I’m back in the thick of it all, theres light pollution and smog and everything here. Sometimes I miss the clear crisp nights of the country, where I could lie on the grass outside staring up and the stars for hours (not, of course, that I did that much, the british weather being what it is).
Part of the condition of any visa here that lasts for a period of longer than 90 days is that you need to obtain an “Alien registration card”. So I went to the ward office on Friday to register. The building was strange, something similar to our council buildings back home, but with some striking differences. Everything was open plan. I mean everything, there was no concept of keeping the public out of the office areas, where the work itself gets done. Back home we have bulletproof glass in case there is trouble… you can see, leastwise, feel some of the reason for the openness, theres no airconditioning so the place is hot, the more draft throughput they can get the better.
The meeting with a tax advisor left me a little distrubed, basically the advice was to claim I wasn’t living in the UK (OK, thats true), but not bother to tell anyone I should be paying tax in Japan. Somehow, this doesn’t sit well with me, while I don’t like paying tax (it was my biggest single expense last year) I hadn’t expected to just stop paying it because I wasn’t in the country. I was actually intending to maintain my UK residency status and class this trip as a business trip, allowing all of my accomodation and meals (and some incidental expenses) to be payable before tax and take a small salary. But the other possibility is to class myself as non-resident, take a large salary but then all the accomodation becomes personal expense. Need to get some tax advice when I get home and do some accounts, but I don’t think I’ll be paying much attention to this set of advice. Any thoughts anyone?
Yesterday I thought I’d take a wander around Ikebukuro. Another cluster of department stores cum shopping malls near the station, much like many of the other stations. One of the more market-like blocks contains some fairly cool stalls and has a great music shop on the top floor, if I ever feel like buying a guitar out here, that’d be the place to do it, there was the sad old hippy guitarist pretender playing Stairway to heaven very badly and everything.
Once again, I was just about to go home when I spotted a sign that said Sunshine City this way….it just had to be followed. Turns out its a shopping mall under a set of office blocks and it goes on for miles and miles, I just kept going in a straight line until it looked like that would just dump me in a McDonalds, took a sharp left and discovered a ToysRUs…should be interesting, I wonder whether they’ve homogenised their offering here as much as back home. Of course they have, except some of the things have stickers on with instructions in Japanese.
Their selection of Lego is the same as everywhere else here, with the addition of a couple of localised cluster boxes of some of the smaller packs. The games were mainly German again, no Japanese games in sight except Shogi and Go, mostly in combined sets with Othello. Scrabble was probably the most out of place game, its the English version and seems to be quite a good seller…shame, a version with Hiragana would be quite a nice learning tool for me.
McDonalds Dining is another example of the Japanese not quite getting western culture, whos idea was it to have a high-class McDonalds. Its just not right getting pepper mayonaise on your handmade burger on a real plate. I mean everything is familiar, theres still two slices of pickles in there, but its different. For some added amusement the fire service turned up halfway through my meal to do some fireman stuff in the backroom out of sight of customers who might be put off their already offputting food.
It turns out that actually I wasn’t so much hungry as thirsty, I’ve not quite figured out how to survive this heat yet, must remember to drink more.
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