Quite a quiet week

After all the excitement of the kid's health checks and the rugby last weekend, this week has been on the quiet side. This is good as I needed a week off (whilst still being at work). It's actually a quiet time in Japan at the moment; the politicos don't seem to be doing anything wrong (or really anything for that matter), so it feels like a bit of a return to Silent Shinzo's premiership, and big business doesn't seem to want to get into scandalville - they're probably still trying to work out how much money they've lost over the last18 months (and how much they're going to have to declare to the taxman).

One bit of news from Toyota was that they are quitting F1, this is big news as they have been front runners, podium sitters and world champions several times since they joined in 2002. Oh hang on, that must have been someone else as Toyota, biggest car maker on the planet, were utterly rubbish. But the important thing was that the J-boss of Toyota F1, Tadashi Yamanashi, did the decent thing and blubbed when he announced the news:



This is important as it shows he really meant it when he said he was happy to save the company about a gazillion yen a year. Crying is an important part of corporate Japan and is certainly an expected part of any news conference where bad news is on the menu. Indeed some foreign correspondents on the Japan big business beat have taken to ranking the sincerity of the apology given by the unfortunate suit:



Obviously not a good one that - perhaps it was Shinzo's resignation speech? (Actually probably not as a '4' would be far too high for that).

Anyway I've also been running a bit, Wednesday night was a 7.3km trot down the riverbank towards Akabane - that was a 36m 21s effort so pleased with that. Then this afternoon I did a 10km quickstep up the river towards... not sure what's up there actually, Nerima? Anyway I did find out that the kilometer markers stop as 28 (25 is next to the flat) but some useful person has painted a discreet but noticeable maker on the road for 30km so I knew when to turn. Anyway that was done in 51m 45s so maybe the 52m 10k I did a while back was pretty accurate. But again the left achillies is painful, might have to do something about it.