Hidemi’s Rambling No.542

These days, I’m busy preparing for a trip to the U.S. that I will visit for the first time in ten years. Although the destination is the same area as I used to live in, ten years is long enough to change everything dramatically and make my knowledge obsolete. Numerous new hotels have opened and their rooms are WiFi-ready. The transportation from the airport has changed. Since it’s now a smartphone era, check-in for the flight and the hotel is done by it. We don’t need to carry a digital camera anymore and it turned out that an app for a smartphone dispatches a hired car instead of calling for a cab, which I’ll definitely use there. I got a gizmo called an overseas SIM card that converted my cheap smartphone into an essential companion with which I could make a phone call and get data communication in the U.S. The biggest change I noticed above all was price hikes. Inflation in the U.S. and depreciation of yen has soared all the prices and I won’t feel like buying or eating out there when I think of the price converted to yen. But there are some things that haven’t changed. A copy of an itinerary of a return flight is necessary for the immigration at the airport to prove that the return flight has been booked and paid. They check an itinerary copy instead of a physical ticket, which can be forged easily if someone wants to, and is therefore meaningless. Even so that system stays unchanged, and I’m pretty sure so does an arrogant attitude of a US immigration officer. I turned to my journal of ten years ago and I had written there that I wish I could come back to the States before I die. It’s good the wish did come true. It’s even better that my motivation to go to the States no matter how costly it is didn’t disappear. People can become their different selves in ten years either by dulling themselves or by growing themselves in it. In my case, I live a life with so many changes that I wouldn’t have imagined ten years ago. But on the other hand, it remains the same that I’m cheap and desperately make ends meet every day…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.541

I came across a very nice restaurant that served an incredibly money-saving all-you-can-eat lunch buffet on weekdays, and I have been frequently there lately. The restaurant is inside a thrifty hotel but its interior and food is gorgeous since the hotel is also used as a wedding ceremony hall. The lunch buffet has mainly Japanese dishes that other buffet restaurants usually don’t serve because they are costly and time-consuming to prepare. In addition to common buffet items like curry, fried chicken and pasta, it has a wide variety of expensive dishes such as seafood, tempura, chirashi sushi and beef stew. They are laid out on the beautifully decorated buffet table in a luxurious atmosphere. Amazingly, the price is only $11, including soft drinks and desserts. It’s so unreal and I feel I must be in a dream or something every time I eat there. Maybe because of the surreal price, a line of customers is often formed in front of the entrance before the restaurant opens. It happened once that I couldn’t get in when the table got full in the middle of the line. About 70 percent of the customers are seniors, which is peculiar for an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant and I guess is due to Japanese food. As seniors are getting healthier, or they have too much time to spare, or human greed never decays, or for whatever reason, they devour and enjoy lunch immensely. Come to think of it, Japanese society has been aging rapidly and shopping malls and cafes are filled with seniors. Japan has a crazy pension system that seniors receive what young people pay. The demographic change of more seniors and less youth causes a serious shortage of the pension and the government makes up for it by a debt. Japan is tumbling down a steep slope by keeping such an unsustainable system. Thinking this country might be eaten up by senior citizens soon, I match them with my appetite at the buffet and eat gasping for air even after I’m full. I stay on until the lunch time ends and the place closes, and by the time I’m leaving, I end up running toward the bathroom. I have an upset stomach almost every time because I eat far too much there. The super-saving buffet may work against me after all, but I will feel like going back there by the next day…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.540

