japan

This event was borne out of two separate desires - one, Shiho (my Japanese childhood friend) has been begging for me to host a party at my place for a while now, and two, admittedly, I’ve been feeling pretty homesick lately. I didn’t think I was the homesick type, but when I was picturing living just a normal day without the usual festivities or company on Thanksgiving day, it did honestly make me a bit sad. I’m usually not that into holidays, but Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday. Most holidays have evolved to revolve around buying things (we love capitalism), and while technically Thanksgiving has Black Friday (again, we love capitalism), Thanksgiving itself has been left relatively unsullied and remains just about the food and people. I also like how the foods people associate with Thanksgiving are pretty much universal across the country and are actually delicious (rather than simply perpetuating not-so-tasty historical foods for the sake of tradition), so when November rolls around each year, my cranberry sauce on turkey cravings start increasing like clockwork. This time though, as I walked around Tokyo with zero signs of turkey or general Thanksgiving vibes as expected (in fact, most of Tokyo has already converted straight to Christmas decorations), reality hit me that I might not get my beloved Thanksgiving experience this year, only further contributing to my homesickness. Which is slightly related to a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now actually…

I’ve never lived alone before, and I knew it was going to be a difficult transition, but I suppose I didn’t know exactly how it was really going to go or how exactly I was going to feel. It’s a bit strange to be honest. I’ve always identified myself as an introvert, despite happily organizing events, having no problem talking to strangers, and having the ability to be quite energetic in a group setting (totally depends on the group). When my social interaction bar fills up, I find myself desperate to escape, craving comfort and familiarity in my own space. Socializing is vitally important to my mental health, but I find that negative social interactions are far more draining than no social interactions. Without the same consistency and familiarity now as I had especially back in San Francisco, I’m left both craving more social activity yet feeling unmotivated to engage in communities that I know I can, but just don’t scratch that same itch.

So…I’ve skipped a few days. If I can’t start and finish a blog post in a single sitting, it ends up dragging on forever, because I lose my initial inspiration and line of thinking, and then it becomes such a slog to have to revisit the same topic over and over again. So I think the trick is to just quickly wrap up whatever is currently on my mind and submit in order to crank out posts on-schedule. There is also the element where I don’t want to say things that are incorrect or could be misconstrued, despite my low readership - people can find anything on the internet, and it seems better to be careful than hastily publish, which does make me a bit post-shy. Anyways, onto today’s (more like this week’s) topic.

My legal immigration status, housing situation, and future life plans have been on my mind a bunch lately. I’ve been a bit surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed working for the latest company so far, and it was honestly so great to be able to “shop” around and try working at each of the companies for 1-2 months. Working for a company is kind of like dating - this is 40+ hours of your week you’re committing to, and tied significantly to your mental health and wellbeing. While you can make your best judgement during the interview process, people are obviously going to show their best side at first, and there’s nothing like actually working at the company for a bit to figure out well, what it’s actually like to work at that company.

Delayed weekend update. I spent the weekend with Steven (the same one from back in January). While it probably would be better for him to share his story, I’ll just give a quick summary since it’s pretty interesting. Steven actually got a job from a Japanese company back in January, while he was wrapping up his almost 1-year-long trip around the world. He wasn’t necessarily looking for a job (at least, I don’t think so), but he had met the president of a factory at the airport flying from Korea to Japan. The guy must’ve liked Steven so much that he decided to hire him. Steven then tried to apply for a work visa while crashing at our first apartment in Musashi-Koyama, but ended up hitting a big roadblock - Japan only gives work visas to people with college (specifically, Bachelors+) degrees or 10+ years of relevant work experience. He was about to finish his Associate’s degree before he started working at my company back in SF full-time (that’s how we met, actually), and to-date only has about 5 years of work experience.

The Triathlon in Tokyo (TnT) club has a Friday morning practice known as “Friday Morning Pain (FMP)”. It consists of bike hill repeats (going up and down a steep hill), then running a 5 or 10K around Imperial Palace, a very popular spot for running (one lap around the palace is exactly 5K, and it’s completely uninterrupted). Apparently, biking and then immediately running after is called a “brick”, because your legs supposedly feel like bricks (don’t fact-check me on that one), and it’s something you have to specifically practice for triathlons. I thought the “pain” in FMP was because the workout sucked, but it’s actually because it starts at 6am. I failed to get a good night’s sleep and had to wake up at 5 since it takes 40 min to bike to practice. I’m literally falling asleep as I’m writing this post so…zzzz

This was originally going to be family trip pt 2, but it turns out the only thing I wanted to talk about from the Tokyo part of the family trip was kaiten sushi (conveyor belt sushi). All of the other Tokyo things we did were just classic tourist activities that you can see anywhere on the internet. And sure, kaiten sushi is also a very widely-known activity, but there are many conveyor belt sushi places. The three major chains are: Kura Sushi, Sushiro, and Hama Sushi. All three are within a block of each other in Takadanobaba, so we really scored the jackpot.

