There’s a beautiful view out there right now. Visibility is easily 40-50km. If the Toyota building weren’t blocking the view, Mt. Fuji would be clear and sharp. I can see the mountains on either side clearly. But perhaps as good an indicator of distance is the image above. Note the mountain line behind the Kasai Rinkai ferris wheel. That’s on the Chiba peninsula, across Tokyo Bay and beyond Makuhari. That’s pretty good visibility, especially for the summer. It’s a crisp, clean day out there. Maybe the humidity and heat will return, but right now it’s really nice.

Yesterday afternoon, after the typhoon had veered off (we didn’t really get too much rain), we got some interesting views, with the interesting light and cloud arrangements.

One thing that struck me when I moved to Ikebukuro was the sheer number of convenience stores, or conbini. In the 500-meter-square area shown, there are no fewer than 18 such shops–and I’m not sure that the map shows them all.

Even more surprising was the concentration of one brand of store. In this area, Family Mart is king. 10 of the 18 stores here are FM, with am-pm coming in second with 5. You’ll note that in one area, there are three Family Marts within just a block or so of each other.

Sachi found a kaiten-sushiya, or conveyor-belt sushi joint, in Higashi-Ikebukuro via Yahoo Gourmet. It’s on a side street just off of the Sunshine 60 shopping street. It’s called “Waka Taka,” which I assume is a reference to the sumo wrestlers Wakanohana and Takanohana; the hint is the picture of a sumo wrestler on the receipt (Is that supposed to be Waka?).

It’s not a bad place. I’ve eaten at quite a few sushi shops, and this one was pretty decent. Better, they have a simple pricing policy: every sushi plate is ¥136 ($1.12), with soft drinks priced the same. Beer is more expensive, but pretty much everything else has that basic price. The receipt at right shows the total cost of Sachi’s and my lunch. She had seven plates of sushi, I had six. Not too shabby.

Most sushi joints will have a range of different-colored or -patterned plates; each different plate represents a different price. Waka-Taka just has one plate, meaning that the maguro and the chu-toro are the same price. A few of the more expensive plates have a different way of charging more: instead of getting two pieces of sushi on a plate, you just get one. But that’s as far as it goes, and as far as I could tell, there were only about a half dozen such 1-piece plates out of several dozen different menu choices.

As is usual, they offer free tea, cold water, and ginger. If you’re looking for a quick, cheap lunch in East Ikebukuro, this is a very good candidate.

You’ll find the shop located here.

• Bugs. After having opened the balcony doors for a certain period of time, we find ourselves besieged by one specific type of insect, a tiny, quiet, flying insect that slowly weaves around your head. People who have lived in Japan in the summer know what I am talking about. These things are relatively easy to kill–you can’t get them every time but more often than you could a mosquito or housefly–but there are so damn many of the things, they seem to keep coming and coming no matter how many you kill.
• Altitude. I knew we were high up, but did not expect the fact that riding the elevator up to our floor would be enough to make your ears uncomfortable. Luckily, I have the ability to open my eustachian tubes really easily and so can equalize fine. Sachi reports no discomfort herself.
• Garbage disposal. I’ve never seen this before in Japan, and it’s pretty easy here. There’s no external switch; you just put in the stopper for the drain and turn to the right. This drainstop-switch feature also guarantees that you won’t accidentally drop a piece of silverware, a ring, or your finger in the drain while the blades are going. Furthermore, it’s quiet and efficient.
• Cost-cutting. Sachi mentions that it appears the makers of the building did a good job overall but cut corners in a few places. One is the bath room mirror; aside from not having a defogging mechanism, it just seems kind of cheap. Another is the air conditioner in the living room. It’s cheap, not very strong (Sachi’s is way stronger), and just this morning started dropping ice and water on our TV set.

Recently, I’ve been showing you shots of the neighborhood and the view, but nothing inside the apartment. Actually, we got it cleaned up enough to be presentable in the past week, maybe 3 or 4 days ago, so there’s no reason (aside from slothfulness) to put it off any further.

You may recall the layout, if you were keeping track of comments from previous Ikebukuro posts. This was the floor plan, with numbers representing tatami mats, each tatami roughly 3 x 6 feet:

Inside that floorplan, this was the expected layout:

Although in “bedroom 2,” the “computer desk” (light beige rectangle on the right) had to be thrown out, that was for the best–it would have seriously overcrowded the room for no good purpose. The sofa in the living room we moved back a bit from the TV… but aside from those two changes, everything was placed as planned, and works very well. So with that layout established, let’s look at some main points of the apartment:

First, the kitchen, as viewed from near the dining room table (the dark brown thing with four chairs around it):

Click for larger view

Turn a little to the right, and you can see the living room area (note the green curtains, a recent apartment-wide addition):

Click for larger view

Step back into the kitchen a bit and look back towards the balcony windows:

Click for larger view

The following views do not have enlarged images. If you go down the hall from the kitchen area to the bedrooms, then on the right is the bath area:

Hidden in there on the left side is the washer-dryer, and almost at the door on the left is a second mirror-cabinet dressing area. Turn around, and you see the main bedroom:

The bed does take up most of the room, but there’s more space than there seems in this image. Out of frame, there’s a fair amount of floor space beyond the bed, and full-sized closets to the left.

