Thoughts from Kyoto - January 13

My prepaid cell phone. It's better than the one I have in the States, ironically.

Shouma playing Pokemon on the DS, while doing his kanji homework.

The family refrigerator

Today I met the rest of the KCJS students for the first time – about a little more than half of them are doing a full-year program, and just came back from winter break. All of a sudden there are a ton of students here. Well, there aren’t all that many all in all, (roughly 50, plus a few Japanese Kyoto University students who are auditing courses with KCJS) but given the size of the rooms and that we were all there at the same time, it seemed quite busy and full. I quickly realized that there are some kids that are *really* good at Japanese, which on one hand is intimidating, but is also simultaneously encouraging because I guess it makes me feel that I could be there someday. I feel there are definitely some overachievers here, but I suppose that’s to be expected given which students from which schools are participating. (hint: it’s not Washtenaw Community College, no offense to their Japanese program)

Afterwards, I left the welcome lunch fairly early (which was delicious, by the way) because I had to buy the monthly passes for the two different trains I’d have to take during my daily commute, and figured that it might be complicated. It turns out, if I hadn’t known the amount of kanji that I did, it would have been nearly impossible to do so. This is an interesting observation regarding what they expect you to know in order to participate in the program, because I recall that on some of the brochures for study abroad programs in Japan indicated that you actually didn’t need much of a Japanese level at all, whereas for this one it was a minimum of 2 years, and thankfully so. Now I’m really curious how other programs do things – whether they figuratively hold the hands of students more than KCJS or something.

At any rate, for one of my routes I was able to buy the monthly pass from a machine, whereas for the other one I had to go to a special counter at the station, fill out a form which was for student monthly passes and do that – basically, it took a bit longer than I thought. Originally I thought that the commute time given to us by the program was fairly conservative, since that’s been my experience in the past – I walk faster than most people so if something says “8 minutes by foot” then it probably takes me maybe six to six and a half. Not the case here – if it said 7 minutes then it meant 9, if it said 15 then it meant 21. I’m starting to think that they used someone on a bike to estimate travel time or something.

Afterwards I went with my host Mom to register as an Alien with the city (feels like such a strange word, but I suppose technically that’s what I am), so I could do things like get a cell phone and what not. They’re really strict about security and what not in Japan, which is why it’s got a low crime rate or something, I suppose. Then we went to get my cell phone, which probably needs a paragraph all for itself.

So I have to say something about customer service in Japan, which is that surprise: it’s *really* nice. Now I know it’s a stereotype, but it’s been true so far. The largest cell phone distributor is this company called “Softbank”. I’m not exactly sure if they just provide phones or a phone service in addition to that, such as AT&T or T-Mobile. I think it’s the latter though, though perhaps with somewhat of a monopoly like Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom. In the long run it’s significantly cheaper to get a phone plan, but because I’m only going to be here for 4 months, that’s not really an economical option. Thus, I decided to get a prepaid phone, which works this way: You pay for the phone itself, and then choose what kind of card you want, which is either good for 60 or 360 days, with 3000 or 5000 yen worth of minutes/functions. If you wish, texting is 300 yen out of that for a month, and unlimited whereas calls are 90 yen a minute or something. Guess which one I’ll be using? 

I don’t know if I would have been able to do the whole thing without my host Mom with me – there was just so much I didn’t understand, and I’m definitely grateful she took so much time out of her day to help me with this bureaucratic stuff today. The salesperson was really helpful too, and it must have been somewhat frustrating having to deal with my limited language ability, so props to that as well. In the end, I got the cheapest option possible (or rather, the only option possible at that branch) which ended up costing 9450 yen, roughly 100 USD – that was a better price than previous study abroad students have been getting – apparently, Japanese cell phones are typically ridiculously expensive, and I can see why, given the amount of functions the standard one has. Hell, my prepaid “cheap” phone is better than the phone I have in the States.

I like how the option for silencing the phone is called “manner mode”. I also love how there are a crapload of emoticons directly built into the phone for you to use – how Japanese. So to text someone that uses a different phone than you, you actually have to use their cell phone’s E-mail address rather than their phone number. This is all… quite interesting to me.

Anyway, the salesperson talked me slowly through the entire process, making sure that I understand absolutely everything, thinking of creative ways in English to describe something when necessary. I’ve been constantly whipping out my electronic dictionary while here… particularly in class. After I finished with buying everything and what not, the salesperson actually gave me a free gift quietly on the side – two of these little eco-bags that take up like no space at all. I thought that was really nice. Then to top that off after I left the store he realized that maybe I would want the original catalog that detailed various things about my plan and things I’d have to do, and ran out after me into the crosswalk to give it to me. Dang.

Shoma is playing Pokemon on the DS. I wonder what version it is, and how many Pokemon there are now. Probably a thousand or something.