It’s the time of the year when Tokyo Disneyland becomes more like Harajuku, when the streets are full of people in costumes, and the crowds are taught how to dance along to the Disney Hallowe’en songs.

Posing Guests

Marty loves the Hallowe’en parades as he gets so amused watching the audience try to dance along.  The song started with a chant of the letters O-B-A-K-E and cast members then spent about 10 minutes teaching the audience the actions. This year, Marty attempted to learn the hand movements, but they were a bit complicated.  And although it was possible to follow along when we were being taught, the song played during the actual parade was a lot faster.

Dancing Skeletons at the Halloween Parade

We don’t own Disney costumes and I’ve no idea where the adults got their costumes as I’ve only really seen Disney outfits for children.  We should investigate this for next year as I quite fancy spending the day dressed as a Disney villain.  I saw some great villains during the day but I thought it would be rude to try taking pictures of strangers who weren’t standing around posing.  One of my favourites was a mother dressed as Cruella de Vil with her children dressed as Dalmatians.

Marty at Disney

The Haunted Mansion has also be refurbished and turned into the Nightmare Before Christmas. The queues throughout the whole park were long and I didn’t really want to wait for 90 minutes to see the Haunted Mansion so we waited until the Electric Parade had started and then tried to make our way to the Mansion. We finally found a gap in the crowds and only had to wait 20 minutes for the ride.

Nightmare Before Christmas

I’ve seen ducks swim towards people in the hope of getting food, but today was the first time I’ve seen carp do this.

Hungry Carp

Today I saw a great use for all those umbrellas that get left behind on the street car.  Instead of storing them in a lost items’ room they are put in a box at the stop.  If it’s raining when you get off you can take one with you.

Everyone's Umbrellas

I spent hours yesterday afternoon chatting to friends.  None of us smoke and someone made a comment on how ridiculous it was to spend money on cigarettes when you could practically afford to go on an extra holiday a year if you stopped smoking.  I laughed and said that the same was true if you stopped buying coffee on the way to work. My friends looked sceptical, yet if you buy a grande latte from Starbucks in Tokyo every weekday of the year it costs more than 100,000 Yen (834 GBP, 1300 USD).

This lead to a more general conversation on the cost of living and how we don’t always know exactly how much money we spend on things.  (One person at the table had detailed financial records on every penny he spends, but he only started to do that when he realised that he wasn’t sure what he was spending his money on.)

When I was in Europe in August and September I was surprised at the price of food.  I believe that I spend a lot more money grocery shopping in Tokyo than I would if I lived in the UK, but I could be completely wrong.  If I had to guess I would say that I spend 4,000 Yen (33 GBP, 52 USD) a day on groceries.  28,000 Yen (231 GBP, 364 USD) a week seems like a lot of money to spend on feeding two people.  I imagine that we spend more money on food than the average Japanese couple, as I still buy some Western ingredients.  I know it would be cheaper to eat Japanese food every day but I haven’t adapted enough to eat Japanese food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Of course my grocery shopping also contains non-food products, but then we also eat dinner out maybe once a week and Marty buys lunch every day.

I know that Tokyo is one of the world’s most expensive cities (Mercer’s 2011 Cost of Living Survey ranks it as number 2), which does mean that I expect to spend more money on food than if I lived in another city.  The Yen has also strengthened substantially over the past couple of years making everything feel expensive when I covert it to another currency.  But now I want to know exactly how much I do spend.  This will mean keeping records but maybe I’ll find out what I’m buying that’s equivalent to the grande latte or packet of cigarettes.

There are times when learning creeps up on me.  Tonight I was sitting in my favourite tonkatsu restaurant when I realised that things have changed.  It’s the same chain of restaurant that we went to when we first moved to Tokyo, but the experience is somewhat different.  I don’t smile as much.  I still love the food but I can now understand what the staff are saying to me.  I no longer have to go with my “if in doubt smile” approach to compensate for my lack of understanding.  We can read the menu, though we do tend to order the same thing every time we go.  And I can name the pickles.

When we moved there were so many things that we didn’t recognise and the pickles in Tonkatsu Heaven were on that list.  We had no idea what vegetables they had pickled so we named them after their colours.  My favourite were the white ones, which turned out to be daikon.  They served us pink, purple, white, and various greens.  But tonight I could name the pickles in English and Japanese.  I wonder what else I’ve learned without noticing?

Last weekend Marty decided to take me away for a belated birthday celebration.  I ended up in the Four Seasons eating afternoon tea while dressed in ripped jeans and a faded conference t-shirt.  I was adequately dressed for the walk we took in a Japanese garden but in no way prepared for dining amongst ladies who lunch.  There were even people wearing traditional kimonos, though I imagine they were part of the many weddings taking place in the grounds of the hotel.

My sister asked me today if they put us in a corner.  She was right, we were seated in a corner and hidden from the view of passers by.  It hadn’t thought about it but it had happened to her when she visited an expensive tea house in Tokyo.  But then not only was she wearing casual clothing, she had also managed to cover herself in mud after falling in the gardens.  I wasn’t covered in mud, but I was rather hot and sticky.

Once the afternoon tea arrived my concerns about my outfit were quickly forgotten.

Afternoon Tea

There is no doubt that discussing the weather is an important part of Japanese culture.  Every summer conversation starts with, “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”.  Even email conversations start with the weather and then move on.

