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.

I’m having one of those days where my head is a bit foggy, and everything spins from time to time.  I’m not sure what is causing the dizziness but Marty is also feeling a bit strange.  Brain fogginess and dizziness are not a good combination.  I discovered that today when I was swinging my legs wildly while trying to walk down the steps to the train station.  If I had just been dizzy I would probably have sat down until the dizziness past but since my brain is moving slowly it took me much too long to realise that the lurching and leg swinging could have made me fall.  My first thoughts were all about Monty Python and nothing about how strange it was for me to be behaving like that in public.  It also never occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t well and that I should have turned round and went back home.

When I got to the train station I saw a older women stop at the top of a set of steps with a pram.  There are steps everywhere in Tokyo and it’s really noticeable at the minute as most of the escalators have been turned off to save electricity.  I walked up to her and said “would you like a hand?” and then proceeded to help lift the pram.  In Northern Ireland this would have been a perfectly normal thing to do.  But not here in Tokyo.  For a start I completely forgot to speak in Japanese.  I wasn’t thinking straight at all, I was just falling into a pattern of behaviour.  For some reason people don’t stop to help people with prams or wheelchairs in Tokyo.  I try to follow cultural rules but at times I just can’t help myself.  I can’t see an elderly woman struggle with a shopping basket in the supermarket without wanting to help.  I have been told that it can be seen as insulting to offer help, that I’m suggesting that the person isn’t capable, but I feel so rude when I don’t help.   And I can’t see a women with a pram at the top of a set of stairs without wanting to help.

I have no idea what the women thought about my help.  She told me that she was fine, and that she didn’t need help, but by that stage I had already lifted the pram .  I set the pram down, she thanked me, and I climbed the steps into the train station.  It was only when I got to the platform that I realised that I’d forgotten to speak in Japanese.  I hadn’t even noticed when she spoke in Japanese to me because I completely understood what she was saying.

I managed to catch the train and get the shopping without anything else odd happening.  But I will spend most of the afternoon sitting down as I really don’t like the spinning sensation when I stand up.

I saw a man walking a ferret today.  Marty tells me that this isn’t a strange thing, but it seemed strange to me.  Mind you I live in a country full of strange things.  I still have difficulty identifying everything I see in the grocery store.  There are whole aisles of food that I have no idea about and I don’t know if I’ll ever work out the difference between the 10 different types of fish flakes.

My local grocery store sometimes has stalls set up in the grocery packing area.  This week there has been a women selling green goo.  It can’t really be a green goo or slime, but I don’t want to get overly close to it.  I was terrified that she’d approach me and offer a free sample of the goo while I was packing my groceries.  I’m not really sure how to politely decline.  I know how to behave if I am given a sample.  I smile, say thanks, eat the goo, say something like “so delicious”, and then try to escape without buying any.  At least, that’s what everyone else was doing.  Sometimes it’s good to be a scary foreigner.

I saw a new item in the store today.  It took me a while to work out what it was but I can now buy probiotic straws. I think that I’ll continue to eat yoghurt to get friendly bacteria and avoid the straws.

I arrived back in Tokyo last night.  I had a good time in Australia but I was more than ready to leave.  The flight home wasn’t great.  I had booked a direct flight from Perth but it was cancelled and I was re-routed via Hong Kong.  Even getting through immigration took longer than it ever has before.

Now I’m hoping that the city stops shaking and that I can stay in one place for a while.  At least until I leave for YAPC::NA in June.

I have a friend who works at an office that’s built on reclaimed land out towards Tokyo Bay.  On the day of the Tohoku Earthquake the ground around his office cracked and shifted.

Crack in Car Park

One week later and you can see that nature is filling in the crack.

Filling in the Cracks

It’s going to take me a while to adjust.  I no longer feel as if I am constantly swaying but I did have a lot of difficulty getting to sleep on the plane on the way here.  I kept waking up thinking that the turbulence was an earthquake.

I’ve read many criticisms about foreigners leaving Japan.  Odd that I hear almost nothing about the Japanese that have also left.   I was the only non-Japanese person in my cabin on the way to Australia.  The queues in the airport were also mainly made up of Japanese.

Australia is noisier than I remember.  Japan also has insects that scream at night but I wasn’t expecting the birds.  They start to make an almighty racket when the sun comes up and also when it starts to go down.  It can be hard to hear another person speak in the apartment.  Mind you, I’m on my own for a few days so for now it’s just me and the birds.

I’m currently at Narita airport.  I’ve said goodbye to my house guest and now I’m spending the rest of the day here as I’m leaving for Sydney this evening.

We left quite early this morning as we hadn’t been able to book train tickets to the airport in advance.  We didn’t have any problems getting a train but given the restricted schedule of the past week we thought it was prudent to give ourselves plenty of time.  Terminal 1 wasn’t overly full.  It had long queues but that’s mainly because everyone turned up before check-in opened.  We arrived 45 minutes before Virgin opened theirs.  I was speaking to one man who seemed to think that the queues weren’t normal and more people than usual had turned up.  But then I fly all the time and I have seen much longer queues than those, and the queues disappeared quite quickly once check-in actually opened.  I also noticed that the queues for security were the normal length.

I was surprised that the man I was talking to was so concerned.  He looked at the queue at said that he couldn’t imagine Virgin being able to handle it in the time-frame.  But there is only one Virgin flight a day and of course they can handle checking in the passengers for one flight in an hour and a half.  We are still in Japan.  It’s not as if they had one member of staff on or anything.  It was actually looking as if they would have everyone checked-in within 30 minutes.  I have waited nearly 90 minutes to be checked-in for a flight in America on a day when there weren’t considered to be any problems at all.  In that case it was caused by a shortage of staff.  It was almost as if they hadn’t realised that the people with tickets would be turning up for the flights.

I’m in Terminal 2 now and it is busier.  There are a couple of very long queues.  But I was still able to find a seat in Starbucks, so it’s not overly alarming out there.  Nothing like it would be during Golden Week, the big holiday during the year.

I have been asked if I’m fleeing the country but that’s not quite what I’m doing.  I have a Japanese friend who left for Perth on Thursday night and she would like me to join her.  She would also like to have someone to fly back to Japan with.  There is no doubt that if it wasn’t for the recent disaster that I would not be leaving.  There are issues with being in Tokyo at the minute, and I don’t mean fear of radiation, but rather the disruption of services and the possibility of another quake.  I also know that my family and friends are going to be happier if I am somewhere else.  Marty has no plans to leave at the minute, but I know that he will leave if he believes that Tokyo is unsafe.

There have been times when I haven’t been sure what the point of Twitter is, or if connecting to lots of people on Facebook was really worthwhile, but in the past week I have been incredibly grateful to have use of these free services.  It was Twitter that allowed me to get the message out that I was O.K. after the quake, and Facebook has allowed me to update my friends and family throughout the past week without having to contact everyone individually.

Thank you.