Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world to live in and my money reserves were soon depleted. I borrowed a lot of money from my family to stay alive but even then was only on a subsistence level. I ate little but instant ramen and bread for a three month period and ended up with a severe vitamin deficiency. (My skin started to turn gray.)
At one point I was so broke and so hungry that I went to an area that I normally didn’t go near and cased a supermarket, found that the afternoon sun was very bright in the front windows and that it was almost impossible to see the outside of the store, then stole a bag of rice. I was really scared that somebody would catch me but nobody seemed to notice.

The Dishwasher’s Guide to the Galaxy

The kitchen of SarajigokuThe school helped me get a part time job washing dishes at a restaurant with the unlikely name of Samurai Steak. Actually, I washed in the yakitoria above the steak place but did the dishes for both. This was really nice because they fed me dinner (well, sort of a dinner) and I didn’t have to worry about not getting enough good food. Often, it wasn’t all that busy and I had a lot of slack time to write incredibly long letters to friends.2
The guy who ran the dining room upstairs was an OK guy but he was lazy and hardheaded. Any chance he could get he would offload work onto the kitchen staff—mostly me. He was a big believer in busy work so when he didn’t think I was doing something he would find something—usually annoying—for me to do. He was a real chauvinist too. When he would put in a drink order he would tell me to cut the women's’ drinks with water or only put half as much alcohol in them. I would wait until he wasn’t looking and mix them the right way. I figured that they should get what they ordered and paid for.

the dining room of Sarajigoku

There were little roaches all over the place and after months I finally discovered where they had a nest—under some shelf paper under the beer glasses. I told the dining room guy but he said not to worry about it. I wanted to get some bug spray but he refused to buy it with the company money. Eventually, I just pulled back the paper and let the roaches run to spite him but he just covered them up again. (Nobody ever sprayed it while I was there.)
Eventually, there were three foreigners working there—three of the four in the animation/manga school. (One had a real job. I guess the manager there liked tormenting the staff by making them work with us.

The Great War of the Peeling Implements

One of the arguments I had with the dining room guy was about kitchen appliances. He and the main cook believed that labor saving devices like food processors, mixers and even potato peelers damaged the quality of the food. This was an utterly stupid concept to me. (It still is.) What difference there could be between sesame seeds ground in a power mill for 3 minutes and ones ground with a mortar and pestle (which takes an hour) by me is probably infinitesimal. (I’m guessing that this had something to do with that busy work.)
I got really sick of peeling potatoes with a knife, which I’m terribly bad at, and asked for a peeler. The dining room guy refused and said that a knife gets better results. I challenged him to a peeler versus knife contest but he wouldn’t go for it. I did the contest myself and found that the peeler (which I ended up buying myself) leaves up to 25% more potato per bucket. Eventually he gave in and they would buy a new peeler when the old one would break. They never did buy a garlic masher though so I had to mince garlic cloves on a hand shredder thingee the whole time I was there. I still have the scars on my fingertips.
If nothing else good can be said about the experience, it was a good way to see Japanese society in action. It wasn’t a particularly large place and it would fill with salarimen after their companies closed for the day. They would smoke and drink and yell and laugh.
Common belief, particularly among the writers of books about Japan, is that the Japanese get drunk and act crazy because this is the only way they can blow off steam due to the stress of rigid working conditions. There is some truth to this but it's more ignorance of knowing any other way to let off steam and because they just plain like to get drunk because it feels good. Peer pressure has a lot to do with it and group drinking is the norm. (For those in the US, it's a lot like high school and college—where you weren't cool if you didn't drink. Except there's no growing out of this.)
Times are different than when there was nothing to do but booze it up or sit in the fields watching the moon. I find that Japanese people who don’t drink tend to have less problems with stress than those who do.
My way of looking that things is that if you are forced to do something which you hate: QUIT! Go do something else! You make your life. Everything bad that happens to you happens because you want it to, because you set yourself up for it. (You don't see certain things as "bad" if you have the right mental attitude.) There are always multiple approaches to solving a problem. If you can't find a solution to a problem it's not because there isn't one but because you haven't looked in the right place for it or refuse to accept the alternatives that seem strange or "wrong" to you. You are the only one who can solve your problems!
I hear people moan and groan about being in dead-end jobs and living in lousy apartments and such and such and I often say, "Then why don't you quit and move to a different city or get a better job?"
"I can't! I don't have enough education/ money/ energy/ intelligence/ whatever to do that!"
My response? "Well, I guess you're already most of the way to being dead so why don't you just kill yourself and finish it?"
Mean? Unfeeling? Nasty? Cynical? Maybe. If you aren't willing to apply radical solutions to your problems then you have been beaten.
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