Spring Cleaning

Does not actually happen in the springtime for Japanese people.

It is something that everybody actually does before the new year, right around Christmastime, or soon afrer. The big osoji (cleaning). Everything must be cleaned. It is pretty much a ritual habit or culture aspect of Japan. Houses, work places, gardens. Everything. And not just your weekly cleaning. I am talking about spring cleaning clean, but almost over and beyond. At least over and beyond any spring cleaning I have ever done. Take everything out and individually clean it and clean the room. Ceilings too. Before you put anything back inside.
I even cleaned under my built-in bathtub with fungal cleaner.
They do this to welcome the new year with a nice and fresh house. The more and more I study about Japan and its culture it is so interesting how repetitive they are with all of their customs and reasons, it seems they are oddly superstitious. They always try to start everything, houses, relations, semesters  workplaces, anew as a way to purify it and to bring in good luck, longevity, and prosperity. To push out the demons of yesteryear and invite in the good spirits and freshness for the new year.
After everything has been cleaned, the decorations are put up, which often consist of mochi and oranges, as well as whatever the year's zodiac happens to be. Likely you will find those large bamboo pine decorations called kadomatsu in front of especially prestigious shops, hotels and other locations soon after as well. In homes, a bit more modest decorations are in place, in addition to their mochi and oranges, they also will typically have  twists of straw rope they are a bit famous for, as well as their paper decorations. All of these things will again reinforce the themes of purity and prosperity in their homes and workplaces.

Salt: A Gateway Mineral

Which is exactly as it seems. A doorway offering. 

I have constantly asked what this was time and again over my nearly year and a half here and have gotten various answers.
"It is a salt lick for horses back when we used them and people still keep it out in remembrance"
"It is actually their table salt. You have to come out here to use it"
"When you work out, you use both your and the airs' electrolytes and we put this out here to replenish the airs' electrolytes. We don't want the air to taste bad for other people."
"It is for you, so you can replenish your electrolytes after running. We are very nice people"

Perhaps I should just know better than to continuously asking the same person. The same person who told me that  the decorative sample meals or fruits and vegetables outside of restaurants are actually free and that they were for the homeless or for us to take home. Because you see, their restaurant had such superior quality produce, they wanted us to try it and see how amazing it was and come back and eat at their restaurant because of their exemplar quality of foods.
So, don't believe that one either.

Salt has an important significance in Japan, it is an offering of sorts to gods and people and has a meaning of purification and cleanliness, as well as to keep away ill luck. You know things like witches and zombies and stuff. Place yourself in a doorway guarded by salt and the oni cannot enter. Ok, but seriously, these salt piles are called morishio, 盛り塩, meaning pile of salt in a very literal sense. Back in the day, salt was an important commodity; it was a well cherished import noted for its importance in keeping fish and meats from rotting and also valued in a spiritual manner as well. It was so pure and white and pretty, it began to be used for religious purposes as well. Probably the most notable today is the use of it at funerals where you will sprinkle it on you before the funeral and throw it at the door as you leave in order to purify yourself from death. A bit resembling the way one would throw beans at the oni during Setsubon.
But even more commonly, you will find it outside of doorways and in gardens and other unusual places. When placed outside of doorways, it is typically in two little dishes on either side of the door, in what are often described as little cone shaped mounds. But the reality of that statement is that there is just salt in a dish, typically in a semblance of a mound. The cones are reserved for the more influential of restaurants and are smashed once a customer has entered the establishment to signify to others that the business is prosperous at that time. In most cases though, these mounds are hand formed by the shop owners and are placed on the outside for a symbol of purification and that their shop is clean. It is an old business model that is still used almost as a token of good luck in attracting customers. It also symbolizes that the restaurant is traditional and is in keeping with some of the more customary Japanese practices. In fact, before placing salt outside of their doorway, most companies and businesses will wash the road and sidewalk in their vicinity with water and salt, or at least water. I actually see this practice every morning, a little old woman with a bent back is up at the crack of dawn watering her street corner as I ride my bike to the station. My Japanese friends have told me that is what they do when they first get to work to open their business as well. They say that it is to 'clean up', so I am mot really sure if the welcoming good business aspect of it applies to that or not, but I assume if you are 'cleaning up' to look respectable for potential customers, that clause is also grandfathered in.
In other practices, for anyone who might ever see a sumo match, the wrestlers will throw salt in the ring to purify the ring and keep evil out. I am not really sure why that is. I am not sure if sumo is a holy sport or if they feel vulnerable without their salt, but it is now a tradition and no match it complete without it.

