Moving

As if preparing for Four Points next week wasn't enough, last Friday my boss also sprung on me the fact that, as my new apartment was ready ahead of schedule, they would be moving me into it starting Monday after school. I had expected the whole process to occur after I'd returned from Four Points, so I had, of course, packed nothing. I was able to delay them until Tuesday night to give me Monday to pack and get ready. That involved finally getting rid of a lot of cardboard and plastic bottles and general junk that the complicated Japanese waste systems prompts us whities to collect in our spare rooms. For example, here's all of the milk I've drank in my apartment since I showed up in this place:

Despite waylaying my eager movers, I was still caught with my pants down when my boss and three of my coworkers from the sports center erupted in my apartment not a minute past 5:30pm on Tuesday. They set to work like efficient monkey home invasions or Grinch Who Stole Christmases or sentient black holes: wandering around and removing anything that wasn't nailed down, heaping it like spoils in the backs of their tiny Japanese pick-up trucks. As we ferried the surprisingly large loads to my new place, the lawnmower go-kart engines in those two-seater pick-ups would bemoan with a voice like a thousand bees my fat gaijin ass and all of the useless gaijin crap I'd accumulated over the last year.

My coworkers were relentless. There were no breaks, there was no standing around talking about what to move next. Up and down the stairs they went, stopping only to suck their teeth at how I hadn't packed more. When they saw that the load I'd prepared for them was mostly furniture with no boxes, I heard them mutter "dorumbo" and "hako" and "yakuba," and then one of them would run off, only to reappear not five minutes later with all of the boxes a person could ever need. They broke me to their unyielding pace, and the result was an apartment's worth of junk (including huge china hutches, refrigerators, and washing machines) being relocated in no more than four hours over two days. I'm still reeling from how quickly they accomplished it.

All of the hubbub does have its benefits: a freshly renovated apartment, with shiny new bathrooms and sinks and stoves and tatami floors. And then there's the sunrise, knocking at the window of my new bedroom, the best housewarming gift I may have ever received.