Crispy Around the Edges

I haven't posted for 3 days. For some people, that's par for the course. For me, it's quite a long absence. It's not that I have nothing to say nor that I have no time necessarily to say it, it's just that I'm just a little burnt out from various tasks and find it hard to collect my thoughts and get them to flow into post form. I think that's okay though. I really believe that posting less often may be better than posting too much anyway.

Before the weather changed, I had a lot of tasks in mind that I wanted to do once it snapped off from oppressively warm and muggy to crisp and cool. Now that that has actually happened, I'm getting to those tasks. Mainly, they include repairs and little home improvement projects that I'd get too sweaty doing in the summer, but also there is a lot of cooking I avoid in the summer. In particular, there are dishes that require use of the oven. Being in the kitchen at all in summer is hard enough without super heating the kitchen to levels that would melt butter to a liquid state just by leaving it on the counter.

Pale bits of dough full of lively and happy yeast about to fry to death in the oven. Oh, the humanity!

Yesterday, I squeezed in some cinnamon roll making between lessons. This is a recipe that I wrote about in my former blog which I make as a very rare treat for my husband. I'm happy to say the freezer is now full of pumpkin cake, brownies, and cinnamon rolls so I won't be baking again for awhile.

Iced rolls... the glaze looks vaguely pornographic in nature. Prudish types and diabetics may want to avert their eyes.

Besides the cooking and household odds and ends, I've been doing 3 or 4 lessons a week with the same student on top of the regular students. She's taking a sociology course and the lessons with her are essentially tutoring sessions. When she writes a paper, I'm essentially writing a paper. When she takes a class, I'm taking the same class with her. It's a bit of a brain drain really as I have to skim the book quickly, organize the contents at light speed in my mind, then spit it all back out for her to record the lecture and use it to go home and write up essays from. It's like mental calisthenics. I enjoy it, mind you, because it's much more stimulating and challenging than practicing verb tenses or prepositions, but it is a bit intense.

Anyway, this is just a brief verbal nod and a wave, and a reminder to myself about why I skipped several days at this point in my personal history.

Two-Timer

A few nights ago, we had a friend and his wife over for a get-together and we were talking about some work he had been doing. He mentioned that he'd had a lesson today with an interesting student who worked making subtitles for television shows and movies. Some of you may recall that I have a student who does this sort of work. I asked him what her name was and he couldn't recall. I said my student's first name and he said both her first and last name.

I should mention that sometimes my husband mentions students who have similar work or life situations as my students and I'll ask him their names. Our students have never matched and I've never really expected them to. The chances that any particular student among the thousands who take classes would happen to be taught by someone I know are very slim indeed, especially since "my student" probably only takes lessons from me in most cases. Otherwise, they're no longer "my students" and have moved on to someone else.

I've been teaching this particular student for over two years now and just spent nearly 12 hours teaching her this past month. I was shocked that she'd be looking for even more lessons and wondered if she may have decided to jump my ship for another. My immediate response was a sense of being rejected, but my logic kicked in. The truth is that students rarely abandon their long-term teachers for reasons related to the teacher. They usually do it for practical reasons. That is, they find a more convenient location, a cheaper price, or seek a different program of learning. If they really don't like your lessons, they tend not to continue after the first one, not after two years.

After rationalizing this incident, I went to bed that night and dreamed that another student, who left about a year ago because her husband transferred to another city and she got pregnant, rejected me roundly for my inadequate teaching. This illustrated to me all too well that I can attempt to mollify myself with logic, but the ego can come roaring back when I'm in no position to argue with it.

The truth is that I'm not even sure that this student has left me. My friend has been working at a place that was offering special travel English courses and she had taken so many lessons from me this past month in order to complete her work and go abroad for a vacation. In an act of kindness (after hearing about my dream), my friend looked into whether or not she'd signed up for more lessons and told me she had not. I appreciated this very much, particularly since he did it unbidden, but it doesn't fix the larger issue which is my taking these types of things too personally or feeling they reflect failure on my part.

