Apartment Hunting, Dinner with the Boss and his Wife, and Teaching in Tokyo.

Apartment Hunting
If you ever plan to move to Tokyo, be prepared to accept one of the following housing options.

1. Live an hour+ outside of the city, have the amount of space in your average medium-sized american city, and commute to and from Tokyo every day.
2. Live a nice manageable <30 minute commute from your work in Tokyo, in a shoebox, with a one burner stove, and definitely no oven, (or dryer, or dishwasher but that's typically the case in all 4 options).
3. Live in the city with a lot of space, and never eat again, because your rent is too damn high.
4. Live in the city, in a Sharehouse, with at least 6 others and have a nice decent sized kitchen, with an affordable price-tag, but little to no privacy and rules about guests, chores, etc.

Of these lovely options I have chosen the final option (or I could say Ultimate option ;)).
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the apartment I will move into in a few weeks. I will have 6 Japanese roommates, who I have yet to meet, but whom I'm told do not speak English (my landlords very reluctantly allowed me to live here, because of my beginners level Japanese, with assurances from my boss that I am a hard worker and will be able to speak basic conversational Japanese within the year, and in the meantime a promise that he will help in handling any important communication). From the three open wine bottles on the clean kitchen counter, however, I think we'll get along fine. The household also has a garden that residents are encouraged to help with, and a pretty great view from the roof (nothing like my 28th floor dwelling friends in Minato, but still pretty impressive to me).

Dinner on Tokyo's Labour Thanksgiving Day
Yes, Labour Thanksgiving. The Japanese love work so much they give thanks for it.

My boss and his wife had invited me as soon as I moved to Tokyo, to come to their home in Kanagawa prefecture (near the beautiful Kamakura) for dinner sometime. This past Friday, being a national holiday, they decided to make a day of it and show me Kamakura in the afternoon first and then go back to their apartment for a sushi dinner. They're both very busy hard-working people (are not all Japanese?), so despite having planned to cook, they asked me if it would be alright if we got takeout and brought it home. I enthusiastically agreed as, being a bit of a pescatarian, sushi takeout based on their suggestions sounded much better to me than the roast chicken that my boss had mentioned his wife enjoys making.

Small train through narrow alleyways to Hase station

We met in the early afternoon and walked around Kōtoku-in Temple, and saw the famous Daibutsu statue. We passed by a bunch of tourists with what looked like some sort of large crackers and after asking my boss what it was, I was delighted to see the process of making octopus crackers. Below are a couple pictures but this video gives you the full picture (although the background music drowns out the squealing sound the pressing of the octopus makes).

    

Octopus Cracker making (or Tako-Sembei)

My boss Takayuki I about to enjoy delicious Tako-Sembei

After exploring Kamakura, drinking some coffee in a small (indoor) cafe where a couple squirrels seemed to have made their home and checking out a few tourist shops, we headed back to their apartment, and bought some sushi, salad, wine, cheese and olives to snack on.

We went through a few bottles of their good wine, one of which they had saved since the year they married, a little over a decade ago (!). Mid-way through dinner, Reiko asked me for help with the English in a manuscript she was working on, which I was happy to do, especially after being told numerous times how lucky my boss tells her he is that I came to work for them, and how hard-working I am. From my eyes, I feel that I'm the lucky one, and feel like I'm barely doing anything, and wish I could do more, but my lack of language comprehension limits me a good deal. Our dinner conversation was easy and jovial and I saw a silly side of my boss that I rarely get to see.  For example, I am terrible at using chopsticks, which is what all Japanese have come to expect of Gaijin; if you come to Japan and you have a basic ability to use chopsticks, be prepared to be met with exclamations of shock, disbelief and awe at your abilities. So in order to help me learn, Reiko took out their chopsticks practicing game and Takayuki put on a thick Japanese accent, macho attitude (very out of character for him) and very serious face and proclaimed that he could do it "No problem. I'm Japanese. I can do it. No problem." We couldn't stop laughing.  

Reiko, my boss' wife, and I at Kamakura.
She said that her outfit theme was the galaxy, and had a little alien pin on her hat and
a colorful dress that looked like the galaxy.

Later in the night I asked Reiko about her taste in music (because I noticed the cd she had played a lot of Western music, including Spice Girls and Celine Dion's Titanic hit), and somehow the exploding in popularity Gangnam Style video came up. Neither of them had heard of it, so of course I grabbed my iPhone and showed them what they were missing, which Reiko found to be the most entertaining thing ever. All in all a fantastic night.

Teaching (Assistantship) in Tokyo
What is your mental image of a typical Japanese university classroom?

Do you picture students avidly paying attention, earnestly asking questions and a strict professor commanding the room's respect?
How about a classroom where ~15% of the students are not only sleeping, but sleeping with their heads down on the desk in front of them, another 10% are browsing their phones or eating a snack of some sort, and an additional 50% just seem to be daydreaming but with theirs eyes fixed up front?

Thereee you go, now we're approaching reality. I may seem to be making broad generalizations based on my sample size of one, but from coworkers, and Japanese peers I've met here, I've heard this is not at all uncommon. This is not to say that Japanese students aren't diligent, but perhaps the high school years wear them down, and they realize once they enter the working world, pressure to succeed will only be stronger, so they take advantage of college as a time to live a bit more. One friend mentioned that Japanese university for her and all her friends was more of a social experience, going out with friends to karaoke, than academically rigorous (as opposed to high school, which is all academic rigor in order do well on standardized tests to ensure acceptance to a good university).
While we're on the subject of sleeping in odd places, here's a fairly common sight on the Japanese metro (ignore the bad singing added to the video).

Since I last wrote about work, my boss and I have had 5 of our 7 classes, all but one of which included a lab portion meaning I'm able to actually help, rather than merely sit in lecture understanding a word now and then (e.g. tokei = statistics, bunseki = analysis, bunsan bunseki = analysis of variance...deta = data) of the Intro Biostatistics course Keio offers. The first lab we had my first questions were asked by two boys (young men? I don't know, they're college juniors, so ~20 years, which seems so young to me now, though I'm a mere half decade their senior) who wanted to know where I was from, and then proceeded to reference the Minnesota sports teams they knew of and search for approval in my reaction. I answered their questions and tried to steer the conversation back to the assignment they were supposed to be working on, but I noticed they soon packed up their stuff and skipped out on the rest of lab.

It's hard to see this class as all that beneficial to the students at large, because 1. There are only 7 total class sessions, each of which has a lab, but many students don't pay attention during lecture, and then require hand-holding throughout the homework problems in the lab that follows the lecture. 2. There's So much ground to cover in these 7 classes that it's impossible to go into any real depth in any of the topics. We basically have to cover T-tests, ANOVA, Regression, Categorical Data, Logistic Regression, Survival Analysis, and more, which my fellow biostatisticians would agree is a big undertaking unless conceptual understanding is of little importance. Regardless, I enjoy helping out in lab, and the students seem to be getting braver with asking me questions in English. And learning to be less timid with their English, which is a problem for many Japanese who speak a basic level of English, will be very beneficial in and of itself, as so much of statistics and research in general (especially at international conferences) is done in English, or with a large helping of English vocabulary.