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Now, on with the post!

Instant Coffee and Lasting Peace

After my meltdown in Don Quijote, the “playfulness of youth” returned, though it was now heavily filtered through the lens of our current bare-necessities situation. After a brief discussion, we agreed to pull the trigger on buying the electric tea kettle. Since we lacked a place to store liquid coffee creamers, we accepted our fate: we would be an “instant-coffee” household for the remainder of the trip, which is a good thing.

As we stumbled into the beverage aisle, we discovered that instant coffee is a massive deal in Japan. Naturally, the “old” Scott and Joy emerged, and we spent the next several minutes bickering over which specific brand of powder would best facilitate our morning caffeine fix. It felt good—a wholesome, much-needed release valve for the heaviness that had transpired just ten minutes earlier.

Trash Culture

Once the “Great Coffee Debate” was settled, we moved on to the next boss level of Japanese living: the trash problem. In Japan, trash is a culture unto itself. Back in the States, we buy trash bags with about as much thought as we give the nutritional value of a gas-station hot dog. They all look the same; your only real choices are white or black, and whether or not you want drawstrings. A newer entry on the market is the scented ones, which, as far as I’m concerned, are an abomination before both God and man, trying to make our garbage smell like a lilac bush. However, all of that aside, that’s the extent of the intellectual labor necessary to pick up trash bags in the US.

Because of this aspect of American culture, we inherently knew what trash bags look like. So, logically, why would it be different elsewhere? As it turned out, the answer is quite a bit different. We spent what felt like an eternity wandering the home goods aisles, looking for anything that resembled a trash bag like lost souls navigating the halls of Purgatory.

Five aisles. Nothing. We doubled back and triple-checked, eventually migrating to an entirely different part of the store, assuming the store’s logic was simply incompatible with our own. After thirty minutes of a rewardless scavenger hunt because I refused to ask for help, Joy broke down and finally asked a clerk, who led us right back to where we started.

The reality was that the bags had been right in front of us the whole time. I sighed. Joy gloated. We both bowed to the clerk, thanking her for her help. Then we rolled our eyes and laughed. We missed them because we couldn’t fathom how intricate the home trash system actually is in Japan. We knew public trash cans were rare, but we assumed trash bags themselves were a universal constant instead of a color-coded hierarchy in which you organize all your life’s trash. Everything in your life, at some point, must be categorized and sorted into one of these buckets. This forced us to start thinking about trash as a lifestyle rather than a chore.

For a moment, Joy and I started to have that intellectual debate, but immediately stopped when she saw my mind whirring with the logistics of waste management. We decided that trying to solve this logic puzzle while operating at a total mental deficit was a bad choice. Still, we are who we are, and ended up having a quick discussion on bag quantity and volume, like they were survival manuals for a post-apocalyptic world we didn’t yet understand.

The full complexity of that system—including the dreaded trash calendar—is a story for another day.

In the end, our haul was modest. We left with some mugs, the kettle, several kinds of instant coffee, our confusing trash bags, a few simple snacks, some bath towels, and laundry detergent. We both agreed that we might be living like savages for the time being, but it was worth it just to finally be sleeping in our own house. That felt good.

When we tried to leave the store, we got turned around and wandered like two zombies in desperate need of brains before finally finding an exit. It wasn’t the door we came in, but we successfully achieved our goal of exiting the building. By this time, the sun had set; clearly, we had been in Don Quijote longer than expected.

A Win is a Win

We headed back to the hotel with our haul. When we arrived, the temptation to just stay put was too great. After a full day at the house, lunch, and the shopping excursion, we decided we were too exhausted to pack everything up, check out, call a cab, and go through the nightly rituals that we have for ensuring sleep, and just stayed at the hotel, one last night. We were still working through jet lag, and our house, after all, wasn’t going anywhere.

As I looked over at my partner, who was nodding off while scrolling on her phone, I realized just how profound our growth was today. We started as two adults who couldn’t manage the level one task of securing napkins for a basic lunch, then hit the literal and emotional walls of a retail labyrinth, proving that we can indeed foment chaos like stressed-out chihuahuas.

But more importantly, we proved that we could find our way back from the verbal vomit of a meltdown to the quiet reset of an apology. Tomorrow we’ll move into the house, figure out the trash schedule, and probably argue about coffee again. But the grace given to me in Don Quijote was the best gift I could have received. It was the band-aid applied to my abrasions and a reminder that as long as we show up daily and actively participate, we’ll eventually figure out how to build this life along the north coast of Japan. In the end, we accomplished our overarching goal of being adults for the day, which looked different than what we envisioned, but a win is a win, and tomorrow is the start of a new chapter.