Japan ~ Day 3 (Going to Work Today)

Today at breakfast Tsu asked me if I wanted to go to work with him today.  Sure! 

Tsu attends car auctions and buys used vehicles and then fixes them in his shop and then resells them.  We drive for what seems like forever:  first about 30 minutes to his shop so he can pick up a pass that I need to wear for entrance to the auction; then we drive about another 45 minutes or more to the car auction.  The ride seems to be taking us down many a country road.  The roads are so narrow here in all of the Japan that I've seen.  I'm surprised that we haven't driven on a freeway since I've been here but in all honesty it just seems to be a lot of narrow country roads with plenty of rice and vegetable fields hugging the roads that we travel on.

We flash our passes to gain entrance into the auction which Tsu has a paid membership to belong to.  He belongs to a few auction houses and has to have a paid membership for each of them.  I am impressed.  Definitely not what I was expecting which was a dingy building with bench seats and some guy up front yelling in Japanese.  Nope, not at all what I was expecting.  Instead we are in what could easily pass as an office building with a receptionist and a cafeteria.  We walk through a door and we enter what looks like a huge theatre with nice theatre seats and a computer monitor in front of every seat.  There is no one standing at the front yelling in Japanese. There aren't many people here at all so we reserve two seats and then go downstairs for complimentary coffee and tea. I appreciate the coffee as its the first cup I've had since arriving in Japan. We go back to our seats and I take full advantage of the opportunity of having Wifi and post a few updates on Facebook. Tsu watches the computer monitor and the van he is bidding on finally appears on the screen. It ends up being so over-priced that not a single person bids on it. He'll keep his eye on it over the next few weeks to see if its price goes down. It ended up being a long way to drive for nothing.

At the car auction with Tsu.

We head back towards Tsu's shop and stop for lunch at a "hamburg" joint called Flying Garden. In Japan they drop the "er" off the end of the word. Once seated we are given a "refreshing towel" to clean our hands. All dining establishments seem to offer the "refreshing towel" as a standard of service and I've come to appreciate it and think that North American food service has such a long way to go and to improve. Tsu orders our lunch: Japanese steak. Well they may call it "steak" but we call it hamburger! The waiter brings a humongous butcher knife to our table, puts it on the table and walks away.  Imagine that happening in North America - NOT!  Our sizzling cast iron plates come to the table, we lift up the paper placemat and hold it against our chest to protect our clothing while the server cuts our 1/2 raw burger in half with the humongous butcher knife and puts the raw side face down on the sizzling platter. Then the server takes our paper placemats with him.  I guess the placemats are there solely to protect our clothing from getting splashed and not to protect the table. Our burger patty is served medium rare! Argh! I tell Tsu that it is dangerous to eat 1/2 cooked hamburger but he insists that is how they eat it in Japan. Yet another instance of "When in Rome..." So I eat my hamburg, vegetables and rice and admit it was really delicious but I have no intention to start cooking or eating any more 1/2 cooked hamburger.

Tsu at the Hamburg restaurant

We stop in at Tsu's shop and he shows me to the office area while he deals with a few things. We remove our shoes and put on slippers before entering his office. He turns on his computer for me but with a Japanese keyboard I make no headway at a simple task. So much for that idea.

Wearing slippers is a "rule" in Japan. In Tsu's home, you step into the home on a small tiled landing foyer area. Then you step up one step to the hardwood floor. The protocol is that you remove your shoes on the tile floor, step up onto the wood floor and put on your slippers. You do not wear your slippers in the bathroom, instead you remove your slippers outside the bathroom and put on the slippers that are kept inside the bathroom. You also remove your slippers before entering any bedroom. You leave your slippers in the hallway and walk sock foot in the bedroom. One day I was putting on my shoes and I stepped down onto the tile with my slippered feet. Tsu immediately pointed out to me "you're wearing your slippers where the shoes go". Whoops. So sorry.

We leave the shop and head towards home and we stop off at Mamoru's shop. Mamoru owns a bicycle & motorcycle repair shop. The shop was his father's whom Mamoru learned the skills from. The family home is up above the shop. Mamoru and his Dad are in the shop which is jam-packed with bikes. Mamoru wheels a few of them out to the sidewalk to make room for us. He offers us something to drink which entails a walk across the street to the vending machine, I choose water and Mamoru gets 3 hot coffees. Vending machines are absolutely everywhere in Japan. You don't have to go more than two blocks in any direction to find a vending machine. The vending machines dispense hot and cold items. Coffee and tea are in tin cans. Want it hot, press the red button. Want it cold, press the blue button. All vending machines don't all carry the same products. There are vending machines for cigarettes too. Packages of smokes in Japan are small and hold 10 cigarettes. I have no idea how much they cost. Anyways, I digress. We have a visit in Mamoru's shop for less than an hour and in that amount of time he had four bicycle customers stop by for bicycle repairs. There are a lot of bicycles in Japan - mostly touring type bikes with only a few speeds. Junko and Emiko with almost 3-year-old Satsuki have now come downstairs for a visit too. We visit a bit and then drive less than 10 minutes to Tsu's house. Tsu and Mamoru live in the same city only one train stop between them.

Mamoru and Tsu outside of Mamoru's bike shop

Tsu's Mom has a gift for me: a Jinbei jacket. The day I got to Japan I was chilly inside the house. She gave me a thickly padded jacket to put on. It would be similar to a "smoking jacket" or a housecoat, except shorter as it only goes to the hips. Well Tsu's Mom is this petite little lady whose head comes up to underneath my chin. I try on her Jinbei jacket and she chuckles as she realizes it's many sizes too small for me. She tells me to "try on Papa's" and Tsu's dad takes off his Jinbei jacket and I try it on. It fits perfectly. So today I get my own brand new Jinbei jacket - a matching jacket to "Papa's".  I am grateful for the gift. It is very warm but not overly warm. It's perfect! I end up wearing it constantly while I'm in the house and I've worn it daily since I've returned home to Vancouver too.

We eat another lovely home-cooked meal.  I sure wish I had noted exactly what we ate every day but rest assured Mrs. Tsugawa kept me well fed with her scrumptious home cooked meals.  Her delicious cooking has inspired me to learn how to cook Japanese food.

Around 7:30 PM Tsu says we are going to take a ride around Tokyo, cover the ground that I did on yesterday's tour except this time we'll go by car and see the lights of the city I'm thinking we'll be gone half the night but surprisingly there was no traffic at 7:30 PM. We took the usual country roads and then we finally hit and expressway. So many toll roads in Japan. I think we went through three tolls this night and they weren't cheap, anywhere between $4 and $6 for each toll.  I guess it's one way to keep the downtown core from getting congested with cars.  I enjoy seeing the lights of Tokyo as we approach the city and eventually travel over the Rainbow Bridge that I had sailed under the day previous. Driving the Rainbow Bridge is wicked! The on and off ramps are literally like driving a circular staircase. Oh geez! I'm thankful Tsu is a safe and careful driver and that the curved walls are covered in reflective safety signs. We travel through the suburbs of Kawasaki and Yokohama too. We are traveling back over the Rainbow Bridge and all of a sudden there were these lights at our level hovering almost overhead. It looked like a freaky Sci-Fi movie and we realize it's the lights of two huge jet-liners that look like they are flying much, much too close to one another and they are flying very low over the bridge. It was freaky and a "Wow, that's unbelievable" moment.

We get back to Tsu's house around 10:30. We covered a lot of ground in only 3 hours. It's bedtime. No clue what's on the agenda for tomorrow but I do have plans to go out for dinner with Emiko and to do some shopping too. I'm looking forward to it.