Andy in Tokyo

Shunbun no hi

This coming Sunday is shunbun no hi, or Vernal Equinox Day. Traditionally, on this day Japanese people would visit their ancestral graves and hold family reunions. These days, however, they are more likely to visit Starbucks and hold rat-like Chihuahuas.

Shunbun no hi also marks the beginning of spring. It won’t be long before coats are consigned to the wardrobe and t-shirts once again become acceptable outdoor attire. Fantastic.

For all you avid cherry-blossom watchers out there, sakura trees in Tokyo are expected to flower from the 24th March, and should be in full bloom on around the 1st April. Probably the best place for hanami (lit. “flower watching”) in Tokyo is Shinjuku Gyoen, which is pictured above in its late summer guise. It’s a tranquil green oasis in an otherwise concrete-filled desert. Yoyogi and Ueno parks are also good bets, but whatever you do, don’t bother with Inokashira Park in Kichijoji – it’s absolutely rubbish, you’d hate it.

The Food Obsession

Japanese TV programmes tend to fall into two broad categories: 1. celebrities eating food and 2. everything else. Usually you can find, at any time of day, at least one celeb-food show on the air. The perplexing thing is that most of these programmes are not cookery shows in the Jamie Olliver sense of the word (ie, they don’t teach you anything about how to cook), rather they involve people standing around in an insanely-coloured studio stuffing their faces. Invariably, the food is declared to be “oishii” (delicious), and the celebrities spend the next ten minutes prattling on about the time their mum made the same thing, or when they went to Osaka and saw locals putting mayonnaise (shock horror!) on the food in question.

Admittedly, now and then some TV shows do actually have celebrities eating in proper restaurants, but I really don’t care to watch them noisily slurp an enormous bowl of greasy ramen in a random Yokohaman restaurant. “What am I getting out of this experience?” I say to myself. Apart from the knowledge that that particular celebrity likes eating katsudon, or whatever, and what the food looks like, it offers me nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a restaurant because I’ve seen so-and-so eating there on TV, in fact it works more as deterrent: the place would be so busy that I’d have to queue up for an hour just to get through the front door. If I’m going to eat out, I’ll either wander around and explore a few places by myself, or search online for a reasoned opinion that stretches to more than just “umai!”

Perhaps the one decent food programme I’ve seen while in Japan is, unsurprisingly, not Japanese. It’s called Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and you can watch it on the Discovery Channel. Bourdain is not only a trained chef; he is also a witty, down-to-earth host who travels the world in search of new experiences. The idea is that yes, food can be nice, but it can also be bloody awful. Food is used more as a means to exploring the people, places and culture of wildly different places, rather than an end in itself. And that’s the way food programmes on TV should be.

Japanese Newspapers

These days it’s not uncommon for people to get all their news from the internet, and for absolutely nothing. Needless to say, this whole ‘free news’ malarkey has proved disastrous for the newspaper industry. Many papers, such as the New York Times, initially required users to pay for online content, but as more rival sites became free such revenue models were abandoned. Some thought that advertising would help plug the gap, yet so far online advertising has proved far less lucrative than its paper-based counterpart.

While Japanese newspapers have also suffered from declining sales, they remain absolutely vast, in terms of both circulation and reach, when compared to their foreign cousins. The following diagram is my attempt at shedding some light on the scale of the big three Japanese dailies: the Yomiuri, Asahi and Mainichi “Shimbuns”. (Click the image to expand.)

Snow-kyo

Well, I was convinced that the snow we had earlier this month would be the first – and last – for Tokyo this year, but I woke up this morning to find yet another covering of the white stuff:

Akebono’s Gleeful Journey

Akebono has had many fine achievements during his forty years on earth: becoming the first foreign sumo wrestler to achieve the rank of yokozuna, winning eleven top division titles, and, err… managing to win one fight out of twelve in his career as a K-1 fighter.

