Eduardo's Bad Day

It was a bad day for everyone, especially Eduardo Haybiff. Monday started out hot and humid with that dumb dog barking at 6:30. The scabby wart on his head was bleeding again. The barking dog wasn't what got Eduardo of the apartment building that fateful morning. The racket was being created twelve stories up. Eduardo could see a woman beating a futon hanging over her balcony. Pop pop pop! "Stop that noise!" Eduardo yelled.

Startled, she lost her grip on the futon. The impact knocked Eduardo's head clean off. At least there was no more scabby wart to pick at.

Mail and Kanji

It's strange the things that you take for granted. Like being able to read. I read really well...in English. I don't read really well in Japanese.

I received a notice in the box on our front door. It's like a mail box but we don't get our real mail there. We get some flyers, but mostly it is for bills and for 'unable to deliver' notices. The latter is what I received yesterday. Actually, I received two of them. One of which was from the Higashinishinomiya Post Office (The East Nishinomiya Post Office) stating that there was an attempt to deliver a package but nobody was home. No biggie. There is enough English on the notice for me to pick it up. I've done this before. It's the other notice that I'm worried about.

The other notice is all in Japanese writing. It's not a matter of knowing the meaning of the words. I can't even piece together the words because Japanese doesn't use a Roman alphabet (usually). Japanese uses three (mainly) different scripts, kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana alphabet (syllable symbols) and/or katakana alphabet (syllable symbols specifically for foreign words). Roman characters (Romaji) are sometimes used for the benefit of Japanese speaking foreigners. Hiragana and katakana aren't really that difficult as they are just symbol substitutions for sounds that an English speaker is already familiar with. Both sets are divided into symbols representing consonant/vowel combinations かきくけこ

Kanji are symbols representing entire words and, as I have been finding out, it isn't simply a matter of memorizing the 1,945 or so necessary to be considered literate. Context dictates the pronunciation as well as the meaning because the kanji themselves are not very often specific as to the type of word they are (verb, noun, adjective, etc). Plus, the pronunciation can be further dictated by the use of hiragana tags. Then on top of that there are compound kanji characters. Some characters have multiple meanings. For instance, the　神　(ko) in 神戸　(Kobe) and the 神　 (shin) in 阪神　(Hanshin) are pronounced differently. Oh yeah, and then of course the aforementioned 阪　(han) becomes "saka" in Osaka　大阪。Taihen, desu ne? (Troublesome, isn't it?)

I know about 450 kanji which brings me to about a third grade level here in Japan. I have a tendency to stress a bit when I get a notice with my name (in Roman characters) on it, with a time and date printed on it when I wasn't home, and from a place I cannot discern. There is a phone number on it and a Japanese speaking person on the other end.

I feel particularly helpless in situations like that. I have no control and limited recourse. I could take the notice to someone who reads kanji and speaks fluent English. This is not very common. We do know a few of these at my wife's job, but that is lot more effort than one immediately wants to put out. Knowing that resource is available though, does alleviate the stress. Another option is to take the chance and just call to try to discern where the notice came from.

I did the latter. Finding someone who spoke enough English to shore up for my very limited spoken Japanese was difficult but managable and between the three or four of us, I was able to glean that the notice was from the post office and was related to the other notice that I received. It took a good fifteen minutes or so to figure out the two notices were related. The man said that he'd back to me. Sigh.

Confusing the matter more was the fact that I received three other packages that day after I encountered these notices, two at one time and then a third, an hour later. Were they all tied to that or those notices? Did the guy at the post office call the delivery person en route and have him/her redeliver? I called back but I forgot the guy's name and I got a purely Japanese speaking person who could not or would not help me out. If you've ever lived here, you understand the reality of the latter. Then a little later I received a call explaining that the package in question would be delivered later on that evening. Oh. I went round and round with this person a few times trying to discern if the packages that had been delivered were related to the notices. This wasn't simple because of the language barrier. The lady was thoroughly confused when I told her I received three packages that day ("eeeeh?"). I got off the phone under the impression that all packages had been delivered and everything was squared away. Wrong.
A fourth package arrived around 9:00 PM that night.

I could have just been a little more patient and waited until Thursday to take the 40-minute bike ride to and from the post office to pick it up.