And just around the corner is the hallway leading to the genkan, and the front door:

There’s more, but that’s enough for now.

Here are some night views from the balcony. Some really good views out there, especially on a clear night (we haven’t had too many of those). The first two images have blow-ups (well worth looking at!):

The above is a slightly zoomed-in view of downtown Tokyo, with the tip of Tokyo Tower visible at far right; to the left is probably Roppongi, Yotsuya, and Akasaka, with northern areas in the foreground. That’s the view we have out our bedroom window.

The next view is straight out to our east, out the dining room windows. Between the tower under construction and the larger apartment tower to the right is the skyline for Ueno, Akihabara, and Kanda. We have seen Disneyland fireworks behind the Akihabara buildings.

Back to the Roppongi area–we noticed that one building seemed to get a blue tint every few seconds. A look with the zoom lens on the camera revealed this (click for larger image):

And just for fun, I glued together three images for an animated GIF showing how the lights came up on that building:

Anybody know what building that is? Roppongi Hills is my guess, but I don’t know for certain.

Now that we’ve been living here for ten days, there are a few impressions of the place I figured I’d share.

1. The Size. Honestly, I felt it would be bigger. It’s 73m², which is just 11m² less than my Inagi place. But the hallway eats up a lot of that space. I dunno, maybe they’re counting the balcony in that as well?
2. The Bathroom Door. You swing it shut and let go, and it closes perfectly, ending with a firm but quiet click. They couldn’t have balanced it better.
3. Lamp Switch Tags. They put the TV, phone and Internet jacks in one side of the room, but the switch which turns that light on is labeled “Dining Room.” The other end of the room, devoid of any media outlets but with a wide bay-window view perfect for a dining table, is labeled “Living Room.” Hello?
4. Mirror Defogging. The mirror outside the bath/shower has a heated defogging mechanism; the mirror inside the shower doesn’t. Somebody call an electrician–they got that reversed, too.
5. Easily Maintained Kitchen. At first I fretted about the usability of an all-electric kitchen–I’m still not sure how well I’ll be able to cook popcorn, it’s hard to find the right pot that’ll work with the electric “burners.” But it’s a dead cinch to keep clean. Just wait for it to cool and wipe it all down. Sweet.
6. 24-hour Supermarkets. I have found no fewer than three within easy walking distance of the apartment now. One on our building’s 1st floor; another, Seiyu, on the other side of Sunshine City; and one more, Maruetsu, down Kasuga Boulevard a bit. That said, I thought I’d be using them a lot more during the odd hours of the night. Not yet, but it’s still early.
7. Convenience Stores Galore. Just how many can you pack into a neighborhood? It’s pretty astounding, really. Just Family Mart alone counts for a dozen stores within ten minute’s walking distance, mostly between us and the station. They seem more ubiqutous here than vending machines, fer chrissakes. Or would be, if there weren’t stupendous numbers of vending machines, especially when packed in groups of a dozen or more all along one side of a building along a block.
8. Soft “Hardwood” Floors. I was surpised how easily they could be dented in by the rollers on my computer chair. They seem more like soft plastic than hard wood.
9. Elevator Quirks. It doesn’t take too long to wait for one to arrive, usually–not too surprising with three servicing each floor. All too often there’s one on the first floor and one on a higher floor. But if one is coming your way, push the button quick–if you push the call button when it is less than five floors away, it won’t stop for you, even though you pressed the button about three seconds in advance.
10. Balcony Cleaning. I thought the windows would be hard to keep clean and the balcony floor easy. Strike that: reverse it.
11. Layout Hiccups. I thought that my furniture layout plan for the place would need revising; it only took a few tries on the computer to lay out the furniture the way I thought would work, in advance. And whaddaya know: it does. We’re doing wonderfully with stuff laid out the way it is. Cool.

One other thing–these places tend to frown on drilling holes in the wall, though they gave us a wall cradle for the air conditioner remote control which has to be drilled into a wall. More to the point, I need to ask them about drilling into walls to secure furniture in preparation for an earthquake–otherwise a couple of my cabinets are going to fall rather heavily onto my computer chair.

One of the things that I don’t miss from my old apartment, which I also mentioned before: the trash service. It would be right out the window, and with only a skimpy net to protect it, crows and cats and other creatures would make a mess out of it at the first opportunity, as you can see from this photo from my last week in Inagi:

As a result, we couldn’t toss our trash until late the night before, or early the same morning the garbage people came. It was a huge inconvenience–if you forgot, you’d have to keep the stinky bags in your apartment until the next trash day, or put them out days early and risk being visited by the garbage nazis for not being a good garbage neighbor.

Here in my new building, the same worries do not apply. There’s a trash complex down in the basement second floor, on my way to my scooter cage, where I can drop off any kind of trash, at any time I like. No birds or other critters can get in there, and you can leave stuff at any time of day or night. Sweet.

The standard burnable/unburnable bags get their own special room, with what may or may not be a compactor unit preparing stuff for easy haul-away. You go into a little room and there are these two biggish metal doors with large handles on them.

