Sunday, December 26, 2004

Clean Laundry for Christmas

Christmas Eve will be remembered for the great laundry room flood. We had washed down the roast teriyaki chicken with a nice Spanish red wine, eaten the Christmas cake, and opened the presents. I had retired to the couch and was examining a Lego airplane my son had created when I heard the sound of rushing water. I rushed towards the washing machine. The floor was covered with an inch of water and more was trickling out the washing machine the door. I turned off the machine, grabbed a towel, and began pushng water through the door to the bathroom, where there is a drain set in a tile floor.


My wife clattered down the stairs to see what was the matter, and helped me with the towel work. My son peered into the room from time to time and wondered why we were more interested in mopping up water than in playing with him. It took about an hour to restore normality. Then my wife hit the Internet and found a 24-hour service number for Toshiba washing machines. She called up a representative and was told a service person would come the following afternoon. The problem was diagnosed as a faulty hose. The service guy rigged up a temporary replay and said it would hold until a new part arrives next week.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Christmas Eve in Japan

Christmas goes down on Christmas Eve in Nippon. Of course there are presents; some people have Christmas trees, but Christmas cake and chicken seem to figure prominently in most peoples' plans. Your typical Christmas cake is layered, frosted with whipped cream and decorated with fruit, but chocolate versions are also available. Supermarkets sell a lot of roast chicken, but KFC and MosBurger are also eager to prepare your holiday meal for you. One of my enduring holiday memories is watching a housewife bicycle home from her holiday shopping with one kid behind her,another one strapped into a seat in front of the handlebars, and a Xmas cake and a bag of groceries balanced her lap.

On Christmas morning the decorations come down and the serious business of preparing for the New Year's Holiday begins.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Christmas Cheer

It's time for Holiday content on the Internet. As usual, JibJab's offering gets a laugh.

I'm also found of Rhino Records
Xmas Card.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Running Around

I haven't been inside a bank for a couple of years, but yesterday my streak ended when I had to transfer some money. I spent a lot of time waiting and picked up a newspaper to kill time. All the major pc makers had great deals on their web sites and there were plenty of computers with LCD monitors in the $450 to $1100 price range. After the bank, I walked across the street to a big electronics chain, Yamada Denki. There were lots of shiny PCs with TV tuners and DVD burners going for $1600 to $3000. Most of there were packaged as home entertainment centers. Monitor sizes ranged from 17 in. to 26 in. With prices like these, I'm not surprised that Gateway is reentering the Japanese marketplace. The thing to do is to check out computers at the big electronics stores and then buy your choice, or something similar, at the manufacturer's web site.


Later my wife picked me up and we went for lunch at a French restaurant. I had some sort of sauted white fish, served over braised daikon, bok-choy, and a mixture of red and yellow bell peppers. It was delicious. My usual lunch is rice, vegetables, and a protein du jeour served in a gray plastic box. I chase it down with instant coffee. Note to those who must make do with instant: Go for UCC The Blend, Taste No. 117.

During lunch my wife got a call from one of her friends. Her computer went down during a lightning storm, but luckily she had insurance. Now she had a new laptop and needed to set up her email program. My wife immediately volunteered my services and we dropped by on the way home. She had a new Toshiba laptop with a nice clear, bright screen. I didn't have time to check out the specs and just set up her email and downloaded the free AVG anti virus program for her. Like a lot of people here, she said she was more comfortable doing email on her cellphone. They mostly used to laptop to play DVDs in the car.

I'd rather plunge my hands into freezing water and clean bushels of squid than input kanji and kana into cellphone email. There is a program that anticipates what you are writing and offers words and phrases as you type in characters, but I'll take a keyboard and a monitor any day. Most Japanese seem to get their first taste of the Internet and email from cellphones and not computers. This may change as the government is making a push to make sure everyone has access to a broadband connection to the Internet, but the cellphone remains the cheapest way to get connected.

Monday, December 06, 2004


Some views from my office window Posted by Hello

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Monday

Monday is a day of sanity because I only teach one class and have plenty of time to sit around the office, fire up the coffee maker, and prepare for the coming week. It's the best of times and the worst of times at work. Yes, the junior college is closing in April of 2006 and I'll be out of job, but a 2-year notice sure beats one of the 2-week variety. The reduction in meetings and the end of student recruitment activities has also reduced my work load. No longer do I sit through meetings on how to publicize the school or when to upgrade the school network. When the board of directors announced the closing back in May there was initial panic and a lot of activity that was equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. No icebergs in this part of Japan; the school just ran into a rapidly falling birthrate and a trend toward schools that specialize in vocational training. Majoring in English in Japan has become the equivalent of saying I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I graduate.

