Section 50 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 July 05 Saturday.
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A couple of weeks back there was a crisis meeting on the paved area outside our front door - four or five of our neighbors standing in the rain, holding umbrellas, talking earnestly about the catastrophe which had befallen us. This meeting went on and on and on, and, as it lengthened, I grew increasingly uneasy.

The reason for my unease was that where I come from - New Zealand - you would never keep your neighbors standing outside in the rain. You would automatically invite them in, and they would automatically accept the invitation. However, in Japan, there is really no tradition of inviting people into your house.

At little later, however - last Saturday, to be exact, at eleven in the morning - the neighbors did enter our house. This was a little awkward in that we ended up with seven people in the living room, and we did not have seven pairs of guest slippers.

The convention in Japan is that you shed your outdoor shoes in the genkan, the foyer, and then step up into the house proper. (This almost always involves taking a literal step upwards, although, these days, some apartments are build without such a step. They generally still have something in the way of a foyer, though.)

Our visitors, then, entered in their stockinged feet, and a council of war proceeded. This lasted an hour and a half, and I became increasingly anxious, this time because we had not offered our visitors anything to drink. They didn't seem to think this odd. (But then, given that people don't usually go into each other's homes, I don't think there is a set convention on this.)

Today, Saturday the 5th, everyone gathered in our house for a second council of war, and this time the meeting went on longer than before. My anxieties mounted. Finally, I took the initiative and put the kettle on to boil, then asked who would like tea or coffee. Everyone accepted one or the other. It is now very hot, and we are not using the air conditioning.

Today's council of war concluded after two and a half hours of discussion. I didn't get to say very much during that time, except to ask for clarification at a couple of points. My contribution was to print out drafts of an agreement which one of the neighbors produced on his computer.

The cause of this crisis was gomi - that is, garbage.

For the last twenty years or so, there has been a vacant plot of land in the neighborhood, and a great many people have been putting out their garbage for collection at the roadside by that plot of land. Recently, however, the land has been sold, and new houses are being constructed on the land.

Someone talked to someone else, and an edict came down through the chônaikai system - the neighborhood committee system.

Whether it was proper and correct for an edict to be produced by the system in this manner (without any of us being consulted) is a question which I will not attempt to answer. However, that is what happened, and what provoked the initial crisis meeting, the gathering of umbrellas outside the front door.

Under the terms of the edict, the households which had been depositing their garbage outside the vacant plot of land were divided into three groups. Each group was told it must decide on its own garbage collection point.

Initially, I thought it highly unlikely that we would be able to resolve this situation in a satisfactory manner. Wherever the garbage collection point was placed, someone would suffer. There was no equitable place to put it.

One solution would have been for each household to put out its garbage separately. However, while this is apparently possible under the rules which govern affairs in Tokyo, it is not possible in Yokohama. Apparently Yokohama city insists that people put out their garbage collectively (which is in fact, I believe, the Japanese norm.)

Despite my pessimism, an equitable solution was, in fact, arrived at. We agreed with our neighbors that each household would take turns at hosting the garbage collection point for one year at a time, and today's meeting was to iron out the fine points of this agreement and to produce a document to solemnize it.

This matter is not quite as trivial as it would seem, since garbage placed out for collection in this part of Yokohama tends to come under attack from cats and crows. The crows are the greater problem, since they are noisy. It is not pleasant to be woken at first light (which, in summer, is round about 4:30 in the morning) by a raucous bunch of crows which are busy tearing apart the garbage and strewing it across the road.

Anyway, this small exercise in civilization-building meant that we really got properly introduced to our neighbors, of whom we have seen little since they and we moved into the area (at about the same time) a little over a year ago.

The whole business once again reminded me that my Japanese is far weaker than it should be. I had difficulty following the conversation, even though I knew the topic and most of the core vocabulary. The only part that was easy to follow, in fact, was some chit-chat about cockroaches which came after the conclusion of the negotiations.

None of our houses are infested with cockroaches, but we do, from time to time, have occasional fully-grown cockroaches intruding into our dwellings. One of the neighbors observed a fairly large cockroach being pounced upon and murdered by an even larger spider. With some dismay, I asked, in Japanese, "Do we have large spiders in this neighborhood?" And the answer came back, "Yes."

(I didn't really want to hear that. Mind you, I don't think we're talking about spiders the size of dogs. Just spiders which are significantly larger than a fingernail. Maybe, in the worst case, palm-of-your-hand spiders.)

There was also some talk about the crows, which apparently have recently been attacking small children in the neighborhood. These crows are extremely large, intelligent, confident birds which entirely fail to understand three important things. The three important things are:-

(a) Birds do not attack human beings, except in Hitchcock movies, and real life is not a Hitchcock movie;

(b) The laws of nature state that birds do not attack cats - it's supposed to be the other way round; and

(c) Similarly, dogs are supposed to chase birds, not vice versa.

At this stage I planned to wrap up this account by adding in some of the new Japanese vocabulary I have learnt, but I find that my energy levels are low. It is, after all, Saturday, which (theoretically) is a day of rest. On top of that, the temperature has climbed above thirty degrees Centrigade. Because of the heat, my computer started misbehaving, and to write this account I had to haul a kind of frozen pillow out of the fridge and park it under the computer.

The bad news is that we may have power cuts this summer in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, as one of the power companies has been forced to shut down a bunch of nuclear power stations for maintenance. Consequently, everyone is (or is supposed to be) in "let's save electric power" mode.