I tried to write a post about politics, didn’t like it, rewrote it 4 more times, and then just gave up. So, in trying to keep up with an average of 1 post a day, I’ll switch topics while I figure out if/what I want to say. Prior to coming out to Japan, I swear I watched a bunch of youtube videos talking about how everyone in Tokyo bikes, it’s such a bike-friendly city, etc. Yes, biking is very popular and common, but my rose-tinted glasses are off now and I can confidently say - biking in Tokyo sucks.

This is going to be a series of posts about my recent family visit. I still haven’t quite fixed my sleep schedule yet (slept from 1-5…last night) and I’m behind on work and studies, but at least my blog, triathlon training, and keeping my apartment clean (I know this wasn’t explicitly mentioned but it kind of just happened) have been going well. It’s kind of funny because this was roughly my original set of goals. from way back when and it completely collapsed after we moved apartments. There were just so many things to distract me constantly that I found it hard to maintain a schedule, but I finally feel a bit more settled with no big travel plans on the horizon. Also, this is going to sound crazy, but the weather finally got cold enough to run outside…I think I could’ve resumed running earlier, but it was simply way too hot. Crazy to think how weather-affected I am.

Though there was a schedule laid out for the weekend’s activities, I still didn’t really know what to expect. They advertised it as a beginner-friendly event, but I’ve learned over and over again that that could mean anything. I got off the train and met up with two others from our group, and one of them said that they’ve been training since COVID, and the other for over 20 years (and before that she was a runner), so…we were off to a good start. Then we met up with the club leader, Andrea (who is obviously an incredibly seasoned and decorated athlete), and she kindly gave us a ride to the inn (which was honestly so helpful. The bike ride, which I was considering doing, would’ve been truly awful in hindsight).

Welp, I missed this post’s deadline. I actually did finish this post yesterday, but there was so much I wanted to talk about that I ran out of time, so I’ll post what I finished so far. This section of the story should’ve really gone into yesterday’s post about the Shinkansen, but it literally happened the second after I finished writing and uploading the post. So, when I booked my tickets to the Shinkansen, it was pretty full, and I ended up choosing an aisle seat in a 3-seater row with the window and middle booked up. Two ladies, one around my mother’s age, and the other likely her mother, came and sat next to me a few stops after I got on, and they seemed friendly but very Japanese. I was writing my blog post about the Shinkansen while I was sitting on the Shinkansen (so, I almost always write posts in the morning, and I aim to get it in by midnight PST. Not sure why, it’s just what has been working for me, even from the beginning), and after about 45 minutes or so, the two ladies decided to switch seats, so the older one was sitting by the window now. I suddenly felt super self-conscious, like maybe my typing was annoying or maybe I smelled weird, so she insisted on sitting far away.*

I joined a triathlon club recently, not that I do triathlons, but one can always hope. The club is hosting a “training camp” for beginners this weekend in Niigata. I was trying pretty hard to avoid another early morning shinkansen, but I didn’t really want to miss more school by going earlier the day before, and it seemed better to just stick with the group, so alas I pretty much had the identical 4:30 am schedule (I did manage to go to bed before midnight at least so we’re slowly making improvements).

I was almost going to slip on my once-a-day posting today, but I’m going to prioritize churning out anything, even if I only spend 5 minutes on it, just to try it out. It’s possible I’ll switch to longer, detailed but less frequent posts at some point, but figured I’d give this my best effort first before quitting.

