I contacted Tatsunami Beya yesterday to ask if I could join their supporters club from outside Japan, seeing that the membership form requires you to choose a Japanese prefecture as part of your address. Fingers crossed! Only got an automated response so far.

Went to my ward office today to ask about ward tax things, and they gave me this “lovely” English guide book but if only i could actually understand it properly :’))) my Finnish ass needs to learn English better

So, it turns out for the past five months I've been saying a really important word totally wrong and nobody has corrected me until now. The word is the negative form of the word ある (aru- to have or there is, used for a non-living thing). I was saying あるない (arunai) but that just contradicts itself. Aru means I do have it or it is there, but nai means that I don't have it or it isn't there. Five whole months of me saying both yes and no to so many questions, and nobody corrected me, probably because they thought the mistake is cute. It's kind of frustrating when I don't get corrected for my mistakes because I'm a little foreign girl and aww, it's so kawaii (cute) when the little foreign girl makes a mistake. Please, I am trying to learn Japanese properly, if you're going to call me cute when I screw up correct me afterwards so I don't do it again!

Random annoying Japan thing: the question "can you eat X?", with X often being some completely mundane food. I have actually, honest to god, been asked "can you eat rice?" before, as if I were some kind of bizarre alien creature incapable of consuming normal people food. I always want to respond with something like "no it is impossible to eat that with my mandibles" but alas, that would go over people's heads.

yo listen i know i signed up for the gaijin starter pack when i moved to japan and i know what comes included in your kit but damn it would be nice if someone looked at me and smiled instead of looking at me like i want to eat their first born child