in Tokyo are now more worried about their parents back home than their parents are about them, due to this sort of fear-mongering.

The JGSDF (or as they are known in Japan, 自衛隊 jieitai, “jee ay tai”) are becoming great heroes now. The radiation levels were too high to get helicopters in earlier today, but they managed it. Four buckets were emptied into it, and they are still going to continue with that approach. They also took out the old high-pressure water cannons that last saw use in the public eye in 1969 when they were used to suppress rioting Todai students who took over the Yasuda Auditorium. The radiation was too high for the cannons to approach at first but eventually they were able to approach.

The power problem remains. Today there was threat of a huge outage, as many people had turned on their heaters at home in reaction to the cold weather. However, we were warned that if we didn’t cut back immediately there would be big outages, and big companies and factories were specifically asked to cut back as much as possible. The outages were averted.

Despite all these happenings, Edano simply reasserted that people should be careful if they’re within the 20km-30km zone, and there were no explosions or new fires at any of the reactors. This makes it an uneventful day. Since last night a lot of usual Japanese TV has returned, which is a very good sign. Tokyo is certainly taking steps toward normality, slowly.

There is no cause for panic in Tokyo, and people are not panicking. Everyone is calm, and even though participating in panic buying are calmly queuing to buy supplies. The people watching the news from abroad are certainly more concerned about the possible negative outcomes than the people living in Tokyo.

In Tokyo there are scheduled blackouts for the suburbs. As I live near the city, and in an area with many important data centres and TV station headquarters, it is unlikely that we will be included in the blackouts. Since the blackout plans were announced, there has been an enormous effort to reduce energy consumption in Tokyo. The typically permanently illuminated Akihabara, Ginza, and Shibuya are running with not much more than street-lights at night, and in Ginza even the street-lights have been tweaked to consume minimal energy. Many companies with big factories, such as Toshiba, are shutting down their operations. Companies with many servers (as well as the University of Tokyo) are shutting down as many of their machines as possible. Trains are running with typically 25-50% capacity. People at home are not using kettles as much, keeping lighting to a minimum, and not using heaters/air conditioners as much as possible. This big reduction in usage means that many of the blackouts that were planned are not necessary. TEPCO is still planning these, but only implementing them as power demands require.

Other than this, there is no big effect on Tokyo. People are not concerned about radiation as there is not a significant danger yet. There were only seven deaths during the earthquake and no tsunami. People in northern areas are flocking to Tokyo. It is the safest place to be right now, and I am here, in a big, strong, tall building, with plenty of supplies and great friends around me.

Anyone reading this from home, please trust that I am capable of looking after myself, and do not be any more concerned for my wellbeing than I am. At the moment, I do not feel any less safe than usual here, and if I did feel in danger I would not be here. Despite the events at the plant in Fukushima, Tokyo is still the place where I most want to be. This seems to be a common theme among foreigners here, and I am no exception.

The university’s entrance procedure has not been affected by the events of the last week, and I need to submit some paperwork between today and Friday, so I am about to go and do that now. I may have to wait four minutes for a train instead of two, but that is nothing compared to the suffering of those who have been affected by the tsunami. Please keep your thoughts (and donations if you are the type of person to donate) focused on these people and do not be distracted by the reactors in Fukushima.

There have been times when driving in winter on icy roads when I have experienced a similar feeling. The feeling of control remains during the first part of a skid, but there comes a moment when you realise that this may get serious, and very suddenly fear drops in. Just like going a little too far into a skid and realising that this may not end up the way you imagine it, there was a point where the strength and length of the quake was longer than I had experienced before, and I realised that this time it may not end quietly as they usually do.

It was shortly after this moment that I grabbed the SD card containing the video, and slid under my table. The table is a Japanese kotatsu, which has legs that are about a foot long, and quite thick. I started imagining what might happen to this table when the ceiling comes down. Or would it come down? Would it be more of a lateral collapse of the building? There is a big metal stairs at the back, so would the building fall over on its side, or rip the stairs out of the ground and fall forwards? Probably on its side, so should I try to be on the side of the table near the edge of the building or near the inside of the building? As long as the legs hold up, it should be possible to slowly pull away rubble and work my way up, as the iron constructed building wouldn’t likely just collapse down on itself.

The vibrations got stronger still and now I stopped planning what to do after it stopped and just prayed and prayed for it to be over and for everyone in Tokyo to be safe. There was a sound like a vicious wind outside. I suspect it was the power lines being shook about.