This one’s going to be a short post. I really love having the flexibility of being a contractor/freelancer, and really appreciate that the companies I’m working for now are entirely outcomes-focused versus requiring me to show up on a schedule, at a location, attend meetings, etc. But with freedom comes responsibility of course, and I still don’t have the discipline to do it. I’ve always been the biggest procrastinator of all time - I’m the worst offender of waiting until literally the last minute to do my assignments in school, and the only times I’ve hit flow state at work is when people were constantly relying on me to output in order to do their jobs. If I want all the benefits that come with this kind of job, I know I have to finally figure out how to untrain my procrastinating brain and stick to a regular schedule. I’ve been so out of whack these past few days since coming back from Shanghai, sleeping past 3 am every night, but I’m actually going to try to go to bed early tonight. I’ve already been developing some more structure to my schedule - class from 1-4 pm, then go to the gym after. Now I’ve been adding on my daily blog post (I’ve been starting them in the mornings and then finishing them up during class…I’m a terrible student oops). My last two puzzle pieces will be where to slot in work and study. One of my issues is I usually take US calls in the morning (family, friends, and other networking things) and have dinner plans at night, which really chops up my schedule. Anyways, things for future me to figure out.

The original plan was for Miles to cover his portion of our apartment rent even after leaving, but for various reasons, I’ve decided to just cover it myself. It’s quite pricey for just an individual in Tokyo to cover, so I started passively looking for roommates. I’ve found Facebook is still the best method to reach large groups of relevant people, but unfortunately, some of the Facebook groups are just flooded with (what really seems like sketchy) realtors spamming their apartment listings. I actually tried making a post in one of the groups, but I guess it never got approved, so instead I’ve resorted to browsing the pages for people looking for apartments. I did a few cold reach-outs, but I’ve been needing to carefully evaluate inviting a random person to live in my apartment vs. the monetary savings it comes with. I’ve even considered just fully subletting the apartment since sharing a place is not popular or necessarily ideal for most people, but finding a new place to live isn’t that trivial either (see: original apartment hunt blog posts), and my apartment is really quite nice. Also, I’m technically not allowed to sublet my apartment.

I got a gym membership at a 24-hour gym a 10-minute walk from my apartment a few months ago. Honestly, I didn’t use it as much as I thought I would. The gym was very small and cramped, and though the machines were fairly modern, it just didn’t feel that comfortable to use. I think if I already came in with a lot of prior gym confidence it would’ve been sufficient, but alas…

This might be crazy, but I’m actually going to start posting every day again. Just a lil’ daily update.

I’m not going to make any promises about update frequency anymore, but I have a feeling I’ll get back into blogging more regularly. I assume most people have stopped reading by now, which is totally okay with me - in fact, I feel a bit freer now that blogging will really just be for me to collect my thoughts rather than to hold myself to any external expectations. I also have been stuck weighing between maintaining my own (and people close to me’s) privacy and being as transparent as possible. You never know what information you put out for the public to see will come back to bite you. But, there’s so much value in being fully transparent, and the main reason why being vulnerable can put you in a tough bind to begin with is, in my opinion, due to a lack of understanding and empathy from the public. While there are pockets of the internet where people do try to be more honest, I think people usually try to present themselves in a positive light and produce content that they want others to see. I think we could all use a bit more vulnerability, and I’d love to use blogging as a tool to bring that out and connect with people on deeper levels, especially with those who may have felt more alone in their thoughts and feelings. Once you put something out there though, there’s no backtracking, so the safe route would be to keep the sensitive details private at first. However, I’d love to be able to share as much as I can and will keep striving towards that goal.

Well, this is a little embarrassing because I’ve had a couple of drafts lined up that I’ve written over the past few months but never got around to finishing or publishing. But, I think a 6-month update is a good opportunity to take a moment to not confine myself to recounting things I’ve done with detail and accuracy (I don’t know why I felt the need to do that in the first place, and I suspect it’s one of the reasons why I struggle to publish posts), but rather reflect on my impressions of Japan and Japanese culture that have changed since I moved here, and more broadly the process of moving to a new country and also being (sort-of) unemployed.

After a month-and-a-half-long haitus, I’ve finally returned! While admittedly I wasn’t occupied every single second of every day from the end of February till now, it felt like there was a constant stream of things to do and I was struggling to pick up writing and publishing again. I have so much I want to share, from some of the more significant activities we’ve been up to the past few weeks, to more small nuggets/slice-of-life-esque things that I desperately want to capture, but I’m still figuring out how to best convey less tangible things like subtle feelings of simple joys or small frustrations via this blog. It’ll take me a while to go through the backlog of experiences, but for now, I’ll just give an overview of what I’ve been up to over the past month-and-a-half.