My grandfather and I used to go to the department store together when I was a small child. He had a pass that entitled senior citizens to a free ride of the municipal streetcar. He usually said, “Not using the free pass is waste of money,” and tried to take the streetcar as much as he could although he had no place to go. As part of his useless effort, he often went to the department store where he didn’t have to go at all, and made me accompany him. While he didn’t have anything to buy, he strolled around all the floors. To get only one different floor he used the elevator that had an operating girl inside who would push the buttons and say the floor information, and the other girl outside who would close the outside iron door manually. It seemed he enjoyed the ride as a free attraction. His typical behavior was to ask a salesclerk the price whenever he spotted something expensive that he had no intention to buy, and to exclaim loudly, “How expensive!” He often looked into the costly merchandise that was on display in the glass case, asked the price, cried his ‘how expensive, and just walked on. When he was looking into the glass case of fountain pens intently one time, the salesclerk asked if he wanted her to take some pens out of the case and show them to him. He pointed out one by one and the clerk put them out on a sheet of velvet. He asked the price each time and at each answer he exclaimed, “How expensive!” “Outrageous!” “That much for a pen?”“Really, really expensive!” His loud remarks rang out through the quiet, elegant floor. After five or six pens were laid on the velvet, he just thanked the clerk casually and left the counter as if nothing happened. Even as a small child, I duly sensed his behavior was fundamentally embarrassing. That was why I hated to go out with him so much. In the lunchtime, he would order the most inexpensive noodle at the food-court-like restaurant on the top floor of the department store. He always ordered one dish for two of us and asked for an empty small bowl to divide the noodle into two. While I ate the smaller portion, he eagerly poured free tea, saying, ”Make your stomach full with free tea if that’s not enough!” We usually had a lot of free tea since we were hungry with only one noodle, and the huge kettle on our table went empty fast. The table was shared with eight people and each table had one kettle. He would start going around other tables for a full kettle. Many kettles were sometimes empty and he would go to the far end of the restaurant for free tea while checking the remaining content of every single kettle along the way. He would loudly say, “Those who pay for a drink are crazy when they have free tea!” right next to a customer who was drinking a glass of soda. In those cases, he would return to our table with a kettle in his hand as if he had hit a gold mine. Even a small child like me understood that his habit was extremely embarrassing and I really hated to go out with him. He did all of these things so happily by wearing tattered clothes and shoes with a hole, and he clearly enjoyed it immensely. I grew up and noticed there was a terrifying thing such as atavism. When I visit an outlet mall, I first go through price tags to see the percentage of discount, and if the percentage is big enough, start looking the merchandise itself. Last time, my partner asked me to quit that habit of mine. He wants me to look at the merchandise first, then the price tag. I don’t order a drink at the food court because it has a free water server. I also bring an empty plastic drink bottle from home and refill it with the free water for later breaks. “Those who pay for a drink are crazy when they have free water,” I usually murmur in my mind…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.539

I was walking beside the math teacher on whom I had had a crush, on the day of a school excursion when I was a sophomore at high school. He asked me which university I was applying to. When he heard my answer, he asked me again, “Do you think you can jump across this paddy field to the other side?” The paddy along the path was over thirty feet in width and I dismissed it as absolutely impossible. “That’s exactly what you’re trying to do for the university,” he said. I resented as I thought he would encourage me since I had gotten full marks in almost every math test. But he was right. I eventually failed all the universities I applied to and my dream to work as a super businesswoman at the leading company was shattered. I lost confidence in myself, lost sense of purpose in my life, and ended up being a freshman in the women’s college that belonged to the same school I attended when I was in junior high and high school. The entrance examination of that college was the only one I passed although I hated to go there and took the exam for my worst-case scenario. Students from the same high school were entitled to get in the college without entrance exam if they didn’t apply to other universities and colleges. While I endured three years of studying for a different university, my classmates just had been having fun, and I settled in the same college as them who didn’t have to take the exam. I was humiliated every day when they spotted me at the campus and asked me, “What are you doing here?” or said, “I thought you were going to the better school!” Everyone in the college including faculty seemed dumb to me in those miserable days. Even the slip-on sandals that the president would neatly leave in front of her office door made me furious and I kicked them away to the hallway with all my force. One day I was called into the school office. The staff told me to see a psychiatrist who was temporarily assigned to the college. I had no idea why I needed to see a psychiatrist. I entered her small office and she welcomed me with her warm smile. She just kept saying to me, “It’s all right. Everything is all right. You don’t have to worry anything. It’s all right.” That was all she said. Only two freshmen including me were called in and I asked the other girl what it was all about when I bumped into her. She guessed that had to do with a survey the college had conducted for all freshmen. She suggested that we were called in because we checked yes on a question whether we ever want to commit suicide. I was astonished at the fact that other students except two of us had never felt like killing themselves up until in their late teens. I strongly felt they were the ones who needed to see a psychiatrist, not us. I was slowly, gradually coming to grips with who I was. I wasn’t made for a businesswoman to begin with. Being a musician seemed much more like myself…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.538

