Sunday evening

Evening all, so what a fun packed weekend that was - well, packed is an accurate descriptive expression, however it's something of a stretch to include 'fun' in there as well.

Saturday morning I was up bright and early - actually make that still dark and early as I had agreed to go with a bunch of school kids down to a mass footy kickabout at the American school (ASIJ) campus down in Chofu. The get together started at 8.30 so it was meet in Setagaya at 7.30 so yours truly had to be there at 7.00 to make sure everything was set up ok, so up at 5.15 am in the morning to be on time. Lawks that's early for a Saturday! But I made it, thankfully. The reason I was doing this rather than, say, the Primary PE teachers whose job it is, was that last week was half term and we couldn't possibly ask teachers to work during their holidays now could we? So helpful HR managers step into the breach so the kids can attend a tournament.

So we took three school teams down there; ASIJ have a great campus, they had a choice a few years ago - stay as a city centre school and have limited space and facilities or move out of Tokyo and have fields - they took the latter option and have a great place, lots of space, sports fields, big classrooms, first rate facilities etc. They also have a large fleet of buses to ferry the kids from central Tokyo to Chofu and back everyday. One day our school will have to make the same decision - I wonder which way we will go...?

Anyway I just thought I was going as a bus monitor (got to have enough adults on the bus or it won't be allowed to go), but when we got there we realised that all the teams would be well spaced out and playing almost continuously so in the end it was 'Justin, here's the girls team, look after them, they have only ever had 3 lessons, good luck...'. Ah.

But actually it was great. They didn't have particularly high expectations and the tournament was really a tournament as no one was keeping scores (luckily for us) or progressing to the next round (as there wasn't one). The first game they were completely overrun and didn't really know what to do so were hit for a cricket score (it was 6-a-side and two 8-minute halves), same in the second game with an even worse score, but at least they started playing a bit thanks to some on-the-spot coaching from their new gaffer.

Then in the third game they really started to play (and listen to my shouting from the side line). The first half ended 2-0 to the opposition but the second half, after what must have been a half-time talk from yours truly of Shakespearean (or Fergusonian) grandeur that they went out and played really well, scoring their first goal (a lovely strike by right-midfielder Lauren) and only a late defensive error allowed the oppo to score, making it 1-1 for the half. OK, they lost, but they scored their first goal and the smiles at the end were really special.

The girls lost all their games in the end, but they scored a few more times and really got into it. The fact that all but one of the teams they played were all boys showed that they scrapped really hard, giving one boys team a torrid second half after one of the little blighters said to his coach 'this is really easy, we can score whenever we want' after they went 4-0 up (the second half was 2-2, I think). If they had played another all-girl team I reckon they could have won a game, but it was not to be. Next time, however...

Sunday morning was the next health check day. This follows on from a colon cancer and hepatitis check (results available from tomorrow) and the annual medical on Friday; today was barium time. For those not in the know this is good for knowing if you have stomach cancer - you drink liquid barium and then they take lots of photos on a weird rig thing that turns you over and around and upside down. Personally I think filling your stomach with radioactive barium is a jolly good way to give yourself stomach cancer, but apparently I am wrong in this (or maybe some bit of it).

Anyway as I'm going to run the marathon the guru said I had to get as much of my health checked as possible as she does not want me to keel over whilst running (sensible girl), and as the barium check this is free, organised by the local ward office, then one would be silly not to take it. So off we trooped to Itabashi ward office this morning, after not eating or drinking (no water even) from 10pm on Saturday night to get the job done. There isn't much to write about really, as it was all done with typical ruthless Japanese efficiency, even down to providing the laxative necessary to expel the barium gloop from the other end sometime this evening (took the thing at 2pm and still no sign of Niagara Falls...).

What was not operating with ruthless Japanese efficiency, however, was the Denny's just over the road from the ward office. As you can imagine the first thing a big bunch of people who haven't eaten or drunk anything for over 12 hours is going to do is make a bee-line for the nearest restaurant --> Itabashi Denny's. Waiting 20 minutes just to get a cup of coffee - the first of the day - is not going to make one happy, and the food was cold as well. It was the same for everyone in there and so it was not a happy atmosphere. The staff kept apologising but they were fighting a losing battle - better coordination with the ward office needed, I think.

On top of all that I got a couple of runs in as well. I didn't do the 10km again, but a 5.3km on Saturday in 25m 58s; and a 7.3km this evening in 36m 35s, both of which I was happy with. Felt a bit ropey after the Saturday run (it had been a long day) but much better tonight (even though I kept worrying the the ex-lax would suddenly kick in and I'd have to dive into the bushes for an emergency evacuation a la Monty Python's Marathon for Incontinents). Luckily I made it home safely.

I know, I know...

I *should* have gone out running last night, but as it was the end of my working week (Thursday and Friday off as it's half term) I had a few beers and watched Valkyrie instead (which was quite good even though you knew what was going to happen in the end).

So anyway I went out tonight and to make up for it I did my first 10k run. I clocked a respectable 52m 05s, which I think is respectable anyway. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it was slightly longer than 10k as there is a big dogleg over a tributary and I think the distance is measured on the river not the riverbank. We'll see on Saturday as I'll do a 10k going up the other way (with hopefully no doglegs) and see what the time is (I was hoping for a 50m or slightly under tonight).

Not good pain wise though as I have a sore left calf/Achilles (again) and the right knee feels iffy, soI'd have to put that at a 4/10, the highest for a while.

Other than that today we went to *another* park, this time one in Shinanomachi (near Shinjuku). Again this was an adventure playground stylee thing, but certainly less bucolic than Abiko Shrine on Sunday. But it was fun and the little fella had a good time. It was also, oddly, chock-full of French kids with their (French) mums. This is not a bad thing, I hasten to add, just odd as it felt like a lot of families - maybe they had arranged a big playdate (there's a weird expression, playdate, it's probably American; when I was a kid it was called 'going to your mate's house after school': I agree playdate is easier, but it sounds so...American) because the Lycee is on half term as well. I don't know, but it was nice anyway.

Then we had lunch and wandered back past other, less inspiring, parks and the, more inspiring, national stadium, (but which I'm not sure they use much anymore - it seemed a bit on the rundown side).

Tomorrow, however, is health check up day... (oh joy)

Monday night

Out again tonight, 7.3K in 36m 27s, which for that distance is pretty good so happy with the time. Felt good and right knee felt pretty stable so hopefully getting stronger there.

Didn't get the chance to go out yesterday as we went to this shrine place. It is in a place called Abiko and the reason we went there was to save the world. As I'm now writing this I think we can safely say 'mission accomplished' but in a very real way not in a rubbish way like certain former US presidents.

Well sort of. It was all about Feng Shui, which the guru is most into. You write down your wishes, work out which direction from your house is best to travel and then go to a shrine in that direction, the further the better I think, take your letter with wishes on and pray. In the end it all becomes true so fingers crossed. Naturally one of my wishes for politico types to put an end to war in the word so watch this space as it could be happening to local armed conflict near you anytime soon. Our premium direction was northeast, hence Abiko and luckily enough it was northeast for both of us - if your feng shui isn't aligned properly you have to go in different directions apparently - dashed clever the ancient Chinese monk fellows, or whoever invented it.

Anyway we went, we prayed and then I took lots of photos with my new birthday camera. Some of the shots are quite good, but I did make the mistake of leaving it on a really high ISO setting from last time so a lot of the really sharp detail has blurred a bit. Oh well, you live and learn.

Next to the shrine, which really was in the middle of nowhere (part of north Chiba) was a jolly little sort of country park thing (I mean it was little and jolly, not that it was jolly little), with open grassy spaces, ponds, a bbq area (with food supplied) and a little but super adventure playground. So after the shrine we lunched on bbq'd food and then Marcus attempted the play ground. It was great as it had about 20 big wooden obstacle things you had to crawl, jump, balance or climb in, out, through, up, down, under, over and any other prepositions you can think of. Marcus did most of them and was most chuffed by the end, as were his admiring parents. In fact we were all so chuffed we had ice creams to celebrate.

