Well I finally took in the Lost finale and am back on the interwebs. Luckily I was able to watch without any spoilers, and I could enjoy the experience. I first watched the show when I had pretty much just arrived in Japan, so now that it is over it does feel a little strange. I kind of associated the show with being overseas.

Speaking of feeling strange, single life is continuing here and it does feel a little weird going about my day alone. The last few evenings I’ve been eating Mexican food for dinner, but tonight it’ll be back to Japanese food for a while. I’ve been listening to music in the evenings and watching the occasional TV show – pretty mellow stuff.

I’ve been surfing the web now and then for news on the world. It has been pretty tense over in the Koreas lately with sabers rattling and what not, so I have been checking up on news. Google provides a lot of news, but often it is just 1000 articles with the same basic content. I’ve decided to adjust my media stream a little bit – especially trying to cut out U.S. media organizations. It is surprising how heated and shrill those organizations can get sometimes.

Well, off to work. Things at the workplace are the same as ever – lots of classes and the students are hopefully remembering all the English intake and output that is happening in class. I was able to recommend The House of Prime Rib in San Francisco to a student on business there, and he sent me a mail saying that he was able to get reservations. I haven’t heard how the meal went, but I hope there is a doggie bag in it for me.

We’re just a day away from Kuniko’s departure to Vancouver, and I think she is pretty much packed. There hasn’t been a lot of time available in the evenings because she has had to work late this week a couple of times, there was a student home visit last night, and a lot of paperwork to prepare as well. Tomorrow she’ll take her suitcase to work, and then after a morning class or two head to the airport with her students.

As for me, I have a meet-up with Yoshi on Friday night tentatively scheduled, but I’m not sure what we’re doing yet. Maybe just a quick drink and then head home – maybe a wild night on the town. We’ll see, but I’m feeling a little tired from the workweek and maybe an early night is in order.

Outside we are completely socked in by fog – it will be an interesting commute. In the 2-3 years I’ve lived in Okubo I’ve only seen fog once before, so it is a bit of a rare weather phenomenon around here. Hopefully it won’t interfere with the train schedule.

Yesterday after work a few of my students from last term dropped by the classroom to chat. I have been lucky to have visits from quite a few of my ex-students this term, and it has made the afternoons a lot more lively than they were before. Today’s students wanted to talk about their recent business trips, as well as try to get some inside information on some of their coworkers who are taking my class now. We went over to the break room and talked out in the open in English, and they were really enjoying it.

Between classes I was surfing the web and found this interesting article on a large corporation in Japan called Rakuten that has made it a policy to conduct all formal meetings in English. Even if all participants happen to be Japanese, they will do the meeting in English. As the article mentions, it is part of their strategy for overseas expansion, and they are also hiring a lot of non-Japanese both inside and outside Japan to help with this expansion. This isn’t new in Japan – other big companies also have made English the language of business within the company (i.e. Nissan) but this is the first time I’ve seen it in the implementation stage. I wish I could be a fly on the wall during their first meeting in English.

It seems my complaining about the heat brought about some change – today the rain came, and it looks like it will be here a while. Ick. But I still had an iced coffee this morning out of protest.

On the train home yesterday I had a couple of strange experiences overhearing some people speaking Japanese. The first was when two high school age students got on the train and actually used me as a landmark.

“Let’s stand here in front of the gaijin so that when he gets off we can take his spot.”

I looked right at them when they said that, and I could tell the boy who said it was wondering if it was somehow possible to suck the words back into his mouth and un-say them. Sorry dude – I caught that. They still stood in front of me, and were a little disappointed that I didn’t get off the train before they did.

Two stops after that a pair of junior high school girls got on the train and were admiring my appearance out loud in Japanese.

“Foreigners are so cool, aren’t they?”
“Yes – I wish I had a tall nose like he has.”
“Where do you think he comes from?”
“I don’t know. He looks a little English.”

