Yesterday morning I walked over to the local barbershop to get my quarterly haircut. I’ve been there three or four times, and I’m really starting to like the place. The guy is really friendly, the service is very old fashioned, and now the guy knows what I like so I don’t have to explain it every time.<\/p>\n
When you go in there time seems to slow down – you wait for the chair, read a newspaper, chat with the barber’s wife, watch some TV, drink coffee, and soon enough he calls you over. The barber is always talking and asking questions is a really quiet voice, and he is probably the most difficult speaker of Japanese for me to understand. I get about 20% of what he says, and that makes for some pretty one-sided conversations. He doesn’t seem to mind, though. One of the pieces of information I gleaned from the conversation is that the big empty lot across the street from our apartment is going to be a brand new Max Value supermarket in June. That was very good news for us – we missed walking across the street to get milk whenever we needed it from Jusco.<\/p>\n
Walking back through the old neighborhood is always interesting. Before they built the train station in what is now the center of Okubo this area was the center of town. There was an old shopping street (\u00e5\u2022\u2020\u00e5\u00ba\u2014\u00e8\u00a1\u2014 “shoutengai” in Japanese). These shopping streets are one of the foundations of the Japanese market economy since the beginning, streets lined with shops on either side catering to shoppers walking down the middle. Kind of a Japanese version of an outdoor shopping mall. Every town (no matter how small) has one somewhere, and when you see an old abandoned one it gives you a little bit of a melancholy feeling. This one had just a single shop still open, a small fruit stand. In this part of town they’ll probably have about five customers a day – old ladies that have shopped there since they were children. It gives you a sense of how long things have been like this in Japan – somehow more intense than the ancient temples and shrines I walk by every day.<\/p>\n
After work Kuniko picked me up and we picked up some sushi and went to her parents’ house again for dinner. She wanted to borrow her mom’s kimono because Kuniko is going to take kimono lessons (how to put it on, wear it comfortably, and walk around without tumbling down stairs, etc) on Saturdays, and she needs a kimono to practice with. Kimono are big bucks in Japan – just to rent one for a day can cost nearly a thousand dollars. <\/p>\n
We ate a big meal of sushi and homemade sandwiches that Kuniko’s mom made, and we had some coffee while watching TV and enjoying the heated floor in the living room. There were three big boxes in the corner that I noticed had a giant red sticker that said “FOR JAPAN” in English. It turns out they were full of fruit. <\/p>\n
So I can’t say exactly how it worked, and I am sworn to secrecy, but we came home with a box of green bananas (about 80 in the box, 10 of which are ripe) and a box of papayas (8 giant ones). So now we have to figure out how to get rid of them. Part of the secrecy requires that we can’t give them away to other people. Anyway, I ate a couple bananas for breakfast, and just 78 to go. Do you know any papaya recipes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning I walked over to the local barbershop to get my quarterly haircut. I’ve been there three or four times, and I’m really starting to like the place. The guy is really friendly, the service is very old fashioned, and now the guy knows what I like so I don’t have to explain it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-nw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}