To be honest, however, dad was most chuffed by the fact it was free to get in.

This afternoon's run...

Was an 8K wander along the riverbank, this was good as it was the longest I have run for a while, certainly since the marathon came along, and overall it was fine.

Whilst I was running I was thinking about politics. I know, I know, but it happens sometimes and once it starts there isn't much you can do to stop it (well, apart from think about sex, but that's not good when one is running - the bulges can get in the way...)

Anyway what I was thinking about was the fact that a lot of politics has gone on since I last wrote about politics on this blog, and that's not good (not good that I haven't written about it, I mean, it's ok that lots of politics has gone on). That isn't good mainly because we've had a few politicians that I haven't given nicknames to, which is most remiss on my part. So we had the Kool Kid (Koizumi) and Silent (Shinzo Abe) and I think that was the last of them that I named.

So, in a better-late-than-never offering can I propose, after Silent we got the Fuckwit (Fukuda) and Short Step (Aso - as in It's only a Short Step from Aso to Asshole) until we come to the present incumbent of the job (I wanted to say where he lived, e.g. the present incumbent of 10 Downing St or the Elysee Palace, but I don't know what the official residence of the JPM is).

Anyway the new guy is Yukio Hatoyama, he is the first non-Liberal Democratic Party (who, lest we forget, were neither liberal nor democratic) PM in years (well, from 1993 to 1996 we had Hosokawa (Japan New), (mad) Hata (Renewal - whoever the fuck that was) and Murayama (Socialist) but apart from that...). So since 1945 we had 64 years minus 3 of LDP and this year the electorate threw them out. Why? Because they were shite and at last people realised it. By the way I knew they were shite ages ago but I'm not allowed to vote so no one else gives a toss what I think.

So Hatoyama is a bit like Obama in the US - he's new, new's not from the old guard and he's making a load or really good sounding promises that he just isn't going to be able to deliver on. You know the sort of thing, an end to pork-barrel building projects, less corruption, no more amakudari, incentives to have children, that sort of thing. He's also a Democrat (but not a Liberal Democrat) which means he and Obama should get on well. However he isn't black, or the Japanese equivalent which would be Ainu, so the parallels stop there.

Anyway he needs a nickname and this, returning to my opening theme, was what I was thinking about whilst running this afternoon. But as I couldn't think of a decent nickname it can't have been that successful a run. OK, I admit Fuckwit isn't particularly original or that difficult to think of, but Fukuda really was one. I'd like to think of something a bit better for Yukio so I think I'll wait a bit, see which of his big election promises nosedives first.

So to the run - 8K in 38m 59s (which is pretty darned good going even if I say it myself - puts me in a 3h 46m marathon time (allowing for slowing) according to Runners World's calculator thingy, to which I say 'no, no, sub 5 hours is fine with me!). Pain factor again only 3/10, some left achillies and right knee issues, but nothing too bad and both seem OK now at 11pm. The most important thing, however, was that at the end of 8K I didn't feel I had to stop - it was nice to, but I could have carried on. Important that.

Tomorrow we're off to some shrine but might get a cheeky run in later in the afternoon.

Lots of running...

...but no running training tonight; no, Friday night is footy night.

Now I know this throws up a few interesting questions, the first of which is 'I didn't think you could play football...?'. This is both true and, indeed, not true. I cannot do skillful things like dribble (with the ball) or 'beat' players with my silky smooth footwork. However there is a lot to be said for commitment and getting in the way of the opposing players, or, to put it another way, defense. Running around, huffing and, indeed, puffing and stopping other players doing their 'thing' can, in itself, be a thing of beauty. Well, that's what I keep telling myself anyway.

The other question, of course, is what does this have to do with running? Well lots of running around playing football is useful as it is a different kind of running. Usually,when I go out to the riverbank, it's short gentle jog, stop and stretch, long medium/hard run, stop, water, short gentle jog finish. Very little change of pace or direction.

But playing football is good because it is lots of short intense sprints, short recovery time and then short hard sprint again (which is, of course, essentially what Fartlek is all about). Included in this is a lot of changes of direction which good for my iffy knee joints as they need some lateral stress on the tendons. Of course there is the only to real possibility of going over on an ankle or some other such muscular misfortune, but there you go - I'll stop it after Christmas as I would be mightily pissed off if I missed the run with a ruptured achillies after playing football.

Until then I will keep snapping and harrying the opposition. Tonight's pain factor 3/10, got a whack on the left calf and stamp on the right big toe (again) and a smack on the nose (but that shouldn't stop me going out this weekend).

So, 7k tomorrow and I reckon a 9 or 10k might be in the offing for Sunday...

Don't ask why...

But not only have I signed up, but I have actually succeeded in the lottery, for a place in next year's Tokyo Marathon.

Yup, on 28th February 2010 Iwill strap on a pair of running shoes and slog round 26miles, or about 42 kilometers, of Tokyo's finest urban sprawl. I will be aiming to do this in less than 5 hours and then aim to recover in less than 5 weeks. My aims may be lofty, but I think I can reach them...

I have been asking myselfwhy I should sign up for this kind of nonsense and think it is the responsibility of my mate Dave who... (aside, everyone in the world has, according to an immutable universal law, a mate called Dave. These Dave characters do stuff so their mates can begin stories with 'well, my mate Dave who...'. But it does beg the question, do people called Dave have mates called Dave...?). Anyway my mate Dave who lives in Bangkok and who has done the Bangkok marathon twice was over in Japan a while back and during a drunken conversation a plan was hatched that we would do the Tokyo marathon with Steve as well. Now Steve totally denies he ever agreed to it and I'm not sure Dave ever applied, but I did and I'm in.

I have been running at weekends (and the odd evening) for a good few years now, indeed my MBA was written on the back on 5K runs on Sunday afternoons - very good for clearing the mind of clutter, I usually started the run with a question or a 'how am I going to do this tricky bit of [plagiarism/editorial vandalism/statistics]?' and by the end I would have had an epiphany and the next section would be written.

But big jump from a 5K on a Sunday afternoon to 42K on Sunday morning, but we'll give it a crack. I've already started regular evening runs and will start upping my weekend distances soon. I may even drastically cut my alcohol intake from January onwards! Yes, it's that serious...

Anyway, that means that this blog will now become my online journal of running and pain. I shall log runs, times and all that stuff, along with breathtaking insights on how really dull it is (apparently) to run by yourself for 20 or 30 kilometers.

So tonight, 5.3Km, 26m 59s, slight precipitation in the air with some thunder and lightning, along the riverbank. Pain factor 2/10, felt pretty good but disappointed with the time (best is 25m 05s) as thought it was faster, some right knee issues whilst running but nothing severe.

Back with a vengeance

OK, apologies, been busy etc, but we’re back now.

As I haven’t put finger to keyboard pretty much this year a lot has gone on, however as it is now August I can’t remember most of it. What I can remember is that 1) we moved and 2) the folks came to visit, so that is what I shall write about (so if you don’t want to know about either of these things, stop reading now).

