Hello from Yokohama — scribbler at large

Hello! Three years have passed since my last post. Did you notice? To sum things up neatly (and in case you missed it) we spent a year in Pakistan, then a year in DC learning Japanese, had a kid, and now we live in Yokohama, Japan! Since I’m still paying for this site, I think it’s time to dust off the old keyboard and feed my legion of devoted followers with a post.

Like all things in 2020, our arrival in Japan was deeply impacted by COVID19, and our experiences of the country have been stilted by multiple states of emergency that limit opening hours and occupancy at destinations of all sorts. For a while, I felt like there wasn’t much to blog about. But compared to the U.S., Japan’s COVID situation is pretty safe, and we have been able to get out much more than we would elsewhere. So, here we are.

Cherry blossoms in Negishi Forest Park near our house.

We arrived in Yokohama in August of 2020. Luckily, quarantining here was pretty alright. Ubereats and Amazon Fresh were here to carry us through two weeks of isolation, and some friendly foreign service neighbors helped us with the trash (more on trash later). First impressions have stood the test of 8 months time. Things here are clean, orderly, and helpful. Services and infrastructure are almost relentlessly reliable, and people go to great lengths to help us with daily life challenges. It’s almost laughable how safe the environment is. People leave cars running, bags open on the grass in the park and patio furniture out on the sidewalk overnight in the middle of Tokyo and Yokohama. It’s shocking.

Using public transportation when you’re this old, with no parental supervision, is normal in Tokyo. So is the school uniform.

One major adjustment was portion sizes from restaurants, which made our giant American stomachs gurgle with laughter/despair. The first week we were here I ordered $85 of takeout and it showed up in one tiny paper bag. On the upside, the food was packaged to withstand a category 5 hurricane, and the bag was thoughtfully placed on a clean paper towel that had been laid on the floor outside our door in order to protect our food from the dirty surface.

An actual large bag of food, but the pic illustrates the practice of putting a towel underneath the bag.

After 14 days of quarantining, I left our apartment for the first time (ever) at 6:30am in a suit, hoping that somehow I’d find my way to work, 17 miles away in Tokyo. I had my Google Maps ready, and I walked the 11 minutes to the train station on quiet, super charming narrow streets. The first thing I noticed is that every pedestrian waited patiently at traffic-free crosswalks until the green “walk” sign gave the go-ahead to cross. We stood there in the silent morning while zero cars approached and waited for the walk sign. Imagine doing this at a narrow street that is a maximum of ten human steps in width. It took (and still takes) every ounce of my willpower to resist charging across the street in the face of a red light.

The train was full of silent, well-dressed people reading books, looking at their phones, and sleeping while sitting or standing perfectly still. I boarded the women-only car by accident, which is an important part of commuting here, and enjoyed a peaceful (if crowded) ride with my fellow females. People around me sat with their knees together, hands folded in lap or wrapped around a backpack or phone.

Guess what? I made it to work by 8am that morning, navigating a brand new train system without any problems! All I did was follow signs. I even bought an ice cold canned coffee from a vending machine, which I could magically do with the train pass I bought.

Since then, my morning train to Tokyo has only been late once. I get in the “women only car” because it’s less crowded, and I sit in complete silence for 46 minutes until I transfer trains. Signs tell passengers to observe “manner mode” and not talk on their cell phones. Everyone follows the rules.

That’s not to say I haven’t had problems with the train. It took me a while to learn what signs to read, and I’ve accidentally boarded the local instead of the express, or fallen asleep and overshot my stop. But overall, we’re talking about a quality transpo experience.

A glimpse of the very quiet business commuter crowd. The general outfit is “Cool biz” which is an environmentally friendly dress policy for the summer - essentially a lighter version of business attire.

A couple of months ago, I accidentally left a package on a crowded Tokyo train. I was devastated, and made a faithless attempt at retrieving it by calling an english-language helpline for the train network I’d been riding. I waited on hold for two minutes before being told that my package had, in fact, been retrieved and was available for me to pick up on my way home from work that same evening. IN THE MIDDLE OF TOKYO! In what major U.S. city would this ever happen? I’m completely won over by this.

How cute is our tiny giraffe-print garbage truck?

Back to the trash: this was one of the hardest parts of adjusting here. There are 5 trash collection days per week, and each day is a different category. All trash must be washed and dried, and cardboard must be broken down and neatly tied up with twine. A 24 hour trash hotline was made available to newcomers when we arrived, and we were urged to download a garbage app to help us succeed at trash. Jetlag with a baby does not add value when you’re trying to figure out which pile to put your dirty tissues in. But eventually we figured it out. I mean eventually. Just last month we realized we’d been putting our cardboard out on the wrong day, which explained the dark looks we’d been getting from the property manager.

The cultural trash differences are impossible to avoid. There are no public trashcans in parks - only the occasional recycling bin placed right next to a vending machine (which, in the other hand, you can find everywhere). I always feel guilty if I put something in one of those recycling bins that did not come out of the vending machine it’s sitting next to. Our son’s daycare gives us a bag of his dirty diapers at the end of each day, so we can bring them home and throw them out in our own trash.

It may sound funny, but mastering the trash felt insanely hard. How do people deal with this all the time? But we just adjusted because we had to, and now it feels totally manageable. To me, Japan is a place where people do things (like sort and clean the trash) that seem ridiculously burdensome or intolerable when you’re used to a one-step process. But in the majority of these situations, the time-consuming process is in the interest of the greater good. People follow the rules and internalize the complicated steps required to create a safer, more comfortable, cleaner environment. And for the most part, it seems to work. There are downsides, too, but we’ll talk about that some other time.

Another major cultural difference is that if you do something wrong here, you can’t always tell. Probably no one will directly call you out on your mistake. You may receive a long-winded email or a note that asks oblique questions, or a pamphlet/form letter that describes a certain rule without explicitly telling you that you’ve violated it. I had a hard time with this at work. I ask direct questions, like most Americans, but have realized this makes people uncomfortable sometimes, and have had several conversations devolve into mute head shaking or looks of concern while I keep repeating my question. In its most negative light, this can feel passive aggressive, but it seems born from the general goal of respecting of people’s feelings. From the perspective of low-context cultures like America’s, the communication learning curve can be steep here.

A playground around the corner from our house.

In Yokohama, we are surrounded by beautiful parks that are squeezed between densely populated areas. These spaces are usually super clean and beautifully landscaped. Each tree looks like it has been planted with a calculated sense of design and artistry. Flowers bloom in parks all year round, and have cute signs identifying the plant. Dogs are all the rage here, riding in their own strollers, or being carried like babies. As far as I can tell, it’s polite to comment on the cuteness of each dog, and ask its age or name.

Like his dog friends, my son is constantly smiled at, waved at, and told he is cute. He uses the Japanese baby-word for “dog,” and yells it whenever he sees one, which really endears him to the locals.

I have much more to say about Japan, so consider this a belated first impressions post. We still have to talk about the food, most importantly. For now, here’s a ramen pic. More to come, eventually.