It was raining again today, and when I woke in the morning, I discovered that my period had arrived.
I had got up early for breakfast, but I was simply too exhausted. Once I had eaten, my strength gave out and I collapsed back onto the bed, half awake and half asleep, without even enough energy to read a little Japanese.
Fortunately, the orientation for the new term was in the afternoon, so I still had some time to rest. I drifted in and out until nearly noon, then noticed that the parcel whose delivery had failed yesterday was now marked as delivered. I went downstairs to inspect the parcel lockers, but there was nothing there.
I turned detective and followed every scrap of evidence I could find. Eventually I worked out that the dormitory manager must have misread the room number, taking the 2 for a 5, and had therefore registered the parcel under a different recipient’s name.
I took photographs, drew lines across them, made screenshots and relied on AI translation, all to prove that the parcel was mine.
There really were quite a few moments when I was afraid that my parcel had simply vanished into thin air and been swallowed up. I had already been put through this once before by Yamato Transport, so I carried a preconceived dread of the black-cat courier with me.
I needed to replenish my supply of period products, so I set out early. Rather than buying them from one of the drugstores lining every street, I wandered into a drugstore in the underground shopping arcade of a department store just outside the subway station and bought sanitary pads there.
Perhaps it was because this was not one of the cheaper drugstores, but I noticed that period products were rather expensive. If those were the ordinary prices, then they really would place a certain financial burden on women.
Once I had bought what I needed, I meandered over to the ISI Japanese Language School in Shinsaibashi.
The school’s impressive street-facing windows were visible from the main road. The floor was piled with textbooks, perhaps because a new shipment had just arrived, and numerous members of staff were busy carrying and sorting them.
To operate a school in a prime location like Shinsaibashi Station made me wonder whether a large part of the tuition we paid was being spent on the rent for that handsome frontage.
If all that money went into appearances, then the staff and teachers could not be paid very much; and if the staff and teachers were not paid well enough, it was easy to foresee the effect on the quality of the teaching.
ISI uses Microsoft Teams.
Personally, I find Teams both harder to use and far less intuitive than Google. Sure enough, during the orientation, the students had to sign in to no fewer than three systems that did not connect with one another.
One system was where students were supposed to upload their registration information. I searched for ages and could not find the registration page the school kept referring to. Halfway through the demonstration, the school itself remembered that the system had changed and that the new registration page now sat on a different Teams page.
Next, we had to use the username and password issued by the school to sign in to our Microsoft Teams accounts. Once inside Microsoft Teams, we then had to sign in yet again to something resembling a campus portal in order to read school announcements.
One system after another reminded me of graduate school in Shanghai, where the school likewise had an entire succession of systems that were not integrated at all. But speaking of poor integration, the German university where I did my MBA had systems that were every bit as disconnected.
I could not help wondering whether a lack of integration was simply a chronic ailment of educational institutions.
Yet ISI is only a private language school, not a school in the formal statutory sense, and its students therefore cannot buy student commuter passes.
Its status is not equivalent to that of a state-recognized school, yet its administrative structure is moving ever closer to that of a conventional academic institution? What sort of logic is that? Or are there standard procedures and auditing requirements in education that force different functions to be separated into multiple systems?
The orientation sessions were divided by country. The German group I was placed in was quite large, with at least twenty students, most of them men. Listening in on their casual conversations, I gathered that quite a few were young people in Japan on working-holiday visas.
The classroom was saturated with the body odour of young men. No wonder Westerners are so often accused of having strong body odour: it really was quite strong. I had never noticed it before. I do not know whether my nose had become more sensitive, or whether I had simply rarely shared such a confined space with so many young men in the past; I had usually been in places where there were more women.
Most girls still smell rather lovely.
What surprised me most were four or five young German men whose builds made me think: surely these are American bodies. In more than twenty years in Germany, I had almost never seen men built like that. Why had so many of them converged in Japan all at once?
I know it is rude to pass judgment on other people’s bodies, and these were only thoughts kept to myself. I was simply… unable to stop wondering what sort of Germans Japan attracts.
There I was, a conspicuous middle-aged woman with an Asian face among a crowd of young Westerners, and throughout the session no one wanted, or dared, to speak to me.
I only hope that when regular classes begin, placement by level will not also be divided by nationality. I really do not want to learn kanji in the same class as a group of people who do not know any Chinese characters.
After the orientation ended, I hurried back to the dormitory for an online meeting.
As soon as that meeting was over, I rushed off again, this time to Umeda for a networking party.
I felt so terribly busy, and having my period made me so tired. I will leave my thoughts on the online meeting and the networking party for another day.
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