The Monday after I arrived I visited a realtors office so he could find me a place to live. I didn’t much care about size but I wanted a place close to work and good arcades. I work in Shinjuku and there’s a really good arcade in Shibuya so he ended up showing me a place in Shibuya and a couple of places in Shinjuku.

They were all fine but one of the places in Shinjuku was a block from work and came furnished so I went with that place. I spent a few days chilling and bumming about around Shibuya and other places in Tokyo. It’s pretty nice to be in this city and not have any obligations but I would be glad to return to work. It’s good to have a purpose in life.

In Japan, apartments have quite high move in costs. Not only is there 1 month rent agency fee and 1-2 months deposit but there’s also 1-2 months of key money (礼金) which is essentially a bribe to sweeten the deal for the landlord. This plus first month’s rent and stuff like lock changing fee and cleaning fee made me worried for a bit that I wouldn’t be able to move in as soon as I needed. In the end, everything worked out and I was able to move in.

In that time, I also went to the Tokyo Game Show with Hidde and spent quite a bit of time sleeping. In the near future, I’ll have a post about the former but probably not about the latter.

This post is about my journey to Japan.  As you know, I was on a road trip previously, but my papers came in so I left in the middle to file my visa application.  I’d been waiting for more than 3 months so I didn’t want to be the cause of any delay.

My COE (Certificate of Eligibility) came through perfectly in the category of Engineer valid for a 3-year visa.  With that, my passport, a visa application and 3 days I had all the documents to ensure I could enter Japan.  (Assuming they didn’t find drugs or child porn or Chinese nationalist propaganda on my person.)   I sent Square Enix a copy of my visa and they said I was good to go.

My plan was to fly first class because I’m kind of a big deal, but American Airlines decided that my request was not compelling so I picked up a last minute ticket on Air Canada and jetted over to Japan just in time for Silver week.

The plane ride was fine.  I slept at first and then watched some movies.  At Narita, the guy didn’t see my visa so tried to set me up with the temporary visitor landing permission, which is useless to me.  A small complaint and 20 minutes later I’m going to pick up my bags with a passport that says I can chill in Japan for 3 years as an Engineer.

I sent my heavy bag ahead via the convenient door-to-door delivery services that Japan is good at and grabbed a train to Shibuya where I would be staying until more permanent accommodations could be found.

Besides the annoying lugging of luggage through stations and up mountains, I arrived at the hotel unscathed, checked in and settled down for a long stay in the land of the rising sun.

• Utah has people in airplanes that check your speed.  I want to be pulled over by an airplane.
• Utah also has a beehive as it’s state highway symbol.
• Going down mountains are super fun.

Vegas was fun, I was trying to acquire a taste for beer, but it’s still at the pretty terrible range.  I had a pretty good fruity drink at some place that cost like 13 dollars.  Everything around here is way too expensive but I guess that’s the price you pay for being in the city of sin.

Also, Tom was really interested in the the calling cards that were handed out by random people everywhere advertising the best prostitutes.  $35 special indeed. (That was actually a lie.)

Tom has more here: http://alltom.com/pages/road-trip-2009

Since last time I graduated from MIT with a BS in computer science and have begun my summer job as a TA in the MITES program.  I have a great group of kids and look forward to teaching them something about programming and life.

This year we’re doing iPhone applications which means I get to learn something about coding for the Macintosh platform.  In order to facilitate this I bought a new Macbook Pro which came with an iPod touch.

I’ve also been accepted in to the Master of Engineering program in EECS here at MIT.  I’m deferring it for awhile though because I’m going to go work for Square Enix in Japan.

I have a lot of things I need/want to do this summer.  I hope I can manage to get some of them done.

That’s all for now.  Maybe I’ll update more often in the future.

In this case, not this society, but Japan’s.  That’s right, I’ve decided to go to back to Square Enix to work full time after school.

This was a tricky decision which took a lot of soul searching to arrive out.  In the end, SE has a vision and a mission which is simply more exciting than the other places I looked at.   

It will take a bit for me to get my visa after a graduate so I’m still up in the air about what I’ll do for the summer.  I’ve applied to MITES but besides that it’s up in the air.

If I don’t get to do that, I’ll just chill in Kansas doing nothing, or maybe fun projects or possibly anything at all.

First, I have to graduate.

I’ve decided to make this entry more of coming back post than anything else.  A flashback episode to get us caught up to events more relevant to the status quo.

I survived the last semester of school pretty well.  It was my hardest term but also my best term with respect to grades.  This was also the time of my main job hunt (I have to leave school eventually) which required me to fly all sorts of places which gave me less time do work and turned one A into a B.

Now, I’m into another term which I’m supposed to be taking easy, but at the same time have all sorts of added responsibilities and unsurprisingly still no real time for my various hobbies and pet projects.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to catch up a bit in the near future and develop some kind of sane schedule before I graduate.  I’m not holding my breath.

Future posts will cover my future after MIT, spring break, and maybe other stuff less related to my life depending on how much I care to share.

Wish me luck.

This week, however, I’m on vacation because it’s Obon week.  It’s the week that the Japanese return to their homes in the countryside and light laterns to guide the spirits of the dead back home.  It’s like Mexico’s Day of the Dead, but in August. 

While I’m technically on vacation (literally as well until today or possibly tomorrow at least), my project deadline is coming up and it’s hard for me not to think about work.  I’m pretty sure I can’t just go to work legitimately, but who’s to stop me form stopping by when I’m in the neighborhood, just to check on things.