People usually make their decisions out of self-interest or based solely on what is in their minds at the time without considering the feelings or impact on others. (This is one reason people are so rude.) We often mistakenly believe that things are related to us which have nothing to do with us. I'm more prone to relating a person's self-centered (and I mean that in a neutral way, not a pejorative one) actions to my failure than some others because I was raised to believe I was responsible for everyone's happiness and that it was my fault if things didn't go as I'd liked.

I don't know if I'll be keeping this student or not. Chances are that I will, but if I don't, it isn't going to be about me. After I internalize this idea more thoroughly, I'm hoping that my ego will keep its mouth shut while I sleep.

Little Compromises

I spend some time every week thinking about refining my living space. I do this not because I'm hopelessly obsessive (well, maybe a little), but because I spend a lot of time in that space and it's important to feel comfortable in it and satisfied with it. I've traveled down a long and labor-intensive road to get it to a point that I'm largely, but not completely, happy with.

That being said, there are some things I'll never be really happy about that I have to accept because of the compromises I'm either forced to make or unwilling to consider. On the "forced" front is the small space situation and the lack of built-in storage. There's no getting around having a small place unless you're so wealthy that you don't mind tossing your money down the crapper for the sake of elegantly wasted space. I love a good barren minimalist landscape in a home as much as the next neurotic compulsive anal-retentive neat freak, but I'm not willing to work harder so I can throw money at having such a place.

The points which I'm unwilling to consider though not forced to accept are based on a lack of desire to sink money or materials into making things better. I have the money, but I'm not willing to replace something for aesthetics unless it is so painfully awful that it would embarrass me in front of open-minded people. When I say "open-minded", I mean people who don't think things that are worn-looking are "dirty" or unusable.

There's an obsession in Tokyo with replacing things that look old whether they have excellent utility or not and it's extremely wasteful. Tokyo has been my first experience with homes that last 25 or so years and get replaced. The concept of a disposable houses never occurred to me until I came here. I'm not sure if this is in line with an aesthetic which values what is new, novel and modern or simply related to keeping the construction industry going by having them use the cheapest materials so that places start to fall apart after a certain period of time. Honestly, I half expect the apartment building we currently live in to get replace in the next 10 years if the landlord can get permission to rebuild it with a third floor. I think this building is about 25 years old now.

Some people may not know it, but Japanese apartments get "gutted" between tenants. They strip out the walls, floors and often any installed cabinetry and plumbing. It's on a deeper level than what you tend to see in the U.S. where walls may be painted and carpets cleaned, but most of the fixtures are left in place. Since I've lived in the same place for so long, this stripping is long overdue for the cheap materials in it, but I'm not giving in to the urge to have the landlord replace things. He'd certainly do so if we asked.

My walls may be smog-stained and crumbly from humidity, but that makes them no less utilitarian. Also, let's face it, I can have the landlord strip the pathetic cheap covering from my walls and slap up pristine new ones but it's going to get covered in smog again in a year or less and humidity is going to make mold form behind cabinets during the first summer following the new installation. I know how much dust accumulates in my place and I'm unwilling to create piles of waste for the sake of temporarily "clean" walls. They are clean. I washed the damn things myself. They are just old and show it.

Still, I look around some times at the things that I hate like open shelving or the necessity of having part of the pantry on display because there simply is nowhere else to put things and think I should just give in to the urge to replace them with some sparkly new thing. I consider it a test of my ethics to not give in to superficial, materialistic urges such as these. If I'm going to say we shouldn't create unnecessary waste and live simple, frugal lives, I should damn well be prepared to live a life in tune with that.

