Last night I finished up a class over at Kawasaki and as I was headed home I noticed a huge banner at the main entrance. Translated into English it said:

“National Safety Week Preparation Period – June 1st-30th”

Whereas I think of a national safety week as a time to reflect on how to improve overall safety, maybe attend a few training seminars or see a few safety videos, at Kawasaki they are spending a month getting ready to improve safety for a week.

In other Kawasaki news, it looks like this weekend I’ll finally be able to see a ship launching ceremony in Kobe. These are supposedly pretty big events, and because of company security not everyone can attend. While working at Mitsubishi I was invited to one but had to miss it because I was in America at the time. This time Yoshi, one of my students at Kawasaki invited me to see it, so I’ll bring my camera and check it out.

This year Kuniko has her busiest day of the week on Monday, and that means that she is always starting off the week with an exhausting day. The good news is that her week only gets easier, but after the first day she is pretty tired. I cooked some stew for dinner because I knew she’d want something simple and easy, and we’ve got lots of vegetables thanks to Kuniko’s parents giving us a couple of bags of potatoes and onions. The stew turned out pretty well, and I made enough for it to last another night.

The freighter with the new BBQ is almost to Japan – just a few more days before it gets here. I think it will probably make a few stops at other ports before reaching Kobe, and then it will be a matter of figuring out how to get it through customs and back to our place in Okubo. The boat is much faster than I expected – hopefully we’ll be grilling by mid-month!

On Saturday morning Kuniko went off to work and left me to deal with my hangover. Actually it was nice to rest up at home and do nothing for a couple of hours. I used Kuniko’s train pass to get to Kobe to buy tickets for Star Trek later on, and then came home and went back to sleep for a while. When Kuniko got back in the afternoon she joined me and we both got in some Z’s before going back out to Kobe for the evening.

The purpose of the night on the town was to see a coworker friend of Kuniko’s playing at a club in Sannomiya. Since the show didn’t start until 9:30, we killed time by seeing Star Trek at a local theater (and we really liked the movie) and then had a couple of drinks at the Belgian beer place. It was about 9:20 when we arrived at the place, which turned out to be a restaurant called Papa’s Bistro.

It was a fairly small place, and all the seats were taken when we arrived. We managed to make it up to the band to say hello to Kuniko’s coworker. He was the only Japanese member of “Beergarden” – the other members were foreign guys – mostly in their 30’s and 40’s. We said hello and good luck, and then went back to watch the show.

As it turns out, the best part of the show was before the band even started. As they warmed up, more and more foreigners came into the place, and it was apparent that everyone knew each other, and Kuniko was by far the youngest person in the restaurant. Not only did the place fill up with foreigners, but a lot of older Japanese women – some dressed in way too skimpy outfits. These cougars walked around hugging all the foreign guys (I guess the women were regulars as well) and it made for quite a scene.

I’ve made a point to avoid the “gaijin bars” in Japan because of the customers they attract – and this was a great example. Some of these foreign guys were in their 50’s and 60’s, and to me they seemed to be still holding on to this party culture that a lot of (most?) foreigners embrace when they come to Japan. I don’t know any of these people, and a lot of my views are probably biased, but I can safely say that it was not my scene. For her part, Kuniko was pretty shocked to see this particular social situation… like me, she doesn’t spend a lot of time in foreigner bars.

The band started up and they did a mix of covers and original material, mainly popular rock songs. Kuniko’s teacher friend was playing bass, and he did a few vocals too. Overall the band was pretty good, but we only stayed for the first part of the set and then headed back. I think the sight of old Japanese ladies in cocktail dresses chasing around middle aged foreigners was a little too much for us.

This middle aged foreigner made it to Okubo by midnight, and after a little shopping we headed home and right to bed. No wild parties for us tonight.

I’ve got a little bit of catching up to do! It is hard to believe that it is already June – time is flying by. We had a brief but fun-filled weekend, and now Kuniko is off to work on Monday morning and I’m sitting in front of my lesson plans getting ready for my class tonight. However, the blog must be updated!

Friday night Kuniko had a get-together with some of her friends in Umeda, and since I had the evening off I thought it would be nice to go out and visit some of the places that I haven’t visited in a while. First stop was Donkey, in Akashi. It has been a very long time since I’ve dropped in, and the place was pretty quiet. The master and his wife seemed healthy and happy, and I sat in on a conversation with a couple of old-timers and a younger guy.

