This weekend was a fun one for us. Kuniko and I met Yoshi and his family for dinner at the cheese restaurant in Kobe on Saturday night and had a great time. Yoshi’s son Akira really got into the cheese menu. As an elementary school student he is pretty rare in Japan as he has no problem eating all kinds of cheese (even funky blue cheese) and he ate plenty of pizza, prociutto and an entire camembert fondue all by himself. We tried to do our part and ate and drank big. It was a fun night.

Before meeting Yoshi’s family Kuniko and I did some shopping in Kobe and managed to obtain a sofa for the living room. We agreed on the shape and color right away, and the sofa passed the in-store comfort test – me lying across it like a drunken sailor. They’ll deliver it soon after we move in to the new place (whenever that is).

Today I was at the bank sending money off to pay for the sofa, and I noticed for the first time the system that my bank uses to move customers smoothly through the process. I have lots of complaints about Japanese banks, but this particular strategy is especially clever.

My bank’s tellers are usually lower level employees, probably getting paid near the minimum wage. They are polite, they are great at handling “normal” transactions, but if there is anything unusual they need support. The support is provided by one of two workers that walk around the lobby. These two are experienced pros who do a surprising amount of customer service while the customers are still walking to the service area. They get the right paperwork in the customer’s hands, steer them to the correct windows, and generally try to get as much of the workload off of the tellers as possible.

I never would have thought of putting your most knowledgeable people on their feet in the lobby, but this works really well in Japan. With an older customer base, there are a lot of things they can do to speed up the process for some of the senior folks in there.

Last night I met up with Nozaki sensei and Hosokawa sensei, to recap their thesis writing experiences and to settle up on some old debts. It was interesting to meet Mr. Hosokawa, who was younger than I expected. He was very shy and pretty quiet, so it was a little tough to get comfortable with him at first. We were eating dinner at a Japanese-style restaurant on the 18th floor of a building near the waterfront of Kobe Harbor.

We had a pretty good conversation that improved as we drank more and more beer, and Nozaki sensei started getting a little tipsy towards the end of the night. Luckily there was plenty of food to absorb the alcohol. The whole evening we switched between Japanese and English and I learned a few new expressions.

As for their theses, they both received a pretty good result, and they asked me to interpret some of the comments on their papers. The comments were written by Japanese instructors of English, and sometimes grammar that I had used threw them for a loop. I simplified some grammar structures and hopefully that will clear things up.

At one point both Hosokawa sensei and Nozaki sensei had left to use the restroom, and I was left sitting at the window looking over the Kobe skyline. As I looked over the major landmarks I was surprised to find how many connections I had with each place. From the restaurant window I could see the Hotel Okura, where I had enjoyed a party with the Takasago Minami teachers five years ago, then directly on the waterfront you could clearly see the Oriental Hotel, where Kuniko and I spent our wedding night. The more I looked around the more I realized how close a connection I had formed with the town of Kobe, and it really felt comfortable. It really felt like home.

After dinner we went back to the station, and parted ways. I may or may not be involved with more projects like this in the future – we’ll have to see how things go. It was a nice way to wrap up the job, though.

“If you think of people as global citizens, then nobody gets left out.”

Yesterday Kuniko found out her assignment for next year – she’ll be a home room teacher for a junior high school class. For a lot of reasons this is not the best gig at her school, but it is the one she expected, and it didn’t really come as a surprise.

She’ll be teaching the advanced level of junior high school English, and that kind of came as a surprise for me since I didn’t even know there was an advanced level. In Japan students first start learning English officially in junior high school, and Kuniko will be guiding students through what may be their first impression of English. My own experiences teaching English to junior high kids were pretty positive, but I think Kuniko will be in for a little bit of a jolt to her teaching style, as she usually works with much more mature learners.

So the bad news is that teaching at the junior high level will mean no international school trips – next year the high school students are going to New Zealand and Canada, so Kuniko will miss out on that. Kuniko is a little bummed out because she has a very high skill level in English, she has a lot of experience and skills in passing high level English exams and using English in a career, and she’ll be singing songs and teaching the ABC’s.

The good news is that working with younger students may produce some stress in some areas (like behavior) there is much less stress in other areas (like getting into colleges, taking extra weekend classes, exam interview practice, and parents constantly calling to check on their child’s progress towards graduation). Working with the junior high school students can be quite satisfying as they are full of energy and optimism, and are not embarrassed at all about trying to use English in class.