The $25 Challenge

In the U.S. right now, some people are attempting to eat for a week on $25. This challenge is meant to simulate the lifestyle of a person living on food stamps who has to feed a family on $3 per person, per day. I learned about this challenge via the web site The Kitchn and read some of the blog entries by people accepting the challenge. If you read the linked posts, you'll note that many Kitchn readers smugly assert they can do it nutritiously with no problem and that they have already done this because of their judicious shopping at "farmer's markets" and great cooking skills. I'm sure one could do it for one week with luck and shopping coincidentally with harvest seasons and good sales resulting from said harvests, but I don't think it'd be so easy to manage year-round.

If you're not American and don't know what food stamps are, they are the means by which the U.S. government helps people on public assistance ("welfare", "the dole") while ensuring that they spend the meager amounts of money they're given on food rather than on ale, whores, and crack. I add that last bit sarcastically. Food stamps can only be used to buy food while cash can buy anything, so food stamps are a way of controlling behavior. Note that they can't buy other necessities. If you're on welfare and need toilet paper, over-the-counter medication, or new underpants, you can't use food stamps.

I grew up around people who lived on food stamps and my family spent one exceptionally painful Reagan-era year on them. That year was due to my father getting kicked off of his disability payments as his situation was "reassessed" by the fine Republicans who thought he was faking partial left side paralysis, left eye near blindness, crippling headaches, and a blood clot that could kill him at any moment.

Using food stamps is a humiliating experience. Clerks at the markets treat you differently than people who pay in cash. One of the CH's and my friends used to work as a cashier at a supermarket and she made scathing remarks about people who used food stamps to buy soda or junk food. She felt that, if she were assisting in footing their food bill, she had a right to judge how and what they ate. Never mind that she had lived with her parents all her life and never worked any job but low-paying dead end ones. If she weren't getting free rent and subsidized food, she'd find her perspective on life rather different. I daresay she'd need some public assistance herself if she were to live on her own.

My grandmother worked for many years of her life at a tree nursery. After she could no longer work there, she lived on public assistance because she wasn't strong enough, skilled enough or able-bodied enough to do more work. She lived in a trailer with no running water and used food stamps. The amount of cash people receive on welfare is paltry and she was "lucky" to own a plot of land and not have to pay rent. You can't live on welfare and afford real rent. You have to live in special low income housing or have your rent subsidized. You can imagine the wonderful quality of home you're likely to get as a part of that deal.

To get by, my grandmother worked "under the table" for a well-to-do woman who lived on a large plot of land and couldn't care for her own property. Sometimes my grandmother would pay one of her 8 grandchildren (my sister and I plus 6 cousins who were lying, thieving, drug-using hellions) to pick up sticks or rake leaves for her on this woman's huge property. The woman paid her in cash so the welfare people didn't know about the money. We'd also sometimes go with her to pick strawberries for 25 cents a quart. It was hot, hard work for pocket change. These were the only ways she could get by, though I didn't realize her hardship at the time.

Getting back to the challenge though, I found myself wondering what an equivalent amount of money would be for dealing with such a challenge in Tokyo. I have wondered in the past about the lowest amount of money you could spend and eat healthily in Japan. When you're forking over at least $1 per bit of fresh fruit in many cases, and sometimes more, it'd be awful difficult to keep numbers down. For Tokyo, I think 500 yen a day would be a doable, but difficult challenge. That would be about $35 a week, though I don't think that would be too hard if it was "per person". Covering one person alone would be much harder than doing 1000 yen a day for two people or scaling upwards for more.

It's a little harder for me to get a good handle though on what a reasonable low amount is for someone in Tokyo for two reasons. First of all, my husband and I buy in bulk and are drawing food from our stores of items bought from Costco or the FBC. We have determined that we probably are "spending" between 5000-6000 yen a week because of food we're using from the freezer or pantry. I spend another 4,000-8,000 per week on fresh food purchases from around the neighborhood depending on prices and eating habits. That means I'm spending about 12,000 a week in general for two people. The other reason I can't easily conclude anything about food prices in Tokyo is that our diet is pretty Westernized. Neither of us is much of a seafood fan and I'm not about to make tofu or beans for one. My husband is decidedly a meat-eating person.

