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Luke's Blog
January 1, 2007 to March 25, 2007
You do not want to have to be taken anywhere in an ambulance in Tokyo. OK, so you don't want to go anywhere in an ambulance if you can help it but it's definitely a bad idea in Tokyo. First off is that the roads a too narrow that there is no way for cars to get out of an ambulance's way so they get stuck in traffic a lot. Second, they don't seem to be able to drive the ambulance very fast. I don't know if this has anything to do with the size of the engine but when the roads are clear, cars are driving faster than an ambulance. Third, and the most annoying, is that the Japanese people are determined that an ambulance is as important as every other car. They don't let the ambulance pass through an intersection easily, as cars race to get to the other side of the crowded intersection as if waiting a few seconds is going to cause the world to come crashing down on top of them. The same goes for pedestrians who, although they have a green walking light, still insist on crossing the road before allowing the ambulance to get through. What daft people!!!!
Last weekend, Mika and I finally had people over for a sit down meal. I say finally, because every time we tried to organise something in the past, people were busy, we were ill or some other catasrophe ruined the plans. So finally we had people over. I must say it was nice to cook for a large group of people. It makes it worthwhile to cook a three layer chocolate mousse cake.
We have finally got moving on getting some of our wedding photos printed as well. Our photos were all digital and it has been very easy to show people the photos on the computer. However, we do want printed versions and have only yesterday managed to get ourselves to sit down and sift through the hundreds of photos to decide which to get printed. In addition, we have had a terrible time trying to find a photo album to put them in. The land of cute extends, unfortunately, photo albums. Essential most albums are covered with awfull, girly, frilly, yucky nonsense to the extreme or contain cartoon characters or are so plain and boring that they are good for everyday photos but not something special. Well we have found something finally so now we have the motivation to get photos printed.
Next week I 've been given a contact to do some more supervision work but at our consulate in Fukuoka. This consulate, along with Osaka, is closing down thanks to the PMO's office and they require someone in the last week to make sure the sensitive and secure stuff doesn't go missing. Sounds more interesting that it probably will be as essentially I'm going to act as a security guard. Oh well, hopefully I'll get to see a little of Fukuoka at night.
It's the Ides of March so beware of Caesar's ghost!
Japanese modern architecture, of the everyday variety, is not very interesting to look at. In fact it is quite appallingly ugly. There are of course interesting buildings, skyscrapers etc. but for the number of people in Tokyo and surroundings, the buildings are giant chunks of concrete with very little effort into making them look nice or even consistent with other buildings in their neighbourhood. As one of the travel guides says, this as the up side in that if you are a Japanese architect, you can design your building to look anyway you want because it will fit in with the rest of the hodge podge of buildings around it.
This brings me to Kawagoe. A smallish town in Saitama that is a suburb of Tokyo, although you can't tell. You see Tokyo and surrounding cities/towns all flow seamlessly into one another and all look pretty much the same. HOWEVER, Kawagoe does have a street with Edo era buildings which make the architecture a bit more interesting to look at. They apparently are also known for a festival they hold in October too.
So we discovered this place when flipping through an magazine for English speakers in Tokyo and decided to see it. It does have a castle. This castle is only one floor but was quite roomy and large in its day. There is less of it left but that's probably because land is expensive and that Japan was bombed into a crater in WWII. It's actually quite a nice place to visit and you can even see a very uncomfortable and heavy, but nice to look at, carriage for the Lord. It weighs in at about 50 Kg empty and is carried by minions. It doesn't look like it would be a smooth ride though. No shock absorbers.
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A little further off is the street with all the nice buildings which also has a bell tower where they place a recording of the bell three times a day. I guess their afraid of breaking the bell if they actually ring it or something. Anyhow, this is where the architecture is more interesting if you like this sort of stuff. The surviving buildings (maybe 20 or so out of 200 in the past) are fire proof store houses. They are a little more substantial than other Edo era buildings, which are pretty thin walled etc. You can see this when you look at the windows which look like giant, security safe, type doors.
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There are a few interesting shops here, in particular a family business that has been making and selling knives and scissors and other sharp edged tools for generations. Sorry no pictures. A little further on in the town is a small street, affectionately known as confectioners alley. All along this 100 m stretch are Japanese sweet vendors. Now I read this in the magazine and thought that we needed to visit this place. It turns out, as far as I can tell, that Japanese seem to have a bit of a salty tooth when it comes to "sweets" as this street has about half sweet "sweets" and half salty "sweets" in the various varieties of osembe (rice crackers often flavoured with soy sauce).
