I live in Wakayama prefecture, on the southern part of Japan's main island. To put it lightly, Wakayama leans much closer to the "stately natural beauty" image you might have of Japan than to the "flashing neon futuropolis" part of the spectrum. On the very low end of the country for population with only one city above 100,000 people, Wakayama has much more to offer for the woodsperson than the weebperson. You will not see many giant arcades (a single Round One in the capital city) or any 7-11s (the superior conbini in the minds of all right-thinking individuals). Instead, Wakayama offers gorgeous mountain trails, luscious views of the sky, and seemingly infinite vasts of rice paddies and other agricultural domains.
After training had finished, I took the Limited Express train, the Kuroshio, to Kii-Tanabe Station. The Kuroshio is not like riding the Shinkansen at all; you have to be extremely lucky to get a seat with a power outlet, and despite its status as an express train it doesn't exactly make for a short journey. Travelling the full length of the Kuroshio's route would take considerably longer than riding the Shinkansen between Osaka and Tokyo. From the middle of Osaka to Kii-Tanabe takes about two and a half hours. As the cars went past Wakayama City, the prefectural capital, I pondered how frequently I would be visiting this decaying metropolis to play music games. As they passed the Gobos and Kainans of the ken, I started pondering if I'd die of loneliness before I had the chance to return north. Finally, I arrived at the station, walked off the train, and began my true Japanese residential experience.
My apartment wasn't ready for move-in that night, so I had to stay in a hotel room provided by my company. I started following the roundabout directions to the hotel that my employer had printed for me off Google Maps, first walking left along a small road, heading past a pachinko parlor and some barbershops and restaurants. The road bent to the right, and at some point I felt like I was basically making a big circle, when suddenly I stumbled across a classically styled Shinto shrine and some sort of festival. There was a a small costumed cutesy samurai character, and little kids were having their picture taken with the mascot. I peeked at some of the small vendors before heading back along the route I had been given, and when I arrived at my hotel a few minutes later I realized that the ambitious route Google had plotted could've been avoided by simply walking out of the station in a straight line for three minutes.
It was a very small hotel room, but comfortable enough, and anyways I had more important things to do than sit around using mediocre free Wifi. I needed to know where the arcade was. Google Maps informed me of not one but two arcades in the city of Tanabe, so I walked to the one that was closest. When I got to the "arcade", I was looking at a Daiei supermarket. I walked inside, and saw nothing resembling an arcade. There was a grocery store, of course, but also a small food court (well, one fast food joint and some tables), a massage parlor (?), a book store, a shoe store, and a cell phone store. I took the escalator to the second floor and saw a hyaku-en store (a dollar store, essentially) and a department store with everything from clothes to dog food, but still no arcade. On the third floor, there was a cafe and a music shop, and I thought that was all, so I left disheartened. Walking back towards my hotel, I settled on a fancy looking restaurant with a nice looking selection of sushi.
In the morning, my apartment manager picked me up from the hotel and took me to the "apaman shop" for a debriefing. After signing some papers and getting my keys, we drove to my landlord's place to say hello to her and then to my apartment in Kamitonda. Kamitonda (basically "upper abundant rice field") is a small farming town, wedged between Tanabe's vaguely metropolitan aesthetics and the decaying yet still tourist-friendly beach resort of Shirahama. Kamitonda spans a fairly wide range of turf, but my apartment is about a five minute walk from our only train station, in the neighborhood of Asso. I live in a small yet comfortable studio apartment on the third floor of a three-story "mansion", the outside of which was swarming with spiders and their webs for most of the spring and summer months.
My apartment manager was preposterously friendly from the outset, and I regret not spending more time with him. He is from Gobo, a good many stations away, yet committed himself to driving me around town so that I could buy a rice cooker and begin the process of setting up internet for my apartment. When the store didn't have my rice cooker in stock, he agreed to pick it up for me at a later date after he got done with work. On the night he brought my rice cooker, he also brought over a large bag of rice from his father's farm as a gift. A month later, after weeks of harassing the ISP to come, he sat with them and patiently installed the internet while I was at work, then cleaned my apartment for me after I had to leave while the finishing touches were applied on my router. This sort of generosity and devotion to good service isn't entirely uncommon in Japan, but he took it to another level and has been a great friend.
The next morning, I went to the town hall and registered my address, then set up my bank account through Japan Post. Although it seems inevitable that I would've eventually befriended my fellow local gaijin, the trip to the town hall expedited the process significantly. The only person who spoke enough English to help me through the process of registering first introduced me to a man named Yasuo ("a very strange name you might not know," she said, as I pulled up a picture of the LoL champion on my phone) and then gave me the LINE ID of my fellow Kamitonda ALT, an Australian named Ben. After some initial discomfort, I got up the courage to message Ben, and he invited me to dinner with another teacher named Peter. As it turns out, Peter is a fellow Floridian and went to FSU with my friends David and Hudson, and this first night hanging out snowballed into meeting the whole gaggle of local JETs.
After having my most important adulting matters solved, I set to work on buying a clothesline to hang my laundry. This gave me the opportunity to walk past all of my schools, as it seemed the closest place to find such a thing was a store called Konan, pretty much our local Home Depot. Konan is about an hour's walk from my apartment, and walking back with a giant metal pole in one hand and a small shelving unit in the other made me reconsider buying a bicycle. I eventually did buy a bicycle, and after riding it about three times some asshole locked my bike and I have no idea where the key is.
Before losing use of the bike, I did manage to haul my ass to THE BIG U a handful of times. Located near the really great Kii-Shinjo park, THE BIG U is a branch of Wakayama University (I guess) with a library and some classrooms and cafes. Most importantly, THE BIG U is a source of free Wi-Fi, so before I had my internet installed I would go there to Skype friends, play games, watch YouTube, etc. THE BIG U is shaped in a BIG U and it's pretty cool, I guess. One day I walked all the way to Shirahama from THE BIG U and did some sightseeing. Along the way I passed a family having a BBQ on their front lawn. They were grilling meats and veggies and having some beers, and asked me to join them. After a few minutes, they offered me the chance to drink some of their homemade umeshu, plum wine, which I greatly enjoyed. Leaving their company, I was no longer afraid of a lonely future. Language barriers could not keep me from achieving happiness.