You open a door, put the bag in, and close it again. Some big noises follow, and your trash is somehow taken care of.

We’ve already had one hiccup in the building; the burnable trash door was out of service a few days ago, causing everyone to pile trash up at the room’s entrance. The next day, a notice was up telling people not to put in bags bigger than a certain size; apparently someone had gotten too ambitious and had jammed up the system.

For everything else, you use the special trash room next door to the plain garbage room.

Here, you’ve got your PET bottles with space underneath for cardboard…

More space for glass bottles, cans, and newspapers & books underneath…

And then in the corner, places for old clothes, milk cartons, and styrofoam trays.

There is also a place for unburnable garbage too big to fit in the regular trash room door, as well as for sodai-gomi–but so far no one is bothering with sodai-gomi stickers. People seem to be throwing out whatever stuff they thought they could fit but couldn’t. A nice, big sofa was there the other day, and disappeared fast. A washer-dryer unit is still down there, probably too big or otherwise problematic for these units. Someone threw out a satellite TV dish, apparently unaware that they are prohibited in this building.

What’s also interesting is that the special trash room is locked–requiring you to wave your key in front of the ping-pong-ball receptor, just like with the front door or bicycle room.

What’s more interesting is that you also have to use the key in order to get back out of the room–I guess people could access the place by coming in where the trash collectors enter.

They don’t have trash chutes here like you see in some U.S. movies for tall apartment buildings, but for Japan, it’s a very nice system.

I’ll probably be doing this from time to time–giving you a look at what’s happening out my window, now that a lot more is out there to happen. What drew me out there this morning was a bit of noise. Now, there is noise–nowhere is free from it–but even when Sachi has the balcony doors open to air out the place, the noise from the street is pretty muted. In Inagi, it was so loud that I had to play loud music or TV in order to half-drown out the repetitive dullness and obnoxiousness of it. Here. it’s more like a faint sound that less annoys you than makes you wonder what’s making it.

Today, it was shouts from men that had me wondering what was going on. At first I thought it was from a construction crew downstairs, but then I discovered the real reason: we live a few block away from a major fire station, and they were conducting drills of some sort.

Actually, I am kind of surprised that we don’t hear sirens a lot more. There’s a fire station next door to where I work, and we get quite a bit of noise from that. Here, we’ve heard them a few times, but nothing to annoy or frustrate. Instead, we simply benefit from having such a public service so close (next-door to which is a major post office, open 7 days a week, 9 am to 9pm on weekdays, 9 to 7 on weekends). A lot of stuff like that is nearby now–the Ward office is halfway from here to the station, for example.

Next up is a potential convenience:

No, not the driving school. You might not see what I’m looking at here, but I include this wide shot with the balcony edge at right of frame to show the closeness. Here is a zoom-in of the previous image:

Yep, that’s the puppy. I pointed out before how the Narita Express train service goes directly to our station, and I may have mentioned the bus–but the bus service direct from Narita Airport stops just 150 meters from our front door. Hard to get better than that.

Lastly, I thought it would be kind of neat to show neighborhood shots from a height. Looking from the balcony, it is possible to take photos and have nothing but neighborhoods in the frame. For those of you who enjoy this kind of thing, 1200 x 900 blowups of each of the following photos is available with a click:

After spending the day unpacking and cleaning (we’re 80-90% there by now), Sachi and I went shopping, and picked up, among other things, a few nice comfortable stools for the balcony. In light of this, we decided to try a little outdoor barbecue. That is to say, we trotted out the gas-canister-driven burner and set up on a small table on the balcony.

Or, at least, that was the original idea.

I had just returned from a trip to Seiyu supermarket (which we have since learned is also open 24 hours–cool!) with the meat and some beer, when I went outside to set up the gas burner. And it wouldn’t work. I tried again and again, inserting and re-inserting the gas canister… and it still wouldn’t work. Convinced that it had somehow broken during the move, I went back to Seiyu and bought a new gas burner.

When we got it home, it had the exact same problem. Wouldn’t light up. Figuring this was too much for a coincidence, we opened up the instructions for the new unit–and then I flashed on the problem: the canister must be turned just so, with a notch in the canister lining up with a groove in the burner unit, for it to fire up. Sure enough, the old burner still worked fine. At least we can get our money back on the new one… but I feel like a royal idiot nonetheless.

So we set up the table and chairs outside and got ready to barbecue some yakiniku.

But the wind was too strong, and kept the hot plate from getting at all hot. So we turned the table in toward the building, sheltering it from the outside as best we could.

Even that wasn’t enough–so Sachi and I spent the better part of the evening covetously protecting the flame, lest the wind steal too much of the heat. Sure, it was stupid–we could have just gone inside and done things twice as fast–but being stupid was most of the fun. We were having a blast, just surrounding the burner and plate like fools, enjoying every scrap of cooked food that finally got done after three or four times longer on the plate than it should have taken, while holding out or coats like we were imitating Batman or something.

Say what you want about us, it was great fun.

