No Job, No Apartment.
Day 6:

-OR-

"Gee, I wish I had been wearing pants."

Yesterday I went to Tokyo for a job interview and to look at apartments. The interview went tolerably well. I think I have a fifty-fifty shot at getting a real job in a real school, not at just another conversation mill like the one I just left. Only downside is that the job, if I get it, would start in April. So that's something to put on the back burner.

You know, once I get a stove. And a kitchen. Which brings us to apartment hunting.

Thanks to some really bad phone directions, I spent most of the afternoon hiking all over the neighborhood of Ogikubo. Carrying a 40 pound pack. (One suit, a pair of shoes, all my interview and apartment hunting notebooks and the greatest winter coat ever.) After meeting the realtor and looking at some really underwhelming rooms (a 7' by 10' box with one window and a shared bathroom. The room was upstairs. The bathroom was downstairs. And to get to it you had to go through the kitchen.) I met my cousin for dinner and prepared to take the night bus back to Fukui.

But I was feeling funky.

And not the good James-Brown-George-Clinton-get-on-the-good-foot kind of funky. The been-nervous-and-carrying-heavy-bags-and-haven't-had-a-shower-yet kind of funky. And the prospect of getting on the bus and trying to sleep in a too-small space in a cloud of my own BO was not a pleasant one.

So I went to a public spa.

Maybe you're not familiar with the Japanese bath, and the rituals that surrounds it. You don't just bathe to soak off the crud that's built up around your unmentionable bits, you bathe to soothe your soul and cleanse your spirit. But it's definitely not a private-time-with-aroma-candles-and-Dave-Matthews affair. These are public baths. You and all your naked neighbors. Scrubbing and soaking themselves and talking to each other.

Buck naked.

Unless, of course, you are a gaijin.

Then it's just you and all your naked neighbors. Who are scrubbing and soaking themselves and talking to each other and pretending not to see you.

Buck naked.

Yeah, all right. So it's like the first day of PE class. But instead of your classmates, it's a bunch of middle-aged Japanese men, some of whom may never have seen a real, live gaijin in person. Much less in the nude.

But I figured it wouldn't be a big deal if I just took off my glasses, handled my business and left. If I can't see them, it's no problem, right?

So I got a locker, stripped down, got my towel, and headed off to clean up.

The bathing room was generally unremarkable . There were two big tubs in the room for soaking in, a door leading to the sauna, and a series of little washing stations around the wall for you to scrub yourself clean at before you get in the big tub. All pretty normal except for two things:

The two fully dressed young women working at the massage tables on the far side of the room.

My first thought was that I had paid to go to a massage parlor. But the no-nonsense uniforms and decidedly non-erotic nature of the massages led me to believe that it wasn't anything more than a sauna that happened to offer massages.

In the same room as the baths.

By women.

Where I had just walked in wearing a tea towel, my glasses and not even a smile.


They say the best way to deal with odd or uncomfortable situations is to try and act like the natives. You know, "When in Rome..." Since no one else seemed to care about walking around naked in front of those girls, I figured I shouldn't either. So I walked to the washing station that was farthest from the next dude, took off my glasses, and got cleaned up.

I lathered, rinsed, repeated, and was generally feeling pretty good about my situation when I put my glasses back on. Not only were the middle aged men staring at me, but the girls who had previously been so businesslike were staring too.

You ever want an awkward moment, take off all your clothes and then make eye contact with a fully clothed total stranger of the opposite sex, who had been, until she noticed you, completely engaged in the act of vigorously pummeling the back of some other naked stranger. Who is also staring at you. Along with everyone else in the room.

I'm proud to say I was able to meet their stares, then turn around and walk out. But at no point in my life did I expect to have to stare down a room full of naked people. Much less without the benefit of pants myself.

I've said this before, and I'll no doubt say it again, but my life has really become vastly different in the last year.

No Job, No Apartment.
Day 4:

Unbelievable. I spent most of November and December watching my sanity fray as I waited for responses in a job and apartment hunt. But now that I'm actually unemployed and it's too late to avoid any more massive expenses suddenly they're knocking down my metaphoric door.

Between three companies asking for sample lesson plans or personal statements and some dickweed realtor calling me back about a vacancy, I may actually be able to get a new job and a place to live.

Everything's coming up Milhouse!

Stuff about someone other than me!

The Japanese Imperial family, which is constitutionally incapable of anything more than merely symbolic functions, is currently being headed by an Emperor who recently had prostate surgery. While he is still in rehab, there is the very real possibility that the operation has made him sexually, as well as politically, impotent. Coming on the heels of fan-favorite sumo wrestler Takanohana's injury-forced retirement, a year in which two members of parliament were arrested while in office, a 12-year economic recession, and the continued inability of the Japanese Self-Defense Force to produce one viable giant fighting robot, these have not been great days for Japan's self-image.