Keeping today’s post super short because I have to study for a test. Went to Daiso yesterday to pick up some moving supplies, and found these:

Previous post here

Heads-up, this one’s going to be a reaaaaally long post. I haven’t really posted about the apartment hunt since the prequel, so I’ll walk through the entire process of what we went through, from the start.

I went on a run this morning around the nearby park as usual (“as usual” - er, I may have skipped a week, shhh), and being both lazy and the kind of person who really likes to optimize time usage (so I can get an extra minute of watching Youtube shorts in, of course), I’ve noticed I’ve been cutting my workouts shorter and shorter, without cutting corners of course. My watch has a preset training program to hit my running goals, and many days it starts with a 5-minute warmup, then a distance-based run (today’s was 4km), then a 5-minute cooldown. My goal is to finish the workout exactly at my apartment front door, which I successfully accomplished once, and it felt so good. I thought I had solved the optimization problem. My routine is: walk then run to the park, lap the park a bunch (taking different laps every time for some more fun and variety), then run home. For some reason I remembered the perfectly optimized day as having 1km left in my run before heading back, so I tried that out again today, and it was a gross overestimate of the actual distance home. I still had 0.5km left rounding the corner of the last main street before heading home, which doesn’t even include the 5 min cooldown. So I went down a new path and realized, huh, this neighborhood actually has a lot of cool stuff! There’s an onsen, a nice bakery, izakayas - until now, we’ve spent the majority of our time in Palm (the giant covered shopping street) because it just felt like the one-stop-shop for everything I could ever want, but only now did I realize that there’s lot of really cool places outside the mall too.

To be honest, I’ve had a lot of “normal” days in Tokyo so far - I’ve been reflecting on this a bit, and while it would be nice to have fun new adventures all the time, I don’t really think that’s necessary, and it’s kind of unrealistic. I actually have lots to talk about on the blog still, but since I want the blog to be a more accurate snapshot of my everyday life here (instead of a curated, “interesting and fun” social media version), I wanted to specifically callout that I don’t think I had many novel/notable experiences yesterday.

Met up with my friends from elementary school over the weekend. Shiho moved from Japan to the US in second grade (we met and became friends in 4th grade), and then moved back to Japan in 10th grade, and Alex grew up a few houses down from me and was just briefly visiting Tokyo with his family. We started the day off in Tsukiji market, I think the only tourist destination/activity I’ve been really wanting to do but haven’t done in any of my previous visits. We chowed down on fatty tuna, uni, and baked goods. Yes, Tsukiji is more expensive than the average place you’ll find in Tokyo, but I don’t actually think it’s a major tourist trap. You get what you pay for - I paid ¥1000 for a skewer (about 4-6 pieces) of tuna sashimi, and it was way higher quality than sushi I’ve eaten at say, conveyor belt places for about ¥100-¥200 a piece. Miles is all about the deals, so when he found a vendor selling a whole box of sashimi for only ¥1000, he jumped on the opportunity, only to find that the box was a bit frozen and the pieces were definitely the odds and ends of the fish, quite tough and chewy. Turns out, there is a practical limit to being cheap.

Contrary to popular belief, Japan doesn’t really celebrate lunar new year - the solar/Gregorian new year is the one that is a national holiday and widely observed. My Japanese school teacher told our class today that the real celebrations are happening in Yokohama actually. Yokohama is about an hour away by regular train (not Shinkansen), so an evening trip would’ve been very doable, but it wasn’t on my radar at the time. Something to keep in mind for next year though.

After talking the big talk about habits, I promptly ignored writing blog posts. Actually, that isn’t entirely true (only mostly true) - I have a lot of content queued up from the past few weeks that has been taking me longer than expected to churn out. Turns out, it is much easier to talk about what has just happened than to recall even things that happened a few days ago and write them down; also, when I was keeping the blog-writing habits up daily, I’d spend the day thinking about what I would want to write about, which made the writing process a lot easier. So, I definitely want to write about at least the highlights of the past few weeks, but I’m going to keep up the daily (likely much shorter posts) in the meantime regardless of my progress on the past posts. Basically, lowering the productivity bar for myself so I can output something and don’t fall behind more.

Sorry this post is coming in very late, I didn’t have access to internet for a while…(more on this later). Despite forcing myself to post every day, I have yet to post a full summary/reflection of the past long weekend, so it’s finally time (only a week late, shh). This might be a little bit dry but I know if I don’t do this now I’ll never come back to it.

