Foil gift

An important value in Japan is to not inconvenience other people (or, another way to say that is: not annoying other people, as I wrote about in a post three years ago). 

As a foreigner, it is not always easy to figure out when you might inconvenience other people and we're still learning. But in a city where space is at a premium, where you put yourself, your children, and your belongings is a serious issue.

But when it comes to doing construction work on your house, you're heading into a land of much inconvenience to others. So we find that construction workers are generally very considerate about things like their vehicles blocking the narrow roads. However, to ward off any potential bad feelings, prior to doing construction it seems that they do an obligatory run around the neighbours to give an apologetic notice accompanied by a gift.

Last year we got a towel from the neighbours behind us. And we got another towel six years ago when a neighbour's fence was being fixed.

This time we got 20m of foil.

A house on our street, about 30 m from ours, has been demolished. It looks like they are going to be building again very soon. The block of land is bordered by two roads, neither of which is very wide. They aren't main roads, but they do get a reasonable amount of traffic on roads that are only about 5m wide. We've caused minor traffic jams by someone stopping near there to pick us up by car. 

Blue rectangle: our house
Red star: the construction site
Green arrow: entrance to kindergarten
Orange arrows: roads

I'll have to write another blog post to explain why there's
white paper suspended from string in the middle of the block!

Obviously, large construction vehicles are going to potentially cause traffic congestion and inconvenience to pedestrians, especially because across the road is a large kindergarten where most kids arrive by bus and on foot. They have a car park, but it is down the street about 50m. 

So, we've received a letter of apology in advance and some foil! I presume the kindergarten and all our neighbours received something similar in the name of keeping neighbourly relationships smooth.