Just the rants, now...
Jan. 5th, 2004 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanHow does rural Japan suck? Oh, let me count the ways... New Year's kicked ass, but before I wow all of you with how cool it was, some bitching is in order. I was going to try and make it humorous, but it wasn't worth the effort, in the end. So, please allow me to treat you to a glass of ice-cold :
bitching on the rocks:
The construction outside my window resulted in a fucking ground level parking lot, as I feard it would for all the five long months of daily construction noise pollution. This means that not only do I not have a sound buffer between me and the station, but my view is now entirely one of concrete; no vegetation as far as the eye can see. Furthermore, the parking lot owners saw fit to install five four-storey tall halogen streetlamps in the lot. These lamps illuminate my bedroom like a second nuclear holocaust, piercing through the two-layer thick shades I have hanging on my windows. Between that and the freight trains rolling in at five minute intervals, I can kiss any hope of sleep goodbye.
To add insult to injury, the construction crew has laid the cement sidewalks and then jackhammered them to smithereens approximately three times. The jackhammering starts at 6:30 on Saturday and Sunday mornings and ends at about 11:00.
To top it off, I have yet to see a single car parked in the place.
I have a cold. The solutions to colds in Japan is taking long, hot baths. One bathes in Japan by showering before entering the bath, thus allowing one to use the same bathwater for a week. Of course, I can either shower or bathe in my shithole apartment. I also cannot keep the bathwater heated, which means I spend about $25 each time I draw the bath.
The bath takes about thirty minutes to draw and one third of that to cool down to -20 degrees centigrade. I have discovered to my delight that when I drain the bath, my bathroom and kitchen flood. Because my apartment is freezing cold, the water (about two inches of it) sits. So I have to wade through my kitchen and stand in ankle-deep frigid water while washing my face, brushing my teeth, or using the bathroom. Incidentally, it isn't standing in the ice water so much as standing in the shit that the drain burps up that is the true delight.
As a corrollary to the above, my bathroom is now covered in a lovely grey mold.
My bitch of a landlady still hasn't fixed my mailbox. While I was away on break someone stole the packages my grandparents, Chas, and Abbie sent me, and possibly my plane tickets as well. Merry fucking Christmas, Japan.
And my rent is still increasing each month, although no one seems to be able to tell me why. Neither will they show me a copy of my lease. Nice.
And then, just when I think I have it bad, a good friend of mine IMs me to say leaving Japan. For good.
And this is why. She was living in a small town a few prefectures north of me, teaching English through an earlham college program. Her superior (also a member of the BoE) kept making inappropriate advances, which she rebuffed. She told her coworkers, who told her to ignore him. She told earlham college, which told her (via the school - they wouldn't even treat with her directly) that they were too far away to do anything.
She complained to the BoE, who "scolded" the person in question, and then backed off, giving him free reign to harass her further. As he is both the head of her school and a member of the BoE, he told the other teachers to isolate themselves from her or lose their jobs. And so the teachers had (as they see it in Japanese society) no choice but to comply.
She's pretty fluent in Japanese, and could manage on her own, but the point is, these people are being paid to help her so that she needn't manage on her own.
And it gets better because a few months later, the supervisor molested her while she was driving the two of them to a staff meething.
She notified earlham college, and earlham college said: We will help you to resign, but we can't do anything else because it would jeopradise the status of our exchange program with the town.
So she's leaving, and earlham will send another woman along to be molested.
I should take this opportunity to mention that one of the reasons I didn't apply to earlham (which has a great Japanese language program) is because during my senior year of high school, an exchange student on their program was raped by her host father. The student had asked to be removed, but earlham told her that she would have to learn how to work out her differences with her host family, underestimating the gravity of her complaint. Sound familiar?
So yeah, I'm not so hep on small-town Japan right now.
That will be all.
bitching on the rocks:
The construction outside my window resulted in a fucking ground level parking lot, as I feard it would for all the five long months of daily construction noise pollution. This means that not only do I not have a sound buffer between me and the station, but my view is now entirely one of concrete; no vegetation as far as the eye can see. Furthermore, the parking lot owners saw fit to install five four-storey tall halogen streetlamps in the lot. These lamps illuminate my bedroom like a second nuclear holocaust, piercing through the two-layer thick shades I have hanging on my windows. Between that and the freight trains rolling in at five minute intervals, I can kiss any hope of sleep goodbye.
To add insult to injury, the construction crew has laid the cement sidewalks and then jackhammered them to smithereens approximately three times. The jackhammering starts at 6:30 on Saturday and Sunday mornings and ends at about 11:00.
To top it off, I have yet to see a single car parked in the place.
I have a cold. The solutions to colds in Japan is taking long, hot baths. One bathes in Japan by showering before entering the bath, thus allowing one to use the same bathwater for a week. Of course, I can either shower or bathe in my shithole apartment. I also cannot keep the bathwater heated, which means I spend about $25 each time I draw the bath.
The bath takes about thirty minutes to draw and one third of that to cool down to -20 degrees centigrade. I have discovered to my delight that when I drain the bath, my bathroom and kitchen flood. Because my apartment is freezing cold, the water (about two inches of it) sits. So I have to wade through my kitchen and stand in ankle-deep frigid water while washing my face, brushing my teeth, or using the bathroom. Incidentally, it isn't standing in the ice water so much as standing in the shit that the drain burps up that is the true delight.
As a corrollary to the above, my bathroom is now covered in a lovely grey mold.
My bitch of a landlady still hasn't fixed my mailbox. While I was away on break someone stole the packages my grandparents, Chas, and Abbie sent me, and possibly my plane tickets as well. Merry fucking Christmas, Japan.
And my rent is still increasing each month, although no one seems to be able to tell me why. Neither will they show me a copy of my lease. Nice.
And then, just when I think I have it bad, a good friend of mine IMs me to say leaving Japan. For good.
And this is why. She was living in a small town a few prefectures north of me, teaching English through an earlham college program. Her superior (also a member of the BoE) kept making inappropriate advances, which she rebuffed. She told her coworkers, who told her to ignore him. She told earlham college, which told her (via the school - they wouldn't even treat with her directly) that they were too far away to do anything.
She complained to the BoE, who "scolded" the person in question, and then backed off, giving him free reign to harass her further. As he is both the head of her school and a member of the BoE, he told the other teachers to isolate themselves from her or lose their jobs. And so the teachers had (as they see it in Japanese society) no choice but to comply.
She's pretty fluent in Japanese, and could manage on her own, but the point is, these people are being paid to help her so that she needn't manage on her own.
And it gets better because a few months later, the supervisor molested her while she was driving the two of them to a staff meething.
She notified earlham college, and earlham college said: We will help you to resign, but we can't do anything else because it would jeopradise the status of our exchange program with the town.
So she's leaving, and earlham will send another woman along to be molested.
I should take this opportunity to mention that one of the reasons I didn't apply to earlham (which has a great Japanese language program) is because during my senior year of high school, an exchange student on their program was raped by her host father. The student had asked to be removed, but earlham told her that she would have to learn how to work out her differences with her host family, underestimating the gravity of her complaint. Sound familiar?
So yeah, I'm not so hep on small-town Japan right now.
That will be all.