This has got to be one of the strangest views from the balcony: a driving school. Not that driving schools are strange in Japan; what’s strange is that it is located smack in the middle of a heavily crowded urban center. A two-story structure, it is the lowest building in the neighborhood, surrounded by a towering Sunshine 60 complex (that’s the entrance to the Prince Hotel above it), and the dozen-story-tall NTT and post office buildings, as well as other tall buildings.

These driving schools do charge a lot of money–it usually costs about ¥300,000 ($2500) for a three-week-or-so training course–but it can’t be enough to really justify taking up so much space in a prime real estate location. This must be one of those throwbacks, something owned for so long with property taxes so low that it doesn’t cost the owner much to exist–but selling the land would incur prohibitive taxes because of that financial gain relative to the original purchase price.

Not that I’m complaining–were it sold, it would likely be replaced by yet another view-blocking high-rise. It’s just a strange anomaly, is all.

Other interesting bits viewed from the balcony:

You get to see how people use their roof space. It must be really nice to have this balcony in the summer time, when it’s not raining, that is.

Little bits of the city congeal to form pockets of light at night; this grouping caught my attention, far away enough that I could not make it out by eye. The “Pioneer” sign is now dark, a small while after I took the photo.

(Click to enlarge.) As I think I might have mentioned before, we can get a direct view down Sunshine 60 street, a pedestrian shopping street with theaters and other shops like Tokyu Hands.

I was wondering why people on a high floor of the NTT building were looking back out at me, until I saw closer up:

It must be the NTT cafeteria.

Sunday was a cleaning day for me. I left Ikebukuro on scooter and headed back to Inagi to clean up the place. Despite all the work over several weeks, there was still a lot left to do. Still junk on shelves and in drawers and cupboards, still items unboxed, so that was the first task. At the end of a few hours, almost everything was packed in a box or otherwise stowed away in one corner of the apartment, leaving the floors bare elsewhere. But not clean.

So next there was vacuuming, then cleaning along the baseboards and fixing up the little and medium-sized messes–gunk stuck to the floor, dust accumulated behind where the washer-dryer had been, etc. After which the place was halfway presentable.

One thing that you quickly become aware of when you clean out an apartment is the sheer mass of junk that has accumulated. When I started paring down my stuff several weeks ago, I impressed myself by throwing out a half dozen largish garbage bags filled with papers and other items that I decided to toss. Well, that was just the beginning, as it turned out. Right up to the last day, I was filling up bag after bag of burnable and unburnable garbage, loads and loads of stuff that I can’t understand why I kept, or can but figured I could do without. I don’t know how many dozens of trash bags there were in the end, but it was quite a heap.

And then there’s what is left behind. After seven years, a lot of stuff happens to an apartment, especially in a climate that ranges from hot and damp to cold and bone-dry. The humidity in summer mixed with the air conditioning, and the humidifier and heating in winter mixed with the cold on the other side of the windows, doors, and walls leads to condensation and other water-related badness that lends to the formation of mold. And so you start to see stuff like this:

And that’s not the worst of it. Near the front door, where the cold metal door drew condensation and the darkness of the closed genkan welcomed spores, there was a lot of damage behind this large cabinet I had by the front door. Here’s what it looked like normally:

It looked okay, really. I mean, the cabinet was hideous and the clutter was not pretty, but it didn’t look moldy or damaged or anything. But when it was removed, it was pretty ghastly behind it. (No, I don’t have a photo, sorry.) The wallpaper (or whatever that wall covering was) was coming off and was pretty severely stained with black and brown mold deposits. The thing is, how can you keep that from happening? Maybe I could have predicted it, but what could I have done on a day-by-day basis to keep it from happening? Haul this big piece of furniture out of place every month and clean behind it? Guess that water condensation was building up on any given day and move this honking big piece of wood across a confined space so I could reach behind and dry the wall off periodically?

In any case, by the end of Sunday, I had as much cleaned as I could. There were three or four spots with mold damage like I described above, and nothing I could do about it. The guy who calculated my deposit told me that the kitchen and bath would be cleaned for me, so no need to deal with that–thank god! Mostly left behind was the pile of boxes and other stuff I had set up so I could load it in a van the next day.

That night, upon returning home, Sachi and I had received the bed frame. While the air conditioning people came in to install the two we had brought with us (charging an extra ¥14,000 yen because our existing tubing wasn’t long enough, so they claimed), we started building the bed frame. The problem: the drawers below the bed were only on one side, and that side was the one with the furniture blocking it. But Sachi pointed out that we could just reverse the construction and put them on the other side. After mulling over the parts and the diagram, I came to the conclusion that her idea would work–all the parts seem symmetrical. And it did, after an hour or so of putting it together. We even had fun with it.

At the end of the night, we were sleeping in an actual complete bed with air conditioning around us. It was actually starting to feel like home. With tons of unpacked boxes, but home.

As a consequence of the timing of our move, we are seeing very little of the view from the new apartment. This is now tsuyu, or the rainy season. As a result, our view tends to be like this most of the time:

However, the view has cleared up from time to time–we saw the moonrise the other night, for example, made even nicer by the effect of some occluding clouds.

