For the past four days we’ve been enjoying a break between the previous fiscal year and the new one starting April 1st. We were lucky enough to host Roger and Philipp for a couple days, and also to have some time on our own to get some annoying paperwork done.
Roger and Philipp came in on the Shinkansen on Saturday, and we spent the afternoon showing them around our town, eating a little conveyor belt sushi, settling them into our place, and then heading to Akashi for yakitori. We ended up drinking way too much at the yakitori and later at our place, so we were nursing a hangover on Sunday. We braved a light rain to go see Himeji castle, which look very much refreshed after several years of renovation. The rain let up in the afternoon, and we went in to look around Kobe and have Kobe beef and okonomiyaki for dinner.
On Monday we drove into Kyoto, and waded through the crowds at Fushimi Inari, Arashiyama, and Kinkakuji before taking Roger and Philipp back to their hotel. We had dinner with them near Kyoto station and enjoyed some shabu shabu and more drinks. We had to drive back to our place afterwards, but they were doing one more day in Kyoto and then heading out for a day in Osaka before heading to their final day in Tokyo. Their timing was pretty good with the cherry blossoms – I think they’ll be able to see plenty before they head back to Switzerland.
We had a great time with both of them – they were cheerful and funny, and great guests. We’re hoping they’ll be able to come out to Japan again sometime in the future.
We had Tuesday on our own, so we went out and did some boring government business. I applied for a renewal of my Japanese visa, which apparently you have to do in person on a workday only. The application took only ten minutes, so it was hard to believe that people have to take an entire day off just for ten minutes of paperwork.
Then Kuniko and I both went together to an office that handled title transfer of automobiles. We recently paid off our car, and in order to transfer the title you have to go to a special office and file a bunch of paperwork. The amount of paperwork, special stamps, and the number of staff were mind-boggling. Even Kuniko said, “There is something wrong with this country” upon seeing the amount of people and paper and low technology going on in that place. I watched a lady stamping documents; the whole time we were there her job was just to stamp documents, again and again.
It was obviously a pain in the ass for people to go down there during business hours and take care of the task, so across the hallway in the same building were some offices of people who you can hire to take care of it for you. They were also filled with people wasting paper, and physically walking documents across the hall to the workers in the main offices. It was interesting to see inefficient side businesses being built around the inefficiencies of the main business, which itself is built around the inefficiency of the government. It would take colossal time and energy to change something like that in Japan – even a foreigner like me could see that. It was a unique experience.
Today I start my new term with new students, a new schedule, and hopefully, more planning time. At this point it looks like my schedule is lighter, with fewer group lessons, but we’ll see how quickly that changes. I’m also working on planning an email writing class for later this term. That should be a fun class to plan – it is a high priority for the workers here to write better emails, and I would agree based on some of the emails they’ve sent to me to correct.