The moving

Yes, as I type this at the office (it’s summer so it’s quiet…) I know that when I finish I will return home not to the bustling metropolis of Kawaguchi but to the sleepy-except-for-the-trains Ukimafunado. ‘Where on earth is that?’ I’m sure you’re all wondering, well, if you google it you can find it, but it is in Itabashi ward of Tokyo, so I can finally say that I really do live in Tokyo rather than in a bit of Japan right next to Tokyo (not that it ever stopped me). Anyway the new gaff is actually pretty close to the old gaff, over the river and along a bit, so we are still nice and close to the riverbank (good for jogging) and also very close to a jolly nice big park with a pond (but also close to a train line and a fairly big road) and also we’re on a direct line into Shibuya, making the morning commute slightly less stressful for me and the little ‘un (who has now attained the ripe old age of four – about the right age and size for chimney sweeping, which is where I would send him over the summer holiday if only a) the guru would let me and b) anyone in Japan had a chimney… I digress)

So anyway, the first part of the year was mainly taken up with getting this gargantuan move sorted out. As I’m sure you can imagine there were plenty of hassles along the way, mainly involving money and pieces of paper that had to be signed. Luckily the bank and the mortgage neatly involved both of these bothersome requirements and the Guru and I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time travelling to Mizonokuchi (where we nearly bought before and where the man with the money was) and sitting in the bank’s loan plaza (which was unlike a plaza in almost every way) listening to a man with bad breath talk to us about mortgages. Of course we went through the whole fixed or free floating conundrum and ended with a deal that, to be honest, I don’t really understand, but some of the loan is floating and some of it fixed for 10 years, but the rate on the floating bit has limits so it can’t suddenly go up by 5% overnight. Or something. I don’t know, I just filled in and signed lots of bits of paper. Interesting that whilst the bank savings interest rate is something like 0.000000001% at the moment, the rate on loans and mortgages is, of course, much higher at something like 3.5%. Hmm…

Note on filling in forms – over the last few months and, well I suppose a year now, I have had to fill in a shitload of bits of paper, usually with exactly the same bits of information like names, address, work, family details etc. Now as a non-native writer of Japanese I have had to practice a bit to get to a point where what I write is legible. The Guru, on the other hand, is Japanese so has had a lot of practice. The result of this is that, as a Japanese person, her handwriting is allowed to be nearly illegible and another Japanese person reading it will have no issues; however as a foreigner my writing has to be of almost typeface quality otherwise a Japanese person will refuse to believe it is Japanese. A case in point. There is a katakana character 'イ' which is the phonic equivalent of a short ‘i’, on one of the bank forms an officious banker decided that with my written イ the slanting top bar was too short and therefore illegible, so I had to go back to Mizonokuchi one evening by myself after work and redo all the forms because one or two of these characters didn’t look right. It didn’t matter that there isn’t really another katakana character it could be confused with (see here if you want http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) or that, in context, it couldn’t really have been anything else, to him it didn’t look right so had to be changed. Can you imagine having to fill in the same forms all over again because the bloke at Barclays doesn’t like the way you write the letter ‘e’? What a tosser.

Anyway the important point here was that we got the cash, which made the construction company happy as it meant that we could actually buy the place.

Moving house is a big business in Japan, although I can guess that this may well also be the case in other parts of the world. Moving in April is even bigger business here in Japan as a lot of people do it, so moving companies can, and do, make it more expensive. Interestingly the reason April is so busy is that it is the start of the financial year; ‘so what?’ you may muse. Well, Japanese companies are extremely likely to, at the drop of a hat in March, decide that the company would be better served if Tanaka san from accounts in the Tokyo office would become, on 1st April, Tanaka san from marketing in the Nagoya office. And off Tanaka san will duly toddle, possibly but not necessarily taking family in tow with about 2 week’s notice. This may seem harsh, and it is. The reason, so I am reliably informed by my memory, is a hangover from the feudal samurai period where the samurai were distributed around the country and, importantly away from the wives and families who stayed in Edo (Tokyo), so as a) not to ferment rebellion/assassinate the emperor or shogun in Edo with their mates and b) so wives and family could be held hostage. Nowadays it is corporate salaryman that gets shunted about and usually families are encouraged to go (but if hubby is moved to, say, Utsunomiya would you go…?), but the moves are still there. It seems like a serious waste of time and money to me, but then I’m not Japanese so I couldn’t possibly understand.

Moving into a newly built apartment block can be tricky. If it is a really big block then you can imagine the problem if each and every of the 758 new apartment owners all tried to move in at 9am on Monday morning – so these things have to be organised.

As you can imagine this is a jobsworth’s wet dream.

Our new block is quite small, only 50 or so units, however we also had a partner removal firm appointed by the construction company. It was their job, let’s call them Kitazawa for that indeed was their name, to organise the moving of new owners and, as they are a removal company themselves, basically get as much business for themselves as possible (what, I wonder, was the kickback to the construction company to get the business…?). The equation was quite simple, if you used Kitazawa you could move at any time you wanted, spend as long as you want loading and unloading your gear, block everyone’s access to the building if you wanted and have the them kiss your butt everyday for a month; if you didn’t use Kitazawa then you could move only when Kitazawa said you could, everything had to be unloaded from your removal van in 30 seconds or less, your removal van could not, however, actually stop moving outside the building for more than 4 seconds and parking facilities were available but only in Osaka.

With this in mid we contacted Kitazawa and asked them to give us a quote. For moving all our stuff about 1½ miles and recycling about 13 pieces of old, crap furniture they wanted the princely sum of 500,000 yen that’s over 3 grand in real money. Next! The recycling bit was the bit that got me – in Japan the local council will do this for you, you just call them up, they give you a date and then you buy a recycling sticker from your local convenience store, total cost about 500 yen per piece and the hassle of buying the sticker and putting it outside your apartment on the designated day. So for Kitazawa to quote us 150,000 yen for the recycling was the clincher – well, that and the fact we couldn’t afford half a million yen on the removals.

Luckily the school I work for uses a local mover every summer to cart teachers stuff around, so I gave him a call and asked him to give us a quote and he came back with a removals only price of 100,000, much more like it, though he did blanch a bit when we gave him the ‘rules’ for delivery and unloading.

After that it was mostly plain sailing. We packed up all the stuff, sometimes with the little un’s help but more often with us packing and he unpacking at the same time, sometimes from the same box. The appointed day came quickly, as they always do, but just before it did my folks arrived from the UK for a month’s stay – more of that later.

The moving itself was fine, we stood back and let sweaty men do all of the hard work whilst worrying about the new place and the old place. Although Kitazawa had all these draconian rules and penalties about the unloading of stuff the truth was that the new block was quite small and the arrival of new owners was actually spread out over a number of weeks, if not months, so there was very little in the way of moving in clashes and certainly no removal rage which, apparently, is not uncommon. Also we moved in on a Monday morning so it was never going to be that busy, not like a weekend.

The bigger concern for us was how much, if any, of the deposit on the old place we would get back. The deposit was 100,000yen and we figured if we got 20,000 back we’d be happy. There are horror stories of bastard landlords not only not giving any deposit back but of making demands for huge extra payments for spurious cleaning or repair work. I didn’t think it would come to that, but you never know.

So on the Monday afternoon we went back to the old 7th floor, fine view Kawaguchi flat for the final time to witness the last rites (of our stay anyway). Surprisingly neither the letting agent nor the landlord turned up, just a bloke from a redecorating company who would give his professional opinion. OK, fair enough. So as we sat on the floor of the empty flat he nosed around. The reason we were a tad worried was that over 6 years of wear and tear, including 4 years of small boy, there were bits of the flat in a state of disrepair. The tatami mats in the living room were threadbare in places, the paper on some of the sliding doors was a tad holey (not wholly holey, but enough), there were plenty of nicks in the wallpaper and the kitchen floor had scratches and, worst of all in our opinion, the odd gouge. So we weren’t too hopeful.

So chap did his rounds, then showed me what he’d found, all of which I agreed with. So, how much to put right? He started to fill in his clipboard and take measurements with his tape measure. When he started on the walls and wall paper his comment was – [with sucking of teeth] “and this is where it can get really expensive…” Gulp. And the final tally…45,000yen to you squire.

“Gosh, well, hmm, that seems an interesting number, does that include the tatami?” “Yup, everything in there chief”. OK, hold on…

Of course we were pleasantly surprised and could have said yes right then, but I had an even more cunning plan. One of my team at work is a qualified estate agent (they have to take exams in this country!) and she had said it was ok to call her to discuss what landlords can actually charge for, so I did. I went onto the balcony and left redecorator and the Guru inside. This made redecorator nervous as the Guru told him I was taking legal advice (which was in a sense true), so even whilst I was talking outside the quote came down to about 39,000yen as redecorator had made a ‘mistake’. The advice was that as tenants of 6.5 years and more we were legally only obliged to contribute a maximum of 10% of the cost of a number of items, specifically the wallpaper. Nice work! We told chap this and he said he would pass on to the letting agents – he did and a couple of days later the final bill was agreed at about 25,000yen! Yaay, result! And he never even checked the kitchen floor.

