Today’s post skips ahead a bit — from the little shop where we had our tea and cake straight to breakfast the next morning. It’s not that nothing happened in between; it’s that what did happen was mostly us avoiding being responsible adults for the rest of the day, which includes activities not appropriate for you, my audience. So thank you for your flexibility as we jump forward to breakfast at the hotel — the first morning that felt like we were shifting from tourists to people trying to build a life in a new country on a new continent.

Responsible Adults

Joy and I started the morning with breakfast and an agreement that today, we were going to be responsible adults. Before we could do anything fun, we had to get our stuff up to the house and do some shopping. For the moment, though, I sat there enjoying an omelet and some grilled salmon while Joy sipped her coffee, poking at her potatoes and sausages while scrolling silently on her phone.

“Ah, ha,” she said. “I know what we’re going to do.”

In every relationship, there is one who does the planning and one who packs the car. My partner has taken on the planning role in ours, and frankly, it’s for the best. Otherwise, she’d be looking at a lot of airplanes and Star Trek conventions in her future. Besides, I don’t mind packing the car. It’s the easier of the two.

“Oh?”

“Yes, we’re going to go up to the house and take inventory of our stuff, put everything away, figure out what we need, and then go shopping at Don Quijote.”

“Don Quijote?” I ask.

“Sí, Don Quijote.”

“What is Don Quijote?”

“It’s a store that all the TikTok girlies say is all the rage in Japan, and I happen to know exactly where our local one is!” She put her phone down triumphantly and smiled.

A small wave of existential dread washed over me. “What kind of store is Don Quijote?”

“I don’t know, but we should go find out.”

“Just because TikTok says we should do something doesn’t mean we should do it.”

Joy gave me the look. We were doing the TikTok thing.

“Alright, I’m game. Let’s get everything settled, and then we’ll go to Don Quijote.”

Joy picked her phone back up and went back to her breakfast. I took a bite of omelet and watched the sun move across the harbor. It was a bright morning, promising to segue into a brighter afternoon — and probably a lot warmer than either of us had anticipated and packed for. That tracks.

Fun Fact: Hokkaido is at the same latitude as Oregon back in the States.

As Pacific Northwesterners, it’s very familiar to us, and we know what to expect. At certain times of the year, the sun is a gift straight from the gods, shining down from the heavens, wrapping us in the warmth of its divinity. Other times, it is a floating death orb that makes it clear why vampires prefer prowling at night. I squinted out the window. Clearly, the death orb was in one of its murder moods today.

As we continued eating and going over the day ahead, the sun kept climbing, reminding me of another issue I had forgotten to plan for.

“Ugh, I need to go to the store and buy some sunscreen. I didn’t pack any before we left.”

Joy put her phone down. “That’s okay. We should probably do a little grocery shopping too. Just to have some things on hand.”

The Great Grocery Debate

I stared at her. “We don’t have a refrigerator, much less a cooktop. I don’t see grocery shopping anywhere near our to‑do list today.”

Joy gave me the look. “Well, we need food, and I need to eat, so we have to go grocery shopping.”

For the record, Joy had bariatric surgery a few years back. The perk is weight loss. The downside is that you must eat several small meals throughout the day. Back in the States, we don’t think much about it — she handles it with grace — but it means we have to think ahead in ways most people never consider. And right now, that’s tricky.

Still, it’s manageable. It just doesn’t mean a full grocery run is in our best interests, no matter how legit the need might be. There has to be a third way between buying food we can’t cook or store and stopping what we’re doing every few hours to find a place to eat. Besides, our suitcases are already overflowing; we don’t have room for anything else. As my grandfather would say, “We successfully packed 10 pounds of shit in a five‑pound box.” He would’ve been proud of our commitment, if not our judgment.

“Hmmm…” I muttered. “Is there a 7‑11 or anything near the house? I think I remember seeing a Seicomart on our last taxi ride up.”

“I think so. Why?” Joy asked.

