The trend in modern sexually-repressed conservative america these days, is to brainwash teenagers into proudly pledging abstinence, vowing to preserve their precious virginity for that special day where they’ll tie the knot… or get invited by the priest to join one of his exclusive, altar-boys-only, mass after-party…

In effect, promising to keep doing what they’d be doing anyway. That is: not getting any, for the entire duration of their ungrateful puberty phase.

After all, they are only following official government policy regarding “abstinence as the only viable way to prevent STDs“.

Well the bad news for the proud virgins is that, on top of not getting laid, they do catch sexually-transmitted diseases, as shown by a recent study of the sex lives of 12,000 US adolescents .

How can you catch an STD while — allegedly — not having sex?

Well, that’s the miracle of statistics (and hypocritical bigotry):

The data was gathered from young people aged 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later.

According to the study, the STD rates were:

Whites who pledged virginity 2.8% – did not 3.5%

Blacks: pledgers 18.1% – non-pledgers 20.3%

Asians: pledgers 10.5% – non-pledgers 5.6%

Hispanics: pledgers 6.7% – non-pledgers 8.6%

The study’s authors say that from a statistical point of view, the rates are the same for both groups.

The explanation for these numbers does not take a genius or a statistician to figure out:

A good number of those teenager who had hastily claimed they’d never consider doing such icky sticky things, must have quickly changed their mind, once the acne wore out and they found out they actually could get a date… And when it got there, I guess it was too late to consider trading Sunday School for Sex-Ed…

Hence proving once more what most experts have been saying all along: shunning sex-ed in favor of abstinence campaigns is not only gonna produce more morbidly stuck-up conservative morons, it will also help spreading AIDS and other STDs.

Because my last entry on Japan might have sounded overly negative, and also because the tone of the last few weeks is dangerously edging toward serious and mature stuff, here is something to bring back the balance on both counts.

Although on some level, this might read as yet another episode of Wretchedly Altered Dave’s Comical Adventures in Magic Tokyo, it is also a heartwarming testimony to a people’s confounding sense of honesty underlined by the epic struggle of a man with the evil power of pharmaceutical-grade narcoleptics. A modern tale of hope and pride, if you will.
This is what I will be solemnly citing in answer to the usual insipid inquiry regarding my inspirations for coming to this country. Of course, I couldn’t have cared less about this when I bought my plane ticket, but I sure ain’t telling people the truth about coming here to complete my lifelong collection of worn Japanese schoolgirls uniforms.

Anyway, this all happened about two weeks ago. I know this is no longer fresh news, but, as you might recall, I have been quite busy lately ensuring that I did not have to find a spot for my tent in Yoyogi koen. And after the move, NTT persisted in taking more than ten days to move an ADSL account that had been created in three days, thus ensuring my internet activities were limited to the most essential stuff (which oddly enough, does not include ranting on this page).

This actually happened right after we had found a place at the last minute and gotten approved by the owner: all that was left to do was bring the cash and sign the lease, on Saturday morning, and move in the following day.
On Friday evening, I had planned to go play a few records at Bar Tokyo with Miss Kate, which seemed like a great occasion to celebrate at the same time. Lease-signing meeting time was 10:30 in Ueno: that gave me ample time to get back home with the first train, take a quick shower, maybe even a post-disco nap and then head over to the agency with Nordine and Yoshiko (who had been enrolled as our personal scribe). NOTHING wrong with this plan, right?
Oh yea… one important detail: a conjunction of factors such as daily ATM withdrawal limit, the scarcity of ATM accepting foreign cards in this city and the presence of one such bank, open 24h, in Roppongi, had caused me to stop on the way there to withdraw the last leg of the rent/deposit/gift money we were supposed to bring in the day after.

So it was half past midnight, I had about 60,000 yens in cash on me, and I was heading toward some seedy bar for the night.

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…stop pulling all-nighters?
On one hand it’s great work-out… On the other hand, all this is probably not helping my premature aging… and it’s been a while since I haven’t somehow regretted in the morning


Those in Shinjuku are depressingly normal compared to the fun ones you can find in Shibuya… Still got karaoke, cheesy japanese porn and space-age control boards in every room, though…

Disclaimer:
Despite evidences to the contrary in what follows, I am not whining and moaning about life in Japan here: nor am I bitching about its ludicrous cost of living or its locals’ strong xenophobic prejudices. In fact, I am not even complaining about anything.
That, for three reasons: a) I hate these foreigners who make it a mission during their whole stay in Japan to rant endlessly about every single irritating detail they encounter: if I didn’t want to be here, I’d have got the hell out a long time ago. b) I know this type of thing is hardly a Japanese exclusivity: for instance, I have yet to see how a person with only vague notions of English and limited intent to settle for long-term would fare into getting a random landlord to rent him an apartment at market price in NYC. And c) I found a place after all… so screw all these other discriminated-against gaijins who will have to sleep in Ueno Koen next month… I love Japanese landlords.
Why am I writing this then?
Because the noise of my fingers randomly hitting keys on a keyboard has a soothing effect on my naturally psychotic character. That’s why.

As part of my lifelong ambition to stay away from the bore of a peacefully happy and enjoyably simple lifestyle, I must ensure at all cost that I do not ever spend more than three months at the same address (ok. it also helps keeping the feds off my back… but that three-count-of-felony-with-aggravated-manslaughter-and-international-drug-trafficking thing was a total setup anyway). So, in keeping with the plan to make my life a little more difficult with each passing day, I decided to give my notice a month ago, intent as I was on finding a new, nicer, cheaper house. Preferably a house where announcing rent price would no longer send half our friends into fits of hysterical laughter and prompt the rest to politely inquire about the state of our mental health. And indeed, it sounded like we were paying quite a lot compared to Japanese already vertiginous market prices.