After that it was just trying to work how all the new electronic gizmos in the new place worked (we still don’t know…)

Next, the folks visit…

Lots been going on...

Which I haven't got time to write about now (though it's coming soon). As a taster, we've finally moved house (into our newly purchased "condo" (as I believe they're called)), the folks have been and gone, we've been to Mt Fuji and taken a lot of pictures and the Easter holidays have happened.

But the most important thing is that whilst the folks were here there was an extended Backgammon championship, best of 5 sets, each set to 21 points. The short story, which I will tell here, is that the home team won 3-2 (and I'm still not quite sure how I did it (though a double 4 in the final game of the final set, with the scores at 17-19 to the away team, that filled up my home board whilst the away team had a man on the bar probably helped...))

Heh, heh heh

Jammy Git

You know who you are. The only throw I really didn't need was a 6-3, and what did I get...?

18-20 the final score.

Bastard (but thank you for a jolly well fought 3 hour game, most enjoyable except for the final score).

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! etc

Good job I'm not competitive otherwise this would have made me *really* unhappy...

Oh, Happy New Year everyone.

The right to reside

As I mentioned a while ago one of the things that is meant to make buying property easier in Japan, when one is an alien, is having permanent residency. I didn’t have it when we started the process so, in the spirit of… well, applying, I applied for it. Now this may sound easy, but it is not – actually it is easy to apply but it is a pain in the arse to get everything done for the application.

Now as we know the Japanese as a race love bureaucracy as much as, no, more than, the next nation state, and usually this means that as long as you follow the guidelines and tick all the boxes you should be fine. However the Immigration bureau didn’t sign up to this and to call them capricious would be to describe Usain Bolt as ‘quite fast’. This is not just me, by the way, anyone who has had any dealings with immigration feels the same way and phrases such as ‘case by case’ and ‘depends who you get on the day’ and ‘what a bunch of shysters’ are often heard after a trip of one of their offices.

So, I know that we have to get the required forms, some bits of paper from the town hall to prove I pay my taxes, copy of the marriage certificate, pay slips and other stuff, but then there’s the ‘extras’. Permanent residency is sort of the holy grail of ‘visas’ (it’s not really a visa, it is permission to reside, which is different apparently), so they don’t give them out willy-nilly. If, for example, I wasn’t married to the Guru and/or have a 3.5 yr old progeny running around (and making a lot of noise) then the basic requirement for PR would be 10 years continuous residence and having made a ‘significant contribution to society’ which by the look of it means being a Nobel laureate in pro-Japanese propaganda, or something, so they take it quite seriously. Luckily, if you’re married to a Japanese personage and your contribution to society consists of a 3.5 yr old noisy child then apparently this is on a par with Nobelhood (and thank goodness for that).

So anyway, back to the application. Before submitting the documents we did some research, of course – in one of the Japan forums I participate in there was a plethora of advice, most of it consisting of information like, ‘submit the stuff they ask for and then add…’ some of the stuff they suggest to add sounded quite useful, like degree certificates and references, others quite strange, like a map from your local train/tube station to your house. But then again when we did the spouse visa application we had to submit some daft stuff, like photos of us together, a report on how we met, that sort of thing, so you shouldn’t be surprised. One of the most amusing bits of advice was from a bloke who described the PR application process along these lines – ‘what the bloke dealing with your application does is get your file and start taking bits of paper out, like the application form. He won’t read what’s on the paper, he will just place it on the desk in front of him. He will do this until he has put all the pieces of paper on the desk. If, when he has finished, he cannot see any of the desk uncovered by paper, your application will be approved; if an area equivalent to one piece of A4 is uncovered, he will read your application and decide. If more than one piece of A4 of the desk is uncovered, your application will be rejected.’

So, off we trooped to the Saitama immigration office in May to submit the application. I took along the necessaries and a selection of the optional extras (with full intent on providing sufficient desk coverage). Up came our number and so I started to have over everything – as soon as I started the chap said ‘oh, permanent residency’ as if he were a little surprised – perhaps not the sort of thing that usually happens in Saitama. Once I had given the necessaries I started on the extras, the chap looked a bit bemused when I gave him the map of the station/apartment, but when I brought out the degree certificates he started to look panicked, saying “no, no, we don’t need all this stuff, the application form will do” and started to hand stuff back to me – very odd, I thought, don’t you want to ask me to name all the prefectures of Japan, I have memorised them…? But no, just the docs, as it were.

So, “how long will ask this take?” was the next question; “well, about 6 months to a year, so if you haven’t heard from us by June 2009 then reapply for your spouse visa anyway, just in case” was the response – a whole year!? What are they going to do, genealogy and DNA testing? Probably, is possibly the answer, and I wouldn’t have put it past them. So that was it, really, all we had to do then was wait.

And wait we did, until the end of November when, low and behold, the application was approved. A colleague of mine from the Philippines, who has PR, said his application took a year to complete and whilst it was going on immigration contacted his landlord and his then current and his previous employer, to check he was legit. As far as I can tell there were no checks done on me like that (as, for one our landlord is a right old gossip and if immigration had called him he would have been straight round to us; and two, if they had contacted my employer they would probably have ended up speaking to me as that sort of HR thing would probably end up on my desk). But for us it was almost exactly 6 months to the day since we made our application.

Now, after all the palaver of applying I was expecting a little ceremony or something when I went back to the immigration office to get the stamp put into my passport, but, disappointingly, there was nothing – no ceremonial stamping, no handshake from the branch director, no word of congratulations from the immigration minister, not even a photographer from the local paper to record the happy event. Just a ‘here you go, and don’t forget to go to your town hall and update your alien registration card’, which I duly did a couple of weeks later.

If all that seems like a bit of an anti-climax, rest assured it was for me too. But the good news is that I got it and so I don’t now have to go back and get a new visa ever three years as this one lasts, in theory, forever. But I do need to get a re-entry permit, which does only last for three years, which is the government’s way of… sorry, another government way of making money from foreigners. And gaining it didn’t make any difference to buying property as we’ve already bought it; oh well…

Jesus Christ!

Apparently he was Japanese, you know, buried in a field in Aomori Prefecture when he died at the age of 106. It was his brother that was strung up by the Romans; tsk, imagine they must have been pretty narked when they found out. Anyway, read the whole story here.

We like Wordle




See here for the full image

(started in October)

Hmm, has it really been that long since I posted…

Yes indeed it has. Oh well, back now.

So, we’re still in the process of buying an apartment. As I mentioned below we’ve bought this new-build thing that is, I am glad to say, actually being built (I had a peek in the summer and they’d completed 5 of the 10 floors, or the shells thereof, including ours on the 2^nd floor, so Marcus and I could go ‘oooh look, that’s going to be ours soon…’). The issue we’ve got at the moment is that we haven’t actually, technically, got a mortgage yet, as in signed a piece of paper that commits the bank to handing over the cash – we’ve signed lots of bits of paper that, in principle, mean the bank will hand over the cash, but not a contract. Normally this wouldn’t worry me too much as we’re not meant to move in until March or April next year, but in these uncertain times… well, extremely certain in the sense that the world economy is in meltdown and no one is lending anyone any money any more, we’re getting a touch restive that the bank won’t commit to the cash handover at the moment. It’s not that they’ve said they won’t, it’s more that they haven’t said anything for a while. Anyway, I’m sure it will happen sometime.

So lots of things have been and gone since I last wrote. We went on our hols en famille, which was nice. We went to stay with the Guru’s folks for a couple of days, which was nice, and then, as they live closer to the beach than we do, we moved from theirs to Kujukuri (that’s 99 Kuri beach for language fans out there, a kuri being an olden days unit of measurement, quite possibly equivalent to one grain of sand, or possibly an elephant, who knows?), which is on the eastern Pacific side coast (for all you geography fans out there).

