Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists here and you’ll probably hear a lot of complaints. I recently changed dentists because my old one loved to break routine dental work into multiple visits, like the time he took 18 months to put in an implant I needed. My new dentist is much more efficient, taking only one visit to fix my mushiba, or “bug tooth,” the oh-so-cute word for dental cavities in Japanese. Apparently he hadn’t worked on many Americans, and he went out of his way to tell me that the material he was filling my tooth with was made by 3M in the U.S., and to carefully explain exactly what work had was doing, since foreigners have a reputation for wanting more information from dentists and doctors than they normally provide patients. Like many businesses in Japan, the dental clinic doubled as the dentist’s family home, with an attractive glass-and-concrete front door for patients to enter through and a residence built above. This is a common practice in Japan, and most of the convenience stores in our prefecture feature rooms built above for the manager to live in. My own house follows this business + residence pattern, too: the rear part of our house is a two-story domicile for our family, and the front is the liquor shop my wife’s parents run. That’s right, I live in a liquor shop — why do you think I like living in Japan so much?
Many business are designed with residences built into them.