That, of course, turned out to be even poorer an idea as it may sound (and if you are me, or know my tendency to come up with moronic plans, you are already expecting a pretty high level of stupidity here).

Let me start with a quick explanation regarding housing options in Japan. More specifically, housing options for this evil race of non-japanese people that sometimes attempt to invade this beautiful country; the one we commonly refer to as “gaijins”.
Though some of them can be insidiously hard to spot, due to their similar skin color or their impeccable mastering of local customs, rest assured that the average local won’t be fooled two minutes by any attempt at obsequiously bowing every twenty seconds while chanting “hai, sou desu ne, wakarimashita” as if you were one of them. Rest assured you will soon be reminded of your real status:
“Most honorable respected visitor friend, I must point out to you that, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you are and will remain for all practical purpose, a good-for-nuthin, bread-stealin’, virgin-raping, foreigner.”

So being a gaijin slightly affects your housing options.

At the bottom of the scale, you got the guesthouse, tellingly found under the “gaijin-house” denomination in most ads.
Overall, it’s not a bad option: it’s cheap, it’s convivial (you get to share your living room and your bathroom with all types of interesting people) and, if you pick carefully, you can even avoid some of the nastier short-term ones filled with european otaku backpackers and obnoxious american frat-boys (oxymoron added for clarity purpose) in favour of places that house equal numbers of slightly older foreigners and japanese nationals, with nicer atmosphere and improved wa as a result (it should be pretty clear by now that foreigner being the source of all evil, the fewer there are, the better). Guesthouses are ok, provided you don’t mind walking around your pockets filled with 100 yen coins, mandatory to operate about every other utility or household item (shower, heater, washing-machine etc. depends on the house), but it’s fair game since you don’t really pay utility bills after all.

The next evolutionary leap in the life of the profesional gaijin dweller is the gaijin apartment. Gaijin apartments are similar to regular apartments in every respect except for the noticeable fact that they belong to realtors who cater exclusively to the foreigner community in Japan.
I am not talking here about company apartments, residential hotels and other expat dwellings: no point going over these depressingly boring uber-expensive sanitized apartments sometimes provided by corporations to their foreign recruits (though less and less in those days of post-bubble economy). Beside, if that’s the kind of housing you are shooting for, you probably should be doing better things than reading this, such as trying to convince the boneheaded corporation that hired you that it was worth paying extra to import the US version of the upper-management salaryman droid, minus politeness and local language skills.
Gaijin realtors are targeting regular foreigners who still have to pay for their house and want/can afford better than shared housing. In addition to offering services in non-japanese languages, they usually provide lease conditions closer to western customs and will not run away if you tell them you don’t have a Japanese passport and that, indeed, neither does any member of your family that might sign as your guarantor. These places usually also come with basic furniture, unlike traditional Japanese rental, where you’ll be lucky to get a sink and a bathtub, let alone heater or fridge.
They make up for this convenience by charging roughly twice the price of any equivalent surface you would find at the Japanese real-estate agency across the street. Can’t have it all, can you?

Well “not true”, I reckoned.
Nagged by the intimate belief that the perfect house was just around the corner and required only a little extra effort to reward us with a significant cut in our ludicrous rent budget, I decided to take it to the next step and start hunting:

Equipped with my laughingly approximate Japanese vocabulary and life-savior sidekick: Atsushi, vital in helping to ask and answer any question not starting by “genki”, this is how I foolishly decided to get a Real Japanese Apartment…
Conscious I might very well end up sleeping in Yoyogi park and would in this case need a housemate, if only to take turns watching over the tarps and personal belongings at night, I convinced Nordine to follow me on this hapless venture (not like he was happy with our previously inflated rent either).

Man, was it a lot of fun or what!
Over the course of the last two weeks, not only have I got to dramatically improve my knowledge of kanjis (especially location names) by reading thousands of useless Internet classifieds, but I also learned about 2530 different ways to say “no” in Japanese kenjougo (super duper polite version of Japanese spoken by anybody who might have to be otherwise very rude in what he got to tell you, but will therefore do it in the most humble possible way)…
The most common answer from realtors after calling the owner to inquire about a house, being a somewhat embarrassed:

「外国勢だから、ちょっと難しいですねー。」
Gaikokuzei dakara, chotto muzukashii desu ne…

Which translates literally to:

Because you are foreigners, it might be a little difficult, huh…

itself the teineigo (polite Japanese) version of:

Muwahrharhar… Not in your wildest dream, you White Devil Foreigner!

And it’s not like you are begging for a special treatment either: moving in will cost you, no matter who you are, one to three months of “reikin” (礼金 or “key money”), basically a gift to the owner, on top of the one month-commission fee to the agency and the two to three months “shikikin” (敷金: deposit). If you’d rather they use lube during the whole thing, you probably have to pay another extra.
Because one can never be too sure in Japan, you will also be asked for two guarantors (保証人) to sign along. Needless to say: your guarantors must be Japanese and, preferably be your own blood. The mere fact that our two japanese co-signer friends were not family-related was already a show-stopper with most owners that had not yet hung up upon hearing the word “gaijin”…

So in short, we can say it was a bit tough.

But we found one…
It’s definitely second dip, it’s quite a walk from the station, not in the hippest neighbourhood by any stretch…
but it’s about 50% cheaper, bigger, and it’s even got some kind of backyard (two by three feet at the most)…

Conclusion: We don’t have heaters anymore and it seems like winter’s decided to play serious prolongation, with a bit of snow around here, but we got a kotatsu and a flask of rhum: domestic bliss indeed.