We just got back from Kyoto yesterday. We had four days, and they just flew. Kyoto is an incredible city, such a contrast from Tokyo. We have a write up here.
After the debacle that was Christmas Day, I've decided to see if I can go without alcohol for 2003. This is despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Our first winter Christmas! It'll be cold, but unfortunately it won't be a white Christmas. We're having a few of Kathleen's fellow JETs around to Kamoi for a multinational (well, Australian, Canadian, South African and American) celebration.
So what do Japanese people do for Christmas? Funny you should ask.
In my former career, I had the (mis?)fortune to flat with a guy from New York during a 3 month training course in Tampa, Florida.
Over the weekend, he got engaged to his girlfriend. Congratulations Dan Kanka.
If he was in Japan, he could get married here.
There's a great article at The Age about the Franklin river blockade in Tasmania, which was the start of the Australian environmental movement.
It was my dad's birthday today (Happy birthday, Dad!). He was pleased to note that he shares this honour with the Emperor of Japan.
So we marked the occasion by getting up really early on our day off (it was a public holiday here today) and heading to Tokyo, to the Imperial Palace for the celebrations.
My mate Troy sent me a link a while back to a weird Japanese video game. He'll be glad to know that's not the only weird one we've come across.
The Microsoft XBox has a fighting series called Dead Or Alive, which is similar to Tekken or Virtua Fighter except for one significant aspect for the predominantly male players:
The developers appear to have spent more time rendering the 'bouncing boob' physics of the female characters than focussing on the gameplay.
You'll be glad to know though, that in the same vein comes (and I am not making this up!):
Dead Or Alive: XTreme Beach Volleyball.
OK, being a conspicuous (i.e. non-Asian) person in a virtually homogenous country, I'm guaranteed to get stared at occasionally. But I hope that the starers aren't thinking I'm secretly plotting evil plots.
I've read a number of articles about foreigner crimes being on the rise. But when visa violations are included in said crime figures, I have a hard time believing that the police here aren't trying to pin any failures to keep the crime rate down on non-Japanese.
The Tokyo governer a few years back urged the army to round up foreigners if an earthquake hits, since we are likely to riot. What a tool. The Tokyo police urge people who overhear Chinese being spoken to report it.
"Why wouldn't they let us in?"
- Distraught schoolgirl, in tears, after she and dozens of friends were refused entry into the hotel room where Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, 13, held his news conference on Monday.
Read what the sarcastic buggers at Japan Today have to say.
Check out the stamps we got at the post office. They are nuts about cute in this country.
"Japanese schoolchildren are among the most privileged in the world. There is no need to spoil them further."
- Japanese politician during a debate about whether to install airconditioners in public high schools. Read the reaction
here.
About 80% of Japanese homes have air conditioning. The kids come to school in the disgustingly hot and humid summer and the last thing on their minds is study - all they want to do is go back home to the aircon! Can't say I blame them.
Mind you, I have a vested interest in all this - I have to work in these conditions, and also try and teach English to kids who are trying to keep movement to a minimum sothey don't sweat buckets. It doesn't make for fun lessons, that's for sure.
More photos are here: here. These are the rest of the photos from when we went to Yamanaka (back in November) and ourday trip to Tokyo (Asakusa, Ueno, Ginza and Roppongi).
The world's worst night out.
This weekend was freezing - wet and miserable. Checking the weather on Sunday night to see a daytime high of 4C, with 80% chance of rain, you realise that winter is here. Monday morning, and I open the door to falling snow!
The entire walk to the station, I have that damn song "Winter Wonderland" in my head. With wet feet, cold ears, and slushy, muddy snow underfoot, the last word you associate with 'winter' is 'wonderland'.
Once I arrived at school, however, and warmed up, then it is truly beautiful seeing wispy white snowflakes fall and settle on the trees. It was a nice, powdery snow, too!
I'm sitting here watching the Grade 9 boys throwing snowballs at each other. The last time it snowed in a city in which I lived was Hobart in 1986 - before these kids were even born!
