Lost and Found
By William Wetherall
How to sneak into Japan and stay
Began 29 March 2016, completed 29 October 2016.
Last revised 15 November 2016 (2,390 words)
Lost and Found
By William Wetherall
Lately I've had to check the trash before setting it out on the corner by nine every Tuesday. My husband has taken to tossing almost anything he can't figure out into the nearest waste basket. At times he even looks at me as though wondering who I am, what I'm doing in the house, and whether to call the police or chase me out with the baseball bat he keeps in the umbrella rack inside the front door. He used to play ball with our children, but the bat is now a precaution against burglars, in what's left of his mind.
I'm fairly certain the passport went out with the trash. Unable to find it, after turning the house upside down several times, I rather than he, given his attitudes and abilities, had to apply for a replacement so he could attend his sister's funeral in Manila last summer. Even if he never makes another trip outside Japan, as an alien with permanent residence he's expected to have a valid passport, or a certificate of statelessness.
Legal existence in Japan means registration as a resident. If you have a household register in Japan, you are a national of Japan, and if you don't then you're an alien. An an alien who has no nationality is stateless. My husband has a nationlity but he's come close to losing it twice because of the political circumstances under which he came to Japan. The present regime in his country takes his asylum in Japan as an act of expatriation and a case before its supreme court could go either way.
It's not as though Japan would throw him out if somehow he were to lose his nationality. His permanent residence is asured so long as he doesn't violate any immigration laws -- including keeping his registration here up to date. This is where I come in, for he has lost his ability to keep his bureaucratic house in order. If the court rules that people in his position are no longer nationals, with a little paperwork Japan would issue him a certificate of statelessness.
In my meaner moments, though, I've pictured him being deported to the wardship of his home country, if not thrown in prison. To my great relief, I'm ashamed to admit. I gave up urging him to naturalize. He always got belligerent about the list of required documents, which require a bit of leg work. "Why do they need a copy of my college diploma?" he would ask. "And my mother's death certificate?" He's made a career of fighting the system, but admits he was wrong to put it off.
under the bed we still share
like North and South Korea
share the peninsula
Now his old passports, and even his birth certificate, are missing, probably the victims of a triage he performed on his files when in one of his erase-the-past states of mind. And now he has trouble with the simplest matters, like bribing a vending machine to release a bottle of tea or issue a train ticket. Why not use emoney or a train pass, you say, but that's the problem. He loses cards faster than I can replace them. I've found them in books he never finishes, under the bed we still share like North and South Korea share the peninsula, behind the TV, in a flower pot on the veranda -- and, yes, in the study, bathroom, or kitchen trash. Heaven knows what he has flushed down the toilet.
His awareness of missing things changes from hour to hour. In the morning he might say "Don't worry, it'll show up." Or "It's got to be where you left it", as though I had something to do with its disappearance. An hour later he's apt to say, "Have you seen my wallet?" And I'll say, "Isn't it on the tray by the wash basin?" And he'll say "Nope," then clenching his fists and staring at the floor, "Watanabe took it."
Watanabe's the name of a bank clerk my husband accused of embezzling money from his account a couple of years ago, when I began to suspect that his forgetfulness was abnormal. The postal savings account into which the missing funds had been transferred turned out to be his. He had recently opened it out of fear that the bank, which had merged with another bank, the third such merger in as many years, would fail. Within just a few days, he had forgotten the new account and the transfer.
From about this time, he began to hide important documents and objects and forget where he had hidden them.
I intercepted his wallet in the kitchen trash, simply because the bag of peelings and leavings and bones and spoiled leftovers broke as I was lifting it from the sink to the larger bag in which I consolidate all the burnable household trash every Monday evening.
I decided to take some countermeasures. I had heard about key finders. You attach a tag with a buzzer to a key chain, or to any object for that matter. The buzzer is triggered by an electrical signal transmitted from a finder device the size of a small remote control. If you lose the object among the clutter in your office or house or car, you simply push a button on the finder, the listen for the buzzer, which tells you where it is.
A search of the computer and appliance store at the local station, a hub for three feeder lines, turned up an set of four tags, each a different color, and cell-phone sized locator with four color-coded buttons. The tags were thin enough that I could slip one into the coin purse in his wallet.
I slipped the red tag into the coin purse, which empty except for 5-yen and 10-yen coin. The 5-yen coin was a sentimental gesture to our marriage of nearly 50 years, for 5-yen is prounounced "go-en" in the Japanese, which shares the same sounds of a word that meanings "honorable relationship" or "engagement" or "close bond". The 10-yen coin was to make a call from a public phone -- if he could find one.
In the old days, pay phones became so common they practically found you. Today most train stations have one or two, but when out on the town, they're a rare species. You ask where one is, and people look at you as though you just stepped out of space ship. I don't like cell phones either, but I carry one for emergencies. And if only he would carry one, I could track his movements by GPS. But he refuses to carry one, and anyone he sees spots using one while walking, he'll cross the street bump into them with such force I'm worried that someday he'll injure someone. Of course I understand his anger, but I see in it the same impatience he has with the bureaucracy.
But back to the buzzer in his wallet. I buzzed it everyday to make sure it was there. I'd push the red button on finder, heard the buzzer, and confirmed that the sound came from the wallet.
Then one day, after putting on his coat to go for a walk, and to buy a sports sheet at the convenience store, a daily ritual, he reported his wallet missing. I was practically beside myself with delight that at last I had an opportunity to demonstrate the key finder in an actual case.
I pushed the red button and listened, but heard no sound. I pushed the button in every room in the house, and around the house, but heard nothing. Thinking the battery might be weak, I put in a fresh one and searched again. Nothing but silence.
Thinking the tag might have had a flaw, I conducted a manual search. RESUME
, was that the finder tells you where the tag is. It only tells you where object is if the object is still attached to the tag.