Living in a foreign country means that simple things can be difficult. Traveling, shopping, eating, even washing dishes is suddenly more complicated. The upside of this is that you get really, really excited whenever you complete one of these challenges. The downside is that if you brag about your ability to wash your dishes to people who don't live in that foreign country they aren't really going to get it. Washing your dishes involves many steps when you're operating in a different country. First, you must figure out how to turn on your hot water heater in a different language. Then, you go to the store to buy dish soap. You make a mistake and accidentally buy hand soap. Or floor cleaner. Or tatami cleaner. You must do research, recruit a friend, or take a picture of your school's dish soap and buy the exact same bottle. In any case, by that point being able to wash your dishes without them smelling like windex is a huge accomplishment! It's an exhilarating way to live, and that's how I felt when I ordered a kotatsu and kotatsu futons and chairs from a Japanese website the other day.
You see, I've been inspired by Orangepeeleater. I want to have a kotatsu in the US. It's space efficient, it's comfortable, it's easy to transport, and it's a part of Japanese life that I want to keep with me. So, I've been shopping around for awhile. My dad sent me links to places where I could buy a kotatsu in the US without having to ship it back, but they were either the cheapest kotatsu in existence or a hand-carved 600$ masterpiece. Also, even the cheap ones were more expensive than the ones I was looking at over here most likely due to less demand and import costs, so I decided to buy here and ship home. My supervisor had given me a magazine, Nissen, and it had really nice things, so I checked them out online at Nissen. Oh, my gosh. Never more have I regretted living on a year to year contract in another country. So much lovely, relatively inexpensive furniture! I can't wait to get home and start getting a life together that doesn't have to be packed up and shipped over an entire ocean.
I checked with a coworker to make sure that Nissen was decent quality before getting too attached to any of the kotatsu. I didn't want to get my heart set on something, pay a lot of money for it, pay more money to mail it back to the US, and then have it fall apart after ten minutes out or something. She vouched for it and I spent the next few days perusing the website. Now, the Nissen website is all in Japanese. That meant checking, double-checking, and triple-checking to make sure that what I was looking at was actually what I was ordering and that what I was ordering was in the right size. I had decided ahead of time on getting the rectangular kotatsu instead of the square one, and I didn't want to screw up the sizing on the futon. Some of the futons I really liked weren't in the rectangular size. I had to check the materials of each futon because I didn't want to get fleece covers that would feel nice, be soft, and then get all tatty and yucky after a single washing. All in all it was a lot of work.
And then the actual online ordering. That was an ordeal that made the choosing of the kotatsu look easy. It's all blurred together, but I'm pretty sure it was a 25 step process. It took over an hour to navigate through the entire process. I'm pretty sure it would have been impossible for anyone without a high Japanese level. A few steps I had to fix inputted information because the system only accepted katakana instead of hiragana or kanji, and it told me that through tiny, black, kanji-filled Japanese sprinkled with honorifics and extreme formality. It had special offers every other step in addition to the usual customer profile, address, payment method bits. When I finally made it to the end it was like climbing a mountain. I don't have anything to show for it yet, and it's going to take a few months for everything to get here since a couple of the items aren't currently in stock, but I'm still ridiculously proud of myself for being able to do it myself without having to call in a translator. It's one of the things I really enjoy about living in Japan. Online shopping isn't nearly as exciting back home.
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