If anyone who reads this post is eating a more Japanese-style diet and has some input on the type of numbers it requires, I'd appreciate hearing their thoughts. Sometimes I think a Japanese diet would be cheaper, but I'm not entirely sure. Rice is certainly a good buy (and I do make dishes with rice on occasion), but other things less so. I'd especially like input on whether or not 500 yen a day is an equivalent challenge to the U.S. $3 per day challenge or if it's too much or too little.

Kicking and Screaming

That title has a double meaning. Today, it's 88 degrees F. (31 C.) and so humid that you can sweat standing still in one of the multitude of stores with inadequate air conditioning. Summer is going out kicking and screaming and I'm just about ready to scream from putting up with it. I'd kick someone as well if I thought it'd clear the steam from the air and dial down the heat. The high temperature today, by the way, was 91 degrees F. :-p

My weather widget claims that the coming week starting tomorrow is going to be milder, but I've come to realize that that widget is a stylish-looking, slickly designed liar. Yesterday, it claimed today's high would be 84 (which would be bad enough with this humidity), but now it's 88. In fact, everyday it gives high temperatures that are lower than reality. You'd think it'd learn to fudge the numbers instead of giving me false hope.

The worst thing about living in Tokyo (barring a really bad earthquake which fortunately has not happened during my stay) is the summer. It starts popping up like an unwanted guest around late April and then starts becoming a regular visitor in May. By June, it's the smelly deadbeat who is sleeping on your sofa day-in and day-out who you're barely putting up with. By the end of September, you're ready to throttle that deadbeat to get it the hell out of your house. Summer has completely overstayed its welcome.

Cornerstones of Saving — Part 3

(This first paragraph is mainly going to be for the females out there, but it may apply to some progressive and/or cross-dressing males as well.)

Remember your home economics classes where you were taught how to make a pie crust or sew a skirt? Well, maybe that was my class back in the day. I'm hoping that lessons are a little more practical these days. "Home economics" should include learning how to economically run your home, not only how to cook and sew. Both of these are useful things to know, mind you, and I believe everyone should know them, but I do believe understanding how to deal with daily living less expensively should be part of the lessons.

My days often include teaching myself lessons in home economics. For example, I can buy a bottle of pre-made cold tea to serve students in lessons (or myself when I want ice tea) for about 250-300 yen or I can make my own iced tea for 30-70 yen (depending on the type of tea). Making the cold tea myself requires adding water to a pan, boiling it, putting teabags in a jug, adding the water, allowing it to steep and cool, and removing the bags. In terms of my time and attention to the task, we're talking no more than 5 minutes of effort, though it is peppered across across a span of time in tiny fragments. In other words, if I buy that jug of tea, I'm essentially telling myself that it is worth paying a little more than 2400 yen an hour for someone else to make my tea for me (5 minutes is 1/12 of an hour so 12 x the difference between my tea and the cost of the bottle which would be about 200 yen).

Now, if you're one of those sorts who writes blog bits for $10 a post and can whip out one every ten minutes and calculate your time as being worth $60 an hour, then my advice isn't for you. Though, honestly, this whole "my time is worth $X per hour" when considering the value of pursuing a particular endeavor is a pretty big load anyway. It presumes that all effort is equal and that all time is potentially similarly productive or that there is sufficient demand for you work to keep you busy such that you can't spare 5 minutes to make your own tea without sacrificing a moment of precious earnings potential. Also, seriously, I'd rather work less and spend less than work more and earn more. The mental and physical toll of pushing myself to work for more cash is far less than making a pot of tea, but that's really just me.

If you start to do home economics in accord with your lifestyle, you can see where you're making choices to pay someone else to do the work for you and make an informed choice about whether the effort is worth it to you or not. I'm not advocating that people stop buying the things they want or enjoying their lives, but rather that they apply serious thought to their consumption and the real costs of it.