(carried on in December)

It’s quiet, I don’t have a lot to do so let’s write some more of this.

Update on the flat buying thing, we have now signed a sh*te-load more bits of paper that, I’m glad to say, does commit the bank to handing over the cash. Luckily we haven’t had to decide on the actual type of loan yet, i.e. fixed for a period (up to the life of the loan) or on a tracker type thing, we have to do that in March, just before the whole thing is finished and we move in. obviously at the moment a fixed interest loan looks quite attractive as rates are so low. If we did that we could get something like 4% for the full 35 years, which compared to a UK mortgage would be pretty low. But a tracker would be somewhere under 2% and as interest rates have been astoundingly low for the last decade, and are getting lower, that is also attractive. The annoying thing is that we can’t change once we’ve decided, so going for a very low tracker now and then changing to fixed when the economy begins to pick up in a few years isn’t an option. I don’t know, I guess we’ll see when the time comes to sign, I like the idea of a really low fixed rate so I know what we have to pay every month for the next 35 years, but then again, it’s cheaper, of course, not to at the moment. I guess the key is when, in the next 35 years, will the tracker rate be more than the current deal on a fixed rate? Of course if I knew that I would not be doing this job, I’d be a fabulously wealthy financial consultant who didn’t need to worry about fixed/tracker rates of interest – oh the irony!

Anyway as I was saying we went to the beach. This was a great adventure as Marcus had never been to the beach before so was jolly looking forward to it. So, by various means of transport, not limited to buses and trains but also including feet, we made our way to One Pine Beach near Mobara, part of Kujukuri. It was obvious from the moment of arrival that the locals enjoyed a joke as there were, literally and indeed actually, lots of pine trees there. In fact it was impossible to single one pine tree out that might have been ‘the one’ as a veritable forest stretched along the coast. Maybe they just do it to confuse foreigners.

We were to stay at some ‘resort’ place, as they often thought of themselves, but all thoughts of ours were on the beach. Marcus was excited, the sun was hot, we could hear the waves and things looked good. So, the usual dumping of stuff and arguing about what to take to the beach, then off. Down the sandy road we wandered, stopping every few meters so Marcus could play in the sand at the side of the road – it kind of defeated the point, we said, as there was a huge beach full of the stuff just over the way, but you know what kids can be like. Then, as we climbed over the ridge, there was the beach.

I must admit it was a little disappointing, the sand was a kind of light grey, so volcanic, and to me that gives the beach a bit of a grubby look. Also a couple of large shacks sold food and assorted beach paraphernalia, but again on the dilapidated side of used. Still, sand and surf there were, as well as people, inflated inflatables, nary a cloud in the sky to soften the unremitting skin cancer attack and a stiff offshore breeze – all the ingredients for a pleasant afternoon at the beach.

So, beach parasol hired and emplaced, plastic sheet weighted down (for some reason Japanese will only sit on a plastic sheet on the ground, preferable a blue one, although if you have children a patterned one will do. I have no idea why, for example, towels, reed mats, woollen picnic blankets/spreads or anything else will not suffice, but no, it must be a plastic mat – go look at a large hamami (cherry blossom) or hanabi (fireworks) gathering next time and you’ll see. Weird) we hit the waves.

How as you’ll remember this was Marcus’ first trip to the beach and first experience with seawater so, wanting to keep things safe, we were very tentative. Tip toe to the shore and stand at the very edge, water just about to your toes, mmm, nice and warm. So far so good. So then we took a few steps forwards and the water covered our feet – at this point Marcus was laughing and jumping, thinking it all jolly good fun. A couple more steps and the water was shin height, again all good fun and Marcus with a big smile on his face. But then, two waves come together at right-angles to each other and seem to hit each other and Marcus at the exactly the right moment – the upshot was, well, an up-shot of water that went straight up his legs, tummy, chest and splashed into his face and lastly, his mouth. Cue PANIC!

Well, panic it was – it took him possibly 0.02 seconds to get out of the water and to the mat. Then the real fun started. As he was wet the sand clung to him – not good. We tried to brush off the sand but as you know that doesn’t work so and the towel felt like sandpaper – not good. Wash the sand off in the water? Not on your life. Ok, sit there and feel miserable – check. Now we need to go to the toilet – ok dad will take you. Ow, the sand is too hot – not good. Struggle up the beach, round the back of the shack to where the rudimentary toilet block is, think French campsite – breeze blocks, hole in the floor, smell – into a cubicle, no too smelly and nasty to go to the toilet here – not good. Return to mat parasol, repeat 4 or 5 times. Decide to go to shack to get some food and drink, sit down order some basics and a bottle of pop, cut to more whinging about hot sand, hot sun, sea water, toilets, beaches and life in general. State enough is enough and you want to go back to ojii-san and obaa-san’s house as life is much simpler there. Continue until parents realise you have been traumatised for life and beat a retreat to the hotel. Time spent actually on the beach during beach holiday = approx. 42 minutes.

Aah, happy days, now I look back on it.

Luckily the place we were staying in had an onsen, a swimming pool and various other rooms and attractions that meant that staying there wasn’t quite as bad as staring at 4 walls trying not to kill each other, but at times it was close…

So we’ve gone and bought an apartment

Once I got my new job at the international school the guru and I sat down and wondered just what in the hell it all meant. The most important thing was that it meant I wasn’t working for the English school anymore, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, doing my head in. But it also meant that we had to reappraise our plans, such as they were, regarding staying or going.

The kind of tentative plan was that we would stay in Japan whilst the youngster was young, probably up to the end of elementary school or Year 6, so about 10 years old, and then head back to Blighty as that way he’d get the benefit of both a Japanese and a British upbringing (and the concomitant language benefits contained therein). But then I got this job at the international school and so now he’ll get a British education but in a Japanese environment, perhaps the best of both worlds (or maybe going to a Japanese school whilst living in the UK would be better, who knows), and, not wanting to blow the school’s trumpet too long or hard, the education he’ll get here will be every bit as good, if not better, than an education he’d get at a state school in the UK (except we don’t have enough space, especially playground and playing fields, but we are an inner city school so you can’t have everything).

So anyway, he’s 3 now and he’ll be able to stay at the international school here until he’s 16 at least (assuming I stay here as well, or else I find another job where I can blag 10 grand’s worth of school fees along with a better salary, which, let’s face it, is unlikely) – by the way I didn’t try to get the job here for this reason, but I must say it’s panned out remarkably well. So that meant that the guru and I took a short, direct think about what was in the offing and decided it was probably a good idea to buy somewhere to live and get out of the rental sector, so we have.

Well, I say we have but what we have actually bought, right now, is a big hole in the ground with a few foundations that will, by March next year, have grown into a 50 apartment mansion block. The good news is that it is new, it shouldn’t fall down in an earthquake, it’s in Tokyo, near where we live now, near the river and a nice park (with a windmill, no less), we can choose options we want, it’s bigger than the place we have now, it’s close to a railway station that’s only 25 minutes to Shibuya so not a bad commute and, probably the most important one, we can afford it. The bad news is that it is quite close to a railway line (the very one the youngster and I will get on to go to school), the mortgage is for 35 years so I will probably be paying this off into my retirement, the land is designated as residential/light industrial so there are a few not so nice bits around the area (zoning laws are great in Japan) and the station area isn’t nearly as well developed as Kawaguchi (so no big library, no city hall, only 1 supermarket, no sports centre etc).

The town itself is a bit like Kawaguchi in that it is going through a strong phase of redevelopment, with lost of apartment blocks being built on the sites of old factories and warehouses. With this, usually, come more amenities like supermarkets and the like as there are more people to use them – this might be wishful thinking on my part, but we have watched Kawaguchi change mightily over the last 6 years so I have high hopes for the new area.