A few times, we’ve had a nice nighttime view, aided by the fact that lights penetrate the haze better. Here’s the view to the east, the same direction as the hazy photo above (click to enlarge):

However, there’s a cool little thing we didn’t count on: Kasai Rinkai Park. That’s the place where I go birdwatching sometimes. It has a big, lit-up ferris wheel, which by chance happens to be completely visible from our window; tall buildings stand in the way just to the left and to the right, but of the ferris wheel, we have a clear, open view. In the above photo, you can’t see it (even in the enlarged version), but if you look just to the right of the building with the construction tower, you’ll see a group of bright buildings. Zoomed in, it looks like this (click to enlarge):

The buildings to the left are still a bit of a mystery, but looking at my map book, Akihabara Electric Town happens to be smack in that direction, so I’m guessing that that’s what those buildings are. Here is the tightest zoom on the ferris wheel.

One of the nice things about it is that the lights change on it, like a giant neon wheel. They iris open, they spin, they luminesce in red, blue, green, purple, and white. And it’s not as tiny as the wide view above would suggest; with the naked eye, you can make out detail about like the second to last image above. Kind of a cool fringe benefit to the view.

This has another upside to it: Kasai Rinkai is on the far eastern edge of Tokyo, about twice as far away from us as the Sumida River–and the Sumida River is where one of the nicer fireworks displays is held every year. Since we can see Kasai Rinkai, that means anything that distant will be nicely visible to us. The possible bad news: like with Fuji, we might have blockage. The Sumida display might be just blocked out by that building with the construction crane on top of it. As far as I can figure from the map, the display will be either just behind or just to the left of the left edge of that building. Why can’t our building be the only tall one around here?!?

But there will be other displays almost as visible in that week. Tuesday, July 24 is the Katsushika fireworks display on the Edo River, and Thursday, July 28 is the Adachi Ward fireworks display on the Arakawa River; both of these are visible north of the Sumida display, and hopefully one of them won’t be blocked by some other building. I am beginning to wonder if we should have paid an extra ¥8,000 a month for that 26th floor apartment with the same layout, after all… but nah.

We’ll have to see what comes around.

Already I am enjoying some of the new qualities of this apartment over those of the old. One is living in an auto-lock building. It just feels more comfortable knowing that people won’t knock at your door. Sure, they’ll buzz you from the lobby, but that’s not the same thing. First off, I can see them from the color video intercom without having to lean over the genkan and peer through a peephole, and second, even if I buzz them in, I still have a few minutes while they come in and take the elevator up.

That said, the elevators are not too bad. I have certainly tested them over the past several days, making endless trips carrying boxes and other stuff. You have to wait sometimes, but not that much. There are three elevators I can use, and it’s not common for all three to be busy. In fact, there is usually one near to where I am. And when you do get on, you don’t have to stop at many floors; so far, only one out of every twenty or so trips was punctuated by a stop at an intermediate floor for someone else. That is partly because two of the elevators are express elevators which skip the 3rd to 17th floors, and we live on the 21st floor.

The noise is also a lot better. I found out that there indeed is an election going on (the poster boards weren’t put up until recently, and are still not up in Inagi), and while I saw several loudspeaker trucks in Inagi while moving, I haven’t heard a single one here. Traffic noise is also very muted, and easy to even forget that it’s there.

I have yet to find a significant gripe that doesn’t involve normal moving or other startup woes. So far…

Update: Okay, a few small gripes, having just taken a shower: the water pressure, while acceptable, is not strong. And the mirror in the shower is chest-level, meaning that I’m going to have to squat on one of those little plastic seats in order to shave.

Still, the benefits still make themselves apparent at the same time. When dressing in the bedroom, I heard what at first sounded like the faint jangling of bells. But then I identified the sound as that of a jackhammer, extremely muted. The sound increased greatly when I opened the balcony door; the noise was not coming from the street, but from the top of the ten-story NTT building right below my balcony. Which goes to show how well the double-paned glass works.

Once my friend and I had finished stuffing all the boxes we had brought in the apartment, we decided to go down to Pororoca and get some drinks and snacks. Of course, right then, the cable TV guy decided to show up. So my friend went down to shop for munchables, and I waited for the TV person–only it was just the guy who wanted to sign me up to the TV service. The technical guy came later. And while those guys were finishing up, the KDDI guy showed up and wanted to connect the Internet. And throughout this, the intercom was giving me some message that involved a graphic of a box. More on that in another post, though.

But that was the bright point of the day–I was still busy as heck signing stuff and had to stay nailed to the apartment, but everything was working. The first night we stayed here, we had Internet, IP phone service, and cable TV. Naturally, I made use of the Internet right away, but the cable TV, two and a half days later, is still not used. We simply haven’t had time.

Soon after the Internet was hooked up, my friend had to leave–just before Sachi came back. The KDDI guy was still working things out, helping us to try to figure out permutations of the system, and getting my email to work properly. As he was leaving, he happened to spot my dryer.

Let me go back a few steps and explain: my washer-dryer was delivered, but non-functional. The drainage tube was on the wrong side, and until that could be fixed, the dryer could not be placed on top of it. So it lay in pieces in the pre-bath area, where the KDDI guy spotted it. He must have eyes like an eagle, because he actually noticed the serial number on a label on the side of it, and immediately informed us that the dryer was under a recall order. He opened his keitai to check, and sure enough, it was under recall.