It ended slowly. That moment when it began to retreat gave a cautious feeling of relief. Until it starts to become weaker, there is no way of knowing how far it is going to go, and a few seconds after I was starting to feel that perhaps it wasn’t going to go as far as tearing down my building.

I quickly got out from under the table, dashed to the door, and ran outside, stepping around some plaster that had fallen from the walls. The landlord’s wife and daughter were at the entrance to the building, along with about 20 others scattered about in the street, looking up at the buildings above them. The wife was just as shaken the building. She looked as though she would be crying if she wasn’t so frightened. I asked if everyone was safe and she just replied by saying that their apartment fell apart inside. The daughter smiled as she always smiles, not visibly bothered by the event.

Satomi was down the road, and we went to the nearby park, which is the designated emergency assembly area. There were groups of people from companies gathering, but not many individuals. It seemed that companies who had emergency procedures in place all followed them and came to the park, but individual citizens saw that their buildings were intact and decided to stay at home.

We decided to go back to the apartment, by way of her grandparents’ house. They were all safe and actually in really good form. We then returned to the apartment. I found the new camera I had used to shoot the video on the kitchen floor. It received some damage but it still functions and the lens is intact. My monitor had fallen over onto a hard drive and the screen was a little cracked on the side. Everything else was ok, but had fallen to the floor.

After some strong aftershocks we took some clothes and left. We went to her mom’s apartment and spent the day watching the tsunami wipe out northern Honshu on TV and waiting for aftershocks to pass. I have been staying here since.

I worked through most of Golden Week but on the weekend I went to Fukui. It was a great chance to get away from Tokyo, one of the biggest cities in the world, and get to somewhere really remote. There are only 4 other prefectures with lower population than Fukui, and they’re all near Fukui. In Japanese, 田舎 (inaka) means countryside. In Fukui’s case, you might call it 「ド田舎」 (do-inaka), with “do” being an onomatopoeic prefix meaning you really aren’t in Kansas anymore. (And yes, the Japanese love onomatopoeia so much they even have onomatopoeic metaphors!)

Whenever I’ve been in the countryside in Japan, the thing which hits me most is family, and I learnt a lot about family in this trip. I met an owner of a steel mill, and he was in such good form he said that if he died tomorrow he wouldn’t care, because he has succeeded in everything he wanted to succeed in. Apparently he never had a son, so was worried about the fate of his company, but one of his daughters got married to a man who would take her name, and they recently had a son, so there are 2 more generations after the owner who can take up the reigns.

I was surprised when I heard about a man taking the woman’s name in a marriage, but eventually it started to make sense, after enough conversation. Apparently it used to happen a lot in Japan before, but not so much anymore. It is a way of keeping a business in the hands of a particular family, which is a very important thing in Japan.

As I’m sure you know, Japanese religion is based heavily on ancestor-worship, and people keep enormous respect for their ancestors. Many large homes (i.e., places that aren’t tiny Tokyo apartments) have a little alter with photos or little memorials of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. People will light incense and pray at these alters. In the case of older countryside homes, people will often pray twice a day, in 20-minute sessions, continuously singing Buddhist chants. To my Irish readers: it doesn’t make Mass seem so bad, does it?

With this in mind, it should be obvious how important legacy is to families with big businesses. In fact, the owner of the steel mill himself married into the business and took his wife’s name, becoming 社長 (sha-chō, business owner). In general, the oldest son would not marry into his wife’s family. Or if he did, at least he would have a brother who could carry on his family’s name. Of course there are lots of cases where the brother left to carry on the family’s name doesn’t have any sons, or he has sons who marry into a woman’s family, or he has sons who don’t have sons or children at all and the family name ends. With declining birthrate in Japan, a lot of names seem to be about to disappear.

The owner was so happy to have his grandson, for Children’s Day he bought an enormous set of armour, with a great big decorated folding screen behind it. He also bought big carp streamers (鯉のぼり, koinobori) for outside his house. The streamers hang from a pole that’s as tall as the house. Inside the house, the armour is set up beside the room with the alter. This room is big enough to fit in the entire extended family. It is used when there is some event that requires the family to assemble together in front of a monk. This is often a funeral or Japanese version of a “christening”. Otherwise this room’s huge space is rarely used. The rest of the house is decorated mainly with Japanese calligraphy. Furniture is sparse, and many rooms simply have tatami mats and calligraphy hung on the walls, maybe with a small table in the middle. If people want to sit in the room they can take out cushions. If people want to sleep in the room they can take out futons. There are lots of rooms like this, with no specific purpose in mind.

