In my last post, I talked about how the coronavirus situation unfolded for me in Japan and some of the bigger changes going on in the country. Now that school closures have been extended (again) and I’m starting to get a little bored working from home, I thought I’d write about some of the changes in my daily life.
The Rush for Masks and Toilet Paper
In Japan, it’s pretty normal for people to wear masks outside for a variety of reasons. If you have a slight cold, trying to block pollen, or even to keep warm in the winter. Usually, there’s a whole section of masks to choose from at the drug store and even at school in the staff room, there’s a box for teachers to grab a mask from if they need it. Given this, I wasn’t expecting masks to run out that fast because I assumed most people already had some at home anyway. Japan didn’t seem to be taking the virus that seriously at the start, so I thought there wouldn’t quite be that rush on supplies like I see back home when there’s a hurricane. I live just a couple minutes from a drug store and planned to grab a pack to have on hand, just in case, on one of my many trips to pick up snacks.
Turns out I was already too late. I noticed a big gap on the aisle as I walked toward it. Empty shelves where the masks used to be.
This didn’t bother me too much since I don’t usually wear masks. What was a little worrying was when toilet paper disappeared too.
Luckily I had been to Costco in December and picked up a big pack of toilet paper, so I was fine. But the fact that it was constantly out of stock by the time I was heading home for lunch was surprising and started to become worrying as my own stash started to dwindle. A rumor had been spread online that toilet paper supplies could run low because China would be using the supplies or ingredients to make masks. This turned out to be laughably false since the materials used for masks and toilet paper are different and 98% of the toilet paper in Japan is produced domestically. Not from China.
Before I started working from home, I would see a line of people waiting outside the drug store for it to open. The stores had instituted limits on how much people could buy, 1 pack of masks and toilet paper per person. Even so, it was consistently sold out or not in stock by lunch. Eventually, the TP panic died down and once it started to stay on the shelves I bought another pack. The shelves are back to being fully stocked for TP but there still aren’t many masks.
Since I can’t seem to buy disposable masks, I finally made my own cloth mask. Being a hoarder of craft supplies came in handy and I happened to have enough fabric to work with and a borrowed sewing machine to use. After a few unsuccessful patterns and 1 failed mask, I made one that fits ok.
Shops, sheets, and sanitizers.
Another one of the early changes was some of the germ-fighting measures the food shops implemented. Supermarkets and bread shops have always had a bottle of hand sanitizer out front but not everyone used them. I am one of those people mainly because more often than not the supermarket’s automatic dispenser either doesn’t respond or is empty. After Coronavirus started to spread though, they pulled the hand sanitizer out so it was a little easier to see and use. Other places that didn’t have it before started putting it out for customers, like my local drug store.
My favorite donut shop, which usually had trays of donuts for you to grab from and put on your tray, attached vinyl sheets that you had to lift to grab the donuts. Later on, convenience stores, supermarkets, and drug stores erected vinyl sheets in front of the registers to limit any cross-contamination between customers and cashiers. (Just don’t sneeze on your hand before you give them the money.) At the bread shops and the deli section of the supermarket, everything was prepackaged into plastic trays or bags instead of being left out for customers to grab on their own.
The most recent development is many shops closing and restaurants changing their operating hours. My local mall closed everything except for the supermarket area and local restaurants have earlier closing hours. Some of the izakaya (bars), which are normally small, enclosed spaces, are shifting to selling pre-made lunch sets to make up the difference now that they can’t operate as normal.
The Food Situation
I did a pretty good job of gradually stocking up on food early on just on the off chance that people went crazy and stripped the shelves a la US hurricane season. Despite the toilet paper panic buying, no one was panic-buying food at that point. There were a few times the ramen shelves got low but everything else seemed normal. After the state of emergency was declared this changed a little and in kind of a weird way. My mom had been telling me how everyone was buying up dried pasta and pasta sauce back home in the US. Dumb because you can’t just live on pasta, you need some fruits and veg in there. Theoretically not a problem because the fruit is comparatively cheap and easy to get in the US and our refrigerators are larger, so more storage space. Chop that stuff up and freeze it.
Not the case in Japan. I did fill up my modest freezer space with some fruit, vegetables, and meat; bought some canned goods and dried beans, and some seasoning and quick meal packs so I would have a nice diversity of foods to get through. I’ve cooked pasta once in like the past 2 or 3 months. I was not surprised by the instant ramen selling out. It’s Japan. I was surprised that pasta also sold out in Japan. The rest of the aisle, with all the other Asian noodles and seasonings, seemed well stocked. Why is everyone buying pasta? Potato chips also got a little low which I thought was odd until I realized that Japan doesn’t have the same diversity of snack foods as what I’m used to in the US. (I weep as I get to my last few fig bars from Costco)
Most of the food is staying stocked but some of the meal and seasoning packs are consistently low. Flour is also sold out because everyone has started baking at home. Even though I had a decent stock of food, I still find myself heading to the store as often as I used to. This is because everything is smaller here. My fridge, the portions sold at the supermarket, and the space I have to store dry goods. I keep burning through bread, eggs, and milk. I miss the days where I could make a trip to Food Lion or Walmart and get 2-3 weeks of food in one go and not have to go out again. I think Japan is socially set up on an assumption that you’ll grocery shop nearly every day, buying the ingredients for that night’s dinner and not much else. I laughed when I read that Tokyo was advising people that they needed to go to the supermarket less to reduce crowd exposure, and try and get enough food for 3 days at a time. 3 days at a time? Minimum I always try to shop for a week’s worth.