Now, his ability to spot this was even more impressive because that dryer is nine years old. But apparently there was trouble with hundreds of thousands of control panels on numerous units. So he called the center responsible for this, and made an appointment for us to have a service technician come out to us Tuesday (tomorrow morning) and fix it.

Now you may be wondering how the heck a KDDI Internet installer technician knew all this (we sure did), and it turned out that he had previously worked to repair washer/dryers. So I asked him if he knew how to fix our problem with the drainage tube, as I had already surmised that a fix was possible, but I didn’t know how. Sachi was looking at me and quietly mouthing “no, he can’t do that!” when the guy pulled out our washing machine and promptly fixed it for us. With much gratitude, we bade The Service Man from Heaven goodbye.

Soon after that, Sachi’s movers started to come in. Hers were a lot nicer than mine, probably because she didn’t tax them as much as I did, and they were working for a pretty girl and not some demanding gaijin. They were smiling and efficient, and soon had everything in. But by the time it was all done, it was late at night, and we just wanted to fall down and zonk out after a nice shower.

At which point we discovered that we had no hot water. The lady at the building’s Kanri office had helped me turn on the water the previous day, but she fell a step short. I asked her if we should turn on something called “Eco-Cute,” as per the instruction sheet, but she said no, that wasn’t necessary. Well, that was the hot water heater. At first, Sachi and I didn’t realize this, and spent a while looking at the voluminous instruction manual book that we got with the apartment. (I promise, I’ll have photos… as soon as I can take the time to take them!) But then I recalled the “Eco-Cute” thing, and sure enough, after we turned it on, the hot water started… after one hour.

That brings me up to Saturday night. Thrilling blogging, isn’t it? Well, scan past this if you’re not interested, as there’s more to come. I’ll at least see if I can condense Sunday and Monday into one post tomorrow.

I woke up around 6:00 am, and at 7:00, I headed north to Ikebukuro. After a short stop at the new apartment, I headed out to the rental car place, which, conveniently, was just around the corner from the new apartment. I was not able to get the reservation switched to the larger van the previous day; I was very worried that not enough would fit in the mid-sized van that I ordered. After all, I had a room full of boxes and stuff outside that as well. If less than half could fit in the van, then I would need a bigger van on Monday.

When I go to the rental office to pick up the van, I innocently ask what the charges are for bringing the van in late. Not that I intended to, but I was just checking. The lady points out that it’s something like ¥1,500 yen an hour. I ask, can I extend on the fly to a 12-hour rental instead of the six I had asked for? She answered “no,” and I said “okay.” I asked purely just to know my options.

I wait a few minutes for things to happen, and then a guy comes up to “help” me. He takes my official order, and starts going on about how it’s really bad and impossible to allow me to be late. Even though they posted the hourly late fees, he said it was not possible at all, and that I had to be back exactly on time. I replied to the effect of, “okay, okay, jeeezz… I was just asking!” And then the bastard tries to charge me for the 12-hour rental without telling me that he has switched me to the new time frame; I only notice when he asks me to pay the higher fee. When I point out that six hours will do fine, he relents, but only with more stern warnings about getting the van back exactly on time.

After doing the normal check-out-these-scratches dance routine, I am off and on my way–in the opposite direction. I have waiting for me an angel and savior, a co-worker who gracefully volunteered to help me move without my even asking. I went to downtown Tokyo to pick her up, and we started to head out on the expressway.

In Japan, there are no freeways; all the roads without traffic signals are pay-only. Since I wanted to make good time, we used them, and then I promptly made a wrong turn. I then discovered that it’s impossible to pull a u-turn on the expressway, and getting off and back on at an exit means you have to pay the $6 fee all over again, receipt or no.

After that hiccup, it was smooth sailing. It’s ¥700 yen for inner-city expressway driving, ¥600 for the outer reaches, and ¥200 for the bridge that takes me directly into town–in all, about ¥1500 ($12) in tolls. My coworker and I arrive at my old place and we start loading boxes. Lots and lots of boxes.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, the apartment building I was in has a frustratingly inconvenient feature: the elevator stops only between floors, making it necessary to walk up or down half a flight of stairs to get to the elevator. So we worked in shifts; I would take boxes to the door, my friend to the elevator; then after we loaded up the elevator, we did the same division between the elevator and the van, and loading stuff into the van. Her help easily cut the amount of time and effort by two-thirds, a real life-saver. It would have literally been impossible to do by myself, partly because of time constraints, and partly because the air conditioner was a two-person haul.

To my relief, we fit almost all the pre-packed boxes into the van–a relief because it meant that my Monday haul would not only be possible, but a bit easier as well. We got the job done and within three hours, we were ready to go.

Here’s where the speed bumps started coming into play. You see, I had to sell my extra air conditioner and my gas range, else get swindled by the recycle shop guys (more on that in an upcoming post). But the buyer that I found through online ads balked at the takkyubin fees, so I had to agree to deliver myself–a huge pain, as they were not even close to the expressway route. But it shouldn’t be a big deal, I thought–I had run the route on my scooter and it seemed a tad slow, but fine.

