Just before Amy and I left England, we thought that it would be a nice gesture if we could give every Shiramizu student a small present from Hartlepool Wadokai. This would be a great way for us to ahem, bribe (!) all the kids into liking us! No seriously, we thought it would help to reinforce the international links with both dojos.
We needed something that would be small enough to bring in our luggage, something English, which you can’t get in Japan, and we needed 500 of them – easy enough! The obvious choice was a small key ring with the Hartlepool logo on. Ok, so we knew what we wanted.
We spent the best part of a week looking around all of Hartlepool’s tourist shops. The choice they had was pretty poor, unless we wanted something with the monkey on. The other problem was that we needed to bulk buy, for some reason no-one stocked 500 Hartlepool key rings. By the end of the week, we were quickly running out of options, it was now Friday and we would be flying out to Japan on the Sunday! Even Ethan Hunt would struggle with this one...
We decided to go to the Christ church, a converted church which is now an art gallery, right in the middle of town to pick up some small presents for Arakawa Sensei, Richard, Rei and Lawrence. Whilst we were there we had a look around their small gift shop and noticed the custom made key rings that they had. After making some enquiries with the shop keeper, it was agreed that she would pass on our contact details to their manufacturer.
The manufacturer turned out to be local, and he called us that very same day. He agreed to make a sample key ring, with the Hartlepool Wadokai logo on for Saturday. Saturday came, and the guy delivered and we quickly ordered 500 key rings and 200 small badges too. The only problem was that he simply couldn’t make 500 key rings over night, so the only option was to post the finished products to us in Japan hence the ‘where is the parcel located?’.
My mother posted the finished products out to us within a matter of days, and we waited and waited and waited. After 3 weeks, I started to wonder if the parcel had gone missing, or maybe had been stopped by customs or something. I didn’t really want to bother Sensei with this small problem, as he is a very busy man, more so now with the World’s just around the corner, besides, I was pretty confident that I could resolve this myself.
On my next free day, I decided to cycle to the Post Office, which is only a 10 minute cycle ride from my house. I had my dictionary in hand, and I was pretty confident that I knew how to explain my predicament. I knew the basic words, though I wasn’t too sure of how to group them into a sentence, I decided just to ‘wing’ it. I was armed with 3 Japanese words as I walked to the counter.
Parcel - Kozu tsumi
From - Kara
England - Egirisu
Despite being ignorant of the word order, I was confident that I could get the message across. The first guy I spoke to was very polite, and he kindly gave me an envelope to post a parcel to England. I repeated my question, Kozu tsumi doku desu ka? At this point, a post office lady came along to help me out. I managed to convey that I was waiting for a parcel, so they had a look around for it. They quickly concluded that it must be at Sugito central post office, I thought this was funny because I had foolishly assumed that the parcel would be at my local post office. It doesn’t even work like that in England, so I don’t know why I thought it would in Japan. The post office manager kindly wrote down the phone number for the office.
After thanking the two workers and bowing my way out, I headed back home so that I could look at my Sugito map and see where the sorting office is. After getting myself organised, dictionary still at hand, I arrived at the central sorting office. I went through the same thing as last time, and to be fair, the two people serving me were even more friendly and helpful. They searched everywhere, but in the end they concluded that it can’t have arrived yet. I was grateful for help but all I could do was wait and see if it would turn up.
You might not find this story particularly interesting, but I think it’s great to see how accommodating the Japanese people are. Once they realise that you don’t understand the language, and you’re totally out of your depth, but trying anyway, they go out of their way to help. It also shows that you can get by with just a basic understanding of the language, just as long as you keep smiling.
So what happened to the parcel? Well, as you would expect after my mini adventure, the parcel was delivered by courier the very next day. Typical!
Carl
No comments:
Post a Comment