Of course it might still all fall through as we haven’t really got full backing from the bank yet for the mortgage. What we have is a positive pre-judgement for a loan for an apartment in a place called Mizonokuchi, where we nearly bought a place but backed out of at the last minute (I will write the story of that one sometime), the new place is slightly more expensive so we need to go back to the bank to get a new pre-approval. Once we’ve got that the bank then takes its time to decide whether it wants to give us the full approval or not, and actually hand over the cash. If it does, all well and good, if it doesn’t we get our deposit back but have to pay for the apartment options we chose – not so well and good. Bit of a long, drawn out process this, but there you go.

So, we’re up and running, roll on March 2009…

You can have it as an option…

Goodness two posts in two days, verbal diarrhoea!

So, as I said yesterday the Guru and I are looking to buy a place and at the moment we are looking at a newly built place just over the river – so new in fact that it won’t be built until next March. What got me is this.

Last night, as I said, after writing blog type stuff I filled out all the forms necessary to apply for the place and the associated finance that is part of the deal. No problem there, but because it hasn’t been built yet there is also a whole load of add on options you can choose, and pay for, for the particular apartment you are buying; so, for example, you can choose better/more kitchen appliances and bathroom stuff and, well, lots of other stuff as well. The problem is that, for some reason, even though the place won’t be finished for about 10 months, the deadline for option choosing is this Saturday.

Now, as a foreigner it is much more difficult to obtain the necessary credit to buy property – it is possible but takes time. We submitted all the paperwork today, the decision from the bank won’t be made until next week at the earliest but if we want options on the apartment that isn’t ours yet we have to make them on Saturday. That in itself is silly enough, but get this.

On Saturday we’ll hand over a deposit and make our option choices. The following week the bank will make their decision, if they say yes then all well and good. However if they say no then the apartment people will smile, say sorry and then give the deposit back and then give us an invoice for the cost of the options we have chosen as the ‘contract’ for the mortgage is completely different and separate from the ‘contract’ for the apartment itself…

So, how confident are we that we’ll get the finance? Well, seeing as it took us 4 banks (which in Japan is pretty much all of them) to get a mortgage for the place we didn’t buy before, not very, although the sole mortgage provider for the new place is the bank that approved our loan for the old place (but as they are different branches I am sure it will be, in grand Japanese tradition, ‘case by case’). What to do…?

The decline and fall of Japanese civilization, pt.2

So in the last few weeks there have been a couple of instances which have contributed to the notion that Japan is no longer the place that it was. Now I’m not going to talk about the stabbing thing in Akihabara on Sunday as that sort of thing has been going on for ages here, indeed I think I may have written about it on occasion, so some things never change. No, what follows goes far deeper to the core of what it means to be Japanese (and in the process dragged Japan, kicking and screaming, a bit closer to the 21^st century).

The first one was a couple of weeks ago. In the past large numbers of women have come/been enticed/forced to come to Japan to work in the ‘water’ industry – I don’t mean as hydroelectric engineers or plumbers, but as hostesses and, at times, more besides. Now, some of these ladies were from the Philippines and had more than casual relations with some married Japanese men folk and got pregnant. On knowing they had got the mistress up the spout the Japanese gents did the decent thing and scarpered sharpish so they didn’t have any embarrassing questions from their good lady wives like “you have another son…?”, only to have a crisis of conscience and acknowledge their contribution after the kids were born. The Filipinas, no doubt tutting their disgust, decided to have the kids anyway and stay here in Japan, but herein lay the problem. Because the mothers were not Japanese and because the fathers, though Japanese, refused to recognize their offspring before their birth, the children were effectively stateless – not officially Japanese even though to all intents and purposes they were, and not really Filipino as they had no real knowledge of the country.

Inevitably a group of these people took their matter to the court and inevitably each and every court in Japan told them “tough, if your Japanese father doesn’t recognize you before you’re born then you ain’t Japanese, sunshine”. Except suddenly the High Court, in full frontal assault on the homogeneity of the Japanese people, suddenly decided that this was unconstitutional and just a little bit silly, seeing as if the fathers had said “yup, that’s my kid” before the birth then there would have been no problem.

This, of course, opens the huge can of worms of parental recognition of offspring. In this country if a father doesn’t recognize a kid as his own then the kid is hugely disadvantaged as the kid will have no residency papers and the like as these things are always done through the male/father and if you have no father (on paper) then you are a non-person. So anyway hopefully this will now come an end, though I won’t be holding my breath.

The second all out assault on the homogeneity of the Japanese people (I rather liked that phrase so I thought I’d use it again, I hope you don’t mind…I also hope you don’t mind about me not writing anything for a month, oh well) came this time from the Diet, or parliament, which makes it even more odd than the High Court telling the govt to sort itself out. This time the Diet unanimously decide that the Ainu People, predominantly of Hokkaido and very north Tohoku are, in fact, indigenous to Japan and not another bunch of bloody foreigners. It is hard to know quite why the govt suddenly decided the acknowledge the Ainu as Japanese (as opposed to forcing them to pretend to be Japanese, as they did after 1871 when they banned the Ainu from doing anything ‘ethnic’ or ‘traditional’) but the fact that the G8 summit will be held in Hokkaido later this year (I think) might have had something to do with it.

An interesting aside on this one is that last September Japan was one of 144 signatories on a UN resolution calling for recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples (though of course the Ainu weren’t indigenous at the time, only indignant). Apparently only 4 countries voted against the resolution, countries with a long history of support, empathy and peaceful coexistence between the white settlers and the indigenous peoples they found on arrival. They are, of course, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (still, at least NZ got a 1/2 decent rugby team out of it).

Housing problems

The last thing for now is that the guru, the little ‘un and yours truly are in the throes of buying a permanent place to live in this country. I have applied for permanent residency, somehow secured a mortgage and nearly bought a flat that would probably have fallen down if a magnitude 5 sneeze had hit it, let alone an earthquake. I promise I will write more on this soon, but tonight I have to go and fill in more forms for a place we saw last Sunday and we like the look of. This time it is a new build, have a look here for more.

Aliens in Japan

Now as everyone knows Japan is full of aliens. This is evidenced by the fact that most of them carry cards saying they are aliens. Well, I say ‘they’ but I should of course write ‘us’ because I am, of course, a card carrying alien, having about my person, so most occasions, an Alien Registration Card.

So, you may be thinking, this is probably a long segue into something interesting because it sure as shit hasn’t got much going for it right now…and you’d be right.

In true X-Files fashion (remember that show, seems so recent and yet so distant – when I first came to Japan, in 1996, I had never really watched it, but soon after arrival Andy (my soon to go mad travel buddy) and I bought a 17^th hand tv and video and, after the aforementioned going mad period, I ‘discovered’ the X-Files and spent no small amount of cash renting series 1 to about 7 from the place over the road from my first apartment. I think I may have wooed the Guru by persuading her that she didn’t want to go out for dinner but wanted to eat cup ramen and watch Mulder saying “it’s aliens Scully, they’ve taken over Kent… I digress)

Er…

Oh yes, in true X-Files fashion aliens have taken over Japan, indeed they may have been here forever (or at least since the 7^th century. And now I’ll tell you how I know.

As everyone knows the Japanese have about 16 different alphabets, but even though they have all these unnecessary ways of writing, the syllabary (if that’s the right word) is fairly constant. In its basic form Japanese 5 vowel sounds and whilst they look like the roman ones: a, e, i, o, u, their sounds are different. I’ll try and make sense now

English	Japanese	sound
a	あ	hat
i	い	tit
u	う	too
e	え	let
o	お	octopus

OK, so bear with me. Japanese vowel sounds are short, so if you want a long vowel sound you have to double up, as it were. Now, looking at the way I’ve written the ‘sounds’ for you there, go down the list firstly making the short vowel sound…

Done that?

OK, now do it but doubling up and long sounds like saying haaaaaat but just making the ‘a’ sound.

Done that?