Apparently, all the traffic jams happen on Saturdays–or I was just unlucky. We got out to the Tama River okay, but then the road leading to the bridge turnoff was jammed up. I figured once we got on the turnoff to go over the bridge it would clear up–and at first, it did–but then we hit another traffic jam on the second road, across the river. We got to the place where the guy waited to take the stuff, and then were off again–straight into a longer traffic jam. Hopefully, I though, Kan-pachi Boulevard, a big, three-lane thoroughfare, would be more clear. What a fool I was to think that. There was an ever bigger traffic jam there. Eventually, we got in striking range of the expressway, and went for it–only to encounter yet another traffic jam there–apparently, there was a traffic accident five kilometers ahead of us, and it was yet again bumper-to-bumper.

Soon, there was only one hour left of my six-hour rental, and we were still blocked up. I called the rental agency on my cell phone, remembering the dire warnings the guy had laid down for me. I figured, what can they do to me if I’m late? Knowing that they couldn’t do much, of course… but still, the kind of talking-to the guy gave me had me stressed out just because I hate being late for stuff.

After a while, just before I was ready to take the first exit off the expressway and chance the local roads again, traffic sped up. It was still off-and-on, but finally the traffic cleared up as we passed the center of the city, and the way to Ikebukuro was clear. We arrived at the new building with a van loaded with boxes, with just 20 minutes to spare.

The building people were overloaded–it seems that everybody and their neighbors were moving that day (Sachi was due to move in later in the day herself), so we had to wait outside for a few minutes–but we had a plus on our side, which was that we were using a van, which was small enough to go to the basement level. Even at that, several people were using personal vans or takkyubin deliveries, but we lucked into getting one of the two loading spaces. We hurriedly unloaded all the boxes, and just put them inside the door on the loading area. When we were sure the van was emptied, I drove it back around the corner to the rental place–and arrived thirty seconds before the appointed time of 2:00. They didn’t seem too relieved or anything when I got it back on time, but frankly, considering traffic, I saw it as a minor miracle.

On the way back to help take the boxes up to the apartment, I stopped by the 24-hour supermarket, Pororoca, on the first floor of the building. As my friend and I were unloading the van, she had the idea that using a push-cart would be so much easier. Dim as I am, I had not even considered that, and probably would have struggled with each box individually. The building guard in charge of the basement area commented to her that if we told the people at Pororoca that we’d be frequent shoppers, they might lend us a cart. So on the way back in, I stopped by and asked–and indeed, they lent us a cart! And I didn’t even have to promise to be a regular shopper (residing in the building, I can only suppose they took it for granted).

So my friend and I took about six trips instead of 30 or 40 to get all the boxes upstairs and settled in the apartment. It was just past 3:00… and the rest is a story for tomorrow. Now I’m a day and a half behind in telling the story, which is understandable–I still have another day to go before I can close the Inagi chapter of my life. So part three is coming soon, telling of day 1.5. Sooner or later, I’ll get caught up with this, and can start blogging on the minutiae. Maybe I’ll wait for the little stuff until we have finished unpacking all of our boxes, though.

What a couple of days.

Friday, after shutting everything down, I worked to finish packing things up before the movers came. I wasn’t successful. As it turns out, there was a lot left to do… but not that it mattered at all. The truck required by Vanguard Towers (no more than 2 tons) turned out to be only big enough to fit my furniture, and no boxes or anything else. And not even all of my furniture–I had to throw out two pieces, one of which I really wanted to keep… but after seeing how the place here filled up, I suppose it made sense to get rid of it. Pity–it was a beautiful, pristine work desk, better even than the smaller one of similar style that I was already determined to throw out.

I spent most of the day stressing, and fairly badly, for me (I don’t stress all that easily). When I realized that only the furniture would fit and saw that I had a small room full of packed boxes, I began to thing that I would not be able to get it all here before my apartment closed down to me. I called the rental place and they could not substitute a larger van, sorry. So I put in a reservation for another van, same size as the first… and later stressed about how that might not be big enough.

Still, I took full advantage of the movers, more than I deserved to for ¥68,000 yen, I suppose. I kept begging them to fit more stuff in the truck, and in the end had to decide between a low shelf dresser and getting my bike shipped (the alternative being that I would instead ride it all the way in, a massive effort which I did once before and do not wish to repeat). But I also got them to throw out all my large sodai-gomi–including the two big desks, the double bed frame, two full-sized cabinets, a similarly-size metal shelf cabinet, the low drawers, a computer desk, and a large TV cabinet. They overloaded the sodai-gomi space, and I had to keep apologizing as I found yet another thing for them to throw out.

