Land of Convenience – 3

Suzuki and Mikiyo are both in their late 60’s.  They share the job of building superintendent at our modest, ageing apartment block.  Both had been friendly to us, saying hello and goodbye as we went in and out.  We needed to park our new (to us) second hand bikes in the building’s modest undercover parking area, and they were the guys to ask.  Seemed simple enough, I just needed to get past the language barrier, Susan having kindly allowed me to take on this task.  I spent an hour cobbling together a few sentences to make myself understood and set off down the lift to find the superintendent of the day.  I found Mikiyo sweeping leaves at the front of the building and, after opening the conversation with what was hopefully an observation about the weather, I launched into my possibly unintelligible request – a handful of nouns, demonstratives and verbs that made perfect sense on google translate.

Mikiyo looked a little taken aback at my attempt and took a few seconds to respond.  He spoke softly but confidently with a lovely tenor voice and restated my request in English to see if that’s what I was actually talking about.  Yes, I wanted to park 2 bikes in the car park.  He led me to the office and gave me 2, no it was 3, forms (all in Japanese) that needed to be filled out by way of application.  Very kindly, he circled the parts I needed to fill out and wrote in English the type of information needed – name here, address here etc.  He also very kindly pointed out that the cost was to be Y500 per month, per bike and one of the forms was for a monthly banking transfer.  Our apartment is located in one of the central business and shopping districts so parking is at a premium, even for bicycles.  Mikiyo couldn’t help but look slightly amused as he explained while I nodded and kept saying ‘yes, yes’.  I’m sure my eyes started to cross unconsciously.  I retreated to number 709, papers in hand, ready for the challenge.  It wouldn’t be too hard to fill them out in Japanese.  An hour later Mikiyo rang the doorbell.  He was sorry but he had forgotten to give me another form that needed to be filled out, also kindly marked with English to show what information needed to go where.  The desperate thought crossed my mind – I should just ask him if he could fill it out for me – , but he hadn’t offered and really, it’s only filling out a few forms.

Two days later ….. I triumphantly carried my prize paperwork down the lift to seek out the superintendent of the day.  I was pretty happy with the katakana for our names and the hiragana was probably passable, but I was worried about my attempt at kanji.  I found Suzuki in the office and lifted up my fistful of papers to get his attention.  Unlike Mikiyo, Suzuki doesn’t speak a word of English.  Suzuki has a real sense of humour about him and a very friendly disposition.  He knew what the paperwork was for of course as Mikiyo had told him about it, and they had both been watching us wrestle our bikes in and out of the tangle of bikes parked on the pavement in the street at the front of the building over the past few days.  Suzuki started looking over my handiwork, reading partially aloud with an occasional sharp, clear “Hai” accompanied by glances in my direction.  He actually looked a little impressed initially.  A few minutes in he stopped to put on a face mask with a ‘whoops, I forgot’ gesture.  I wasn’t wearing one either.  We were probably a little too relaxed given the circumstances. 

It all seemed to get a pass mark until the banking form, the one I thought had needed some kanji.  He stopped and looked at me, said something in Japanese.  “What the hell is this”, would be my guess.  I looked at my pathetic scribble and dropped my head onto the bench saying, “sumimasen, kanji, sumimasen”, in between bursts of laughter.  He thought it was pretty damn funny but apparently legible enough.  Wait though, what is this where the Hanko stamp should be?  It took a few minutes and the translate app to explain that the bank had accepted my hand written initials as my official mark, this having been organised by our employer, and that therefor they need to be on the form, not a stamp – which I don’t have anyway.  It’s still very unusual in Japan for handwritten signatures to be accepted on documents.  I read recently that the national government were considering changes to the law to allow various legal documents to be processed without the necessity of them being stamped with Hanko.  A lot of people were still traveling in to work during the covid-19 state of emergency mainly due to this particular requirement.

His skepticism eventually gave way and with great enthusiasm Suzuki led me to the car park and showed me 2 spaces, 16 and 17, indicating that we could park the bikes there immediately.  It was my turn to be surprised.  He didn’t have to submit the paperwork first?  It didn’t need to go through several layers of bureaucracy over several days before being returned by post with a stamp of approval?  I went to get Susan to tell her the news and move our bikes.  When we came down Suzuki could see how happy we were and came out to supervise the transition and place the official building parking stickers on our bikes.  He genuinely appeared as happy as we were with the arrangement.  It never ceases to amaze me, the extent to which it’s possible to get a real sense of connection between people who have no common language other than a shared humanity.

Ahh, what a feeling of equanimity and, indeed, achievement.  Now we just have to sort out the compulsory third party insurance.