I can study all day with textbooks and listening exercises, but just an hour of conversation with four or five native speakers of Japanese is a much more effective study method. Conversations make you recall vocabulary just like reading an article or book, but timing is much more critical. After an hour of talking with these guys (and two Guinness) I realized that I have to put much more effort into speaking Japanese.

Next stop was Ichiban yakitori back in Okubo. The atmosphere of this place is more working class than my usual Okubo yakitori, Komedorishokudo. The food isn’t quite as good at Ichiban, but the clientele are usually a little more likely to strike up a conversation, the master always makes time to chat with me, and there is a genuine feeling that everybody is pleasantly surprised to see me when I show up. I let the master choose my meal, and after two beers and a pretty good mix of yakitori I moved on to the next place.

Red Spanky is right down the road from Ichiban, and it was almost empty when I got there – just one other customer. I chatted a while with the bartender and had two cocktails – a daiquiri and a frangelico lime. After having the daiquiri I noticed something off about the lime juice, and so I ordered the frangelico lime just to be sure… and it was off, too. I think maybe the bartender used sweetened lime juice instead of plain, and the drinks were not that good. My first time being disappointed at Red Spanky, but no worries – still a fun place to hang out.

So as I visited each of these places I had a couple of drinks, and after the weird drinks at Red Spanky I was really starting to feel the alcohol. I made a stop at MaxValue for some groceries and then walked home, arriving back there around 10:30 or so. I was tired and went straight to bed – Kuniko wasn’t home yet.

The next thing I remember was my cellphone ringing – I groggily picked up and it was Kuniko saying that she had forgotten her housekey, and she’d been trying to get a hold of me for an hour. She didn’t know that I was inside the house, and she was a worried about me. She had given up ringing our doorbell and had gone to the station in order to take the train home to her parents. Oops. Luckily I had picked up before she caught the train, and I unlocked the door and she was able to get in the house. Anyway, my bad for passing out drunk and her bad for forgetting the key. Another night at the Fredricks household.

I woke up this morning from a dream that was unusually clear and easy to remember – full of details and even containing a dramatic lead-in, an action packed sequence and a cliffhanger at the end that nicely wrapped up a great introduction to the characters and the world they lived in. In short, it would make for an excellent first chapter of a fantasy novel. I’m hoping that tonight I get to dream the second chapter… I’m hoping my subconscious will let me see where this goes.

It’s Tuesday afternoon and I’m rocking the (empty) house while cooking some curry for tonight’s dinner. Tonight is my favorite TV show of the week (London Hearts), and hopefully Kuniko will get home in time to watch it with me.

It is hard to believe that the month is already wrapping up. Next month we’ll be doing even more entertaining as summer is getting ready to kick off. We’re hoping to have Antoine and Miwako over, as well as some of my ex-students from Mitsuboshi Belt and some teachers from Kuniko’s school. I’ll try to get pictures and blog the parties – there should be plenty of good stories to tell.

Yesterday Kuniko and I had a day off together midweek, thanks to the swine flu. We did some laundry in the morning and then took advantage of the beautiful weather and set off on a walk along the seashore from Okubo to Akashi.

I’ve walked a little bit on that route, but I’ve never done the whole trip, and there were a lot of interesting things to see. There were a surprising amount of public beaches, all empty now because of the timing – students were at home in voluntary quarantine and everybody else was at work. The houses on the beach were also pretty nice. There were very few expensive beachfront mansions… most of the houses were normal Japanese-style homes with the exception of larger than normal windows facing the sea. I did see a lot of wood patios and decks, however.

Also we walked through the main Akashi harbor, which mainly was filled with fishing boats, especially octopus boats. There were lots of fishing companies as well, and I think probably this is where everyone goes in the morning to buy fresh fish to sell at the markets and sushi shops in Akashi. Next time I visit the underground sushi place in Akashi I’ll have to ask.

In southern Akashi we also walked past a porno theater. This was a real surprise for both of us. It was clean and in really good condition – not some slummy building in the bad part of town. Although in Japan, sometimes it can be hard to tell what is the bar part of town. This was Kuniko’s first time seeing a porno theater in Japan – and here it was in our hometown of Akashi.

Once we arrived at Akashi station we hopped on a bus and went to the driver’s license center to change the address on our driver’s licenses. It was nice to visit the license center without the pressure of having to pass some test hanging over my head, and it was really easy to change the address. We realized that I was the only one who had proof of our new address, but the clerk let Kuniko bend the rules a little and we got out of there quickly.