Two kids are having a snowfight. They're wrestling, one's trying to trip the other, hang on, this is looking a bit more serious.
Yep, its on for young and old, as a teacher runs in from stage right to break them up and grab the 'winner' before he can hurt the other guy any more. So much for Winter Wonderland. Where's the love, guys?
Now the girls are outside throwing snowballs at each other. When I was at school, the rule was "skirts below the knees" (for the girls, not me). Here, there is no rule, you have never seen girls with shorter skirts. If it covers your arse, its ok. They must be FREEZING!
The world's most powerful computer is in Yokohama! How cool is that?!
It's owned by NEC, and seeing an NEC building across the river from where we live was a pretty exciting moment. Unfortunately, its in Shin-Sugita, which is a few train stations away. Its the size of four tennis courts! 10 trillion bytes of memory! 35 trillion calculations a second! Phwoar! Sorry, but for a computer geek, this is about as sexy as it gets! It's five times as fast as the former no. 1, and is allegedly faster than the next TWENTY combined. Take that, USA, IN YOUR FACE!
Its called the Earth Simulator, and is used to predict the weather. More info can be found: here (press release), here (Japanese news article) and here (Sydney Morning Herald article).
I think you'd get some decent frame-rates in Q3A, enough to kick Chang's arse. Oh, and Australia's biggest supercomputer comes in at a respectable no. 31.
7.00pm Friday night. While everyone at home in Australia is at the pub, I'm in Japan, watching Doraemon on TV Asahi.
Perhaps its the fact that I can understand whats going on, perhaps its just cause its cute as all get out, but I'm addicted to Doraemon. He's so cool, he was even named as an Asian hero by Time magazine.
Rumble in the Bronx (Jackie Chan movie) is showing on TV, and it has the original Cantonese soundtrack, so I'm gonna go watch it. I had dreams of learning Cantonese, but its taken a backseat to the Japanese study for the time being...
One of the biggest differences between male school students in Japan and Australia is that if a group of Australian kids ever saw one of their peers pull out a pink hand mirror and start preening his hair, they'd beat the shit out of him.
Conversely (perversely?) in Japan, its the too-cool-for-school kids who are seen with the mirrors and make-up. Seriously. Apparently the male cosmetic market in Japan is the biggest in the world, and having seen some of the kids, its not hard to disbelieve.
Speaking of make-up, one of the strangest phenomena for a newcomer to Japan is watching young Japanese women on the train pull out the make-up bag and religiously touch up a patch here, an invisible blemish there, ok, now we've finished, oh, gotta check the hair, make sure each and every strand is just oh-so-perfect (a 10 minutes process), now check my scarf, yes looking good, back to the hair, checking my scarf made a few strands change position, fix it up, and so on.
We've booked our trip to Kyoto for late December, during the winter holidays. We'll be going for four days. I read that during World War II, the American forces ordered the pilots not to bomb the city, due to the incredible heritage of the buildings there.
The other big news is that the apartment being built across the road is going up at the rate of one storey a week. By next week, they'll have blocked our view of Mt Fuji and the only trees we can see from our place. Bastards. It's like losing a view of the Eiffel Tower, or the Taj Mahal, and what makes it worse is that there are already a lot of massive apartments in the area. Progress sucks.
The Intercontinental Cup, between European champions Real Madrid and Paraguayan team Olimpia of South America is tonight, in Yokohama. The stadium is at Shin-Yokohama, two stops away from our train station at Kamoi.
Unfortunately, I won't be going - I didn't even know it was on until today. It wasn't on tv, it wasn't in the English language papers, it wasn't on the radio. That's one of the worst things about being functionally illiterate - its so hard to know what events are coming up...
Japan's ads - truly great Japanese TV. A breeding ground for bad foreign celebrity spots, and the just plain weird. Some of the ads are so strange, that you can't tell what the heck they are trying to sell.
One of the funniest we've seen is for Kikkoman soy sauce. In Japanese, soy sauce is"shoyu". Watch this and experience the wonder... of Kikkoman.
