Sign you've been in Japan too long (cont.)

In this post I mentioned some 'signs you've been in Japan too long' that I found on another website. I just wanted to expand on/explain some of them.

(By now I've written over 220 blog entries, so I've forgotten a lot of what I've written. If I've written about any of these before, please forgive me.)

...you see a gaijin get on the train and think "Wow, it's a gaijin!"

'Gaijin' is the Japanese word for 'foreigner'. (Though it's not such a polite word as 'gaikokujin', and in fact I generally don't use the word. If I'm talking about Westerners etc, I'll say 'foreigner'.)
Even though I often see several a day - and more if I'm in Tokyo - I still really notice every foreigner I see. Actually, Miyajima in Hiroshima had probably the highest concentration of foreigners I've seen in Japan, except maybe Harajuku.

...your idea of a larger home is an extra 10 square meters.

Actually, to be really honest, my idea of a larger home is an extra 3 or 4 square metres... after all, my whole apartment is less than 10 square meters... hahaha...

...you think the natural location for a beer garden is on a roof.

I went to a beer garden on a roof this week! It's on Kawasaki More's - it only becomes a beer garden in the warmer months of the year. Last year I was totally oblivious to its existence, so this year I was happy to have the chance to go. (It's really nice weather for sitting outside in the evening.) Better still, I went with one of my classes - four nice, cool guys, and me - lucky. ^_^

...you wait for the first day of summer to wear short sleeve dress shirts.

I don't do this but I have actually become more self-conscious and aware of this unspoken rule. I don't know the exact months, but until around April-ish, people almost always wear long sleeves; until the start of July-ish, people don't wear tank tops, but t-shirts or short sleeves (or still long sleeves). People often dress for the time of year rather than the actual weather.

Also, regarding short sleeves, it's true that Japanese girls seem to have no problem wearing really short shorts, that show off their whole leg, but tend to be a bit more conservative on the upper half of their body. You don't see that many girls with exposed shoulders or low necklines. If someone is wearing, say, a halterneck top, I tend to immediately notice them in a crowd. And if it's not the right 'season' to be wearing warm or cool clothes (no matter what the actual temperature is on the day), people might ask you 'aren't you cold?!', even if it's a perfectly warm day.

Anyway, as a result, I tended to feel more comfortable wearing t-shirts than wearing tank tops. I still wear tank tops (I always think 'well, I'm 'different' anyway, it's my prerogative') but I am a bit more conscious of not looking like the people around me. Not only because I wear tank tops, but because my weekend clothing tends to be a fair bit daggier and more casual than that of the people around me. Most Japanese girls are slim and wear clothes that look carefully put together.

...you have over 30 small, transparent plastic umbrellas in your entrance even *after* donating several of them to taxis and JR recently.

I still often get caught out without an umbrella. The weather here is quite changeable and it does rain a *lot* more than in Adelaide. Japanese people seem to have an uncanny prescience; it's rare to see anyone running without an umbrella; but I'm often borrowing umbrellas, taking them home from work, etc.

...you believe that the perfect side dish to eat with a juicy, deep-fried pork cutlet is a pile of raw, tasteless, shredded cabbage.

Seriously, if you go to a tonkatsu restaurant, that's what you get. And it's not just a pile, it's a huge MOUND.

...it doesn't surprise you that a case of beer has the same per unit price as a single can.

This is both a good and bad feature of Japanese shopping.

In Australia, three things are generally true:
-if you wait for a while, a product will often go on sale
-if you go to different stores, the same product will be available for different prices
-if you buy more of something, the price will usually be less per unit

However, these are not always true in Japan. For example, there was a popular book I wanted to buy, which was about 2000 yen. I didn't buy it at first - and I looked for it in four different stores. All the stores had the exact same price, and even now, almost a year later, it is still 2000 yen in every store. No store had any kind of 'sale' where they discounted the prices.

Another example is that when I went to Hiroshima, I booked a return trip. You would expect that if you booked a return train trip, the price would be less than if you booked two one-way tickets. But here, it's literally one-way price + one-way price = return price.

A third example was when I was buying cookies. I couldn't decide whether to buy one, or two packaged together (they had prices listed for one pack, or two). Then I realised that the price for the two packaged together, was just the same as the price of two individual cookies bought separately.

These things are bad because there's less chance to get a good deal. But they're good because it makes decision-making easier, and you don't have to trawl several shops looking for the best deal.