There's more to making mochi than just swinging the mallet. Posted by Hello
Making Mochi

Ray and I went over to the day care center this morning to make mochi. A barely perceptible drizzle gradually morphed into a torrential downpour, fallout from a typhoon in Okinawa. This is the first December typhoon to hit Japan n 20 years.

Mochi is made from glutinous rice. The rice is steamed and then poured into a stone mortar. Then you beat it with a wooden mallet until it reaches the desired consistency. The object seems to be get a good pounding rhythm going and to not get carried away and hit the mortar with an ill-aimed mallet blow. This causes the mallet head to splinter slightly and the pounding process stops while you pick the splinters out of the mochi.

The other dads and I huddled under a tarp on the playground. Our job was to stoke the fire to steam the rice and to do the pounding. Most of the moms stayed on the porch and shaped the finished mochi into patties with their children. The fresh mochi was pretty tasty. I followed the example of the guy next to me and wrapped my mochi in a strip of nori before dipping it in a saucer of soy sauce sweetened with a little brown sugar.

The kids got the first batch of mochi, then came outside to take turns pounding mochi with their parents. Every family, I was told, used to make mochi in December for the New Year's celebration. Today only people out in the country do it and the rest of the Japanese buy their mochi in supermarkets.

Ray and I do some mochi pounding. Posted by Hello

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Leaning to Shop

My 3 year-old son, Ray, goes to a small, country daycare center near our house. Usual activities are walks through the rice fields, playing in the sandbox, or running and screaming in the playground. Yesterday the kids had a special excursion and rode the bus down to the city to learn how to shop. My wife and I were surprised. Japanese seem to shop for the heady joy of it. Was this introduction to consumerism for tots? We were instructed to make sure our kids were equipped with kleenex. a handkerchief and 350 yen ($3.50). They went to a 100 -yen store, where everything , as you may have already concluded, goes for the low price of just 100 yen. This way the kids had plenty of options and were able to get maximum bang for their yen. After shopping the kids did lunch at a restaurant in a hotel, hamburgers and orange juice, and returned to the daycare. Ray came home with the largest haul by volume: a child-sized, blue plastic chair, a Hello Kitty thermos, and a toy cooking set that provided all the requisites for serving up plastic fried eggs with sausage, corn on the cob, and cucumbers on the side.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004


Ray and Me at Universal Studios Japan Posted by Hello

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Lingerie Industry to the Rescue

Yamada gave us a ride down to the harbor for the mandatory yearly physical exam. He was complaning about the students again and his problem was panties. One look this fall is jeans worn low on the hips with short tops that show a few centmeters of naval. He cited girls squattng down to smoke in the parking lot or leaning forward in their desks. The jeans ride down exposng a bit of panty-waistline real estate that Yamada found offensive, another sign of the level of students he had to put up with in his business classes.

There was a TV in the waiting room at the health center. As I was waiting for a chest x-ray, a panel of TV personalities were discussing the fashion issues of the day. Suddenly they brought up the panty problem. and announced a solution: the low-rise panty. Models appeared and leaned and squatted in various postures to show that these panties did their stuff. I looked around for Yamada, but he was off in another room having his eye sight checked. Low-rise briefs are also available for men.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Everything Comes with TV

Last weekend my wife's mother was out of town. Her father came over for dinner and we feasted on chicken nabe with the neighbors and washed it down with Beaujolais nouveau. I'm amazed at how big Beaujolais nouveau has become in Japan. Every supermarket, liquor store, and mom-and-pop grocery seems to be selling the stuff. About a month ago I walked into a supermarket in a small rural town in Shikoku and was greeted by a banner proclaiming, "Only 28 days until Beaujolais nouveau!" Part of the excitement is tied to the time difference meaning that the Japanese are the first in the world to taste the new wine.

The next day we were all up early as we had to take my father-in-law to a Buddhist memorial service downtown. After we dropped him off, my wife, 3 year-old son, and I decided to go out for breakfast. On our way to the restaurant we walked through a cell phone store. AU had cell phones playing TV programs. A monthly fee allows you to turn your cell phone into a TV. These phones had rotating 2.4 inch QVGA LCD screens, 2 megapixel cameras, an FM tuner , 4MB of internal storage and other goodies. I also saw phones that doubled as universal TV and DVD player remote controls. I presume the advantage lies in never again having to search for your remote control.

TV tuners have also become a standard feature on desktop and laptop computers from all the major Japanese manufacturers like Sony, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu. Even Dell Japan runs a lot of promotions for TV-equipped computers. This means you can record TV programs and movies on the hard drive as well as watch your favorite TV show as you go through your email. Next step is feed the audio and video through a wireless network to your big-screen TV and speaker system.