I tried to keep a straight face, and managed to for most of the conversation. One of the girls was staring at me, and when my head moved like I might turn in her direction, she turned away quickly. They kept this up for a while but finally I had to smile at the goofy comments, and I caught them both staring at the same time. They both started giggling, and luckily got off at the next stop, waving goodbye as they went. Once they were off the train they started screaming with laughter, and other people on the platform watched them walk away with curiosity.

So the moral of the story is that you can ride the train for six months and never hear a word about you – and then hear about yourself twice in the same day. Always interesting, the life here.

After a very long and relaxing five day holiday I came back to work, and things were cranking along normally. One of my students couldn’t make class because of an extended business trip, but other than that it was business as usual for me.

During one of my morning classes there was a knock on the door, and it was one of the American inspectors from down the hall. These inspectors live in Japan and work on-site to monitor the building of trains. They are a couple of older guys who are pretty friendly – we’ve gone drinking a couple of times.

The guy knocking on my door was covered in sweat, and he asked me if I knew how to turn on the air conditioning. He couldn’t read the controls (they are in Japanese), and he knew I could, so he asked me to help him out. I showed him how it worked, and he thanked me and went back to his office to cool down. It reminded me of how hard it could be to live here if I couldn’t read or speak the language – something I take for granted recently. Still, he has been in Japan longer than I have, he just hasn’t studied Japanese, so I guess every now and then you get a sweat bath.

Tonight Kuniko is meeting me in Kobe after work for a last dinner at our favorite restaurant SiGassiga. I got a message that they are going out of business at the end of this month, so it is our last chance to eat there. Pretty sad, really – we eat out a lot in Kobe, but SiGassiga is the most consistent in terms of quality of friendliness. I’m hoping tonight I get a clue on where the chef (Atsushi Fujiwara) is headed next. Hopefully he’ll open a restaurant somewhere else – we’d gladly follow him there.

We wound up a big holiday week with a very chill Wednesday, sitting around the house doing paperwork, reading books, watching Lost (OK, that was just me) and then grilling some sausages for dinner.

Now that summer-like weather is upon us, the windows are open a lot more often, and yesterday we could once more experience Shrieking Boy Syndrome.

SBS? What does it mean? Before you ask your doctor if it is right for you, I’ll explain that it actually is just our neighbor’s teenage kid, who doesn’t seem to realize that their house’s windows are open. I think he gets overly excited playing video games, and he starts shrieking and yelling like a little girl. It’s not just him – sometimes his friends stop by and they shriek too. It is pretty loud, and I think the whole neighborhood can hear it.

Actually, we only hear it when we our windows are open, we are on holiday, and the kid is also on holiday. Which turns out to be a quite rare combination. Still, it is a little unsettling sometimes, and I feel the very non-Japanese urge to go over there and ask him to take a tranquilizer.

But there are distinct advantages to having a noisy neighbor in a quiet neighborhood – with the major one being that we don’t really have to worry about us being too noisy. We are known to have some parties now and then, and sometimes the music might get a little loud, but I don’t worry about it. We’ll never be as bad as our neighbors – call it a surplus of noise credit. I just wish it paid interest.

Kuniko and I have spent the last couple days enjoying as much as we can the Golden Week holidays. We long ago decided to stay home these holidays and save money, since we’ll need that money later this summer.

So that means mainly we’ve stayed close to home. We made a Costco run at the beginning of the holidays, and yesterday we went into Osaka to poke around and see what was going on. We had heard that a new Krispy Kreme donuts had opened (the only one in western Japan), but when we walked by the wait was 90 minutes, and it seemed like a big waste of time.

We did get to check out Douguyasuji – an area that sells kitchen equipment to restaurants and the public. It was pretty cool to look through all the tools and unique equipment. Our kitchen is already pretty stocked, but I did pick up a silicon spatula – the first one that I’ve found that is completely silicon (rather than just the blade).

From tomorrow it is back to work, and I’ll be back on my regular blogging schedule. Just two days of work this week – the next weekend will be here before we know it.