Hello, greetings from the saddest spot in the local Starbucks. In the back of the store, with no windows, in a corner. A one person table against the wall. I’m sitting here with my laptop because I wanted a change of scenery. A moment of no distraction from all the stuff around me, so I can write this blog in peace. At least, as long as the battery of this laptop lasts.
I have been using Riemer’s laptop since Korea. He didn’t need it for a while because he also has one from the company. Or well. Several. Anyway, I borrowed the fairly new MacBook Pro, because my 2016 model couldn’t take it anymore. Just like me. So I went to Korea with the device, on to Japan, and the plan was then to buy a new one here. As a business. My business. That plan is still there, but I have to look into it. And that takes energy, so I don’t.
The MacBook Pro battery life is getting shorter and shorter, but whether that’s because I’ve ruined the battery with the constantly plugged-in dongle-with-charger, or because there are too many processes running in the background, I don’t know. I do know that I rarely turn the device off. Because then my wrong Apple ID starts shouting that it wants to log in, because it is somehow connected to my Teams/Skype. I don’t know exactly what’s going on there, but it’s not quite right. I’ll have to look into it sometime. But that takes energy, so I won’t.
After all, my head is exactly that MacBook with too many processes running in the background. At least, I hope so. Sometimes I think I’m just broken, but I think it’s the processes after all.
House call
Last Tuesday, two people from the Tokyo government came to visit me, to check my office. Mikako was there too, so it was suddenly quite full in my little office. For the renewal of my start-up visa, having an independent office is a requirement, so they came to check that. They seemed impressed, and gave me the idea that my extension would be a formality. A long formality though; Mikako submitted the application in early August, but apparently it’s busy, staffing shortages bla bla, so it could take up to two months. My current visa expires in early September, but that in itself is not a problem, if I show the email that says my application is being processed. “But what if I want to get out of the country now?” – “If you want the application to go smoothly, you’d better stay here for a while,” Mikako said. Okay. Suddenly I wanted to go home.
Yes, in this Freudian slip state, I call Holland “home.” Crazy.
So I won’t be able to go home for the next few weeks. Fortunately Japan has meanwhile relaxed the entry requirements, by which the PCR test has been dropped. So if I have to go back and forth to the Netherlands, I can at least plan with some certainty. But not just yet, because of the visa. Well, okay. I will have to make friends then.
I am here to make friends
Charlotte once told me about Bumble, the app that not only has a dating department, but also a Bizz and a BFF section. I decided to take a look at the BFF corner of the site, found 300 Japanese who wanted to learn English (nothing wrong with that, but I already learn Japanese from Mariko, and then it’s not really equal) and a handful of expats.
It’s hard to pick friends on an app. At least, on Twitter I usually manage pretty well, but on an app where you have to swipe Tinder-style after a profile with four photos and six hobbies? That’s nothing. Mountain climbing? *swipe* Alcohol? *swipe* Extensive cooking? *swipe* Tarot? *SWIPE!* And then it occurred to me that all my Dutch girlfriends do these things too. That I might be swiping away an Aafke or a Maan, dismissed in three seconds as “too wild” or “too spiritual.” I decided to spend fifteen euros on the app, so that I could see who had liked me. That way I didn’t have to wait for a chance match. And the fact that these people had swiped me to the right immediately made them a lot nicer, haha!
After a few messages and voice memos with Adelaide, a cool chick who works as an English teacher, we decided to grab a drink in Ikebukuro. We found a rooftop terrace and drank bubble tea. Then we ate rice with meat at a little restaurant she recommended. I let myself be surprised, although surprises are not my thing. Adelaide was cool, and much more introverted/serious than I initially thought. Perhaps hyper-enthusiastic, self-selling profiles are not at all suitable for autistic people.
Getting to know new people is always difficult. Friday I went with Elyse, a Dutch girl I know through social media, to the new Starbucks in Shinjuku Gyoen. We had met twice before, but as we sat on the grass on the plastic picnic sheet I brought, something remarkable happened. She shared something personal, to which I also shared something personal. The conversation suddenly went a level deeper.
Welcome to my bed talk
Although I had a good time with both ladies, these meetings still cost me a lot of energy. And not only that, the conversations had opened all kinds of old drawers, with things I hadn’t talked about for a long time. No traumas or anything like that, but things that had left me reeling in my dreams. I spent the whole weekend in my bed. Earlier in the week I had bought a fantastic folding table, so it was no punishment to be in bed with my laptop. But still. I was tired.
“Geez, you sure are busy by the sound of it,” Elyse said Friday. “Oh really? I feel like I’m not doing a damn thing?”, I said. It’s true. Because what am I doing at all? Giving this website a new look. Working for clients a bit. Visiting the thrift store. I don’t do shit. I have yet to pick and buy a laptop. I was in a Dutch newspaper this week, to which two people emailed me where this webshop was that I mentioned. I have yet to fill it up. I still have to fix the screen door of my office balcony, still have to make a home tour video or blog, come up with/design/start a new ad campaign for my book, learn for the JLPT (Japanese language test I’m going to take in December), still have to visit Kei with my birthday present for Emma… And oh yeah, I wanted to write a whole new book about this adventure. But I don’t know how it ends yet.
