Do you find life in Japan noisier or quieter than other places where you have lived ?

[mad pierrot]

And I live in a small town in Wakayama, to boot.

What gets me is the damn music they play all day long on the shopping street. It's the same awful, rehashed elevator music all week long. Combine that with all the loud kids on bikes, the stupid yaki imo truck song, the public service announcements, stray cats mewling at night, the ridiculous amount of summer cidadas, door to door salesmen yelling at the top of their lungs so the old people can hear them, and all the kids who yell "Ora, gaijin ya!" when they see me.


No peace and quiet in my neighborhood.

Now, here's what makes my life hell. I live directly across from a large elementary school. Right in front of the playground, in fact. Of course kids are playing there at every hour of the day, all days of the week. This means everytime I leave my house, or look out of my kitchen window for that matter, I get greeted by a chorus of "Joe-Sensei YA!" I stopped wearing just underwear in my house because of that. Next, because it's such a small town I live in, I see my students everywhere. At the supermarket, train station, etc. This wouldn't normally be a problem. Except my students aren't normal. They like to sneak up on me and Kancho me. Either that or scream at the top of their lungs and point at me. I almost dropped a quart of milk once after a kid screamed behind me.



It was cute the first few times but 2 years later it's driving me nuts. I can't even take a sh*t in piece anymore.

-------------------RANT OVER---------------------------------

[Maciamo]

What gets me is the damn music they play all day long on the shopping street. It's the same awful, rehashed elevator music all week long. Combine that with all the loud kids on bikes, the stupid yaki imo truck song, the public service announcements, stray cats mewling at night, the ridiculous amount of summer cidadas, door to door salesmen yelling at the top of their lungs so the old people can hear them, and all the kids who yell "Ora, gaijin ya!" when they see me.

You've just described my neighbourhood in Tokyo. The worst in the list are no doubt the yelling salesmen. Not only is there lots of deaf "baba" around my house (about every inhabited house), but what really piss me off is when they come ringing at my door, and I can't even ignore them as they see the light inside and ring again, and again. Then when I fnally go open the door to see what's the emergency, they all make a strange face and say in an embarassed air "aah, gaijin da !" (oh, that's a foreigner !) and walk away without even bothering to say what they came for ! The stereotype of the polite Japanese certainly does not apply to door-to-door sales people ! :

It was cute the first few times but 2 years later it's driving me nuts. I can't even take a sh*t in piece anymore.

After 4 years, you'll have an idea of how I feel some days. Add to this stupid policemen who stopped me to check my bicycle registration or alien registration card (7 times in total) for absolutely no reason, old grandmas in my neighbourhood who still look at me with evil eyes as if I had raped and murdered their daughters and was going to do the same to them in a fit of dementia, just to be asked by the next friendly people I meet if after 4 years in Japan I can use chopsticks or sleep on a futon.

The problem is that it never stops, anywhere you go in Japan. I've come to realise that these smalls things acted on the life of a foreigner in Japan a bit like lifting a dumb-bell that is just right for your strength. The first 10 or 20 times you lift it, it's very easy to bear. Then you start to feel your muscle aching, and at every new flexion of the arm the pain becomes more intolerable until it becomes a torture. The idea is to take some "rests" and start again once we have recovered. Maybe that is why I have just spent 6 weeks outside Japan, and it did feel better afterwards. But right now it feels like the day after exercising, when your muscle ache when doing nothing and you shouldn't try to lift more weights until a few days if you don't want to tear a muscle.

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