nipponDAZE

Notes from 2009

Payday

My first weekend after my first payday. By keeping careful records all month, I have a good idea of how expensive it will be to live in Japan and how much money I’m actually making. My salary is $35,000 a year (¥360,000 a month), about 40% more than I was making in the US plus it’s tax free. I get paid in yen and I’m exempt from Japanese income tax because I’m a teacher and from US income because of the Foreign Resident Tax Credit. I do pay into the Japanese retirement system and private teacher’s association dues. I live in the school dorm and my rent is a paltry $140 a month, about 1/3 of my mortgage payment in the US. I don’t have a car so my transportation costs average about $10 a week in train fare.

I could spend ¥12,000 a day and still have money to spare. In the first 26 days of August, I’ve spent ¥104,213, or about ¥4000 a day.

JQS has a half day of school on Saturdays and so does my school. However, JET participants were not required to work on Saturdays so I usually used the morning to do my laundry and housework. When school was out at noon, JQS and I went with Murakami-sensei to Oita (where she lived) to have lunch and shop.

English-language Books

Now in the days of Amazon and Amazon.jp, it’s almost impossible to imagine or remember how difficult it was twenty years ago to obtain English-language books in small town Japan. We were hungry for reading material. Beppu itself had no English-language books available at that time. Murakami-sensei showed us a bookstore in Oita which had a small section of English-language books. (I just Googled the name on the receipt and discovered the bookstore is Haruya Shoten.) We also found some English-language books on the basement floor of Parco department store next to one of my other favorite stores, Muji. We had a book swap at the Oita Foreign Residents club–but those consisted mostly of current fiction: mysteries and romances–stuff I don’t read. And it was a long walk from Oita station, so I rarely bothered to go there. Friends sent us books from the US and I discovered Daedalus Books, which, at the time, had cheap, flat rate international shipping charge no matter how many books you ordered.

Mexican Food in Japan

Echoes is the “Mexican” food restaurant that Murakami-sensei wanted me to try. She was very excited by the nachos which were nothing but bland melted cheese on Frito corn chips. It was terrible. I’m trying to remember if I was polite about it but I regret to say that I probably wasn’t.

School Shoes

I had to have indoor shoes for school. I had been wearing the guest slippers all week. I bought the cheapest, plain black vinyl shoes I could find. My indoor shoes actually had a little heel. They looked liked ordinary shoes but I they could never be worn outdoors. M2 has the best shoe story ever.