OK, now do it again but this time change the pitch to correspond to the notes from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind…

Now is that spooky or what? The basic Japanese vowel system, and basis of their whole language, is based on an intergalactic cosmic tonal scale from a Steven Spielberg movie! Startling stuff, eh? And, if that were not enough, when I confronted the Guru with this startling discovery she kind of sighed, then pulled the ‘skin’ off her face, revealing her true, green skinned, bug eyed alien form underneath and lisped “it’s a fair cop, guv’nor”. They never said that to Mulder…

Tsunami in the Sky
Originally uploaded by DubbleExposure

This was taken by a photographer named DubbleExposure on a recent trip to Hokkaido. I wish I could take photos like this (and others of his) - just awesome...

The last few months

So I figure it’s about time I wrote something down. Er…

So a lot has changed over the past few months, not least the fact that I have changed jobs. If you may remember I was working for an English school, the fools having been foolish enough to make me Principal in 2006. this was fine while it lasted but I discovered that the higher up the tree you go, the more shite it gets – might only be true for that particular company but more likely it is a truism all over the world. Anyway I wrote in spring/summer last year that I was trying to make myself more marketable, I don’t know if I managed to do this or not, but I think it put me in the right mindset.

Over the summer I had a number of interviews for hr/recruitment related jobs for banks in Tokyo – this was something of an eye opener, as you might expect, not least for the fact that I had to spend about a week in the library trying to find out what it is exactly that banks do to make money. Actually that’s not true, I spent a week in the library trying to get to a point where I could sound like I knew a little bit about how banks make their money. Luckily I have now forgotten everything I read because these none of these banks were that interested in me (nor me them, really, except the wad I might have expected had I joined one of them, they do seem to pay well).

But what I did see was a position as hr manager for another school in Tokyo, this time not an English school but an International School that happened to be quite British in its outlook, curriculum, teachers etc. So after some to-ing and, but of course, no little amount of fro-ing as well, I landed the gig. Even for these guys it took three interviews including one that lasted most of a day! I started here at the back end of November but as part of my lengthy and extended escape period from the last lot I had to return there 4 times in December to ‘finish things off’ – which meant I went to Nishi Kasai and sat there doing not very much at all, but it did mean that I got paid to the end of the December by those guys and the new guys – double salary action, nice…

Being the new guy meant that I got to work for most of Christmas as well, so whilst for the last 10 years or so I’ve had around 10 days off over crimbo and the new year this time around it was Christmas day and new year’s day only (though boxing day was the last day to return to last lot, so it was something of a bittersweet working day). Therefore exciting stories of Christmas adventure are somewhat thin on the ground this year as, basically, I worked. We did go to the brand spanking new train museum in Omiya (in fact the youngster has dragged me there twice), which was good in a lots-of-trains-can-only-keep-me-interested-so-far kind of way, which, I hardly need to add, isn’t nearly as far as they can keep a 2¾ year old boy interested.

Christmas day was full of the usual presents-and-food shenanigans, this year I even got some presents myself, which was most pleasant after last year’s rather dismal showing. The youngster got lots of car/train action, which, well, I was going to say kept him quiet for hours but in reality they kept him interested and loud for hours. The Guru also received presents aplenty, though I’ll be buggered if I can remember what she got, now that it is February after all.

On the Japan front things have been quiet as well. Quiet is the operative word for the new PM, Somethingsomething Fukuda (sorry, can’t remember his first name…might be Yasuro…). Anyway you might remember that I nothing but ambivalence for Silent Shinzo because, as far as I could see, he didn’t do or say anything of note, or anything at all. Well, Fukuda makes him look like Outrageous Abe (I wanted that to be alliterative, and it kind of is when you say it, but it doesn’t work when you read it, if anyone can suggest a synonym for loquacious that starts with ‘a’ then I’d be happy to edit). I digress, so, Fukuda, even more quiet and crap than the last extremely quiet and crap bloke. Goodness how we all hanker for the excitement of the Kid. Along with much of the rest of the world the people of Japan are worried about recession – no, the media are telling everyone that they are worried about recession, making it a truth even if it isn’t.

Lots of other things have happened, none of which I wrote down (though at the time saying ‘I must write that down and write about it in the blog’) and now, of course, can’t remember. As you might expect the usual white collar crimes have continued unabated, the usual frauds, embezzlements and backhanders that keep Japan Inc ticking over nicely, whilst erstwhile parents have continued to show their credentials by murdering their offspring (and vice versa to be fair).

One story I did like from a few months ago was about a bloke who got legless, literally. Chap was riding along a motorway in the countryside somewhere in Japan with some friends and strayed a little too close to the central reservation barrier. Apparently he felt the bike twitch a little so thought he had clipped a stone or something so he slowed down a little and moved in a little and then carried on regardless. It was only when he stopped at a junction a little later that he realised that his right leg below the knee was missing – that and his mate coming to stop beside him and then handing over his newly liberated limb. Apparently the bike twitch he felt was his leg catching on the barrier and then being ripped off – without him noticing a thing! You have to wonder, all mad these bikers (or extremely hard)

Whoa!

Where in the hell did 2007 just disappear to?

They'll get you, and there'll be no exceptions


Once before, a long time ago, I wrote on this very blog about the local traffic police in Nishi Kasai, or rather the parking police, who drove around putting chalk marks on your car tyres to prove you were illegally parked (having to clean your car tyres being the direst punishment in the Japanese Big Book of Punitive Actions). Anyway it was my contention then that this was 'a bit crap really' and wasn't much of a deterrent - if you can be bothered you can go and read the original post, but heaven knows where it is.

Anyway this general level of dissatisfaction with the parking busies, and the boys in blue overall, should not in any way tarnish the image of the Bicycle Parking Police, who are assiduous and dedicated in their approach to what is, in a country of 120 million people and 874 million bicycles, a hard job. So, on Boxing day I was walking through Nishi Kasai on my way to lunch when I stopped dead because I saw this:



So here we have a child's tricycle illegally parked outside a convenience store. The evil perpertrator of this crime is nowhere to to be seen (thankfully as I would not want to meet them!) but the plucky bicycle police (Child Tricycle Division) have reasoned that illegal parking is illegal parking and, dangerous though the situation may become, they have a job to do and that job is to tag illegally parked vehicles and take them away if no one reclaims them within one year and a day of tagging.

As you can see this tag has been firmly placed on the handlebars of the tricycle and now the Bicycle Police can only sit back and wait for the inevitable backlash. I am happy about this on two counts; firstly that the Bicycle police do their job without fear of favour, protecting and serving as is their remit. Secondly, as of Boxing day I no longer work in Nishi Kasai (that's another story) so will not get caught up in the spiral of violence that will inevitably follow this dramatic event.

So the other weekend we went to Karuizawa

Karuizawa is a town in the mountains in Nagano prefecture, I think, and is full of bracing things like fresh air, rain, trees and people, so it’s is good to go to if you live in the chemical smog of Tokyo, or, indeed, Kawaguchi. The other good thing about the place is that you get to go on a shinkansen (bullet train) to get there, which, if you are 35 years old is pretty cool (though, following the immutable law of the universe of you wait ages for one trip on a shinkansen and then two turn up together, the week before I went down to Osaka on business) but if you’re 2 and-a-half (and really, really into trains) it is just the best thing ever in the world. Even better than all that, if you are parent of said 2 and-a-half year old, the journey by shinkansen is only about 1 hour, meaning that once the magic of the ride has worn off, child doesn’t have too much time to get bored before you arrive – great! Anyway if you look here you can see pictures of small boys and big trains.

