When I first came to Japan I needed a cheap place to live. The solution to this dilemma was to stay at a "gaijin house". They are economical, convenient, and can be interesting places to live.

There are however a few drawbacks to living in one of these houses for foreigners. First of all, you usually have to share kitchen, toilet, shower and laundry facilities. Secondly, the management does not always carefully choose whom they allow in these places. Often you are living with strange, rude or annoying people.

In the gaijin house I was living in, there was an abundance of young men from various countries who would come to Japan without the proper working visas to sell jewelry on the streets. The problem with this was that these guys would work until about three a.m. and then return home wide-awake and ready to party.

I was teaching English at the time and had to get up at about eight a.m. everyday. Needless to say, my schedule and that of the young street hawkers were quite different indeed. Almost every morning at about three a.m., I would have to go to the room next door and ask my young neighbor to turn his music down. He would always agree and say sorry and the music would be turned down. This would last about a maximum of twenty minutes, then the music would start blasting again and he and his friends would start laughing and yelling back and forth over the music.

Finally after about two weeks of this I went over to my neighbor's room and asked him to step outside because I wanted to talk to him. He obliged with a rather puzzled look on his face. I then proceeded to tell him how he had woken me up almost every night for the past two weeks and that I had had enough.

To this my young cocky neighbor started yelling at me about how his music was "not so loud" and that I was "over reacting". So for the next twenty minutes at about four O'clock in the morning we stood on the street outside the gaijin house yelling back and forth at each other. Soon everyone in the house had come down to the street to watch.

The sleepy eyed people standing around didn't get involved, they just watched as we screamed at each other in complete futility. A couple of times we came close to fighting but held back. Even the manager didn't say anything; he just stood there and let us go at it.

Nothing was solved by this argument, and he went right back to his room after and played his music. My next move was simple. When I woke up at eight the next morning I turned on my music: loud. Believe me it was very loud. I had one of the best "gomi" stereos in the house. I purposely ruined his quality sleep time for two days straight. It was the "eye for an eye" method, but alas my hand had been forced. When patience and reasoning fail, drastic measures must be taken.

One of the guys who lived in the gaijin house told me that my neighbor had been complaining the first day I played my early morning rock reveille. "That's too much, why does he have to play it so loud" he lamented. Nobody answered him. He knew what was happening.

Then a miracle occurred, I never heard my neighbors music or loud voice again, ever. We all lived happily ever after...well sort of.