Fall has arrived in Shirakawa, and with it come both typhoons (there's one scheduled to hit Fukushima this weekend) and plummeting temperatures. So what could be better than waking up after a long, cold night to find that there's no hot water coming out of your shower?
Things like this are an annoyance in one's home country. In a foreign country, they're terrifying. Not only did I have no clue what was happening-- was my bill somehow not drawn out from the bank? Was there something wrong with the apartment building itself?-- I had no real way of even directly finding out what was wrong; it's not like I could pick up the phone, call the utility, and have any hope of either getting my message across or understanding them in return. I had no choice but to send an email to my supervisor, who (as I would learn later) just happened to be on holiday. Wee.
I spent all morning in a state of near panic waiting for a reply from my supervisor, but none came. I was so messed up today that not only was I late for one of my classes (which. . . bad), but I actually cut off one of my JTE's while I was driving to work! Fortunately, it was two of my JTE's who ended up helping me out of this mess. They talked to the board of education, and they in turn managed to get my gas reconnected. It was the weirdest thing; the gas company, no doubt after seeing the continuous consumption of hot water from room 201 of Castle Eight, reached the obvious conclusion that there's no-one currently occupying room 201 of Castle Eight, and shut off the gas.
In any event, I've got hot water again. But now I'm worried that other utilities have made the same mistake as the gas company, and that I'm going to wake up on Monday morning with the power cut off.
Japan. It's a gas.
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