So that's Kawagoe. I forgot to mention that on our trip out we walked through a shrine garden, which is right next to Takashita dori in Harajuku, where we say a wedding party in traditional dress getting ready to do, whatever they we going to do. The amusing thing to me is that Takashita dori is the consumer centre for teenage kids with all sorts of outrageous clothing, music and crowds of people. Juxtapose that with the serene, garden and quietness of the garden and the traditional dress and you can't do anything else but smile.
About a month has passed since my last post but there is good reason for this. Mainly I have not been feeling very well in my stomach and it turns out that I have a Hiatic hernia. Something that is common in European men and is hereditary apparently. So I've had really bad heart burn and I'm taking drugs and stuff to get it under control. In addition, I've been processing passports all of February like a real working/employed person.
We haven't done much in the way of exciting adventures. We did go to Kamakura which is a small town about an hour train ride away. It is a nice town with lots and lots of temples and cultutal stuff. In particular, it has a giant bronze Buddha that is, well, several stories high. I can't remember the exact height. Its been around since 1100's and used to have a wooden building covering it but it got washed away in a flood in the 1400's or something. Next to the Buddha are giant straw sandals that I think were donated by some group or other. Not sure why, but it was kind of funny.
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Kamakura has so many temples that there is a pilgramage that you can do to visit all the temples. Not something we were even thinking about but we visited a few including one very nice one on a hill overlooking Kamakura and the ocean called Hase-dera. Among many things it houses a 30 foot tall wooden carving of the 11 headed goddess of mercy (no pictures allowed) and also an area with hundreds of small Jizo statues which is the saviour of children. In particular the souls of children who have died.
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It has been fairly warm this winter in Japan (apparently) and now is the time for the plum trees to blossom which they were doing at the temple. Soon we expect to see the cherry blossoms which I'm sure we'll have pictures of.
On a completely different track. We've been taking Tea ceremony lessons since the fall. Mika translates all the instructions into English for me but soon we will have learned all the steps for the basic tea ceremony. Apparently, I have a good memory for all the actions. I just can't remember what your supposed to say in Japanese at various points. This means that we are progressing quite rapidly, much to the surprise of the teacher. She thinks I might be able to get my first level tea ceremony by the fall if I continue at this pace. We'll wait and see what happens.
Well its the beginning of this weekend which happens to be a long weekend here because monday is Japan foundation day. Or something like that. But I promised pictures from last weekend so here we go. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
Last weekend, specifically saturday, was a Japanese festival called Setsubon. It is the time in the new year when you get rid of bad spirits from youself and your house. For your house, as I understand it, involves opening your windows and doors and throwing out roasted soy beans mean while yelling "Oni wa soto" or something along those lines which roughly translates to "out evil devils and in with the good luck, pronto". The beans are supposed to chase them away but I haven't figured out how that works yet. So that's for your house. For yourself, you can apparently bring yourself good luck by attending a Setsubon ceremony at a Buddhist temple which is what Mika and I did.
There is a very large temple near Roppongi (the heart of foreigner land) near tokyo tower ,which, incidentally, is being planned for demolition when Japan goes all digital. I don't quite understand why but I digress.
So with the seniors walking club puffing by us we stolled up the huge, and impressive gate. Through the gate you get a very nice view of the temple with Tokyo tower behind. The old and the new.
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As we made our way to the front, we discovered that we had arrived just in time to be able to get close to the platform. This turns out to be important later. A Buddhist monk was chattering away, encouraging people to get closer but not to push, which seems a bit contradictory to me. Then some bloke's come out with a hollowed out log, some rice and a big wooden hammer. They put the rice in the log and start hammering away at it for about 15 minutes. They are turning the rice into "mochi" which is a sticky, but very yummy, rice cake. It turns out that this rice cake will be used later for a repetition of what happens a little later.
With hoards of people around, a procession of monks with unusual instruments leads some more monks, a raft of people born in the year of the boar/pig and kidergarten kids wearing homemade devil (oni) masks.