And in the meantime, I want to go home. Because I miss people. People with whom I can lie on the couch, with whom I can talk freely about topics ranging from K3’s new vlog, to Jordan B. Peterson’s downfall.
Just a few more weeks. Then I’ll really go home, no matter how expensive the tickets are. Besides abolishing the PCR, Japan has also more than doubled the cap on arrivals. I hope this will also make the tickets a little cheaper, although of course the rest of the world is still a shitshow.
And suddenly I realize: it’s not at all surprising that I’m tired. My brain is always busy in the background. Learning a whole new language, starting up a business, meeting new people, and searching for clarity in a world that has completely changed in the past two and a half years. But it’s small steps that make everything better.
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Come rain or shine
It’s quite the distance, from Sapporo to Hakodate. The train ride, not on a shinkansen but on an express train, took about four hours – and cost me almost 70 euros! After such a long ride, I figured I probably wouldn’t feel like exploring the city, so I decided that I would stay two nights in Hakodate. I had booked a room at the JR Inn hotel, which turned out to be an excellent choice: the hotel was literally right above the train station.
Sapporo and Pokémon and stuff
Hello, from a hotel room overlooking the train station of a rainy Hakodate. Hakodate is the southernmost tip of northern Japan, the island of Hokkaido. On Friday I flew to Sapporo, the capital of this prefecture. This is where the Pokémon GO Fest was held last weekend: a live event organized by Niantic, the makers of Pokémon GO. I saw the announcement in the app and thought, “Hey, I can just go to this!”
Signs and lines
“Oh yes, and I need you to do one more thing…” Mikako, my bank account, visa and tax contact, walked me through the to-do’s for renewing my visa. “You have to take pictures of your office. From the entrance to the elevator, the front door, and then of course inside. It is important that there is a nameplate on your door. It’s even more important that it not only says Toeps Media, but also 株式会社.”
Greetings from the chaos
You know that feeling? When you want to clean out a closet, pull everything out, and then completely overwhelmed by the incredible mess you want to stuff everything back in? That’s what my life feels like right now. Everything is upside down. And everything is intertwined, like a big jumble of plugs, printer cables and mini-USB, somewhere in an Ikea box.
From the bat cave
It has been over a month since I wrote anything here. My head is full, and even when I talk to my friends it gets in the way. Then I want to tell them everything, immediately, and then the conversation turns into one big monologue about bank accounts, tatami mats and bats, and that’s not very nice of course. Or well. Not very reciprocal. That’s why this is a good old blog; one-way traffic, information dump style. Maybe you have already seen bits and pieces on Instagram (really, that medium still keeps me somewhat sane), but here it is, neatly and with context: Toeps in Japan, the recap.
Blossoming
In my previous blog I promised to tell you more about the trip, but I’ve been here for about three weeks, so the trip can be summarized as: I got on the plane in Korea, got off two hours later in Japan,went through all the procedures at Narita and was allowed to take the train home. There I had to quarantine for another three days, after which I was allowed to leave early after a local PCR test.
Japanese joke
Hooray, my visa has been extended! I heard a few days before Riemer came (and we were going to travel around southern Japan), so I rushed to the immigration office, and an hour later I had an extra year of Japan in the pocket. And, also not unimportant: finally a somewhat normal visa, because with such a six-month thingy, most companies can do exactly nothing. Time to switch to a real phone provider.
Jean-Jacques
A few men in my book, not entirely coincidentally men with whom I once shared a bed, were given pseudonyms. I thought long and hard about these names and sometimes even consulted with the man in question, because the new name obviously had to exude the same vibe as the original. You’re not gonna replace William with Kevin, you understand.
The end of a Starbucks
François and I were standing in line for the Starbucks in the shopping center of Keio-Hachioji station, when a poster caught his eye. One of those posters with big red and yellow letters, and something in Japanese that translated as “clearance sale.” I had seen the poster before, but since my brain still doesn’t automatically translate Japanese, I hadn’t given it a second thought, and assumed it was just another advertising poster. But François’s Japanese is better, so he asked the barista, “Clearance sale?” – “Yes,” said the barista, “everything closes on March 31. We’re leaving too, the whole building is vacating.”
Bye bye balcony Fuji
When I moved to Japan, I spent the first month and a half living in my office. Now, that sounds worse than it actually was, because my office is simply the tiny apartment I bought back when we were all stuck at home during COVID lockdowns and border closures. To meet the requirements of my business manager visa, I quickly needed to find a separate living space (home offices aren’t allowed), and I found one on the 10th floor of the same building. A bat had to be chased out first, then it needed a couple of weeks of ventilation, but after that, it slowly but surely became my home.