We wrapped up the adventure with a bento lunch lakeside in Akashi park. We spent about an hour in the park walking around, enjoying the view and the weather, and then we headed home. We stopped in for groceries at Vivre and then went home for a long nap before cocktail hour and dinner. Yeah, life is good.

Things here have taken a strange turn with the discovery of some domestic cases of the new strain of influenza in Kobe and Osaka. It was a direct result of this pandemic that had Kuniko and I up this Monday morning in our bathrobes sipping mimosas and eating homemade bagels while the rest of the neighborhood went off to work.

Until recently Japan had no domestic cases of the new flu – some people were quarantined coming back from overseas trips, but in the end they had a regular flu bug. Finally a high school student in Kobe was found to be infected, but he hadn’t been overseas at all. This caused a little bit of concern – and within a week there were almost 100 people diagnosed, with most of them being students in various schools.

School trips were canceled, activities postponed, and students were urged to wash their hands more often, wear medical masks, and generally be more cautious.

The cases are limited to the Kobe and Osaka areas, which is where we live and work. Kuniko was advised a couple of days ago that her school was going to close down for a week at the recommendation of the prefectural school board, despite having no students with the flu. Kuniko still has to go to work for three of the five days to sit around and kill time, but she gets a couple of days off this week. That meant we could relax and enjoy a mid-week day off together. So, we’re going to do just that today.

One of the funny things that we heard was that Kuniko will be required to wear a mask while at school. If you didn’t know already, many people here in Japan wear medical masks – flu pandemic or not. On any given day I see hundreds of people wearing them, and it has really become normal for me – I’ve stopped seeing them, they’re such a normal sight. I could blog for hours just on the masks, but to sum it up I’m not convinced that they are effective in doing much beyond giving people a false sense of security.

As more and more people are discovered with the new flu, it will be interesting to see if Kuniko’s school opens up again or if they continue to keep students at home. Until then, we’ll be enjoying ourselves at home, waiting for people’s fear to blow over, and sipping mimosas.

So I’m here in Japan while friends and family (both old and new) are gathering in Florida for Mark and Susan’s wedding on the 16th. I wish we could be there, but I’m stuck on the sidelines because I’ve got classes and Kuniko is booked up (as usual) with school activities for her new students. Here’s a big congratulations to the bride and groom, and I can’t wait to hear the stories. Anybody want to live-blog the event for us?

Yesterday I had to run into Kobe to run some errands during the day, and ended up stopping in at the prefectural museum of art to check out a Picasso exhibit that also included some work by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Overall the exhibition was a little dark for my tastes, but I really enjoyed the styles of Klee aand Kandinsky. I’ve always been kind of a bright color kind of guy when it comes to art. I left the museum completely satisfied.

I also made a stop into the immigration office to start work on getting a new visa. The old one expires next month, so I’ve got to get things in order and this always means tons of paperwork. Luckily I have the time to deal with it, and I got a big list of things I need from the office and headed back to spend the day digging up what I need.

I’m getting ready to head into the kitchen and get ready for tonight’s dinner – snap peas and shiitake mushrooms stir fried in chili and garlic. It should be a quiet evening tonight…

Yesterday I was stuck at home waiting for a delivery guy to find our house. As we don’t have a number or name yet on the house, it is not immediately apparent who lives there. You’d think that delivery guys could figure it out by the process of elimination, since we’re the only house in the neighborhood without a name stuck to the front, but no. We’ll have to figure something out soon.

Anyway, I had to wait for my diploma to arrive – called a testamur in British/Australian English. I unwrapped it, pulled it out, and it was decidedly unimpressive. It really didn’t seem like an adequate representation of all the blood, sweat and beers that went into getting the master’s degree. Oh, well – no biggie.

During the designing of our house, Kuniko and I had to make lots of little decisions, and a lot of those decisions have really paid off. We’re really happy with the place, and I don’t regret any of the little extras that we splurged on. One of the extras that was initially a little tough was a natural gas outlet on the outside of the house, above the wood deck. The idea was that someday we could put a BBQ there, and I was surprised how little it cost to install it during the building of the house (only about $100). Kuniko was a little ambivalent about it, since there aren’t gas grills in Japan, but in the end we included it as something for the future.