My favourite thing about the countryside houses isn’t the huge windows, the comfortable tatami floors, the kotatsus, the beautiful rooves, the elegantly beautiful decoration, or the incredible gardens. It has to be the toilets. They often have the high-tech washlets, with their robotic lids and “spray”, “bidet” and “dry” buttons, but they also have older style toilets too. The traditional Japanese toilet is basically a hole in the ground, just like the ones I’ve seen in France sometimes, but they also have urinals! Yes! Urinals in houses! This is something I’ve been thinking about for years but I never knew anyone actually did this! I was so excited to use a urinal while looking out a window into the beautifully designed garden. First of all, when you sit down on a normal toilet, you are a usually looking at a door or a sink. When you’re using a urinal, it’s often a wall, but because it’s so easy to aim many pubs often afford the patrons a chance to read a newspaper. Well how about replacing that newspaper with a view into a traditional Japanese garden? No better way to relieve ones self than that!

And on that note, my iPhone restore has completed so I can get back to coding. Photos coming soon!

Dear Daniel-san,

Oh, my God.

She helped me out though, and asked the Japanese Language Center if they could accommodate me that day. They said they could, so I left Akihabara and dashed to Hongo for the exam. It was already 5pm when I arrived and the exam and interview took 2 hours all together. I felt really bad for the teachers and administrators in the office: they all had to stay longer to accommodate my mixup. I’m still not sure exactly where it went wrong, but it must have been me missing some part of an email because the administrators in Todai are always totally on top of things. I don’t know how they manage to deal with so many students at the same time and still stay polite, friendly, and in control of everything.

The exam was interesting. I got pretty much full marks on the basic and intermediate parts of the exam, but could hardly answer a single question on the advanced part. In fact, I don’t think I could answer a single one at all. During the interview I was given a few paragraphs of advanced Japan to read, during which I frequently had to stop and ask for the readings of kanji I had never seen. I didn’t know what any of the words with those kanji meant either. However, in the intermediate level Japanese there was only one word I didn’t know, but I could read all of the kanji, including the kanji for the word whose meaning I didn’t know.

This placed me exactly between two classes. I would know almost everything in the intermediate class, and almost nothing in the advanced class. However, this semester I’m a research student and I don’t have any minimum number of credits to get or any exams to worry about failing or passing, and I have a lot of time (compared to what I’ll have once I can start a formal masters course), so I asked if I could try the advanced class, based on the recommendation of one of the teachers. Even if I’m in a situation where I can’t keep up with the class, I’ll at least be getting nice big collections of grammar and vocabulary that I don’t know. Here goes nothing!

I re-wrote the Twitter widget that goes on the sidebar of the blog yesterday. The one I was using (“Twitter for WordPress”) wasn’t ignoring irrelevant tweets, was slowing down page loads, and was mucking up text encoding. The one I wrote uses AJAX to query my server for recent tweets, and the server caches tweets to improve speed and make sure I don’t get throttled by Twitter for overusing their API. It also correctly handles non-English text and does not display user-to-user tweets.

I read a really great article on Kotaku today by Brian Ashcraft about why he lives in Japan. It’s really long, but he makes some really great points and it’s a very entertaining read. I recommend scanning through the headings and reading the ones that sound interesting if it’s just too long to read straight through. I recommend the sections “Japan is Visually Dense” and “In Japan, You Don’t Wear Shoes At Home”.

On Monday I one-shotted a long list of procedures that I had expected to take 3 days. I went to the university’s Office of International Students (OIS), handed over my boarding passes to prove I used the flight that was paid for by the scholarship, and received a lot of documentation. Next I dashed to Toyocho and did my alien registration at the Kotoku kuyaskusho (Koto ward office, my local “county council” if you like). The queue for the national health insurance sign-up was long and I suspected the post-office would close about 3pm, two hours earlier than the ward office, so I went back to the university campus again and opened my savings account at the post office. I gave over the alien registration information, savings account details, and a lot of paperwork about my education/employment history, current address, and information necessary to make my student card. Another dash back to Kotoku’s ward office to join the national health insurance and I was done!

