Takarazuka and Environs

It has been a little while since I wrote anything down, but that has been because I’ve been more than a little busy, though not always in the way that I would prefer. After about 4 hours of driving around from one place to the next I found an apartment that I liked a great deal on Saturday the 2nd. Unfortunately, in order to rent an apartment one needs to pony up the cash for the security deposit, first month’s rent and a variety of other fees. This meant that until I had about 200,000 JPY in-hand I could not move in. This in and of itself is not a huge problem, it only becomes complicated when you don’t have a Japanese bank account to wire money into, and that without a Foreigner Registration Card you cannot open a bank account. It was very lucky indeed, then, that my contact at the school had offered to work some magic for me and set up a provisional account so that I could receive enough money to cover the apartment and tuition until such time as I could open an account of my own. After apartment hunting I decided to send off an email update from the internet connection in the hotel’s lobby, only to find it currently in-use. I waited for a little while, went out for some dinner, came back and the same guy was still there, hunched over the public computer. Frustrated, I asked the front desk for directions to an internet café, which I actually managed to find only to be turned away because, you guessed it! No Foreigner Registration card. I cannot for the life of me understand why I should need proof that I’m a legal foreign resident in order to USE THE INTERNET, but what could I do? I trudged back to the hotel, where I used my best assertive polite language to scare away the little man who had been monopolizing the internet connection for the last several hours.
A list of things that one cannot do without a Foreigner Registration Card (non-exhaustive):

-Open a bank account

-Buy a cell phone

-Use an internet cafe
My good friend J was going to be in Takarazuka on Sunday and Monday, so I tried on Sunday morning to figure out if I was supposed to do anything. Since the school was closed I just sent an email to my contact that I would be available on J’s phone and headed for the Mister Donuts (abbreviated “MisuDo”) in Takarazuka City. I just missed her and so waited on the Hana no Michi until she was done with her fan club activities, pretending not to hear the people talking about me while watching the sakura blossoms blow in the wind. We went back to MisuDo and sampled their new line of fruit and vegetable-flavoured donuts (I had pumpkin, she had apple and mixed berry) with cups of coffee. I was *very* excited to learn that if you eat in the store at MisuDo they will refill your coffee for free. Very few things in Japan have free refills, and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten a free refill on a café au lait. By now more than a little wired we walked around a bit and then headed for the big shopping mall in Nishinomiya Gardens. It was very nice with a pretty good food court where we both got fried rice with steak and a glass of ginger soda. Very tasty. We walked and walked and walked some more before heading back to Takarazuka, where we had dinner at Mai, my favourite okonomiyaki place. Afterwards we engaged in the fan ritual know as Demachi. Because J’s club is small and very friendly I was able to tag along. Had everything gone through according to plan we would have waited in Lotteria (a fast food restaurant) until we received a call that the actress was about to leave the theatre for the day, at which point we would have run back to the theatre, lined up, and then seen the actress off, handing her letters of encouragement and maybe exchanging a few words. Sadly, this was not to be. We stayed in Lotteria until it closed, at which point we huddled in a little enclosure near some vending machines. We moved from there into a line near the stage doors, where we waited until they turned off the lights –the theatre staff’s way of telling the fans that it’s time to go home. Demachi cancelled J and I trudged back to the hotel, exhausted and chilled through by the persistent wind that had lashed us all day.

Some abbreviations:

-McDonald’s = Mac (Eastern Japan), MacuDo (Western Japan)

-Mister Donuts =MisuDo

-First Kitchen = FaKin (say it 5 times fast and you’ll see why I find it the funniest one)

-Family Mart = FaaMaa