In anycase, this is a vacation and I’ll probably update with interesting things sooner rather than later.

I’ve already shown you a picture of my room in my first post about Japan.  It still looks like that.  It’s quite large by Japanese standards.  I have a western style bed (with a sorry excuse for a mattress), a desk, 2 shelves and a bunch of hanging racks.  It basically serves as a place to sleep, eat meals, and hang my clothes up to dry.

The kitchen is small with a stove, fridge, and washing machine.  I’ve only used the fridge and the washing machine thus far, but I’m sure the stove is fine as well.  I use the fridge to store my bottle of water, and that works for me.  I don’t have any other use for such a place.

The toilet is essentially a closet with a toilet in it.  It’s fairly small, but I can fit inside fairly easily.  It’s one of those robot toilets Japan is famous for: heated seat, bidet, etc.

 The bathroom, which contains a shower and a bath is much larger than you might expect.  This is probably because in Japan the bathrooms sole purpose is taking showers and baths.  It’s somewhat convenient and much better than the shower stalls I’ve seen at other places.

I have pictures of all these places but they’re inaccessible at the moment.  I’ll try to put them up soon.

The title of this post is pretty vague; this isn’t going to be some kind of guide.  Really, I’m just going to describe some of the hoops I had to jump through as a foreigner in the land of the rising sun.  Foreigners are called gaijin in Japan, so I’ll use that term from now on.  Unlike in the US, the term is not considered offensive, and it’s not uncommon for people and signs to address outsiders as simply ‘gaijin.’

The first thing I’m going to talk about is gaijin registration.  Every gaijin who is staying in Japan more than 3 months has to register at their local ward (There are 23 wards in Tokyo, which represent seperate merged cities essentially.  Essentially, this is Japan’s version of a city hall.) office where they’ll eventually be given a card they must carry with them at all times.  In other words, Japan’s version of a green card.  The more astute of you might notice that I’m not actually going to be in Japan more than 3 months (thanks to the slowness of the government) and therefore didn’t need to go through this registration process.  That is true, but it’s about 3000x easier to do anything as a gaijin if you have that nifty little alien registration card.  In my case, I needed to open a bank account, which was enough of an impetus to go down to my ward office.

The process isn’t a horrible one, you take 2 recent photographs and your passport down to the office and they guide you a long in the process.  The person who helped me didn’t know English so it was also a fun time to practice my broken Japanese.  It takes 2 weeks to make your cards so when you’re done they tell you to come back.  If you need certification quickly, you can apply for a “Certificate of Registered Particulars” which is a notarized copy of all your information that you can get immediately.  The entire process takes about 20 minutes and the card itself is free. (The certificates cost 300 yen a pop.)

An interesting part of this process is acquiring passport type photos.  A general rule of thumb is that you should always bring a number of these photos with you whenever you go overseas, but I didn’t.  Luckily, Japan is the capital of automation, and every major train station has one or more photo taking booths.  Some even have English language guidance, which is good if you’re not up on your Japanese photography vocabulary.  It was 600 yen for 6 pictures so it’s pretty cheap and super convenient.

That’s actually the only required thing you have to do to be a foreigner in Japan.  The hard part is doing the things that everyone’s required to do, but that only Japanese people know about.  To help with this, the ward office hands out useful guides which are written in 4 different languages and explain all the things you need to know to survive in this crazy land.

I was also going to talk about opening a bank account, but it doesn’t fit in that well since that was a requirement of my job and not of Japan.  Maybe I’ll include that story in a future post about signing up for Japanese services.  In response to reader Darrel, my next post will be about my living conditions and amenities.  You already know I break their chairs; tune in next time to see what else I break.

Narita is a pretty simple airport so I didn’t have much trouble with it.  I changed about 100 dollars into yen, and then withdrew about 300 more from an ATM.  I did the cash exchange simply because you never know when an american bank will decide to not let you have money overseas.  I had let them know beforehand of course, but this was to be on the safe side.

JR, which runs a large portion of the railways in Japan, has a good deal called “Suica + N’Ex.”  It lets me get a train ride to Tokyo while also getting the rechargeable “Suica” card for use on any train or subway in the Tokyo area.   I also elected to have my heavier non-clothes suitcase sent via takkyubin, a delivery service which will bring you your bags the next morning for about 15 dollars.  (Hauling bags through Tokyo sucks, so this is nice.)

The train ride could have been better though.  It turns out they double sold my seat, and so this girl ended up sitting on her boyfriends lap.  It’s really rare for such an error to happen in Japan, and I was lucky that it was resolved so smoothly.  It was still a slightly awkward trip however.

After arriving in Tokyo (Shinjuku station), it was a pretty simple task of finding the apartment agency, Sakura House, and filling out the remaining paper work and getting my keys.  Sakura House is probably the largest provider of short term housing for foreigners but people’s mileage seem to vary greatly.  So far, they’ve been pretty good (they replaced my chair), and my room is nice, so I’m not going to say anything bad about them.

Getting to my station was pretty easy, but it took a bit of time to find my apartment.  Address don’t go in numerical order here so you usually just have to use a map to try to find the exact place.  This time I had to walk around the block once, which isn’t the worst I’ve been lost in Tokyo.

That’s all for now, next time I’ll talk about some of the logistics I had to take care of the first few days I was here.