It's the weekly complaint thread! Time to get anything off your chest that's been bugging you or pissing you off.
Remain civil and be nice to other commenters (even try to help).
- No politics
- No complaints about users of JapanLife
by AutoModerator
It's the weekly complaint thread! Time to get anything off your chest that's been bugging you or pissing you off.
Remain civil and be nice to other commenters (even try to help).
by AutoModerator
42 comments
Yesterday I was working at the local library. For the third time, the same well-dressed and -groomed man sat across from me and spent much of a good two hours intently and deeply digging in his nose with a finger, inspecting the prize(s), and carefully wiping them on his expensive-looking shirt, then spraying alcohol on his hands.
I cannot for the life of me get interested in domestic pop culture (though to be fair this wouldn’t be any different in my home country either). I’m also not doing a great job at finding and exploring quality niche content and both of these factors combined is definitely impeding my language acquisition here.
I had to “upgrade” to windows 11 since some tools I use were not working well in Linux.
I keep a hard drive in a fireproof container that I occasionally connect to back up. Windows helpfully yelled at me yesterday that my drive was disconnected. I pulled it out to connect it this morning to connect it and trigger backup and… it was gone from settings. Searching backup only showed a settings backup and a sync to “OneDrive”. After searching, they removed it from actual settings and the search and jammed it in the old control panel. No, MS, I am not going to use your onedrive and fuck you for hiding backup.
Rain every single day lately means I can’t get yardwork done and I’m not getting my active and outside time which is bad for my mental health.
Thanks to a rare rainy day, the forecast high temperature in Osaka today is 31, and we’ve all been tricked into thinking that is cool.
1 – the opening hours of medical stuff here are shit. And so it’s going to cost me a few hours of wages to see the doc (not 6 months at this job yet).
2 – woken up at 4:30am by my wife’s rumbling tummy.
3 – shitty furniture repairs. Putting star(?) nails through a mortise and tenon joint to stop a leg from wobbling doesn’t work. And now I can’t take the leg apart to fix it correctly becuse there’s a piece of metal stuck in it.
Leaving for work this morning and what do I see just before I step out the door, a little pile of shit!
I had to take a minute and think, is this really the start of a shitty day?
Pop up store booking adventures:
There is a pop up store. You can win a photo with a character mascot through the lottery system if you spend over a certain amount.
Need to use Live pocket to book an entry time slot to store for both normal entry or preorder pick up. Think ok, photos with character start at 2pm so just in case I win, seems booking at 1pm time slot to pick up my preorder sounds reasonable.
Win the photo opportunity, hooray!
Get an email from them with my winning number, I have to register myself at 1:20pm before the mascot greeting. Oh. This information wasn’t stated anywhere before this point. Ok well should be ok if I rush to get my preorder.
Look at details more… oh wait the mascot picture is in another building other side of the city a 20 minute train away? Ok so now I have to rearrange my time slot or I won’t make it.
That’s fine I’ll just book another time slot. No not allowed to do that because I already have one… ok I’ll just cancel my time slot and get a new one. Nope can’t do that, no cancellations for customer convenience (even if it’s free?). Right ok I’ll make another account with my backup email… need phone verification to even book a slot. Won’t let me use my number because it’s being used on my other account. Ok I’ll try my UK number then… nope the confirmation texts you have to send this number aren’t going through.
Can’t pick up preorder without time slot… only in the city for the day so can’t really rearrange. Only time slots after 2pm are left so if I can get one somehow will have to be after the photos. So much hassle just to pick up something I paid for in advance.
Woke up at 4am from a nightmare. Have to really fucken control this work stress.
I hated spending two hours of my evening figuring out how to sideload the MyaPortal app onto my unsupported phone just to view my pension. Beyond that, the entire shambles of Nenkin Net, all of the online processes linked to MyNumber and how they shut down at night, each at different times and depending on the day requiring a multi-page pdf explainer. I hope everyone associated with that terrible system steps on lego tonight.
now that summer is over, suica bars are out of the confines
The weather is still unbearably hot…
Aaaah dammit i went to a famima the other day and they even had a SIGN for the smores ice cream puff thingy, and when I asked about it, they either said they never arrived or they weren’t getting any more. What the hell, I literally never saw it anywhere.