“Well, instead of grocery shopping for food we can’t cook or store, let’s just pick up lunch food and snacks to get us through until we can make more permanent decisions.”

“We can always get an air fryer,” Joy said.

“That doesn’t really help us right now.”

Joy sighed. “It would be really nice to have a good sit‑down meal in our own house after all this restaurant food. I feel like that’s important.”

It was my turn to sigh. “And sit on what?”

“The floor.”

“The floor?”

“Yes. The floor. Everyone else in Japan eats on the floor, so maybe it’s time for us to step into and embrace being Japanese.”

I saw what she was doing. This was exactly the sort of argument I would make. She was heading me off at the pass, and now I had to go on the defensive.

“That’s all well and good, but they still have tables, and we don’t even have that. Besides, you have a bum knee. If you’re adamant about it, though, Uber Eats exists here; maybe we can go that route until we get things sorted. After all, we can get utensils with our meals that way — something else we don’t currently possess.”

Joy glared. “Do we even know if Uber Eats delivers up to our house?”

Time to roll the dice. If I were right, I’d be a genius. If I was wrong, she would destroy me later.

“Of course they do. We’re walking distance from two schools,” I said. Not that that means anything, but it sounded good.

Joy sighed. “Fine, but we’re still getting an air fryer.”

“Fine.”

Ten Pounds of Life in a Five-Pound Box

With that, we finished breakfast and headed back up to the hotel room to finish packing our suitcases. Before we even left the States, we decided to pack three suitcases: two for all the stuff we were going to leave behind in Japan, and the third to bring back souvenirs, trinkets, knick‑knacks, doodads, gadgets, gizmos, and anything else we decided we couldn’t live without or wanted to gift to folks when we returned to America. We had packed with the confidence of people who believed they understood their future needs. In hindsight, that was adorable.

Since we had one more night at the hotel, we decided to leave one outfit apiece while we took our luggage up to the house. Because again, that felt like something responsible adults would do. The reality, though, was that our suitcases simply couldn’t tolerate anything else being stuffed into them without forcing a hole to open up in the space-time continuum.

We made our way downstairs to the taxi pick‑up area outside the hotel and waited. Sure enough, the sun was in full‑on murder mode at this point. Still, it was early enough that the warmth of its rays felt good against the chilly autumn air. We stood in silence, enjoying the morning. A train went by on its way to the next stop up. It’s a peaceful existence — one that doesn’t feel as anxiety‑fueled as life back in the United States. In these simple moments of watching life carry on, our central nervous systems finally began to come down from their heightened states of fight or flight.

The cab pulled up, and the driver hopped out. We bowed and thanked him. He looked at us and our luggage and smiled. Whatever was going through his mind was hard to read — the Japanese are very good at keeping their emotions to themselves in public — but I could see a small crack in his stoic expression, and it was one of exasperation. He didn’t know our story, but he knew these bags were going to be heavy. I offered to help, but he waved me away. Joy and I got in the car as he wrestled with stowing 150 pounds of luggage into the trunk.

Finally, the trunk lid slammed shut, and the driver got in. He looked at where he was taking us, incredulously. He looked back at us, pointed at his map, and said, “Mogami.” It was a statement, a question, and what felt like an accusation all rolled into one word.

“Hai, Mogami,” Joy answered. We both smiled. The driver harrumphed.

This time, he gave us a look that said, Okay, if you say so. He put the car in gear, and off to our little house in Mogami we went.

As the cab approached our house, we saw Kitajima‑San outside working in his garden. He was watching the cab and trying to figure out who was in it. We excitedly waved, and he instantly recognized us, smiled, and enthusiastically waved back. We had genuinely made his morning, and that felt nice. We got out of the cab, the driver pulled our bags out of the boot, bowed, and thanked us. We bowed and thanked him. He backed out and headed down the hill. We waved at Kitajima‑San again, exchanged a few polite words through the universal Google machine app, and then went inside the house to get started.

