This Move Will Break Me

This is Tokyo Gas emergency services. They showed up to my house with the siren wailing, causing the neighbors to stare. The men who called them had already left. He was part of the internet installation crew coming to set up our wifi. He told me in great distress that it smelled strongly of natural gas all around my house and he needed to call the emergency line. I told him the neighbor said it could be unpredictable but documented seismic sulfur fumes in the area, but he said the smell was only around my house and called with great urgency. As the crew left, he told me, “No fires! Ok? Gas off. 30 minutes, they come. Eh… sirens, maybe.” SIRENS MAYBE?! Oh my gosh.

“Another new family on the block called the emergency line for the neighborhood sulfur smell! What a dingbat! Someone oughta include that info in the move in checklist!” is what I imagined the people on my street saying saying as I saw curtains pull apart and close again quickly.

So I waited 30 minutes and the sirens, in fact, came. My neighbor went and got another neighbor to translate. “Tell her do not worry!” said the kind, smiling man who busily circled my house with the natural gas version of a Geiger counter. Both guys—who looked like they were about 15—cheerfully climbed into their emergency van and waved goodbye. Do not worry?! Trust me, all I am worried about is what else could go wrong today.

We moved in last Thursday, with more or less simultaneous arrival of: our express delivery, the gas company, the government appliance people, the realtor and the realtor’s assistant who explained 500 Japanese appliances to me while multiple conversations were going on. At the same time, I needed to run to the kids’ new bus stop to make sure they got off the correct bus at the right place, since they’d walked to school from the hotel that morning. It was kind of a lot.

This was our largest express shipment ever—1,000 pounds of kitchen items, bedding, bikes, curtains, end-of-Belgian-school papers, fall and Christmas decorations, and other stuff we’ve lived with since we shipped the rest of our stuff last October, or whatever accumulated after that. It was overwhelming. How did we move into a house with no pantry, one bathroom, and only half a kitchen? This is a relatively small amount of stuff, and there’s just nowhere to put anything. I can’t buy food to make dinner, because there is nowhere to put it. Chris somehow heated a frozen pizza to an acceptable temperature while Isaac complained that his room was distressingly messy and Eloise asked me to show her the phone case I ordered that was too big, and could she see it now?

Trying to figure out Japanese appliances for the first time was similarly disheartening. But Friday I drove the kids to Isaac’s early field trip and bought cleaning supplies, then set the house in order. Things were coming together. Except the microwave wouldn’t work, and kept giving me an error message. That’s frustrating, but it was finding a huge puddle under the kitchen sink that felt most defeating. The realtor said she’d call a plumber but, so sorry, they can’t come until tomorrow! So sorry! Could you please wait!

Saturday I finally came down with whatever crud Chris had last weekend. The plumbers came and plumbed. I thought I felt better so we went to a home store to build the missing half of our kitchen. The existing half of our kitchen has a sink, a blackened three-burner stove, an oven we couldn’t get to work, 18-inches of dented stainless steel countertop and zero outlets. The empty side of the kitchen had three outlets, the government-issue fridge, and a thin wheelie cart from our shipment. Chris installed the shelves. I decided I did not in fact feel better and went to bed.

Sunday I rested while Chris took the kids to church and to run some errands. I felt better. I figured out the problem with the microwave. We had to wait around all afternoon for the initial internet sales team to show up. I decided to use the oven to make another pizza. It turned out rock hard on two edges and doughy in the middle. A true mystery. We were in relatively good spirits.

Monday the shower declined to turn off. Water streamed down the drain with no abatement, no matter how much fiddling we did. Another call to the realtor. So sorry, could you please wait until tomorrow. Someone will come shut off the water to your house then. Um, and fix it, right? That was unclear. I slept fitfully, worried about our enormous shipment coming to a place 200 square feet smaller than we’d been told to plan on.

“Why would the navy send you to Japan if there’s no housing available for you?” my father-in-law asked. Such a good question. We’d planned the entire move on the repeatedly reported info that it was absolutely impossible to live off base, and we could expect either direct placement or to be put somewhere within a week or so of arrival. The week we arrived, ha! So sorry! We all went on holiday and couldn’t possibly know what will be available within the next 30 days, what’s a spreadsheet?!

The kids liked being able to walk to school and play with friends after. They were heartbroken when there was nothing available for us, especially as family after family who arrived weeks after us got placement right away. I don’t think it’s right to expect better treatment just because of Chris’ job, but I don’t think it’s fair for my kids to receive worse treatment than enlisted families with less time in uniform (more enlisted towers on the mainbase), or junior officers who have a dog (and therefore get priority on the townhouses). We asked if we could wait for the units we knew of were coming available. No. Could we go to the end of the line? No. We were offered a unit a 40-minute drive away that would require both kids to switch schools after a month at their current school and Isaac to be bussed an hour to middle school every day next year. Because we’re not enlisted and don’t have a dog.

“Do you smell that?” the building supervisor said when I toured the building. “It smells like an electrical fire! I’ll check! This unit is very dark, because it’s against the mountain. Yes, you can see the building is very old. It will be renovated after two years. This is old enlisted housing.”

Then we found a house off base, but as we went to sign the papers they emailed to say the owners were selling it instead. So that is why we are living in this tiny house that’s been vacant for months, full of weird bathroom smells, leaking sinks, showers that won’t turn off, and sulfur smells. It’s not that we didn’t want to live offbase, it’s that the kids were distressed at doing a third consecutive overseas tour. I’ve already had the experience of living in foreign countries and for now I just wanted a giant dryer to dry a whole load of laundry in less than four hours. The kids wanted to walk to school. We wanted the built in community of living on base since this is a short tour for us. I wanted the kids to be able to ride their bikes to baseball practice and not have to live on the schoolbus. Mainly, I didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of moving out of a foreign rental so soon after the expensive, challenging move out of our Belgian home.

But here in this offbase neighborhood there are kids galore–next door even, a park right around the corner, and it’s not a base tower apartment! So that’s good, except for the single bathroom, very small quarters, leaking sink, half kitchen, shower situation….

So anyway, this morning at 10am, the realtor’s assistant shows up to do…something? She takes a video of the shower running and not turning off. Two plumbers show up, turn the house water off, replace the faucet, and there you go, success! As soon as the kids got home, the internet people showed up, installed the wifi and called the gas emergency line. The kids were at the park when I heard sirens approaching and hoped they weren’t coming for me. They were coming for me. This house is coming for me. This move is coming for me.

Send help! It’s easy to find me—I’m in the house that smells funny.