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The people born in the year of the boar (inoshishi) are then invited onto the platform and they start throwing roasted soybean packages and mochi and towels and all sorts of stuff into the crowd. The idea is that if you catch one of these packages you will have good luck. No politeness here. People are shoving and the crowd surging as people reach for these packages. Both Mika and I were fortunate enough to get clocked in the head with one which we then managed to catch in our hands. This event was to be repeated as we saw a huge crowd behind us.
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Mika was fortunate enough to get a package with an arrow on it which meant she won something special. After some other events, which I'll describe in a moment, we made our way down to the big gong and found out that she won a little ceramic flower vase in the shape of a boar (since this is the year of the boar/pig).
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However, before we did that we had to see the rest of the event. Once the crowd had simmered down, some bloke's in devil costumes or red, yellow and blue (each colour stands for some kind of sin such as greed or something) came onto the platform. The kindergarten kids who paraded earlier along with a monk then proceeded to pelt the devils with roasted soy beans in order to drive out the bad luck to make room for the good. It was quite amusing.
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All in all we felt quite lucky and hopeful that the devils had been driven off. What an event.
This past week, I continued to work on issueing passports and answering questions about passport applications and consular services. You get some unsual and bizarre questions such as a Japanese parent who called saying that his son was coming back to Japan from Victoria where he was on an exchange on account of a huge earthquake forcing the school to send his son home. He wanted to know if this was true.
Today we intend to set out by car, however misguided it may be, to Costco. It is about an hour drive on the expressway which we are hoping will be express earlyish in the morning. This means 9 am which sounds late except that stores in Japan do not open until 10 or 11 am. Here's hoping.
So last week I started filling in for someone on holiday at the embassy who was helping to process passports and citizenship applications as well as answer consular calls for information. There is so much to learn. Bottom line is contact the specific government agency that handles the service you need (e.g. criminal background checks are handled by the RCMP so talk to them about it). So I have some work for three weeks which isn't bad. Still dealing with settling in to living in Japan.
Buying food can be an adventure. The selection of vegetables, it turns out, is less varied than what we would get in North America and expensive when you can find it. Not a place for vegetarians on a budget. A single zucchini runs about $2.30 when you can find them. Roasts are hard to find and you have to go to the specialty stores that cater to foreigners for an extra price.
I have pictures of an event on the weekend but I have to do some organising to get them onto the web so stay tuned.
Things are not very exciting here at the moment. Our Australian guests have taken a side trip to Kagoshima and Mika is still working hard. I on the other hand am not doing much. I'm inquiring about teaching jobs at the international schools for next year but not hearing much back in acknowledgment of my inquiries. A yes or no or we're thinking about it would be nice to hear.
I have finished an introductory session in Kamakura-bori (Kamakura style wood carving) and have registered for full lessons which begin at the beginning of February. I have also registered for another teacher education course just in case I return to Canada to teach. The course would put me up another pay grade and, well, I have the time to do it.
Last weekend we went to an antique show at the Tokyo Big Site. It is a giant convention centre out in Odaiba. I found out on a Discovery channel show that the whole island is brand new. They trucked in all the dirt and planned this futuristic community all connected to a central communications hub. We had been to Odaiba before, but only to the shopping area and the enormous ferris wheel. Anyway Tokyo Big Site is an understatement. For those who know the Congress Centre in Ottawa, the east Hall has 8 rooms, each about the size of the congress centre. In addition there are different events in the rooms all the time. The central entrance, which stands like a watch tower in the centre is quite interesting to see with its inverted pyramids.
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| Tokyo Big Site Entrance from Train station | Close up of building |
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| Tokyo Big Site from the water ferry | The East Hall Entrance |
Inside the antique show, we ran into the Ambassador and his wife who were looking and not buying because they already have so many antiques. It was quite huge. Aisle after aisle of antiques including furniture, dolls, toys, watches, fabrics, used kimono, glassware and pottery. It is surprising what some people will pay for stuff that is quite ugly. A lot of the stuff was not that interesting to me. Among the more interesting finds was a cabinet sized Victrola and a Edison recording machine (the kind with the big trumpet that records sound onto a wax roll). A lot of pottery priced in the range of $2000.00 for a bowl which I thought was a little overboard. Many of the items were nice, but not $2000.00 nice.
We had taken the new train (Yurikamome) to get there but decided to take the water bus back to a port close to a JR line. Well it was 10 min walk close. Not a very convenient ferry for the likes of Tokyo but a nice trip through the harbour and a good look at the Rainbow Bridge.
