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Just another day in the life of a foreigner in Japan.

We have final test in my school this week. This pretty much means I have very little to do all week. Since I started my project (which is not going very well as a note) I did not make a T.T. section for their test.

Thus I have been sitting around doing very little. I of course try to busy myself, I look up news habitually, been reading up on the Hillary/Obama debate, etc.

Well since I have little to do and other teachers take long lunches today I decided to hear to the city office and register my new inkan. I had two inkans before but one is badly damaged and the other is somewhere in my house, most likely lost. So I made another one and set out to register it. (Required for such things as car buying, insurance getting, license renewal etc) But, my Japanese skills are generally high functioning, while its basically a bother to do such things, bureaucracy and paper work is simply a reality of life.

Granted it is a pain, things that take other Japanese people probably seconds takes me about 10 minutes of planning. After learning the hard way how shitty it is to be stuck in a situation not sure how to explain what you want done in Japanese while there are other people waiting in line behind you getting pretty angry, I know now to prepare to do things.

I've managed to cancel my inkan before, thanks to like a day of prep and psyching myself up. I of course am NOT a second generation Japanese person who has a breadth of many words used in everyday conversation (thus being able to perhaps talk around complicated words), my Japanese has mostly been learned off of songs and T.V. shows. Granted I could talk my way through a discussion about Japanese love songs, trying to communicate I would like to make a new register for my personal seal are two very different things.

I fill out all the forms, which I've gotten rather adept at. And turn it in and settle in for a 20 minute wait of whatever the hell they do in the back office. But after 5 minutes the man who helped me came up and called. Strange, Japan is efficient, but you can shuffle a paper between 10 people only so fast.

He told me the inkan I bought him was no good. I was shocked, seeing as last time I registered my inkan was a PAINFUL 2 month process in which they REFUSED to budge on me using my current inkan which was in Japanese characters, since Japan does not recognize foreigners with Japanese characters in their name. So after MONTHS of negotiating down writing my ENTIRE 18 character name on a inkan to the initials of my first, middle and last name, they finally let me get registered.

BUT apparently in the span of less than a year the rules have changed. The city I live in no longer recognizes seals that include on the initials of the first, last and middle name. I had 4 choices, either write my ENTIRE NAME, write my first two or last two names, or write my first initial and my last name in katakana. I of course pick the last option, but that means making ANOTHER inkan, right after I friggen made an inkan for the sole purpose of registering that was to the exact specifications they told me to make it 10 months ago! WTF!!!!!! ARGH!!!!!!

Do they arbitrarily change these already arbitrary rules just to make us suffer!?!?!! So instead of taking half an hour of waiting, my trip to the City office took 45 minutes of painful negotiating in Japanese, all in Japanese. I understood everything the man told me, but before I left he asked me to write down that I was going to delay my registration. I of course can not write jack crap in Japanese despite being able to read about 1000 kanji. He was of course stunned asked who wrote my address, and I informed him I could at the very least write my own address. He was actually puzzled for a good minute how I could read all the instructions in kanji and speak to him for half an hour and yet not write 3 simple kanji. Well he should believe it, because despite the fact my Japanese is generally high functioning, I am not a Japanese person.

I was not raised in Japan, I was not raised speaking Japanese, and things like making a new inkan, going back and forth to my city office is not simple things for me. They are daily struggles that I have learned to deal with, and stupid random rule changes just make my life that much harder.

I used to feel bad leaving school earlier than all the other teachers (on time according to my contract but a full hour earlier than they are allowed to leave) so I used to stay late for no reason other than feeling bad, I used to feel bad taking long lunches even when I had nothing to do, so I would sit at my desk, but now days I do not. Because simple things that the Japanese do, like go to the stores and ask someone where the facial soap is (yes I sometimes forget the Japanese word for this) is not something I can do instantly, and somewhat inconvenient things for them, like changing over documents at the city office, become momentously horrible undertakings for me.

I used to also feel bad for getting paid more than Japanese people with equal or even more experience than me, I felt I was getting paid too much. But seriously, even I was stressed out, frazzled and completely fed up by this incident, and I can speak Japanese fairly well. I can only imagine how horrible this would be for another foreigner. This mental stress is not an occasional thing, I sometimes just feel like complete shit by the end of the day even when I have next to nothing to do. Meaning they better pay more than living wages to work a job that can be easy but in a world that is not.

So ugh, what was the point of this rant? Nothing really, just needing to blow off steam. Because sometimes we ALT's are just being spoiled brats who have just graduated from college and have no idea what it is like to truly work, and I do feel bad that I dedicate so much of my blog to daily rantings, but this incident was very exasperating. I am still shaking a bit knowing that after making ANOTHER (my fourth) inkan, I will then have to go back to the city office and deal with more bull crap. Before I have to go over to my local bank and tell them I have changed my inkan, then call up my insurance company informed the same thing, and I'm sure fill out even more papers and deal with even more crap.

Like I said these things are life anywhere in the world, I realize this, but with less the fluent language abilities and a feeling of not wanting to inconvenience the teachers around me (seriously I wonder if they'd help me anyhow)it's just painful stressful crappiness.

I also forgot to ask for the poster than tells me what to do with my garbage, even taking out my garbage sucks because the days they take it out have changed and maybe they informed me, and maybe I just threw that information away or didn't read it, or more likely it was buried in the mountains of Japanese papers I randomly get and often just throw it away because I could perhaps read it if I struggled with it for a while but often choose not to read it.

Ugh, so that was just another day in my life as a foreign English teacher in Japan.