The Friday Five (on Saturday)

1 February 2004, 00:00

This week’s Friday Five Questions:

You have just won one million dollars:

1. Who do you call first?
Matt (aka. “The Mister”)

2. What is the first thing you buy for yourself?
Moet and Chandon and get really really pissed.

3. What is the first thing you buy for someone else?
A Single Malt Whiskey for the Mister, so he can get really really pissed.

4. Do you give any away? If yes, to whom?
To our parents and to charities.

5. Do you invest any? If so, how?
Property, darling, property.

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Bureaucracy

30 January 2004, 20:39

Let me diverge from Japan for but a moment, and have a right hearty bitch about my antipodean friends, the NSW State Government.

Matt and I have to get birth certificates to apply for a marriage license (which we have to organise from Japan) and its ridiculous how anal the NSW Government is.

I understand that to get a birth certificate, the government has to be pretty certain that you are who you say you are, but Matt had the good fortune to be born in South Australia, where all you need is a copy of your passport, the most sacred of documents.

In NSW, you have to supply 3 forms of ID - Passport (List 1) , Medicare Card/Credit Card etc. (List 2) and ID from List 3 - a document with your current residential address on it, either gas/electricity account or bank statement. Herein lies the rub.

My Japanese bank doesn’t issue statements (I mean, its not like the Japanese banking system is in the 21st century or anything) and the gas and electricity accounts are in Matt’s name, Matt being in a superior linguistic position to decipher the bureaucratic mayhem that is, well, any Japanese utility.

“OK”, says the NSW government (who, to their credit have been very prompt with answering my questions), “howsabout a tax statement or official company document with your address on it?” “Eureka!” cries I, “they send me enough of those buggers! The address is in kanji, though, is this OK?”

“Well, no, actually, if the address is in Japanese, you need a certified translation of it.” Huh? You don’t got no Japanese readers in the NSW Government to translate a measly address? Shit, even I can read it!

Do you realise how difficult it is in Japan, to get a document with an address in English on it, it being Japan and all, where they speak, um, Japanese??? Does the NSW government have any idea how goddamn difficult this is?

I could bite the bullet and put my parents address as my residential address which would begin the painstaking middle-man process, but I really would like to get my birth certificate this year. Sometime.

Damn. Adelaide is beginning to look pretty good after all.

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F!@$k!

26 January 2004, 21:48

I hope this moral [ ] doesn’t stretch to blogs. Otherwise, I’d be truly f@#$ked.

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Day before Australia Day

26 January 2004, 20:46

If you’d have told me two years ago that I’d be inviting strangers into my home, whose websites I saw on the ‘net, I’d have sent out for the strappy white coats and made you a cup of tea while you were waiting.

Not sure what’s changed, but having Martine, Darin and the ever bashful (?) Kat over for “Day before Australia Day” drinks, seemed totally natural. They didn’t even seem like strangers when they showed up on the doorstep. In fact, saying “Nice to meet you” felt a little fruity.

“Nooooo! My face is all blotchy!”

The fact that they’d brought VB, XXXX (granted, the most heathen of brews), TimTams, Tiny Teddies, and Aussie wine, didn’t hurt their acceptance into the household. XXXX might be crap, but there’s something oddly nostalgic about that red and gold tinnie (must have been that memory of the U of Qld Toga Party circa 1993 when… oh never mind).

And what do 4 Aussies (and one honorary Aussie from America’s “pan handle”) do in Tokyo on Australia Day? Have a BBQ and watch the cricket, always within arms-length of a six pack? HELL NO! They go to karaoke of course. Always within arms-length of a nama-biru and a microphone.

It’s a shame we met Kat and Darin now we’re looking down the barrel of our departure. I really miss good sarcastic banter with fellow Aussies from time to time. Actually, I don’t even realise I’m missing it until I have it again.

So somewhere along the line, my attitude toward meeting new people has flipped a switch. In Australia, I was paranoid about having strangers come to my home, arguing “What if they bring numchuckers and trash the place?” My mother’s words will forever echo in my head - “You can never be too careful”.

I guess we figured that if Kat and Darin were thieves and stole all our stuff, they would be doing us a favour, seeing as we have to get rid of it all anyway. They aren’t thieves of course, but guys, next time you come round, could you, you know… take something???

Kat’s pics of F.U.N
Frangipani’s Happy Snaps

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It's not that I hate NHK...

24 January 2004, 19:56

Any network with enough insight to give us Katori Shingo in a samurai toupee every Saturday night, has to be commended.

But we pay 3,000 yen every quarter for what is basically a crap service.

We rarely watch NHK, save for the bilingual NHK news, the Sumo (in season) and the aforementioned Katori Shingo perve-fest (OK, I may be the only one in the house who watches this).

And at 5 p.m every evening (during the critical moments of the sumo) the network gets an attack of reception tourettes and starts flickering between an average picture and a bright blue blank screen every few seconds.

But the “NHK Man” religiously rings our doorbell every 3 months insisting we pay the NHK fee, simply because we own a TV. In the early days, we pretended we didn’t have a TV, but those little ferrets are on the case and sniff out your antenna, so that ploy swiftly died in the arse.

Payment of the fee is supposedly a law, albeit a non-enforced one. No-one’s going to come and confiscate your TV, but the locals pay with little complaint, so anything other than total compliance is no doubt an affront to the fee collectors. Some months they knock on our door every night for days, at the ungodly hour of 10pm to retrieve the cash.

Last month, I mistakenly opened the door (duh) and had to pretend I had no idea what the NHK Man wanted (ah, the guilty pleasures of discovering one’s inner bimbo). So three nights later, he calls Matt on his mobile phone (so not OK) to ask when he would be home so they could unload from him the fee.

When he came to our door, we told him we wouldn’t pay the fee until someone fixed our reception as all the other channels were fine. The NHK Man said, OK, pay the fee, then someone will call you to fix the reception. Like stupid f#$%kers we gave him the money. Guess who hasn’t received a call about the reception? It sounds piss-poor, but honestly, its easier to just give them the money. NHK trains its fee collectors in rabid pit-doggery. You have to see it to believe it.

So, firstly NHK is a total rip-off. Then there’s the NHK news. A while ago, they had a female “bilingual” voice-over who was apparently speaking English, but we could never understand a word she was saying. They ditched her and now we get female English voice-overs for the male commentary and male voice-overs for the female.

And then there’s the sport report. The Japanese love their local boys and girls who have made it big overseas, and power to them. But after the winning hits of Matsui and Ichiro, it would be nice to see the final score of the game, whether their team won etc. The NHK news (sorry, I’m picking on the NHK news cos its bilingual - I’m sure the other networks are just as bad) is violently tunnel-visioned.

It’s not that I hate NHK. They’re just a bit too much like the government - you pay ‘em, but its a mystery as to what they do with your money.

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