A lot of people find the sort of "nickel and dime" thinking I'm talking about petty and feel that it won't save you an appreciable amount of money. Whether this is true or not really depends on how much you feel you have to save to make it worth your while. When I was living in the U.S., there was a woman who worked at the same halfway house as I who my 22 year-old self used to scoff at because she'd do things like cut up old calendars to use for notepaper. I felt that she was saving the place a few cents and it was meaningless. Similarly, I used to get annoyed with my parents for insisting I turn off the lights all the time when I left the room. I thought they were being cheap and petty. Now, I'm cutting up my old calendars and turning off all the lights.

Since environmental concerns and energy consumption have been something I'm paying attention to more and more, I've found out that these small actions result in meaningful savings. Over the last year, I've discovered that taking showers by intermittently turning the water on and off has reduced my gas bill by about $15-20 a month in the warmer months. Having an air conditioner with low power settings and having two air conditioners (one in the bedroom and living room) and cooling only one room at a time has reduced summer air conditioning expenses by about $50-70 in the hottest and muggiest months.

Over the course of a year, I've discovered that just turning off the lights and television when I'm not using them and showering more efficiently has saved us more than $300 a year in living expenses and we sacrifice nothing in terms of quality of life. All it "costs" is developing new behavioral patterns. That's essentially the cost of a new iPod Touch or iPhone. And it is a real savings. I know what I used to pay and what I pay now. I've saved the bills and done the comparisons. It's not theoretical.

I never crunched the numbers specifically on what other habits we've employed to reduce expenses have allowed us to do because it can get pretty complicated. However, I do scrutinize the cost of home-cooked meals compared to eating out on a regular basis and consider the cost per portion based on the type of ingredients. I mainly do this to dissuade myself from going for convenience over effort as often as possible. For instance, I know making my own chicken pulao costs less than 150 yen per serving whereas going to an Indian restaurant will set me back at least 1000 yen (very likely more) per person. The serving sizes will be bigger, but they will also offer more food than I require and result in waste or overeating. Making chicken pulao also frees me up for the next two evenings as we'll eat leftovers for two additional days.

I know cooking is out of the question for some people as is carefully shopping for cheap food or buying in bulk (which also saves money). I'm not saying what people should or should not do, but rather saying that, if you want to save, you have to start considering the price of convenience. It's very likely more expensive than you realize.

(This is the last one, I promise. ;-) )

Cornerstones of Saving — Part 2

One of our fellow bloggers who also tends to talk quite a bit about Japan recently married a Japanese woman and came to Japan to live after completing university. He was concerned about debts from his education and getting them paid off as quickly as possible. I told him that my husband and I had managed to save nearly as much as his entire educational debt in the two years since I quit my former job so I was sure he could get those debts dealt with pretty quickly if he was careful with how he spent his money. (All the money we save, incidentally, has all gone into savings for when we're old and grey and can no longer work.)

You might assume that we make a lot of money. The truth is that we do not and our rent is pretty high (110,000 yen). The money we saved during those two years represented about 35% of our income. We don't make a small amount of money, mind you, but my CH isn't in a high-paying job and I only worked 5-10 hours a week from home during the two years in which we saved that amount of money. The way we save a fair bit is by not spending what we get. This isn't as hard as it may sound, but it does take awhile to reach a mindset where living well below your means doesn't feel like a burden or sacrifice. For us, it evolved naturally so we've never found ourselves pining for things. I consider us very fortunate in that regard.

I've come to understand that there are 3 cornerstones to reducing your spending:

1. Cook for yourself from real (whole) food ingredients (never pre-mixed, pre-bagged, or pre-made).

2. Don't buy new clothes or shoes unless you need them (never buy because they are attractive to you or you think you'll look good in them).

3. Never shop to entertain yourself or to mitigate unrest in your life.

If you follow these, your spending will be dramatically reduced. Most people waste their money on incidental items they rarely need or use, convenience, and the momentary "high" of obtaining something novel. If you scrutinize the pleasure your spending habits bring you, you'll likely see very few of the items bring long-term pleasure or fulfill recurring needs. Most of the pleasure you get is from looking at the items, considering buying them, making the purchase, and carrying the bag home. Once the item is in your possession, there is definitely a letdown for many purchases.