Okay, so things may have gone a bit downhill after sumo, but when you’ve reached the highest echelons of one of the most famous sports in the world it’s always going to be hard to go one better. But recently the big man has roared back into the limelight thanks to a series of adverts for Fox’s latest smash hit comedy/drama thingy, Glee.

Words can’t really do the adverts justice. All you need to know is that they involve a lot of Akebono singing and dancing. The song? ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey – nothing could be more appropriate.

Check it out for yourself:

You can catch the rest of Akebono’s adverts on YouTube or one of the many Fox-related channels on Japan’s satellite TV network, Sky PerfecTV.

Healthcare in Japan

Japanese healthcare is a difficult subject that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. For those of you living in countries without a national health service the idea of paying for hospital stays and operations may be nothing new, but until I moved to Japan I had never really thought about it. You break an arm, you go into hospital, have an operation, and come out the next day. That’s it: no bills, no nasty fees, nothing.

Most of what is written in this post is based largely on my own personal experiences. If anybody has any further information they would like to share on this subject, please do!

Oi! I thought Japan had a national healthcare system. Doesn’t that mean healthcare in Japan is free?
Yes yes, I know, no healthcare system is free: somebody has to pay for it somewhere along the line. The big difference between Japan and the UK, for example, is how far along that line healthcare is paid for. By and large, in Britain patients don’t pay up front – in part or in whole – for hospital stays or operations. Japan’s healthcare system is not so straightforward. The main Wikipedia article on Japanese healthcare says:

“Japan provides healthcare services, including screening examinations for particular diseases at no direct cost to the patient, prenatal care, and infectious disease control, are provided by national and local governments.”

Some services are “at no direct cost to the patient”, others will cost you. Generally speaking, in their various guises the national healthcare systems pay for 70% of drugs and healthcare costs. The remaining 30% is paid for by the patient.

I’ve just moved to Japan. Do I have to enrol in a healthcare programme?
No, you don’t. Broadly speaking, there are two categories of healthcare scheme: employee health insurance (健康保険 or Kenkō-Hoken) and national health insurance (国民健康保険 or Kokumin-Kenkō-Hoken). In theory all residents of Japan are required to be enrolled in one of these schemes, but for reasons of cost (either personally or to their employer) many are not. Foreigners are recommended – but not forced – to join one of them.

How do I know if I’m already enrolled in either of these healthcare programmes?
Have you got a credit-card sized piece of plastic with either 健康保険 or 国民健康保険 written on the top? If you haven’t, then you’re probably not enrolled. Also, check your pay slip for deductions under 健康保険科.

My company says I have private health insurance, and that it isn’t really worth enrolling on one of the national schemes.
If you’re coming to Japan as an English (eikaiwa) teacher then your company might have a private scheme that you automatically become part of. What this means is that every time you visit a doctor or dentist you might have to pay for the full cost of everything by yourself, rather than the 30% you would be pay under one of the national healthcare schemes. You will need to send all the medical receipts off to your insurer, who will then reimburse the cost – often several months later.

Example: You have private healthcare, but no national healthcare. You catch the flu and visit your doctor. He checks you out and prescribes some medicine. The doctor’s fee comes to ¥6,000, and the medicine costs ¥2,000. If you had national healthcare, this would have cost you ¥1,800 and ¥600, respectively.

If you’re coming to Japan for a year or two. and are fairly confident that you won’t fall seriously ill or have a nasty injury, then a private scheme might be all right for you. They are usually much cheaper (around ¥7-8,000 a month compared with ¥14,000 for national healthcare), and some paranoid twits relish the idea of not being locked into the ‘government system’. However, if you’re going to be here long-term, I strongly recommend you enrol yourself on a national healthcare scheme.