In the time of my school days, women in Japan were mostly housewives. It was considered that women quit working when they get married. One of my mother’s old female classmates stayed single and had an administrative job at IBM in Tokyo, which was so rare at that time. To me, continuing to work after marriage was more natural than being a housewife since my mother went to work every day. Only, I didn’t want to be like her who worked as a farmer in a country. I would rather have become a sophisticated businesswoman like her old classmate at IBM. It was necessary to graduate from the first-class university to be hired at a large famous company like IBM. I started to study for the university’s entrance examination when I was a freshman at high school. My daily life had inevitably changed. I had gradually distanced myself from my cool friends with whom I used to hang out all the time, and spent much time with my new would-be-a-doctor friend. She introduced me the whole new world. She was sincere, courteous and refined, and respected her parents who were both doctors. My study days were troublesome. Because I tended to listen to music instead of studying in my room at home, I studied at the library as much as possible. There, I spent the time solving math problems that I loved to do so much. Although Japan used to have a stupid system for the university entrance exam that the high average mark of all the seven subjects decided the school, I didn’t feel like studying other six subjects beside mathematics. I just studied math day and night, even floating a sheet of a problem in a plastic bag in the tub while I was taking a bath. I knew I needed to study other than math, but I didn’t realize my biggest weakness back then – I can’t do anything I don’t like. As the exam drew near, pressure had begun to seize me. I pulled out the plug of my stereo not to listen to records and stuck the plug to the wall with a note of ‘Patience!’ A small thing provoked my fury toward my sister with no reason one evening, and I found myself gripping her by the throat. I came to myself when I realized I was choking her. She told my father that I tried to kill her and he suggested to me that I should see a psychiatrist. Every practice examination showed I wouldn’t pass the university I was applying to, but I relied on my IQ heavily. I believed that if my brain ran at full blast on the very day of exam, my high IQ would wring out a high score by recalling what I didn’t even remember. Otherwise, it would be proved that my high IQ was a worthless, useless, decorative-only nothing although my whole life had depended on it. I couldn’t possibly accept that kind of notion. I refused, by any means…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.537

The snows reached eight feet high on the ground in a mountainous town where I live, which is customary every winter here. I began to feel suffocated and decided to get away for a few days. As I came across the bargain price for a moderate hotel adjacent to Tokyo Disney Resort, I took a trip there with my partner. Only after a couple of tunnels on the bullet train, snow disappeared and a blue sky spread out. It was already another world. We arrived at Tokyo station and found people there weren’t bundled up, some of them were even without coats. We, on the other hand, were wearing hooded down coats and I additionally had long winter boots on. Winter in Tokyo was warm and it felt hot to us whose bodies have been adjusted to the cold of our town. We were sweaty, and I was walking around with my folding fan flapping. When you stay away from a city life in a remote town and go back to the city after a while, you notice a change in the world clearly. It happened to me this time and I was surprised at the speed of changes. I saw many large strollers inside the train that were obstacles to other passengers. It was frequently a man who pushed a stroller. People wore mean, rough clothes. I used to be annoyed so much every time at an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant by swarms of housewives and their shrieking children, but not a single kid was spotted when I had lunch at one of those restaurants. All those things were uncommon when I lived in the city. Although women’s positions in Japanese society had stayed lowly no matter how long and loudly clamored for improvement, the number of housewives in Japan dramatically decreased so easily once the economy continued to decline. It’s merely four years since I moved out of the city, but with many things I had never seen before, I realized Japan has changed. At a hotel where we stayed, there were many elegant guests from Asian countries and less Japanese. It was supposed to be a decent hotel, but a group of the guests staying in the rooms around ours were noisy at the hallway. My partner had to call the front desk for complaint. I tried to enjoy the stay at least for the value for what we had paid that wasn’t a small amount to me. At the end of the trip, I was exhausted by my own effort to get the trip pay our money. On our way home, we waited in line for the train to Tokyo. When we got on, young men cut in and snatched the seats. I was convinced Japan has become a poor country…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.536

As a two-year contract on my smartphone expires soon, I decided to switch to a low-cost plan of a new phone company and to get a new smartphone that can be used both in Japan and US. I had been looking into the market for about six months and learned that choosing a plan and a phone was really cumbersome nowadays. The price is changing almost every week, the new feature is being added all the time, and the new model is coming up one after the other. To keep up with that speed was so hard for me. It would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t been a cheap person. I would have just sat at the counter in a phone shop and gotten whatever a salesperson recommended. Unfortunately I don’t trust a salesperson and I’m not rich. I simply can’t satisfy myself unless I find the best buy on my own and get it during a special promotion. That required an enormous amount of research, patience, and energy, not to mention time. After all, I got a satisfactory model and signed up for a low-cost plan. The phone came with a USB charger, but I needed one more for travel. The phone maker’s website told that its charger is exclusively made and a mass-market charger can’t be used. I bought the relatively-high-in-price charger that I still can’t see the difference from a common charger, which makes me feel that I lost money. I started using my new smartphone full of glee anyway. It’s bigger than my old one and has a better view on the screen while I’m afraid if I don’t get a good grip and drop it. I needed a case but couldn’t find one that perfectly fits because it’s not a major model. Cool cases for iPhone are everywhere and I now realized how popular it is. I settled on a pouch-type iPhone case that had a bargain price, and squeezed my phone into it. I mustered all my ideas and devices to get and use a new phone at the lowest price. Looking back the long, troublesome process, I’m not so sure if I saved money or it was costly in various ways…