The Roof Resolution

Leak free roof!

I have to retract some of my previous comments about insurance companies that I made here last month. On first enquiry it seemed that damage by typhoons were not covered by our policy. Then it was conveyed that it wasn't the typhoon that was the issue but rather that we weren't covered for things falling on the house from the air such as airborne debris, errant satellites and airplanes. Now I can understand not wanting to be liable for meteors landing or terrorist attacks but a tree falling on someones property has got to be a fairly regular occurrence, especially in this land of a billion trees growing on near vertical mountains everywhere. After quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing the insurance company finally admitted that, yes, we actually were covered for this event and that there would be an investigator assigned who would come and interview us about the whole incident. A bit tricky seeing as we are on the other side of the planet at the moment. The investigator turned out to be a realistic guy however and on sending him the builders quote and some pics he decided to fore go the interview and site inspection. He told us by phone that the whole insurance business is up to it's neck in investigating all the claims in the earthquake and tsunami area and that they just don't have enough people to go around checking out every claim in Kansai. He gave us a budget we could spend and told us to just go ahead and fix it. Sweet!. That's one less problem I have to deal with on my return.

The other issue was what to do with the huge pieces of dead tree lying on the boundary. All attempts to track down the neighbour who owns this tree have proved to be futile. It always amazes me how people in this country can just disappear into thin air in spite of the fact that you have to register your residency with your local city hall and that you basically can't live a normal life if you don't. No wonder there's so many people still claiming a pension for relatives who died years ago. Anyway, I concluded that the only way this tree is going to go away is if I cut it up myself. I have a chainsaw here in Auckland that would be well capable of doing just that and I went through the mental exercise of how it would be to carry it onto an airplane. With the drama of taking a cordless drill through still fresh in my mind, I am trying to imagine what the good folk at AVSEC Level 4 will make of a 16 inch petrol chainsaw tucked away inside my bag. Then there's the problem of  the Biosecurity people when I bring it back to NZ. I would have to pay for a full decontamination of the saw as everybody knows of the enormous risk posed to the country by foreign woodchips and sawdust. So that plan was classified as unrealistic. 

Now the next thought I had was to find out if I can hire a chainsaw in Kameoka. Tool hire places are common in western countries but not so much in Japan it seems. After much online searching we found an outfit in Kyoto who will rent chainsaws to crazy people who actually intend to operate them themselves instead of unquestioningly paying a professional a large amount of money to do it for them. Surprise number 2 was how reasonable the price was. Y4000 for a 3 day hire. Very reasonable I thought...this plan might actually work. Then we read the fine print! Following the greatest of Japanese traditions, the details of the deal are uniquely Japanese. You see, the chainsaw does not come with a chain. Y4000 gets you the saw but if you want to use it to actually cut anything you will have to buy a chain for it. The price of a new chain.... Y6000. Now I can see the point of this....a lot of people will probably have no clue how to drive a chainsaw and will no doubt fuck up the chain in the course of the 3 days. It's the way they go about dealing with this issue that I find mind boggling. Instead of paying a bond which is refundable if you don't break it, you have to buy a new chain which, presumably, you can keep after you return the saw. Setting aside the issue of how ridiculous this scenario is and being totally pragmatic about the whole thing, I calculate the cost of this proposition. Y6000 + Y4000+ say Y500 for petrol and the fact that the hire place is a 2 hour round trip x2 away. This is getting a bit costly. I'm sure I could buy a used saw from one of those 2nd hand dealers in Shin Sekai for this price. Shizuka decides to call the builder who is going to fix the roof and ask him if he can help. In true Osakajin business fashion he offers to hire a saw and cut the tree up and stack the logs out of the way for Y10,000 the same day he works on the roof. I like this company. I had expected much sucking of air through teeth and a long and rambling explanation of how it couldn't be done. We arranged a day for it to be done and told him to call the real estate agent who will come by the house with the key. All sorted.... or so it seemed.

Dont mess with him!

The day before the job was to be done Shizuka received 2 emails. One was from the agent complaining bitterly about how rude and obnoxious the builder is. The other was from the builder saying how incompetent and useless the agent is. A couple of phone calls in which Shizuka had to play referee established that it was basically blue collar Osaka Vs white collar Kyoto points of view. Japan is a hierarchical country and everybody has their place in the grand scheme of things. This dispute seems to stem from both parties asserting the claim to be the most important and therefore the superior. A bit of smoothing of feathers was done and the agent agreed to drop the key in the mailbox the night before. A face to face meeting was avoided and everyone was able to claim a small victory. So much for the famous Japanese "Wa". The next day everything went smoothly. The roof was fixed, the tree was cut, the agent and builder were pacified and the insurance company paid for it all. Once again this country has managed to confound me. A seemingly simple thing can be bizarrely complicated and expensive while things which you would guess to be difficult can be resolved surprisingly easy.