Ward Office

The ward office is an amazing place. Most of the work goes on in a single enormous room. This takes up most of the space of one floor of the building. Along the middle of the room, spanning the entire length, is an enormous desk. This is broken up into numbered sections, starting with alien registration and ending with national health insurance payments. In between you can register marriages, births, divorces, etc. Each section has a ticket machine which gives you a number and displays how many people are waiting. One one side of the sectioned desk, visitors wait for their number to be called. On the other side is a sea of desks with public employees zipping between them. It’s fun that the local residents visiting and waiting can see everyone behind working hard, so even if they’re made wait for a while, at least it seems like they’re doing their best to get to you. I had to wait about 40 minutes for my national health insurance sign-up, and about 20 minutes for my alien registration, but compared to the San Francisco social security wait (about 3 or 4 hours), it was a cinch.

National Health Insurance

Signing up for 6 months on the national health insurance cost me just under €100. This insurance covers 70% of medical fees, and the remaining 30% is capped. There were no questions when signing up: I gave them my alien registration certificate and they gave me a medical card and said I’d receive a bill in a few months but was on the system immediately. Apparently it’s ¥39900/yr (about €320/yr) for a single working person. I believe this is the most expensive. I get mine at almost half-price because I’m a student. If you are employed, the company can set it up for you and contribute toward it instead of you having to cover the entire ¥39900 yourself.

Driving Licence

When I finished the health insurance registration, I still had about 15 minutes before the local driving test centre closed, so I thought I’d try going along. It turns out they were closing up but there was one desk open. I explained that I wanted to convert my licence to a Japanese licence. They asked my nationality and I received a form explaining the requirements from Irish driving licence holders. Here’s what I need:

• My current Irish licence
• My passport
• My alien registration certificate/card
• A translation of my Irish licence (by the Irish embassy or the Japan Automobile Federation)
• 1 passport photo
• ¥4500 (€35)

The only outstanding item is the translation of the licence so yesterday I went by the Irish embassy and dropped in my licence to be translated. It cost ¥4000 (€32) and I will receive it in the post this week. With that done, I will receive a Japanese licence without having to take any tests.

What’s in a Name?

One thing that is frustrating is that I have been forced to use my middle name on all my paperwork. I like my middle name, but I have to write it all the time now. As far as the Japanese are concerned, it’s on my passport so it’s my name. Unfortunately it’s not on my driver’s licence, and that might cause trouble because all my other documents have the middle name on it.

Also, I have to be careful to keep the Japanese version of my name consistent across documents. I used to use ヘファナン as an approximation of my surname (Hefanan) but have changed it to へフェルナン recently (Heferunan). All documents created this time use the latter. If I mix it up though, things can get messy.

なが〜いっ！

Speaking of names, the Japanese have lots of cute shortened versions of big long serious procedures/systems. ゆうちょ銀行 (Yuucho Ginkou, Yuucho Bank) is what they call 郵便局貯金銀行 (Yuubinkyoku Chokin Ginkou: Post Office Savings Bank). They’ve removed a lot of the syllables and shortened it down to something really easy to say. In the same way, 国民健康保険 (Kokumin Kenkou Hoken, National Health Insurance) is shortened to 国保 (Kokuho), which is just half the word “national” and half the word “insurance” stuck together.

Guidance

I have guidance on Friday, which is what we would call “orientation” in Ireland. They have funny English names for things here, which always are just a little off. For example, “tutor student” (not “student tutor”), the “Office of International Students” (where no international students work, yet it’s not “Office for International Students”), and “guidance” of course. Actually on the OIS door, “Engineering” is mis-spelled. A little bit embarrassing for a university, I think. Spelling “Engineering” wrong in the engineering building is bad, but at least it’s not the English department!

The photos below are from a single train car and the platform at the station. A lot have to do with the “silver seats”, which are the seats at the end of the train car with orange handles hanging above them instead of white ones. You can guess what these are for based on the photos below. And no, I have never seen anyone switch off their phone near these seats.

Danny Choo recently wrote about subway posters too. Lots of Tokyo Metro’s “Do it at Home” posters can be found on their website.

“Gropers will not be forgiven.”

“Manners: Please turn off your phone near the silver seats.”

“Power OFF!! No phones near the silver seats.”

“Thank you for understanding. Silver Seats.”

“STOP. Don’t rush. Don’t hurry.”

No bikes on trains. (It must be folded up and put into a special bag if you want to bring one on.)

“Let’s protect children together.” The people at the bottom are being very helpful and polite

“Please give thought to preggers girls. If you see this ‘maternity mark’, we ask for your kindness.”