Rice Cleansing

Here is a new experience for me, cleaning rice. Now I don't mean when you stick a bunch of rice in a pot and swirl it around a bunch of time until the water you pour off it is clear (and no longer white). This is more like a de-shelling process.

Right now is in towards the end of the rice harvesting season in Japan. Their rice patties have turned a golden color (or as one of my students pointed out, the color of my hair - and yes for a shocking second I thought he was saying I had rice-colored/white hair) and are being cut down.
Once you have all those delicious grains of rice all harvested however, you can't just pop those things into your rice cooker...you must de-shell them first. Harvested rice has a golden tint to it and once de-shelled, it loses that tint and becomes the white little grains we know and love.
In order to de-shell the rice, you must either have the proper equipment  or find yourself at one of the odd little stations located in crazy unsuspecting places not near anything else all around the inaka (out-there, the boonies, no-where-ville, the grasslands, farmland, you know). Why the inaka? Because where else are you going to farm rice? You cannot farm it in the city, and as such it makes sense to have these machines located in proximity to the rice patties. Though of course anyone who sells rice would probably own the equipment for themselves. But for those of us who do not have that fortune, there are the machines.
Basically you dump your golden, shelled rice into the indicated area which is then filtered through and you can witness the powder of the shells coming off and the freshly de-shelled white rice pouring out into your container. Here you can see us doing just that, and as you might be able to figure out, it costs 100 yen for 10 kilos of rice (22 pounds people)  and if you have more, you just insert another coin.

Cleaning Time

In every classroom there is a cupboard. And in every cupboard there are brooms and dustpans. The essential cleaning necessities.

After lunch everyday is cleaning time. Occasionally with my JHS I feel that this time will come after school, especially if school on that day ends early. The students are required to clean their classrooms, hallways, stairwells, bathrooms, and pretty much the entire school, and will then call upon the teachers to come and check their work before they can be released to any sort of leisure activity for the remainder of their down time before class or club begins.
Their cleaning consists of sweeping the floors of the every room, as well as cleaning the chalk board erasers, the chalk board trey, washing the chalkboard, washing the bathrooms, as well as a variety of other stuff. Yeah, washing bathrooms. That really surprised me as well. What kid would willingly clean a bathroom. I am not even sure what their punishment is or if there is any for not doing it.
Though of course I could tell you of some students past who I know didn't even know the right end of a broom handle until well after school. So no I can say that not all students do it, but like it was in nearly all schools, the kids that get away with it pretty much fly under the radar or else everyone is too afraid of being a 'tattle-tale' to be the first to point a finger.

there in the back corner, near the window, is the cleaning closet.

Leopalace Apartment Check out

Everything comes to an end.

Including my love-hate, or more like love to hate, relationship with my apartment. My kitchen was too small. The burners were IH (UGH!). The storage was inconvenient (in the front hall). There was no storage.  There was less than no space for guests. Well you get the idea.

So ends my time in Suita, Osaka. 

But one thing you have to do before you leave, is check out. Almost like a hotel...almost. You will arrange for someone to meet you at a convenient time to go through the proceedings. But in reality you should be there two hours before, as the gas, water, and electric men will be coming to do the necessary things to shut off you utilities as well as give you a final last bill on the spot. Guess who wasn't there? Well that is besides the point. Unless of course you as well miss your appointment, in which case your employer may or may not be kind enough to have the last bills forwarded to the office to be taken out of your paycheck. 