Most people can't get past the idea of "deserving" the reward of buying something they want so they justify wasteful spending as a way of making working worthwhile. They feel empowered by the freedom of obtaining what they want when they want it and choose the immediate small sense of freedom over the long term freedom that comes from financial stability and security. I won't say that, if you hate your job and have to placate yourself by buying junk, it's probably time to consider a different job which doesn't make you as miserable but may pay less because I know that's unrealistic for many people. However, it is worth considering.

I'm not judging anyone for their spending habits, mind you. We all make stupid decisions for short-term benefits because life is hard sometimes and some little tidbit can make us happy for awhile. However, if saving money is important to you, you have to change your entire mindset about shopping and the acquisition of possessions.

Cornerstones of Saving — Part 1

One of the reasons many people believe foreign folks come to Japan is to make big bucks. The general impression among Japanese folks is that we make a lot more money than they do. That's a half truth. If you're an underpaid Japanese office lady with a crappy job or a university student toiling at a convenience store or McDonald's for minimum wage, then that assertion is correct. If you do nearly any other full-time job which requires a university degree (and all us teaching types have to have degrees because we can't get a work visa without one), then it's probably not correct.

Most Japanese people calculate your wages based on what they pay to be taught by you, not on what you are paid. They assume you get a much bigger slice of the pie than you do. My referral agency charges students 4,900 yen an hour, but I get paid 2,800 yen an hour. I'm not complaining about the pay, mind you, but you can see how a student might think that I'm getting a great deal more than I am.

It isn't really how much you make but how you live which dictates how well you live here. One of my students is a nurse who makes less money than the average starting level foreign teacher salary of 250,000 yen. However, she also lives in a dorm provided by the hospital which only costs 22,000 yen a month and gets free meals at the hospital cafeteria. To put that in perspective, a super cheap accommodation in Tokyo for a teacher would be 50,000 yen a month for a shared place (gaijin house or shared apartment). If you want your own small place, you're likely paying 70,000 yen a month or more. In terms of food expenses saved, most people can't eat for much less than 30,000 yen a month unless they live on ramen. That means that the "perks" of my student's job as a nurse add to her salary to the tune of at least 70,000 yen each month.

My underpaid student who is a nurse told me that she spends 50,000 yen a month on clothes and she spends that much every month. She gives her old clothes away to friends and coworkers, but she has a constant revolving door on her wardrobe closet. She also goes to concerts and bars with friends at least once a week. Despite having a low income, she's certainly not hurting for discretionary funds.

After you live here for awhile, you understand that Japanese society is different from Western society in that jobs tend to take the average life circumstances of a person into account when deciding how much to pay. Most women who work as nurses are single and child-less because married women with children can't put in the sorts of hours required or be on call. Most office ladies are either married and working for spare cash or are still living with their parents so they aren't paying rent or shouldering the burden of supporting a family. Men who marry get raises compared to single men and men whose wives give birth to new people also often get raises.

Since life circumstances dictate how Japanese folks tend to be paid, but not how foreigners in usual foreigner jobs (teaching, translating, entertaining) get paid, it's hard to compare salaries. We are paid what the market will bear based on supply and demand. They are paid what their culture feels is appropriate based on their life circumstances in many cases (though certainly not all). Companies assume that you won't apply for a job which doesn't suit your needs and everyone "knows" that certain jobs are at a low pay level for students or housewives looking to support discretionary spending and no one expects adults who need to support a family to do them.

This is all my roundabout and tangent-heavy way of saying that how you live is more important than what you make in many cases when it comes to money. In Japan, the wages tend to reflect how they expect someone doing that job to be living. That's not to say there aren't people who simply do not have enough money to live comfortably, even in Japan where unemployment stats are low and it is currently a market (on the Japanese side, not the foreigner side at present) which favors job seekers over job providers.