Turns out the future is moving a lot quicker than we predicted. My parents have been working hard in the USA to get a gas grill shipped off to Japan. They are sending it as a housewarming gift, and together we’ve been trying to work out the logistics of getting such a large piece of cargo over here. It looks like things are all set on their end, and the BBQ and some other goodies will take the trip by boat leaving at the end of May, and arriving in Kobe the second week of June.

Who knows what condition it will arrive in, how long it will actually take, how it will get from the Kobe port to our wood deck, and whether or not pirates will attack (ha!) – there are a lot of factors in play here. I’ll update more later, but the idea of grilling again is pretty exciting! I’ve only seen one other gas grill in Japan – at a foreigner’s house out in the backwoods of Japan – and he has since left Japan to find greener pastures back in Canada. One thing is for sure – it will really change the way we cook meats at our house.

As we come and go in our new neighborhood we’ve been getting lots of friendly greetings from all the neighbors that we see. People seem genuinely pleased to have an “international couple” living there, which makes it even easier to get comfortable.

One of the favorite pasttimes of the mothers in the neighborhood is to stand around out on the street in the late afternoon watching their kids play together. Since the street is a cul-de-sac there are hardly ever any cars, and it is a quiet and safe place for the kids. The mothers talk, the kids play, and the fathers work overtime.

Since we don’t have any kids to mind it is a little weird for us to walk out there and strike up a conversation, but sometimes I am out sweeping, watering plants, or cleaning and the kids flock over to talk to me. I’ve already taught them all “hello”, but after that we switch to Japanese. The next thing to teach them is “how are you?”, but I haven’t got around to it yet.

The other day Kuniko and I were lounging in the living room with all the windows open (but the blinds shut) and from outside we heard a couple of kids come to the front of our house and start saying “hello!” over an over. I thought it was cute that they were trying to get me to come out and play. I didn’t go out, however – if I did they’d expect me to come out everytime they chanted “hello” outside our house and we (and our neighbors) would get no rest.

Last night I had a good class at Kawasaki, but for the rest of the week I’ll be suffering from a wide open schedule. I’m using the time to study Japanese, do housework, and of course to continue the job search. It is really tough finding job opening during this time of year in Japan – the major hiring period is over, and now there are fill-in jobs here and there that I’ve applied for, but nothing really exciting yet.

More later…

It’s been more than a week since my last update, and that means that I’ve been busy again. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) it hasn’t been because I’ve been working hard. Last week was Golden Week in Japan, and we decided to stay home and entertain in our new place rather than hit the road and travel.

During the week we had Kuniko’s sister and her husband over for an overnighter, a big group of Kuniko’s coworkers over for a taco party, and Inoguchi sensei and his wife over for a more quiet dinner. The teacher’s party was the only one that got a little wild, but luckily I had warned the neighbors and no complaints were forthcoming. It wasn’t like we were throwing underwear off our balcony or anything, but once the cocktails started flowing and the Wii competition heated up, things tended to get noisy.

Kuniko and I also had the chance to spend the last weekend together with nothing much on our schedule. It was nice to lounge around working on our separate projects, take naps, sleep in, and munch on leftovers. The weather over the weekend was really nice, which made it easy to open up the house and let the breeze flow through.

There’s some excitement brewing in Florida – if you haven’t heard already my brother is getting married next weekend. I was talking with my folks on the phone and they are pretty excited about it. It sounds like a big event, and I’m sure the stories told afterwards will be on an epic scale. Kuniko and I are both bummed out that we can’t make it – Kuniko has classes that day and I have a class the day after, making a trip to the USA impossible. We’ll be watching for pictures/video/news reports online, though.

Well, the big news around our house is that we finally got the home bar all stocked. I was able to finish constructing the shelf that makes up the top part of the bar in the kitchen, and we’ve been buying bottles here and there to get things stocked up. Thanks to Nancy, Lynn and Kinsey we’ve got the tools we need, and all together the bar looks nice and is fun to play with (maybe too fun).

Last night Kuniko and I spent the evening trying to make a decent Pina Colada. Because pre-made drink mixes are unavailable in Japan, we’ve had to make everything from scratch, which is how I want to do it – especially if it is the first time making a drink. We have a cocktail book in Japanese, and plenty of resources on the internet, so it is easy to find recipes. Last night we experimented with Cuban rum, coconut cream, milk, ice, fresh pineapple, pineapple juice, Malibu coconut flavored rum, and even a Japanese liqueur called “Pina Colada Forever” that we found at a local store.