I’ve been trying to establish a new hyper-productive lifestyle since moving: packing my schedule end-to-end and trying to make the most out of my time here. It’s been mostly successful, but I think I’ve finally hit a wall. I have a decent amount of blog content queued up that I don’t think I’ll be able to get to for a while, there are so many fun things to do but it’s hard to do them all while adhering to the very strict school attendance requirements. I still have a part-time job that I need to do work for. I’ve been getting by with like my 200 words of Japanese that I currently know, but it’s still such a struggle to do basic things. We are starting to feel the pains of Japanese bureaucracy: there was an issue with getting health insurance, the apartment hunt is going very slowly, and it does feel a little bit like we are hostage to the language schools (which is very likely because of the Japanese government’s visa policies). Miles and I were discussing going to his best friend’s wedding back in the US, and while I would love to go, it feels impossible with virtually no permitted time off. Friends are planning visits to the country and it would be so great to travel with them, but we just can’t. Travel logistics are so much better than anywhere else I’ve lived in, but it is still long and expensive to go outside of Tokyo, and we’re still at the whims of public transit schedules.

Ah, I’m so late to today’s post! Today was Coming of Age Day (Seijin no Hi, 成人の日), a national holiday in Japan celebrating people coming to adulthood, which means another day of skiing for me :)

Another short post after a long day (actually, before a long day - I write the posts the morning after because I’ve been going to bed at 10 and waking up at 5 every day…we can just say my blog is on PST :P actually, based on how the web timestamping is working, I think it’s on EST?).

a different side of Ginza

This marks the beginning of probably the most painful thing we’ll have to do in Japan. Technically, I started looking for apartments before even arriving, but the clock is ticking now (as we only have our current place to the end of the month). Tokyo is huge (2,191 km²) to say the least - you can fit 37 Manhattans (59 km²) in it which is really what it feels like sometimes. I’m not even sure we’ll be able to explore most of the districts in a year even if we tried.

Today was a very slow errand day, so instead of posting dry content about my boring day (well, it was actually super rainy today*), I’ll occasionally write about things that I’ve found interesting about Tokyo/Japan that is different than the US. If you’ve visited Tokyo before, you’ve very likely seen these yellow blocks on the sidewalk:

Visited the nearby park early this morning and it was so beautiful. Lots of people running.

For context, a few weeks before we moved to Tokyo, I briefly started hunting for apartments. I didn’t take it too seriously because I figured the quality of the apartment hunt would be far greater if we did it in person. While I was mainly considering the fact that Tokyo apartments are deceptively small so it’s good to visit them in person before signing a lease, it’s especially true because many realtors/landlords require a residence card before starting the apartment hunt, and you only receive that upon arrival. The mistake I did make was not fully committing to waiting until we got here to start the hunt - a part of me was hoping that I could get the ball rolling ahead of time and sign a lease within the few days we were crashing at our friend’s place, so that we wouldn’t have to stay at a temporary place (e.g. Airbnb).

I’m a big Japan Eat fan, and when Steven mentioned he was craving kebabs (we weren’t really feeling ramen after yesterday’s incident, it was pretty bad but I tried to spare most of the details), I remembered this video that highly endorsed Reis Kebab, a stall that sells kebabs in a pita for only ¥350 ($2.23). Through Steven’s sleuthing, he found another place not too far away called Efe Kebab which also advertises ¥350 kebabs but has a 4.8 star rating on Google Maps, as opposed to Reis’s measly 4.3 stars. (People in Japan typically rate very good restaurants as 3 stars, so these were almost certainly bogus ratings, probably from tourists.) We did the only logical thing - ✨🥙 KEBAB SHOWDOWN! 🥙✨

Gonna keep this post pretty short because I’m technically 1 real day in (to be fair I started at -2 days so I deserve a bit of extra credit points) and I’m already falling behind on the blogging (it is 00:03 on Jan 2 as I type this, oops). Today marks our first full day in Tokyo, and…it was pretty uneventful, because we are still very jet-lagged, and it turns out everything is closed on New Year’s day (and I suspect will continue to be mostly closed for the week). We woke up at 5 am because of jet lag, which was fun considering how sleep-deprived we’ve been.

I spent a few days over the past few months getting the website set up, but it’s time to launch the blog officially. I’m on my way to Tokyo now to start a new chapter of my life and I plan on making the blog the primary focus of my time while I’m there. This trip was actually the impetus of the blog, partly to document my projects and adventures, and partly a way to stay connected with my friends and family remotely.