Gaijin

I got back to Rome, and my jet lag is getting better, so I can share some last comments about my Japanese experience.

Foreigners in Tokyo can be divided in two categories: those Who-Have-A-Clue and those who don't - and I didn't.

Those-Who-Have-A-Clue studied Japanese by themselves in high school and have been learning five Kanjis a day, since 10 years. Me, I've picked up very well the 5 expressions that make up 50% of Japanese conversation: anoo, ettooo.. (uhm.. let's see..), eeeeeeh? (really?), sugooooine! (cool!), kawaai! (lovely!), oishii! (delicious!). Also Japanese habits tend to stick: I slurp my soup and it's over a month that I don't dare sneezing my nose - I better flip these very quickly now.
Those-Who-Have-A-Clue know that futons are not to be put in a washing machine.
Those-Who-Have-A-Clue know at least five traditional receipts for cooking daisy flowers.

Those-Who-Have-A-Clue know the name and the origin of everything they eat at the restaurant.
Those-Who-Have-A-Clue don't lose the laundry receipt and anyway don't need tears and a written translation to get the clothes back.

All in all, it has been a fascinating experience. I saw all sorts of strange and funny things, I did things I never thought I would, but the most interesting experience was to discover how it is to really be a foreigner in a foreign land. In other European countries, I could blend with the people without problem and feel at home, but in Japan there was no chance that I could go unnoticed, and it's something I've never felt anywhere else.

Maybe because I'm easy to spot among the crowd from a distance, in the last three weeks I've been stopped four times, and two of these from an under-cover policeman. Every time the first rhetorical question was gaikokujin desuka?, are you a foreigner? to which I've always been tempted to reply, anatawa, nihonjin desuka?, and are you Japanese? After I answer in the affirmative, they started excusing themselves because they knew that I was so busy and was losing my precious time. The following three-four sentences I couldn't understand at all, but they were followed by a kind request of a pasupoto and some suspicious looks because I have three temporary Japanese visa.

Anyway, as long as you follow the rules they're the kindest police in the world (there's a legend here that police stations lend umbrellas in case of rain; I've not been able to verify this). But, if you screw it up, then nightmares happen. At the Italian embassy, a kind staffer told me horror stories about the Japanese immigration police. Several times happened that an Italian person tried to exit from Japan to go back to Italy with an expired passport. They stopped the person and the embassy had to help. It's the only place in the world that stops people on the way out to their home country - where else is one supposed to go with an expired passport?

As in every other country, there are racist people. I could not help noticing some subtle signals of intolerance against foreigners. For example, to a Japanese person, foreigners seem very impolite, so they attached a short etiquette course in the subway.

I finally left Sakura house - or should I say Suck-ura House. People there come and go. When I left, there were a French, an American, a Dutch, a German, a Chinese, and an Indian.

You might be curious about our struggle with rats...

When I and my French colleague assumed command in the war against the forces of evil, the strategy being implemented was the Korean Patient Patience: it consisted in deploying chemicals weapons in strategic way-points used by the enemy in their nightime movements - that is, putting poison in front of two holes in the kitchen. Even though we could get the occasional victim, it was a losing strategy overall.

Intelligence gathering was crucial for the new French-Italian strategy. We inspected all possible escape routes. The intelligence report confirmed that the only two holes were in the kitchen and that actually that area was a communication bridge between the two enemy-occupied camps. Intelligence also reported that at night time the enemy ventured into our territory.

Our first step was to seal the holes during the night, to trap the enemy inside. We also sealed the bottom of the fridge and the cupboards so that there would not be any place to hide, except for one corner where we put the glue trap. The morning after this was the result:

We caught four of the smaller ones. We knew there still was The Big One for which the glue was not effective. We searched and we saw its long thick tail hanging out from the fridge's back. The final action in the war was to let it flee through the front door. The house is now rat-free - you can hear them grasping inside the walls, but they can't enter anymore.

Some final statistics:

glued	5
poisoned	1
captured alive	1
fled away	1
total number of rats	8