Well once you meet with the Leopalace representative, you will of course invite them in to what is hopefully your emptied abode and begin the proceedings. They will site you down at the table they provided for you when you first moved in and will ask for your key and possibly some brief, residence related questions, and then they will get to work. They will spend the next 15 minutes walking through your apartment checking every outlet, light switch, window, ladder, aircon, and faucet, making certain everything is intact. They will also be checking for damages. This is the part I was really worried about seeing as I think just about all Japanese apartments use this really cheap wall covering stuff which is extremely easy to scratch and leave damages upon. Lucky for me, I feel like the stuff they use at Leopalace, is exceptionally cheap and super easy to scratch, but a quick tip for those moving out, you can mend the stuff with just a glue stick and a bit of pressing. There is no way it will look perfect, but hopefully passable enough that the representative will not notice that the damages are actually your doing and not some previous tenants. They will also be looking in your cupboards for stains; so another quick tip, store anything that might stain the pantry boards on higher shelves and hopefully they might fail to notice (or simply remove the boards and stack them or turn them upside down). They also poked at my floor at a nice big stain from where I spilled pancake batter. Hey now, no one is perfect. Either the rep thought that was totally removable and did nothing more than a few pokes or decided that either I couldn't have done it and it was someone previous or that he just didn't care enough. Regardless. I got charged exactly nothing more than my cleaning fee of 28500 yen, nearly 30000 yen with tax. This is a basic cleaning fee. You cannot get out of it. I know a girl who hired cleaners for her apartment for pretty much the same price, and it made no difference and they charged her for it all over again. So don't make that mistake. 

After all the checking, he explained to me the basic cleaning fee and that it would be discounted in a way as they would use the left overs of that months pro-rated apartment rent to cover for as much of the cost as it could. Which in my case was about half. The rest of which they would bill me for. 

So I signed a little contract and bowed somewhere around 8 times ( I seriously can't seem to get it right. I don't bow for long enough or the other person is bowing lower. So then I do it again, and once they realized I did it again they go and do it again. It is a vicious cycle...) and left. And that was that. 

This whole process can actually be made a lot shorter if you speak Japanese or the rep speaks English. That is not exactly my case however. And I had no idea to words like "basic cleaning fee" or "pro-rated" in Japanese. So the rep and myself had to do some cell phone translator magic to communicate some certain aspects of the end-contract. 

Also as a warning, this did no happen to myself, but it did happen to another working for the same company as myself: make sure you remove everything from your apartment. Everything. I do not know how it happened, such as if there was an after charge for this, or perhaps she was not present for her checkout, or perhaps it was just a different system. But she left a coat hanger in her closer. A. As in singular. The removal fee of said coat hanger was 3000 yen. 30 bucks. Most expensive coat hanger ever. 

Well I was warned when I first moved in. And now you are too. Leave nothing!

A night of Fireflies and Romance

Japanese people seem to have a penchant for fleeting ethereal beauty.




Fireflies have a special significance in Japan. Their their fleeting lives and their illuminating presence light up the night in a spectacle for all to see. Indeed, in Japan there are firefly evens where a thousand fireflies are released and rise up into the night like hundreds of blinking stars. Of course there are natural fireflies too, but there just simply aren't enough of them for hundreds of people to enjoy at once.
Fireflies are special for a reason that I was entirely clueless to before moving to Japan. Fireflies will only inhabit clean water. Well I suppose the first fact I was clueless to was the fact that fireflies like water. I have always lived around water and have always seen fireflies in the spring and therefore took it for granted that fireflies are not in fact everywhere. But secondly and more importantly, fireflies will only populate areas with sources of clean, unpolluted water. It is essential for their continuation, as their larvae need it to survive.
Fireflies are more prone to warm and humid climates and therefore are more dominant in the south of Japan. Here we will have minor festivals in Osaka and Kyoto where fireflies will be released for the enjoyment of hundreds of visitors, which also serves to help repopulate the fireflies in these select areas. I must say that this feat is a bit better suited for Kyoto as there are a number of clean water sources present there. I think the best of all is the Philosophers Path with a steady steam coming in from Lake Biwa. There is...not exactly an abundance, but a good amount of natural fireflies to be seen here. Other places are the Shimogamo and Kamigamo shrines. The Shimogamo shrine, in particular, is one such place that releases the fireflies to all to see. Another such area is in Osaka at the Sky Building, at the floating garden. I have to think, though I have no witnessed, that Harie must be the very best place to see fireflies, with their special underground cistern from which the cleanest and clearest water from all of Japan flows. So if you are looking for a site you should visit one of these select places on a warm night when mosquitoes are bound to be buzzing about!