The verdict – the more generous the portion of coconut cream you use, the better it tastes. Malibu rum has a good blending of rum and coconut flavors, and if you can add a strong pineapple flavor and just a bit of cream it tastes better than straight rum. It was fun to experiment. A few days before we worked on making margaritas, and next we’ll try to figure out how to make a drink from a lychee liqueur that we found at Carrefour the other night.

This week is wrapping up quickly. Yesterday was a national holiday, so Kuniko and I went to see a mandolin guitar concert in Kobe performed by her current and ex-students. This was the first time that some of her new students had seen me, and it created a big stir in the student section. Kuniko will have a lot to talk about with her students today at school, I think…

After finishing off the Daikin intensive last Thursday I stopped in at Red Spanky on the way home for the first time since being back in Japan. The owner of the place, Miyuki, cooked me dinner (seafood risotto) while the bartender made me some drinks (a daiquiri, a Cointreau tonic, and a vodka tonic). It was a nice way to spend the evening, and a really good way to work on my Japanese skills.

During the evening some other customers came and went, and since they were curious about me it was easy to strike up conversations with them. One customer came in for the first time in two years, and brought along a friend for the first time. They were a little drunk already, having dinner at a local izakaya, but we had a good talk about the differences between northern California and southern, and English accents around the world. The pair left after insisting I look exactly like Keanu Reeves, which is something that foreigners get a lot in Japan. I’ve been compared to Brad Pitt, Keanu, and even Daniel Craig while I’ve been here.

After they left Miyuki pulled me aside and told me that they had picked up my bill, and they had even left money for two more rounds of drinks for me. I was a little surprised – they must have been more drunk than they appeared. The other customers got wind of it and were a little incredulous at the situation. Since I was done for the night, I donated the last two drinks to Miyuki, who sat next to me on the customer side of the bar and drank them with her customers. The bartender, Abe-san, made himself a rum and coke and we all sat back and relaxed. It was a good night to hang out at Red Spanky.

For the past week I’ve been commuting into southern Osaka to teach an intensive English course for new employees at Daikin. I taught at the same event last year, and it was one of the best times I’ve ever had teaching. This year I couldn’t teach both of the two week sessions because of some class conflicts, so this year I was teaching only this week.

Last year’s students were at the low-intermediate level, but this year I was picked to teach the lowest level class. This was a tough class to teach. Even a class one level higher has some measure of English ability, but there is no bottom limit at the level I was teaching. That meant slow progress and a bit more frustration for the students.

The materials that we used were the same as last year, but because they are targeted squarely at the middle, my students really had to stretch to not only understand but to use the expressions. I had to throw out a lot of the standard activities and substitute them for simpler ones, and in the end things went well.

Most of my students this year were kind of nerdy guys who spent the evenings playing pachinko, smoking and drinking and really didn’t see the need to study English. In contrast to last year, it was a little harder to bond with the students and get comfortable.

Hopefully they feel better about English now, and I think I got through to a couple of students who said they want to study English in the future. Still, I didn’t have the same feeling of satisfaction as after last year’s courses.

Part of settling into a new house is getting to know the neighbors and the neighborhood. In Japan things work generally how you would expect: a visit to the neighbors, a gift to them to start the relationship off right, and a big smile when you walk around outside.

There are some differences, however, and they grow from the deeply-rooted group culture here. As a new neighbor we are now part of the neighborhood group, and we are entitled to all the privileges and responsibilities that go with it. One example is the 回覧板 (kairanban). This is a folder with information for the neighborhood. The people in each house review the information inside, sign off that they’ve read it, and then pass it on to the next house. We’ve already had it go around twice since we’ve been here. Usually the notices are pretty generic and cheesy (5% off the sushi place down the road, kids will be collecting cans next month) but I guess if there was something muy importante they would put it in there as well. It’s a pretty easy way to distribute information and everyone can see if you are on the ball or not by whether you’ve signed it or not.

The other day the doorbell rang and Kuniko ran downstairs to get it while I was working on something upstairs. It was our neighborhood’s leader, saying hello and welcoming us to the group. The leader position rotates through each house in the neighborhood, and it rotates every year. The leader is responsible for the things like putting together the kairanaban, going to city meetings and representing the other houses for boring community outreach seminars.

Anyway, he handed over the list of houses in the community, and as the newest members Kuniko added our name to the list. Our slot comes up in 2022. That’s right – mark your calendars because we’ve got a job to do in 13 years! What will I wear to my first community meeting? So little to do and so much time to do it.