If you think American telecom corporations are bad, just wait until you have to deal with NTT. Nihon (Japan) Telephone and Telegraph owns (apparently) every single phone line in Japan. In Japan, if you want phone, you have to either buy a phone line for roughly $800, or you lease one for something like $60/month or something. The "meigi-nin" is the original holder of the phone line, and in my cases, is about 4 or 5 tenants ago in this apartment. To do just about anything with your phone line (including getting set up for internet) you need to know who this person is. It has taken me three weeks to find out who this person is. YahooBB won't give me DSL without it. Neither will KDDI. So I have it. Then I find out I need the Kanji of the person's name.
For the uninitiated, the Japanese have technically four alphabets. Romaji (roman letters), Hiragana (syllables used for Japanese words), Katakana (Syllables used for foreign words) and Kanji (chinese alphabet). Kanji is singularly the most annoying thing on the planet, especially when it comes to names. People use kanji in their names that may have nothing to do with the actual way that people really pronounce other words.
So I'm talking to this poor girl, Uweda-san, and trying to describe in my crappy gaijin ways the kanji for this person's name. It turns out, the kanji for "KAZU" is not "kazu" at all. It's "OSA." Imagine that. I had to actually draw a picture of the thing as my supervisor had written it and email it to a friend, who finally figured out that it was osameru. Gah!
But enough of that. I'm sure you're all dying to see what it really looks like, no? Check it out: 収める. It's the part right before める. Imagine trying to explain that to someone over the phone. Didn't seem too hard at the time...
For those toilet-sink naysayers: The sink in the toilet is perfectly sanitary! The water that comes into the toilet in Japanese and American homes is no different than the water coming into your shower. It has nothing to do with the water going out of the toilet ... unless of course you're pooping in the reservoir tank. Also, it's just a sink in which you wash your hands after flushing the toilet. You do not brush your teeth there, as there is a separate real sink in the showering area of the bathroom. It's a great way, I suppose, to save water.
Anyway, that's all for now. I'm getting cramped sitting in the one corner of my apartment where I can get internet ...