I was casually browsing apartments in Tokyo because there’s a possibility for me to move there, I know rent in Tokyo is expensive but holy shit I didn’t expect it to be THAT expensive. I live in major city in downtown too now but it’s nothing compared to Tokyo.
Being hit with backpacks.
I find that when passing you in a crowd in Tokyo, some people (usually men) will intentionally pivot at a 45 degree angle in order to bash you with their backpacks as they pass?
Is there an effective way to parry this? I know “get out of the way” is the best answer; but when that’s not possible, how can one counter?
The train line to get to the stupid immigration office in Osaka is the same used to go to the stupid expo.
It took me 30 minutes more than it should have (from the hour+ that would have been normal) being squished like a sardine, and now to waste a few more hours just so they tell me “you can leave” after pretending they’ve checked my documents. And then I’ll need to do the same BS when the thing is ready because they can’t possibly SHIP the damn thing when it’s ready.
My kingdom for someone who can walk in a straight line on the sidewalk.
I want to live in a beautiful city with large sidewalks and tall trees. I want to skateboard to the supermarket, buy a bag of fruit and eat them without peeling like a horse. I want to buy a bag of celery sticks and a big thing of hummus. I want to feel like I have a home. I want to ride my bike with my headphones on. I want to enjoy summer. And enjoy actual seasons, not just seasonal flavors. I want to live in a normal apartment with normal walls, ceiling and windows from which I can see the outside of.
How many meetings am I going to have to attend this week? They don’t even give a shit about my input anyway.
Edit: Sir, another meeting has hit the Outlook calendar
I got roped into helping out with a poorly-planned event a week before. it was just “can you come to help out here and there?” at first, then it became run the entire PC setup for presentations, help with the prize draw and award ceremony, oh and *deal with the literal event space catching on fire the morning of* (at least it was only at the level of “something is smoking somewhere, but we need to evacuate the entire area”)……..
in the end the event somehow went super smoothly, but man. there were several people from the hosting department who were participating *just as participants*, while I and a few others, *who are in a different department*, were the ones running *everything*. why the fuck were they just sitting around and getting to eat a full-course French meal while I was doing all the work???
the lead guy in charge is the son of a company VIP though, so ofc that’s why. can’t manage or plan an event for shit (he literally took half a day off the day before the event, when everybody was panicking because so much hadn’t been finalized yet). and the fucker was like “you did great today, thanks! you can come help out at our next event later this month too, right? :)” please fuck *alllll* the way off.
So disappointing seeing lots parents here avoid basic safety rules. Picked up my kid from afterschool care, a car pulled in next to me with a toddler standing up in the back seat and a baby buckled into the front seat. On the way home, saw a mom with kids getting help after their bike accident. Looked like her infant(!) fell out of the seat onto the concrete. Naturally, no helmet on anyone’s head.
I’m judging these parents hard.
One of my hoarding pleasures is randomly buying old gameboy games at hobby off which I play on a GB Operator on my computer. The prices have steadily increased. I’m so glad I had already picked up plenty of copies of Pokémon games 8 years ago when you could still find them in the bulk junk containers for ¥110. Recently I noticed copies of Pokémon GB games up to ¥1650. Ok, I already have those games, but even the random games are now in the ¥550 – ¥1100 range. It seems that anything with a recognizable character or franchise (Kirby, donkey kong, Mario, harvest moon, Yugioh) is a minimum ¥550 but more often around ¥1000+ a piece. I’m happy I can still bulk buy random games on Mercari but I miss the in person collecting aspect.
Recently moved back to Japan and I want to open a personal Rakuten bank account. In the US, this is something that can be done in a phone app in 10 minutes. Here is how it is going in Japan:
Aug 23: Try to apply online. Find out I need a MyNumberCard, which didn’t even exist when I lived here 4 years ago but is apparently now the single most important document underpinning Japanese society. Go to City Hall to get one. Do I get one? No. They will mail me an application for one which takes 3 weeks. In the meantime I can pay extra for a juminhyo which has the same number on it so I do that.