My food situation is fine with the exception that more time at home makes me feel snacky and I’m trying to resist eating too many potato chips.
Social Distancing and Avoiding Travel
One of the earliest changes I saw with regards to social distancing was actually with the movie theaters. In February I went with a friend to see a movie and noticed that every other seat was blocked out so that you couldn’t buy 2 seats next to each other (seats are chosen at the kiosk when buying your ticket in Japan). Then there were suggestions to change work times to avoid peak travel and work from home. I won’t go into that too much since I mentioned it in the last post, except to say it has not worked well for Japan.
Heading into April one of the big changes/worries was cherry blossom season. Often, people will take tarps or blankets to the park and have a group picnic or drinking party with friends and coworkers. Popular cherry blossom spots can be quite crowded with people looking to celebrate the start of spring and get some nice pictures. To combat this, some parks put up ropes to discourage people from having picnics in the grass (to no avail) and even my local park had signs up. Luckily, our park is pretty small (not a tourist draw) so locals could walk around or have a small picnic with their family and still maintain social distancing.
Around this time there were some campaigns for an at-home hanami (flower-viewing) party which I leaned into. Dominoes pizza put up some videos with music on YouTube that you could watch at home with a hot pizza (no-contact delivery available). I spent a day or two making cherry blossom decorations and after a walk at the local park, came home to have my own solo hanami party.
The next big change is the requests for avoiding travel. Last week was Golden Week which is a peak travel period in Japan. It’s one of the few times when multiple public holidays line up together and Japanese people have the opportunity to travel without having to use as much paid leave. Imagine everyone taking a holiday at the same time and that’s pretty much Golden Week in Japan. Japan had hoped things would normalize by this time, and the original school closure was due to end this week. But social distancing and contact reductions did not go as planned (not even close) and people have continued to go out in crowds and use public transport as usual (partially due to the poor implementation of work from home).
Only recently have they been requesting more businesses to voluntarily close and areas that have reopened too soon have seen cases spike again. With that in mind, and the cheap airfares, there were renewed calls for people to exercise restraint and stay home this Golden Week. Okinawa, a popular destination, had openly asked people to stay away with the hashtag 来ないで(don’t come). Students in University have been asked to stay there and not travel back to their home prefectures and they have even started announcing over the public intercoms requesting people reduce their excursions.
How I’m Handling Things
I’ll admit it, I miss traveling. I had to cancel a family spring break trip and have now passed two 3-day weekends and a week of public holidays sitting at home. Looking back on all the trips I’ve made during these times (as Instagram is kind enough to bring up in memories), I can’t help remembering how much fun it was to go out and explore a new place. A chance to get out of the house and stretch my legs, see new sights, try new foods. I was looking forward to a couple more trips before I end my time in Japan, but I’m grateful I was able to travel as much as I have in the past 4 years. I’m staying home now (and by home I mean literally not going farther than like a 1-mile radius of my apartment) and sacrificing travel for the safety and health of the community I live in. It sucks, but I can’t complain since I have food and entertainment and a salaried job.
So what exactly am I doing with this time?
For a start, I’ve been working from home which has been pretty easy though it’s starting to get a bit boring. My contract allows me to also use this time to study Japanese so I’m going to try breaking up my workdays with some more studying. I have plenty of books I can practice reading with and I’ve started making online flashcards again.
I’ve been bouncing around doing crafts again, trying new things and trying to make new project ideas a reality. This has been a little less successful since I tend to start many projects but finish few. The cross-stitch patterns I downloaded from The Stranded Stitch have been a lot of fun to complete and don’t take too long to finish. Crochet has been trickier as my habit of ignoring the needle and yarn sizes for patterns means the pattern usually does not turn out right and I have to start over again. I need to just pick something easy and repetitive so I can use up all this yarn I’ve been hoarding.
Socially I haven’t been struggling since I normally don’t go out that much anyway. I’m pretty much living life as usual with less travel. That being said, being stuck at home so much has become a little monotonous. One of the Facebook groups I’m in has been having weekly watch parties, so I’ve been able to get a little social interaction out of that while watching some new shows and movies. That’s given me something to look forward to during the week. My almost daily skype calls home have continued as usual so I can chat with my parents or siblings. And of course, I can send quarantine memes to my co-ALT while we work on lessons together via google drive or chat over messenger about we’ve been watching lately. Add in all the streaming services I have access to thanks to family accounts and a VPN and I have plenty of options for killing time. Killing it, but not necessarily being productive. That is one thing I’ve been struggling with.
Exercise is another thing I’ve been lacking. I thought all this time at home would be a great way to get back in the habit of regular exercise. Unfortunately, I’ve mostly been staying up late watching streaming, snacking, and sleeping in. I did sign up for a virtual run event and so far I’ve managed to do each weekly run, but my goal would be to run 2-3 times a week. Now that the school closure has been extended and I will be working from home a little longer, I’m going to try harder to establish a daily routine and incorporate short workouts and runs.
All in all, things are not too bad on my end. Just trying to do my best to stay healthy and occupied.