Ever wonder how much dust and crap can accumulate under and behind furniture that you don’t move for seven years? I don’t have to wonder any more, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

They seemed unhappy that I was driving my scooter back to Ikebukuro via normal roads, apparently thinking that I’d come really late as they were taking the expressway. As it was, I even stopped by work to pick up some stuff… and still arrived ahead of them by half an hour. They must have hit traffic jams. At about 9:00 pm, all was finished and I had an apartment full of furniture… but nothing else, as they would not take any of my boxes, which had all of my underwear, pajamas, bathroom and kitchen goods… everything that wasn’t furniture or large electronic devices. Even though I cajoled them into taking one pillow and the bed sheets (no blankets), I could not see myself sleeping there that night.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to stay there; Sachi did not move until Saturday, so her place was still up and running. I went there and we supped on some McDonald’s and conbini drinks. I took a shower, and we slept, me in pajamas Sachi still had out, plus a fresh change of clothes ready for the next day.

Which is another story. More about today tomorrow. At some point I’ll catch up… but right now I’m way too tired….

Thank god the air conditioner removal guy didn’t come yesterday. They said it would have taken an hour. It took two. Had I let them come just before noon, they would have left around 2:00, making me an hour late for work.

As it is, everything happened right after I finished blogging this morning. The refrigerator takkyubin guys came 20 minutes early, and the air conditioner guy came right as they were doing their thing. Busy busy busy.

Right after I post this, I am shutting down the computer and main telephone here. If anyone wants to contact me before Saturday evening, they’d better do it by my PHS. I will be checking my email at school which means maybe once later today and not again until they (hopefully) get my Internet going at the new place Saturday afternoon or evening.

See you on the flip side!

It’s finally here… and now I’ve got a load of stuff to do. I unplugged the fridge last night (lukewarm water in the morning on a hot day… ugh!) so that it’d be ready for transport. I would have been ticked off at the Takkyubin people for calling me at 8 am, except that on this day I had my alarms set for 8:10, so what they heck. Sometime after that, the person comes to remove the A/Cs (hopefully).

Then, at some indeterminate time in the afternoon, the movers arrive, by which time I had better have all the junk cleared up and be ready to go. I pay them cash at the door, apparently, and that’s set up. After they get loaded up, then I lock the door after them and while they drive to the new place, I ride my scooter over to meet them there (stopping by at work for a few minutes along the way). At the new place, they unload everything… and that’s it. For today.

Tomorrow I’m getting a rental van. The movers are limited to a 2-ton truck, so they might not be able to fit everything in. In any case, I have to deliver my air conditioner and gas stove to some people who are buying them from me. So I’ll pick up the rental van from 8 am, may or may not pick up a friend who has volunteered to help, and then will head back here. After packing up the rest of the stuff and before leaving, the recycle shop people are coming around to pick up some stuff; I will probably disappoint them, as they’ll expect a huge haul, but all they’re getting is a computer monitor and maybe a few other small things.

After I’m through with the rental van, it’s back in the apartment to wait for Sachi’s movers to arrive, while I also wait for the KDDI people to hook up the Internet and phone service, and for the cable TV people to come in and do their stuff. Sachi arrives later in the evening, and the unpacking begins in earnest, taking up a lot of Sunday as well. The new bed frame arrives Sunday, and my Apple WiFi base station arrives Saturday or Sunday as well. Monday, it’s back to the old apartment for cleaning… and then the move is complete.

I need more sleep. Life goes on.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. Things are beginning to happen. The piles of boxes are stacking up, the shelves are emptying, stuff is getting tallied. The Kodan inspector was just in a few minutes ago, tallying up the damage–he figures about ¥33,000, less than $300. However, all of my big furniture is still here, and they must know that some damage will not be apparent until the place empties. That puzzled me, why they would send the inspector over before I emptied the place out. I probably saved a lot of money that way. Though I have to wonder, if they find extra damage after all my stuff has moved out (I know he missed a few things, but I kept mum–am I bad?) will they charge that? I don’t know–after all, the guy signed forms and everything, including the paperwork to refund my deposit. And since this is a government operation, maybe they won’t do anything. We’ll see. At least he didn’t charge me as much as they’d warned me for losing my third room key.

…and I’m not finished yet.

But the big hit for me today will be the loss of my air conditioners. Though I move tomorrow, a person is coming over today to uninstall the air conditioning units. And that’s a big thing for me. You see, I tend to perspire quite a bit; it runs in the family, on the male side. I especially start to sweat a lot when I exert myself, like if I am cleaning my apartment out. So when a lot of the big work gets done tonight and tomorrow morning, I am going to get drenched. Fortunately, the water is still running, so I can shower off OK. But tonight I’ll have to turn off the fridge in preparation for shipping it off (it’s going to the faculty office at my school), which means no cold drinks unless I run down to the convenience store (there’s not even a vending machine closer than the conbini). So no cool air, no cool drinks tomorrow morning. How will I survive? I guess I’ll have to make do with the electric fan and rough it out.

Update: I got a reprieve. They told me that they’d uninstall the A/Cs in the a.m. today–but at 11:30am, there was no call and no show, so I called the moving company. They said that the person would arrive just before noon, and that the uninstall would take an hour. Maybe I’m unreasonable, but an 11:50-12:50 visit is not what I would technically call an “a.m.” visit. I have to go to work, and allowed for a 15-30 minute window after noon, but not a whole hour. They said that the person would come tomorrow instead–which is much nicer for me in any case. One more day of coolness! I won’t have to do my last day’s packing in the heat, thank goodness.