Aug 24: Juminhyo in hand I complete Rakuten’s 7 page application to open a personal checking account. So I can login and start banking now? No. They need to review my application which can take a week.
Aug 29: I miss a random phone call while in a meeting. Later that day I receive an automated email from Rakuten saying they were unable to reach me and will try calling again next week.
Sep 3: They call and I answer. The lady asks me to confirm the details I’ve already submitted in my application. I pass with flying colors. She says Rakuten will email me with next steps. “Today?” “Oh no no, in the next 5 days.”
Sep 8: They email me saying that because I am employed by my own company, I will need to go to the Legal Affairs Bureau and get a certified document of my business standing, then physically mail it to Rakuten.
Sep 9: I go to the Legal Affairs Bureau and request this document. This involves filling out 4 separate forms by hand each containing 95% of the same information like address, name, contact details, etc. “Can I get this document now?” “No, because your personal address when the company was formed is from the US, you first need to submit an address change request to Japan before we can give those documents to you.” “Great I request you change my address please.” “Oh no no, you pay 10,000 yen and the address change will be processed by *points to calendar* September 21.”
I left some steps out of this process for brevity. It is literally going to take me months to open a checking account.
Collapsed at work and went off to a hospital. The nurses stuck a needle in me, but didn’t connect the drip to the bag, and it took twenty minutes to realize that whatever was supposed to be going into my body was cleaning the floor instead.
My downstairs neighbor is a passive aggressive asshole. We have a narrow, short path leading out of our apartment block on to the street, and this guy always speeds down it on his bike, never moves, nor waits for us to get out of the way. My lady had to jump out of his way weeks and he brushed against me this week. He just stared off into space as I shouted in his ear. Absolute dick.
Also, international news. Can’t write about it here, but goddamn it is hard to shake off the feeling that things are escalating to a point of no return.
EDIT: Forgot to add that I failed to get tickets for Ghibli. An entire month being booked in a couple of hours is absolutely insane
I traveled to Seoul for a few days and received tons of messages and notifications on hookup apps. I came back to Tokyo yesterday, and so far I’ve received none. This can’t be a coincidence.
I nearly run over a high schooler everyday while taking my daughter to daycare. The daycare is near a high school, lots of kids riding their bikes to it. But NONE of them stop at stop signs or properly check left and right before crossing the road or turning into another. DO YOU UNDERSTAND I COULD SPLATTER YOU even in my kei car going 10km/h.
My higher order thinking skills are completely broken due to stress and I can’t say anything about it because all I’ll get is “you’re not stressed” from people with a workload that’s 6000x higher than mine.
I’m so sleepy. Every night this week as soon as I get into bed, I’m instantly wide awake. It takes me over an hour to fall asleep only for my kid to miss me and wake me up or I wake up an hour before my alarm is set to go off.
My head practically hurts from lack of sleep. But I can’t get to sleep!
We have two complaint threads. That’s one too many complaint threads.
Went to a bar with an Asian American woman the other night. There was a middle aged man that did his best to interject to get her attention and it kept escalating
He had the nerve to ask why we weren’t speaking Japanese. I pointed out that we were speaking Japanese to the staff, and him, but not to each other, because we are both American. He grumped that it’s rude because he can’t understand us.
He then went for the route of telling me I’m stupid for having tattoos. When I asked him why, he just said “Yakuza kara,” to which I asked him if he thought I was in the Yakuza. I then asked him if he had ever seen or heard of any white person in the Yakuza and he got so flustered that he just doubled down on the fact that I’m dumb.
Then he started talking about American politics and how Americans shouldn’t be welcomed in Japan, but by that point I was ignoring him.
Me and my lady friend were in a conversation when he reached over, grabbed my dick, and gave it a nice squeeze.
