Problems the First Week: Cash Cards and Addresses

Exiting Shibuya Station, you are met with a jungle of
businesses, shopping, cafes, and clubs.

Instead of going down to Nagoya for training, I decided to spend the first week back in Japan up in Tokyo to see my friends, catch the Wadaiko concert and enjoy being in my old haunts.

"And while I'm in the big city with all of this free time," I thought to myself, "I may as well get a few things done."

"Excellent plan, self," I told me. "Let's go to Shibuya and take care of banking and cell phone plans."

A statue of a loyal dog named Hachiko.
According to a famous story, the dog waited for his master
every day in front of Shibuya Station,
even in the years after his master had passed away.

So me, myself, and I went to Shibuya (usually pronounced Shi-BU-YA! by the American visitors, and makes me remember Ron Stoppable) to visit the AU cellphone store and one of the branches of Mitsubishi Bank. First stop is the bank, but instead of going into the actually banky-bank building, I end up at a ATM only building. I tried to withdraw some money using my bank booklet, but while they would tell me how much was in my account, I couldn't access any of it. Oops! Reroute and start again. At the real Mitsubishi, I was directed upstairs by a doorperson (Japan has people who just stand at doors to greet you, but I use them as receptionists, too) and then upstairs again by a security guard (who was so bored that he was acting like a doorperson, so I treated him as a receptionist, too) and then was sent away ever so kindly and apologetically by the doorlady on the 3rd floor. While she was nice enough to point out that I had the right form for a new cash card (the thing keeping me from withdrawing money), I still didn't have my new apartment address from Interac. Without that, I could not proceed with the application. Bummed out, I descended the stairs and passed all of my doorpeople once more.

"That wasn't as productive as I would have hoped," myself signed disappointedly.

"Perhaps not, but it wasn't my fault," I told me. "Let's try our luck at the cell phone store."

Looking back toward the station, underneath the sakura.

Now, before I go further, let me say something my friend Gina would tell me all the time: Japanese people aren't necessarily scared of you or even of English. They are terrified of conjugating English verbs! What does that mean exactly? When out and about in Tokyo town, should I waltz over to a shopkeeper, pedestrian, or shopper, they will probably give the involuntary response of wide-eyed fear.  Have I done anything frightening? Well, perhaps besides waltzing in the city streets, no. But they know that I am not Japanese and, in my case, probably speak that horrible language that their country forces them all to undertake starting in middle school. They hated repetition practice in school, barely did well enough to pass their class before forgetting nearly all of it in college. Save for the wonderful phrases "This is a pen" and "My name is" most Japanese people only use English on their clothing or in some song lyrics. All of the sudden a real Westerner stands before them and "This is a pen" isn't going to be of much help. Luckily, I speak some Japanese (just a skosh), so this moment of fear is brief for my prey. Also, luckily enough, police officers, taxi cab drivers, and cell phone salespeople are so used to being confronted with foreigners that they no longer have the deer in the headlights reaction to us.

CJ and some new friends in front of te 109 Men's
Store with DBZ characters.

The AU store was adjacent to the first ATM Mitsubishi room that I had entered before, so I just went back to that place. Inside, I took a number and waited to be called up. I had a very nice cell phone employee who, even through his face mask (pollen and allergy season are upon us in Japan) spoke very clearly and nicely to me. We chatted for a while about what I was looking for in a phone, about the different data plans they offered, what I liked about my old Softbank phone (another Japanese company; I was sort of switching from AT&T to Verizon, if you'd like to think of it that way), which color case I preferred, some of their special offers, and how I intended on paying for it all. Everything was going smoothly, so I decided to warn him that I had left my cash card in America (maybe?). This was fine, and we were about to start the paperwork until he saw that my alien registration card had a blank space where the address needed to be. Once again, we could not move forward because my company had not told me of my new apartment. I must have made a face because he immediately offered to write out our entire decision process so that when I did get my address, I could just walk into the Shima branch of AU and display this cheat sheet instead of spending another hour talking with their representative. Thank you AU!!

Some cool boys being interviewed. When news and magazine
groups want to have opinions from fashionable teens, Shibuya
is one of the places they go!

Feeling more deflated, I traveled down the street to the next nearest Starbucks (the nearest one is the famous one across from the station and is always crazy full) where I found that they don't take gift cards from America. And that to access their free wifi, you first need to get online and establish a user id. Ugh!! Instead, I had a mango tea smoothie, sat in a comfy chair in the sunlight, and just enjoyed looking outside.

Magic!!

"I haven't lost anything but time," I tried to reassure myself. "And since I started so early, it is only about 2 pm."

"I agree," myself chirped. "Spending the rest of the afternoon wandering around Shibuya would be fine by me."

So me, myself, and I went off in search of more, lighthearted adventures, leaving bank problems and cash card crisises for another day.