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On January 2, I went out on a cloudy day because I wanted to see the Imperial Palace. The palace is only visible to the public twice a year; once on the Emperor's birthday (Dec. 23) and once during New Year. I strode up the long and wide walkway with thousands of other want-to-be gawkers and we went passed hundreds of police. Our bags were checked, we were patted down and they ran metal detectors over us. I thought this was going to be really spectacular. I continued on with the hordes passed the guards every few feet over several bridges and discovered a very understated, one floor, bulletproof encased palace. It was a bit disappointing actually because the outside bridges and turrets were more what I was expecting. I arrived just as the Emperor (behind his sealed in waving box) was going into a back room. Why all the security? Chalk it up to paranoia I guess. Anyway, photos are in the photo section.
The evening of the second, a friend of mine who teaches in Brisbane and a friend of hers arrived to stay with us while they toured Tokyo. Sue was on a teacher exchange at Nepean in Ottawa last year and has since returned to the warmer climate of Australia. She was wrapped up a cold in our single digit weather here in Tokyo. I have since gathered that if you wear a long sleeve T-shirt in winter in Brisbane you will over heat. Their coldest temperatures are something like 15 celcius. They are apparently having a very cool summer with temperatures only reaching 30 celcius with 100% humidity. Imagine that being cool!
They have been quite taken with Tokyo and are enjoying themselves immensely espcially the window shopping and buying all sorts of souveniers. Interestingly, they are always looking a products with the added dimension of whether or not they can bring them into the country. Australia, it turns out, is quite restrictive on what they allow into the country. ABSOLUTELY NO FOOD, and leather can be iffy along with wood products. They seem quite used to it and wouldn't have it any other way besides. I've learned one or two Autralian terms I didn't know before such as "Chook" which means chicken. Don't know why but that's the way it is. They have said they are also going to miss the service they have received in all the shops here as it has been first rate. I've never seen such excited and interested travellers before; and they have been all over the world.
At work, Mika has a minion, or mini-Mika, who is here on temporary duty for this month doing much the same as Mika did two years ago. Mika has planned quite a full training schedule for him so that he has a good learning experience here and does not feel underused or uneducated. I haven't met the bloke yet, but I'm sure I'll get around to it at some point. Everything seems to be settling in for 2007.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. Welcome to 2007. Despite this being the first time for both of us to be away from family for Christmas, we had a good time. There are plenty of pictures of Christmas and New Years on the photo page to look at.
We celebrated Chirstmas with our friend Nick who came up from Hiroshima for a few days. He is trying to take things a bit easier since he found out that he did not need a full hip replacement. However, he is now moving around on crutches instead of a cane to help easy the load on his hips and help the healing process while the doctors decide exactly how to treat him. So he's doing well.
We finally got into the Christmas spirit in the last week before Christmas when we got a Christmas tree (fake) for our house. Christmas day we opened presents that we had received in the mail from various people. Thank-you all. Nick decided it would be good to play some Halo in order to help his relaxing so we did that too. For Christmas dinner we all went to one of our embassy friend's apartment, along with several other families, and had turkey, ham, tortiere (sp?) and all sorts of other food. We had a good time.
In the week before New Year's, Mika had to work and I decided to embark on a different fitness routine. I had been exercising at the embassy fitness centre with very little change. So I started a routine on Wed. that didn't feel too stressful, but my leg muscles were sore for the following three days. All in the name of being fit. It's quite a good exercise none-the-less.
New Year's Eve, we walked a whole two doors down to our friends J.R. and Lisa Walsh for a party. Lots of food and people and, of course, karaoke. One of the attendees owns a karaoke machine so we had fun making fun of our singing abilities. After we rung in the new year, we went off to the local shrine (shinto) and got blessed. The following morning we walk around our neighbourhood as all the sales start and they sell these "lucky bags". They are bags with stuff from the store in them, but you don't know what. They usually have more than the value of the bag and can range from $20 and up, although $100 is the most common. We didn't get any but there were hoards of people shopping. We did see in front of one mall a Taiko drumming display which was quite amazing. They went on for about 20-30 minutes without stopping and was quite dramatic. One of the better displays I have seen.
Tomorrow we have a friend from Australia arriving to see Japan. She was on a teacher exchange at my school in Ottawa last year. It will be nice to see her again.
So here we are, in the new year ready to tackle whatever comes our way. I hope any problems are wee, and all good things huge.