Settling In… Sort Of

There’s something exciting about walking into a new space and picking out where you want your stuff to reside. We pulled our suitcases into the house and immediately dove into our own individual plans of attack. Another layer I haven’t mentioned up to this point is that Joy has a severely mentally disabled sister, and part of the deal is that any place we make our own must include space for her. One of our suitcases was dedicated to things her sister would need in Japan. Joy’s first order of business was tackling that, and we both settled her sister’s space very early in figuring out the house.

Meanwhile, I lugged our bursting suitcases upstairs to the room we had picked for ourselves and started putting our things away. Since most of this wasn’t coming back to the States, it felt good for our stuff to finally have a home here in Japan. It helped mark the house as ours and make it feel like home, even if the house remained mostly empty at this point. We had a long way to go toward making the space livable, but this was a starting point; it felt good.

Lunch and Other Musings

It hadn’t seemed like that much time had passed since we left the hotel, but somehow three hours had gone by in the blink of an eye. Joy shouted up the stairs that she was ready for lunch. I looked down at my watch and agreed. This was a good stopping point. So, I went downstairs, met Joy by the front door, and then we walked down the street and down the hill toward the Seicomart below the schools. The air smelled faintly of sea salt and cleanliness— the kind of scent that settles into your clothes and makes you feel like you belong somewhere. It was a nice little walk through our neighborhood, and it felt exactly like the kind of activity we pictured when we first sat down to imagine what our rich life looked like.

We went into the store, said hello to the clerks, and picked out our lunches and a few snacks for later. The closest thing we have back home to describe what it’s like to shop at places like Seicomart and 7‑11s across Asia is a Midwestern carry‑out. There’s a bit of groceries you can get here, a bit of medicine, a little pet food, some hot meals, some microwavable meals, drinks, lottery tickets, and some bill‑paying services. They’re all little microcosms of daily life contained in a bite‑sized store that supports the local neighborhood and neighborhood gossip. They are a staple of life — the underbelly of all neighborhoods across Asia.

The Delivery

We got our lunch, checked out, and went back home, ready to dig into our finds. If the universe can be categorized as anything, it is a practical joker — a chaotic one, but a practical joker, nonetheless. Our doorbell rang. Who could that be? Joy had a mouthful of food and asked me to answer the door. Without thinking, I set my lunch on the kitchen sink and walked to the front door to see a very confused delivery driver. Not confused in a disoriented way, but confused in a way that suggested he had just lost a bet as a guy named Joy answered the door.

I smiled; he pointed at the name and address on the label. It was my partner’s name in full. “Hai,” I said. He smiled; I signed for the delivery. He bowed, got back in his truck, and headed down the hill.

I walked into the house with a box that was slightly awkward and heavier than it looked. I couldn’t guess what was in it. But because it had Joy’s name on it, it could literally be anything.

“Delivery for Ms. Joy,” I said in my best Don Adams voice. (I’m old, so I’m going to embrace that for a moment. Don’t judge me.)

Joy held up her hands to show me they were full of food and said, “Go ahead and open it and tell me what it is.”

I grumbled and started opening the box. I was equal parts irritated and amused. Irritated because one of my pet peeves is opening other people’s mail and packages — it feels like an intrusion on personal space, like flipping through someone’s diary. At the same time, I was amused because who knew what could be in the box. I affectionately call my partner the Harbinger of Chaos; I can’t even guess what will be in any package addressed to her. It might be something beneficial for the house, or it could be an accessory to murder later on. It really depends on her frame of mind at the moment she ordered it.

The moment of truth arrived as I peeled off the last bit of packing tape and opened the box. I chuckled as I lifted out the contents.

“Behold,” I proclaimed. “Air mattresses.”

This unexpected delivery just changed the course of the entire day and altered the remaining time we had left in Japan. It meant that we would be spending the first night in our house tonight, and that felt really good. It also meant that I had to resign myself to another simple fact: we were going to need an air fryer.