No Job, No Apartment.
Day 2:

Got my last paycheck. I rather cleverly chose to take my contract completion bonus, which was a plane ticket home, in the form of cash. So now I have enough money to support myself for another month or so while I look for lodging.

Odds are I'll have to take a room in a gaijin-house. It's a largish sort of house or smallish apartment complex that rents out individual rooms, usually to foreign types like myself. It'll be too expensive for what I'll get, but still be a damn sight cheaper than anything else available in Toyko.

And here I thought I was finished with that whole roommates thing. Ah hell.

Uh, wait. I meant to say: "Ah well."

No... I was right the first time.

No Job, No Apartment.
Day 0:

Brief misunderstanding at work concerning my final days. I was under the impression that I would finish my last day on Wednesday, and on Thursday morning I would pay the last gas and electric bill, pick up the last of the bags I hadn't already moved, and give the key to the new teacher.

Which was essentially correct except for one fact my manager told our good old head teacher, Miho, but that she neglected to tell me until after she scheduled my final apartment check for the night after work on Wednesday: I wouldn't get my final paycheck until the next business day that I could meet the manager at work after Miho completed my final apartment check. And the manager's day off was Thursday. And my regular payday is on the 25th anyway, so funds would naturally be low anyway.

Fortunately, my manager, who is the single best boss I've ever had , foresaw this problem and advanced me a small loan to cover my ass.

Sumiyo, thank you.

Anyhow, that brings us up to the end of the day, at 11:00 pm, when I got my final apartment check. And the list of things that needed to be corrected, done over, and additionally fixed up to make sure that the place would generally be in better condition than when I arrived. All by 10:00 am.

[11 hours of cleaning, packing and dealing-with-cab-drivers-who-couldn't-understand-my-pronunciation-of-"right"-in-Japanese later...]

The new teacher finally showed up. Before I could give her the list of instructions I've written on how to use everything in the apartment, Miho asked me to tell her how to use everything in the apartment.

Again.

So we started with the closest item: the water heater. But after the beginning the instructions on how to use the oil heater (item 2 on the list of things she'd need to know), I was struck by the realization that the new teacher didn't seem to be so hot at dealing with the unfamiliar. After watching her try her first day of teaching, and now her attempts to understand the intricacies of lighting a wick with a lighter, I came to the conclusion that her primary response to the unfamiliar was to whine. Which she would continue to do, possibly until someone else helped, consoled or hit her.

After much repeating myself I finally got the OK from Miho, gave up my key, and moved out completely.

No Job, No Apartment.
Day 1:

Woke up on my friend's floor. Drank gin for breakfast. Looking for apartments in Tokyo.

Optimistic about future.

Two days left until I have no job and no apartment.

No one ever imagines that there are homeless people in Japan, but they do exist.

Maybe in another day or two, there'll be one more of them.

I've been looking for a job for, like, six months. My company told me in June that they weren't gonna renew my contract, but they wouldn't tell me why, and that they still wanted my to do my best for Goshima-Shibucho and the company's bottom line.

So I started checking out the other English conversation schools in the area (the area being Japan). Most of them said that they tend to hire with a two month turnaround, so to check back two months before my contract ended. That takes us from July to about December.

In December I find out that most of these schools are going to postpone all their new hiring until after the new year. Which means I had about a two week window in which to find a job and a new apartment before my current job and apartment are turned over to my replacement.

Which brings us to the present. I've spent over nine hours riding trains today, been to one interview in Nagano (that place where they had the winter Olympics not so long ago) and have just arrived in Shibuya, the part of Tokyo that looks most like Blade Runner, to find that I have forgotten my map to tomorrow's interview. So I strolled around until I could find a Kinko's, printed out the map, and decided to take a minute to tell you all what I've been doing. After this I'll eat some takoyaki from a vendor's cart on the street, and find a capsule hotel so I can rent a 2 meter tube to sleep in for the night. And tomorrow, I'll act like I'm really interested in relocating to Tokyo to do essentially the same job I'm doing now, but for slightly less pay and a much smaller apartment. Whee!

What a fan-fucking-tastic life this is, huh?

What am I thinking about these days?

In 14 days I will be unemployed and homeless.

In Japan.

There oughta be some kind of joke here, but I can't think of anything funny.

Well, there is this: In LA, when I had shitty jobs that I intentionally slacked at, I could keep them for as long as I wanted. This year I had a good job that I liked and tried to follow the rules for. And I got released.

It's funny. But not ha-ha funny.