But it is incredibly hard to ignore.  I was born in Northern Ireland. I’m used to the weather being mildly annoying.  The sort of weather than means you don’t really want to plan a picnic in summer because it could be a bit damp or a bit cold.  But you make the plan anyway because, as my grandmother would say, a drop of rain won’t kill you.

Then we have Japan where weather is not mildly annoying, in say the way that an insect can be, but is much more like the giant stomping monsters that the Japanese love dearly.  My lunch plans today were cancelled because it might rain.  The airlines are also cancelling flights for the same reason but then this isn’t Northern Irish style rain.  This is due to the arrival of  Typhoon Ma-on which is expected to cause flooding and damage to areas of the city at some point today.  This is weather so powerfully destructive that it gets to have its own name.

And it’s not just the storms that kill.  So far this summer 26 people have died because of the heat and 54,000 people have been treated in hospital.  I no longer just glance out the window to see what the weather is doing.  Now I plan in advance.  I read the extreme high temperature forecast and the weather warnings and advisories.  Today I get to hope that the worst thing said about the weather is, “It’s wet today, isn’t it?”.

I’m back in Tokyo after my trip to America.  I’m told that it’s no hotter here than where I was staying in America but the high humidity makes a lot of difference to how comfortable you feel.  I liked the weather in Asheville.  It did get hot during the day but the cooler mornings and evenings were beautiful.  Here I get to spend the day dripping with sweat.  There is no breeze and the evenings are as hot a mid-afternoon.  At least the sun goes down early so I can stop stressing about my sunblock sweating off in the evenings.

I’ve been trying to sort some things out in the apartment but after washing the dishes I looked and felt as if I had been working out for an hour.  I’m sticky and disgusting and I have been since I arrived back.  We are supposed to be limiting our electricity usage so I have the doors open instead of using the air conditioner.  We will be using the air conditioners at night as sleeping in this heat is difficult.  It is possible, once you get really tired, but I wake up feeling ill.  I’m not even back 24 hours and I’m already dreaming of leaving.

Now that many train stations have switched off their escalators to conserve energy it’s taking me longer to get around the city.  I can no longer dash up a moving escalator to make the train that’s about to leave the platform.  Running up the stairs isn’t practical.  Not only would it exhaust me but the other people on the stairs aren’t moving in an ordered manner.  Escalators are easier as no-one is running down one while you are running up.  There are also rules on the escalator: you stand on the left and walk on the right.  There are no rules on the stairs and I’m surprised that aren’t more head on collisions during rush hour.  Actually there are arrows painted on the stairs to indicate the routes for walking up and down but these get obscured by the hundreds of feet on the stairs.

At times I feel like I’ve walked up a lot of stairs and on Wednesday I decided to count them.  I went to the clinic and did some grocery shopping.  The 355 steps I walked up were in three train stations and on two foot bridges.  I monitor the amount of exercise I do in a week but I haven’t been counting the walking I do between train stations or to and from the grocery store.  I have a tendency to think of exercise as a planned activity like today when I walked 4 miles along the river.  Or when I spend an hour at the gym.  But now I’m curious about the amount of general walking I do.

When I go on long walks I plot the routes using Google maps and work out distances.  I also record the time it takes me to do the walks.  I don’t want to do this for general dandering around the city so I have jut bought a pedometer to count the number of steps I take in a day.  I’ve no idea how many steps I take in a day and don’t know if I’ll come close to the target of 10,000 that I have been told about, but I should know this time next week.

Ovid wrote an interesting post discussing the differences in weight between Americans and Europeans.  The Japanese appear to be thin yet there is still a lot of concern about obesity and the indicators of metabolic syndrome in Japan.  Actually, I had never heard of metabolic syndrome until I moved to Japan and was very shocked to hear people that I would consider to be underweight discuss their concerns about becoming obese.

On the World Health Statistics report for 2011 the number of  Japanese men over the age of 20 that were considered to be obese was 5.5%.  For American men the figure was 30.2%, and for British men the figure was 24.4%.  The definition of obese used was “individuals with a body mass index (BMI) ≥30.00 kg/m²“.

The Japanese, however, don’t think about obesity in the same terms as Europe or America.  My husband, Marty, works in Japan and has annual health checks.  As part of this he is weighed and his waist circumference is measured.  Ovid quoted the following figure as the average weight for a British man – 79.75 kilos (175 pounds).  Marty is about the same weight as the average British man and has about 20% body fat.  His BMI is less than 30 but in Japan he is considered to be obese.  He is very healthy but he gets a grade “C” for weight.  Yes, he actually gets grades for everything that is tested.  They have told him that his ideal body weight is 62.5 kilos (138 pounds)!  (Since I’m from Northern Ireland I just have to write that in stone: they want Marty to weigh just over 9 and a half stone!).

The other measure for obesity is his waist circumference.  The Japanese government has decreed that men should have a waist of less than 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) or they are at risk for metabolic syndrome.  Marty’s waist is currently 89 centimeters (35 inches), another strike against him.  Japan isn’t the only country that uses waist circumference as a health indicator.  But in America there are concerns when a man’s waist is larger than 102 centimeters (40 inches) and in Europe if it is over 94 centimeters (37 inches).

Marty doesn’t get overly annoyed at the results he gets from work, after all since moving to Japan he has lost 10 kilos (22 pounds), but I am glad that I don’t have someone grading me on my weight.