Then he was on the floor. After everything settled they kicked him out of the bar. The manager made him pay outside and everything.
Dear Japan: No, that’s not bacon, and no you weren’t suppose to steam it either. You’ve been lied to all this time, get help.
Not sure whats going on with me but im so irritated and stressed lately. Get so angry quickly even though i dont want to. Went to a mental clinic but of course they just prescribe medicine. Currently got a kanpo that tastes like celery which makes me only more irritated. Injust wanna be calm and relax without upsetting anyone. Tired of mental issues.
My partner and I both work from home. I’m in the living room. He regularly chooses to microwave pre-prepared fish for lunch even though he knows I hate it when he does it, and will have to sit in the stink for the next hour or so until it clears. Funnily enough, he doesn’t seem to want to take it through to his work area to eat it though.
work stress is over the roof. I’m running on fumes.
too many damn trucks in shaken.
realistically our crew can handle 90 trucks per month but this new seibi kacho – old guy refusing to retire still lives in fuckin showa era is pushing us to do like 110 trucks. dude is always walking around and giving his input and how he would do it bla bla.
just piss off dude you aren’t helping you are bothering.
I envy people who actually enjoy living here and people who can leave easily.
Just looking for advice and don’t feel like it’s worth it’s own thread. But, short story is my company is going under. I can take a severence pay and leave now, or work until end of Dec and get a slightly lower (by about 150,000 yen) severence, but the issue is that I must stay until the end if I go that route.
I’m leaning towards taking the higher severance, not because of the money, but because if I find a job between now and December and they require me to start earlier, I wouldn’t be able to and worry that would hurt my chances.
But at the same time, “will I even find a job by December?” keeps running through my head lol.
What would you do?
Made some delicious kimchi fried rice for my dinner/today’s bento but right as I was about to finish a bigass スズメバチ flew into my kitchen so I had to abandon ship for a couple hours. By the time I got her out, food had been sitting out in a hot kitchen for too long to safely eat, so sadly no kimchi fried rice for me :(.
The interaction between stress/sickness-related leave benefits, and side income. You can get a diagnosis telling you to take off for any length of time, but can’t claim benefits if you’re doing *any work at all*.
Imagine that your black company stresses you out and *also* cuts your income. So if you endure a bad rating and a pay cut, and you take on some side work to make up for the lost income, you can’t claim *anything* when that pay-cutting, stress-inducing job becomes so bad that you have to go on sick leave.
My wife and I had thought that it would work like unemployment payouts do, where your benefits are decreased by the amount of the side income, if the side income is too little to live on. For example, if you make 300k yen at your real job and another 30k on the side, you’d get 180k (60%) in benefits minus the 30k you make on the side.
But it doesn’t work like that. Any side income at all means that you’re not really too sick to work, so you’re ineligible for any benefits and have to either live off the side income only, plus savings, or quit the side work that might actually be a source of joy.
I’m on this sick leave right now and am happy to not have to go in to my black company every day, but I feel a little cheated after having paid into the system all those years.
The whole street is flooded after the thunderstorm and now my toilet won’t flush properly…
so upset about it, i dont even want to post about it directly to give it validation that it’s actually bothering me smh
Even though I’m in Tokyo, I somehow completely missed the rain today.
I come back from vacation, thinking maybe something changed.
Nope, we are still running after the next fire caused by sales lying/promising something to clients, and the engineers not fixing the problem fast enough is the real issue between our product and more profits obviously.
We also lost the entire backend part of the team. So being the most senior on the project I am asked questions I don’t have the answers too, have no interest investigating, and most importantly, I don’t think we should even be doing this.
When I ask whether it was profitable to do the feature for the client, they just gaslit me into lots of tables and “we sold the product with this 1 important feature, but the feature wasn’t there, so we really need to fix it”. I don’t think we need to fix it. Just tell the client they can’t have the feature. But that would be the sales guys eating their own shit and we can’t have that, can we?
Being a Nespresso user in Japan. Why does the rest of the world get Maple Pecan and we don’t…? 😢
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