Two prongs? も一つ、お願いします！

Checked out of the hotel today, and they hailed a taxi for me. The taxi took me to Kyoto Gaidai, where I was supposed to meet someone "by 10:00". I ended up having quite a discussion with Tetsushi YAMADA, who... does something at the front gate. I'm not being secretive, I just have no idea what his job is. He's a pretty decent guy and he speaks better English than most of the Japanese I've encountered so far. Most Japanese people seem to recognize just about any single English word I throw at them, so I can use English words when my vocabulary fails me, such as trying to describe a "TV cord", because "coaxial cable" doesn't quite convey the same... I'm-not-looking-for-a-technical-term.

Anyway, as it turns out I got there an hour and some change early, so they told me to wait in the resource room. So I drop my stuff in the resource room and see a line of computers. Yay! Finally, I'll be able to go Internet something! Alas, it was not to be. KUFS apparently has their own domain, and none of the standard guest accounts worked. Oh, and my laptop was at 7% charge, with nary a three-pronged plug in sight.

Which brings me to my next point: grounded plugs. What the hell happened here, Japan? In the hotel room, there was not a single three-prong outlet to be seen. But you can imagine that. I mean, they must have just not redone the wiring since, say, World War II. ... ... Or something.

Except there's not a single one in my whole apartment. Eh? Eh? Surely the Japanese recognize the risk of electrical surges and whatever else grounded plugs are good for.

In the end, I discovered that two of the outlets in my apartment do, in fact, have a ground. It's a screw. Under the plug itself. To use it, you have to go to a 電気屋 (something like Fry's, but scaled down to Japanese-size) and pick up a converter. The converter has a little two-pronged fork on the end of a six-inch wire; the whole assembly looks like somebody's trying to rig up a VHF antenna for their TV through the wall with only one terminal once it's all done.

Now, you'd think this would work like every other such assembly ever but it doesn't, of course, because OMGWTFJAPANBBQ or something. Hell, I don't know. Anyway, you unscrew the brass - I think - screw and then slide the wire under this rectangular washer. I didn't want to end up accidentally flipping the kill-the-stupid-foreigner switch that I'm sure is hidden somewhere, so I had my kanrinrin (something of a live-in manager. Mine's name is "Gyoubu" as far as I can tell) do it. Now I have one surge protector worth of modern, grounded outlets in my apartment.

Mission complete?