Living in Japan Series - The Basics

Happy Monday ladies! Hope everyone had a great weekend. As I mentioned last week I will be doing a living in Japan series since I lived there, actually was born there and lived there until I was three and then my family moved back at the start of my freshman year of high school. I spent all four years of high school there and my family still lived there while I was in college until the end of my junior year. Growing up, my siblings always teased me that we wouldn't go back to the country of my birth, lo and behold the joke was on them! We lived in Japan because my dad was in the Air Force, served 24 years. Specifically we live in Tokyo, not on a military base outside of Tokyo but we lived in the heart of Tokyo. 

I think the best way to talk about Japan is through my favorite things, the food, the customs, the seasons and the people. I hope that I do you readers justice in sharing my life when I lived in Japan and helping you to understand another culture and people better!

I have great memories of living in Japan, it was such a unique experience and I feel it has helped shaped some of the person I am today because of those experiences.

 I'll start with the basics, where we lived. Our address in Japan was written like this
3-21-21- Kamimeguro, Nakameguro
Tokyo, Japan 153-0051
 The train station that we lived closest was was called Nakameguro and the word for train station in Japanese is eki so I lived near Nakameguro-eki. This is how it is written in Japanese.

中目黒

When you told your friends where you lived, you usually referred to the train station nearest you.
We did have a car but we rarely used it when driving in Tokyo, public transportation whether it be the subway, train or bus was always on time, always convenient and easier than driving. Learning to take the public transportation and travel by myself whenever I wanted helped instill in me independence and not having a car to rely to go everywhere helped me to value public transportation. Here is a map of the Tokyo subway system, and let me remind you this is the subway system only, it doesn't include the above ground train system.

See that green circle in the middle of the map? That circle represents the Imperial Palace, where the current Emperor and his family live. While the Emperor is more of a title now than an actual ruler, he definitely has not lost the importance of the position as a whole.

Our house in Japan was considered Western style, and that usually mean anything non-Japanese but not always American. So an American house we had a washer and dryer in our house, typical Japanese homes only have a washer and hang their clothes out to dry. Our Western house had carpet, linoleum and other Western amenities like a full shower and bathroom. The usual flooring in a Japanese house is tatami mats, which is rice straw tightly sown together. In the US, we asked how the square footage is in a house, in Japan, you ask how many tatami mats does each room have, that is how someone knows how large the space is. This is what a Japanese room looks like with tatami mats.

The typical Japanese house has one room that is used as the living and dining room.
Our house separated these two rooms. My family was blessed to find a house that allowed myself, each of my two siblings and of course my parents our own bedrooms. Usual Japanese homes do not have that many bedrooms. We rented our house from a Japanese older lady whose house was right next door to ours. It was a quiet neighborhood and near an elementary school. Japan as you may have heard it a very safe country, and I had no problem walking from the train station to my house which was about 10 minutes by myself at night.
Sometimes the noise we would hear would be the roasted sweet potato seller who roasted the sweet potatoes or called yakimo from the back of his truck and there was the same song always played alerting everyone to come buy his sweet potatoes. Here is a youtube video of the song played from the truck.



We also would sometimes hear the tofu man blowing on his torn and he was selling tofu from the back of his motorcycle.

The school that I went to was an international school, was girls-only and had grade K-12 and had only 650 students. My graduating class was only 24 girl and we came from all over. Most of the girls were part Japanese, part American, full Japanese, from other Asian countries or Europe. Overall, there was only myself and one other girl who was just American. The name of my school was Seisen International School and was run by an order of Spanish nuns. Most of the international schools in Tokyo were religiously-based. Here is a photo of my school.

I'll leave you with a few photos of Nakameguro the area I lived in. These are not my photos, any photos of Japan I have are at my parents house so I found all of these online. Hope you enjoyed today, come back tomorrow and I'll be talking about Japanese food, yum! Also please feel free to ask any questions you may have, I would love to do a post comprised entirely by your questions about Japan so ask away!

This is the actual Nakameguro station

There was a river running through the area Nakameguro and a lot of people would walk along the river which had a lot of trees

The largest street in the Nakameguro area called Yamate-dori, Dori means street in Japanese.
Yes that BR in the photo stands for Baskin-Robbins :-)

Another view of Yamate-dori