Whoa there, Silver. Let’s go back a step: I thought all companies had to enrol their students on a national healthcare scheme anyway…
All full-time workers should, in theory, be provided with employee health insurance. To get around this many of the shadier companies keep working hours at just below the full-time level. This saves them loads of money, but benefits neither their employees nor the healthcare system in general. The number of part-time workers has sky-rocketed in recent years, starving the healthcare system of much-needed funding.

What about dentists?
As long as you’re not having anything cosmetic done, the same 30% fee applies. If you’ve got national healthcare, that is.

A word of warning: enamel fillings seem to be classed as ‘cosmetic’ in Japan. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to end up looking like Jaws from James Bond, though: resin fillings are pretty decent these days.

Mutant Strawberries

Bought some strawberries today. I think they may have been grown in Chernobyl:

Office Life in Tokyo

I’ve spent three years working in the same office, sat at the same desk, seeing the same salarymen day-in, day-out. I still don’t know who everyone is (four hundred people = a lot of names), but I have managed to come up with plenty of nicknames for the most peculiar individuals:

Man Child
This fellow has the head and voice of a man, but the body of a child. His head is absolutely massive: the fact that his neck can support it defies all the laws of physics. He also spends far too long in the toilet, rustling the tissue paper a little bit too vigorously.

The Womble
A sixty-something mumbler with all the speed and grace of a sloth. He has no internal monologue and spends considerable time saying ‘unnnn, sou ka’ (‘ahh, I see’) to inanimate objects. His job is to… well, to be quite honest, I have no idea what his job is. He spends much of the day wandering between floors with a small bag, occasionally picking bits of dust of the floor.

Stewie
Named after Family Guy’s evil toddler, pint-sized Stewie seems far too small to be at work; he should still be at infant school! He sits at his big boys’ desk all day, his little legs dangling off the chair, issuing commands down the phone like Napoleon’s younger brother.

Bill Gates
Nothing much to say about this chap, apart from that he is the spitting image of Bill Gates (if Bill Gates was Japanese).

The Fifth Beatle
Long straggly hair, enormous Bose headphones and a ‘God you’re so unfair, I hate you!’ teenage pout. He also seems to be something of a hypochondriac, and spends a good portion of his day gargling antiseptic mouthwash in front of the bathroom mirror.

The Weasel
A fifty-year-old silver-haired weasel who is terrified of his computer. Every time he sits in front of it his face contorts into a picture of abject horror, as if he’s watching a streaming video of an Al-Qaida hostage being beheaded. Perhaps someone told him that if you click the mouse buttons too hard the whole internet breaks, so he’s being extra careful.

Penfold
Do you remember Danger Mouse? (If you don’t, go here.) This guy is the spitting image of Penfold, right down to the glasses and hair (or lack of). The only thing missing is the occasional ‘Cripes, DM!’.

Snow Way

Last night’s snow was more robust than I had expected. The roof of almost every house between my home and office was covered with it this morning. The road-bound stuff didn’t fare so well, though:

Word of warning: leather-soled shoes + snow = certain death.

No more snow is forecast for the rest of the week. Chances are we won’t be seeing any more in Tokyo for the rest of the year, which is a shame. I was looking forward to seeing ‘proper’ snow, especially considering England has been having its whitest winter since 1980.

Snow hits Tokyo

The first snow of the season has arrived here in Tokyo. Unfortunately it’s not cold enough for it to lay, which means an unpleasant trudge through slush to the train station tomorrow.

Penguin Pilferer Foiled by Sharp-eyed Security

A young Fukuokan pet shop owner has been arrested in Nagasaki for attempting to steal a penguin from a zoo.

Employees at Nagasaki Bio Park in Saikai became suspicious of young Akira Honda’s (24) activities after he became cagey when security guards offered to store his rather large suitcase. Further inspection revealed that the suitcase did, in fact, contain a somewhat perturbed Humboldt penguin.

Police were considering moving the penguin to Britain as part of a witness protection scheme, but had to scrap the plan when it was revealed that the feathered fish-feaster was afraid of Wales.