The first part of our trip out of the metropolis was to visit a great big shopping centre. Doesn’t sound like much fun, I know, but it was a jolly big shopping centre and outlet mall place that sells lots of stuff at knockdown prices. Also it was useful as when we arrived at the station it was chucking it down with, well, not rain but misty, drizzly, cloudy, English style rain, so we didn’t have a great deal of choice. Because we went on a Monday-Tuesday jaunt the place wasn’t stupidly busy, but it was still pretty packed, especially as, due to the poor visibility and lack of maps, we only actually looked at one side of the place. Doh! What we did get to do, though, was spend about half-an-hour in the Lego shop, which was ultra-cool. I remember lego from my days as a kid and in those days it was ‘normal’ stuff, basic space-lego, castles and a few of the ‘technical’ kits. Now, wow, the options are enormous, with more, and much cooler, space stuff, aqua stuff, monsters, really wizard looking technical kits, like the Ferrari 360 racing model, and just loads and loads of fab looking stuff. I can’t wait until Marcus’ old enough for me to justify buying this stuff for him and then keeping it all to myself. In fact maybe I should buy some now and give it a test run, just to make sure it is safe for him to play with, hmm…

Later we dumped our stuff at our pension, a slightly sinister, slightly creepy place, in a you’re-the-only-people-staying-and-no one-knows-you’re-here kind of way. Then we wandered off to find a park to run around in. This we did, luckily, and found not only a park but also a small shrine, which was ok, and also a small sumo dohyo, which was really cool. As you can see from these pictures I taught the youngster the finer arts of the samurai scream and the tachiai – gave me a warm, fatherly feeling I can tell you.

Back at the creepy pension we then attended to our nightly routine, i.e. bath, beer and dinner. The bath was fine, though unfortunately not the onsen style that one might have hoped for. Beer was provided by a small fridge on the 1^st floor landing, you helped yourself and made a note for the owner to tot up upon check out. The problem was that they were charging 300 yen for a small can and, as there was no local beer machine and the rooms had no fridges, this was the only way to get a cold one. Unless you are cunning, of course. So before bath I had one of their overpriced beers but super cunningly I had, beforehand, been to a local alcoholic emporium and brought similar though cheaper cans of asahi superdry. Once I had taken one of their overpriced cans I replaced it with one I had brought, thereby keeping it cool. Later, after dinner (more of which in a moment), I was able to drink a couple more cans of cold beer, but it was the ones I had brought earlier for less cash. Anyway the upshot was that I got to drink beer but didn’t have to pay through the nose for it. I thought it was cunning, the Guru just thought I was being dishonest and tutted at me reprovingly as I quaffed.

Dinner, however, was a fine proposition. How many small pensions in Naka-Karuizawa can boast a Japanese chef who thinks he’s French? Only one to my mind, and that’s where we pitched up. The meal he knocked up for us was really good, a 5 course extravaganza that included soup, fish and meat courses, all of which were tasty and of sufficient volume to fill my stomach. The problem, however, was that the food all arrived in something of a rush. The starter was fine as that was waiting on the table for us, then the arrival of the soup was ok as well. But then, as the last drop of soup was slurped the fish course arrived. Again this was very pleasant, some sautéed sole, if memory serves, but as I was pontificating about something the Guru finished hers a few mouthfuls before I did and, as soon as her fork touched the plate for the final time, the meat course was brought out. So, as she started on her beef fillets I polished off the sole, put the used plate on my left and then started on the beef with nary a break between forkfuls.

Now, of course, she was far ahead of me so completed her beef whilst I had only got though half, but no problem as then desert arrived, giving me the slightly cack-handed task of, on finishing my meat, transferring the desert to my place mat and placing the dirty dish on my right (where the desert had been), so that I then had dirty dishes all around me. Ah, the romance of fine dining.

I mean, is it too much to ask for them to allow a breath between courses, of for both diners to finish one course before starting the next? Actually no, not in Japan, as, to be honest, it doesn’t seem to be something Japanese restaurants have got their heads around (generalising wildly as I go). This might be to do with traditional Japanese cooking, where you tend to get everything placed in front of you when you sit down and then just plough your way through (i.e. like a meal in a ryokan) so the serving staff don’t need to worry about courses; or other Japanese eating experiences like shabu-shabu, yakiniku, okonomiyaki etc where you do it all yourself. It also happens with main courses if you have more than 2 people sitting down to eat – often 2 will get their meal whilst the rest will have to wait a further 5 minutes before tucking in. I don’t know, but it does seem to be something of a cultural blind spot.

The following day we what most people do when going away for a couple of days in Japan and went to an onsen. This was a jolly swish, new looking place to the north of Karuizawa, up a hill a bit. This is worthy of mention as it was the youngster’s first trip to an onsen and we were on the wary side due to the often very hot nature of the water (and he, being small, isn’t too good with hot water). But like most things when you’re 2½ years old he just took it all in as a big adventure. The good thing about onsens is that they are generally big, so lots of space to run around naked, which is what all little kids enjoy doing, as, let’s face it, do their fathers. So we did the whole onsen thing of washing and then sitting around outside in the bath generally relaxing and so forth. Nice though the onsen was it didn’t actually provide a beer machine for me to buy beer, so one of life’s little pleasures was unfortunately denied. But the bar next to the onsen did serve some local brew, the name of which I have now forgotten, but it was jolly nice.

That day we also visited an odd shaped church, which was odd but strangely pleasant. The oddest thing about the place was its founder, however, who was big in dentistry in the early 20^th century and this was how he made the money to build the church. Under the church, where the crypt should have been, they had a little museum dedicated to him and it had old slogans he had made up, like ‘Spirituality Through Healthy Teeth!’, which I thought was great.

Anyway that was about it. I’ve written too much now, my work here is done.

Rugby World Cup

OK, haven't really written much about anything recently (proper new post in the pipeline, with photos this time), but just wanted a quick mention of the old RWC and England's phoenix like rise from the ashes of, well, the last 4 years.

So, into another final, this time against either the Boks or the Pumas. Personal choice would be the Boks so we can beat them and make up for the 0-36 drubbing we got in the pool game - how much would that stick in the craw of the Boks and their supporters? Beat us in a pool but, when it really matters, coming up short... Of course I'm sure England aren't thinking that way as hubris has a habit of, well, coming back to haunt you. Or something. But I would also love for Argentina to be in the final, just so they can stick 2 fingers up to the IRB, the Tri-Nations and the 6-Nations for shamefully ignoring them all these years.

Anyway, whoever it is, come on England. If you have the time, and inclination, take trip back to 2003 and see the nonsense I was writing then.

Requiem for Silent Shinzo

















the end

Your friendly, neighbourhood bobbies on the beat

Apparently this is a flyer published by the friendly boys in blue from Ibaraki. Just a quiet note to the locals that states the best policy when dealing with the influx of foreigners, all of whom are criminals, is to "stop them at the shores!"

Yes, that is a total of 7 riot police subduing one helpless chap (well, 6 and their mate on his way in to help out)...



Just in case you're wondering, the first 3 kanji in yellow say "gaikokujin", or foreigner. And I thought Japan was a friendly place.

For more see the newspaper report here.

Not long until the Rugby World Cup

So here's something to get you in the mood (and have a laugh at Association Football)

Quick hello

Am on holiday this week, and most of next for that matter, so have a little time to post (I said it was only adieu, not goodbye).

So. this week I have mostly been going to the park. Most parks in Japan are a bit rubbish, like the one near our flat. That one is a smallish expanse of white gravel, with about four trees, some playground equipment (which is ok), a toilet (into which I once threw up whilst 'looking after' the young 'un) and a water fountain. This is fine in the autumn and spring but in summer, with 35 degree days, it is like a furnace as you get heat from the sun, reflected heat from the ground and nowhere to hide. The metal playground equipment often reaches temperatures of 850,000 degrees during August, causing small children to combust on the spot.

But the park near the station is different. First of all it's bigger, which is useful, and this space has been put to good use. Firstly a shitload of trees were planted a long time ago. I have posted before about the trees in spring when the cherry blossoms are out, and jolly nice and plentifulthey are too, but they also have maples (to look nice in the autumn) and lots of what I think of as 'western trees', such as beeches, chestnuts and sycamores, giving the place a bit of height as well.

But more importantly than that the good burghers of Kawaguchi also decided to build a small, paddling river that runs from the top of the park to the bottom, with several sections, with little rapids and places that kids, and their hot parents, can easily get into the water. I cannot begin to describe the pleasure of standing in cool, calf-deep water, under a tree, on a blisteringly hot day whilst the little fella mucks about and generally enjoys himself.