I’m thinking that it will work out to be a pretty stress-free year and the biggest problem will be keeping Kuniko’s English skills sharp. We’ll see how things work out in the upcoming year.

久しぶりに日本語で書いています。先日、私のブログのＵＲＬを生徒に渡してちょっと日本語で書くべきと思った。このブログを読んだら是非声をかけてください。ほとんど英語ですがちょっとだけ分かればいい練習になると思います！

これから週に一回位日本語で書きたいですが、忙しいの時は少なくないます。頑張ります！

I’m sure with any major project, especially home building, there are plenty of opportunities for little hiccups along the way to add some stress to the process. Since we spent a lot of time in the planning stages, we’ve had a remarkably stress-free process so far. With the roof on and work in the interior moving fast, we haven’t had any problems. Until this weekend.

It has to do with our kitchen. From the beginning one of the things we really wanted was a tall bar counter to put a couple of stools in front of. We often have a cocktail together after work, and after putting in years of sitting in front of bars we thought it would be nice to have a simple set up in our kitchen/dining area.

During the planning process we didn’t spend much time on it, and it seemed like the standard bar counter set up that they have built in similar designs would be fine. But this weekend we were looking at the kitchen (which is in the very early stages) and we noticed that the whole thing seemed kind of low. We took some pictures and went back to the documentation, and found that it was a little low for our taste. Complicating all this is that the measurements are all in millimeters and centimeters, and it is a little hard for me to imagine dimensions.

Yesterday I went across the street to the Italian restaurant, and even though it was closed the owners let me in with a tape measure to check out their bar counter. They were all smiles as I checked everything, and they even gave me some advice. In the evening Kuniko and even went to Red Spanky to check out their bar.

So finally we put in a call to see if there was a way to raise the height of the bar, and after some back and forth and deliberation it looked like it would be no problem – and it wouldn’t cost us any extra since we’ve been pretty good customers and the change is relatively minor.

But now with all this research into bars, we both started to think about other aspects, and decided to take a little more interest in the exact dimensions of this space that has become a minor pet project for us. I found that the depth of the overhang (on the dining room side) was actually quite shallow, and the whole thing is really designed for much shorter legs than mine.

Now it is finally time for us to make some late night calls to our sales guy – the same guy who would show up uninvited at our doorstep later than 10 p.m. He seems to be taking it in stride, though, and will work with us to get the dimensions the way we want them.

With all these changes, Kuniko has taken less and less ownership in the project, however, and I think we are close to the point where it changes from being “our pet project” to “Bryan’s pet project”. I’m up to the challenge, though. We’ve got a budget, I’ve got the time to deal with it, and my Japanese language ability is just enough (ぎりぎり) to get the job done.

Today I’m off to talk to the site supervisor, give him a bottle of sake, and try to smooth things out. Recent trips to the house have found the place buzzing with activity. Kuniko thinks that they are trying to complete the house before our trip to the USA, so that as long as it is sitting around finished it is our responsibility, not theirs. We’d rather take the house after we get and let them take their time, but I guess we’ll have to see how it goes.

The site supervisor is a surprisingly young guy, and he always has a big smile for us when we visit. I think he likes that he is building a house for a foreigner – and I think he is the guy that I need to be nice to in order to get the bar counter the way we want it.

The good news is that the rest of the house is proceeding very smoothly. You can tell a lot about the people that will live in the house when the most important areas are the bar and the kitchen…

It is midweek in the Fredricks household, and we’re hoping to get a little bonus time tomorrow to take care of some house stuff. The company that is going to be providing the internet, phone and TV will be dropping by to offer our builder some advice and make it easy to install. The don’t want the installer to do any work before they officially finish with the house – they want the house to be “as is” when they hand over the key to make the warranty/guarantee easy to manage. It makes sense, but we didn’t want to be waiting around with no internet/TV/phone for three weeks. This is our kind of happy compromise.

Kuniko and I will go over to the house tomorrow afternoon and sit in on the meeting between the tech guy and the builder, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the inside of the house. I haven’t been in a little while, and it seems like there is always dramatic progress every time I go over.

Tonight is pretty quiet. I’m listening to Widespread Panic, drinking some port wine and I’ve got a port filet marinating in the fridge. I made some garlic mashed potatoes to go with it, and I’m just waiting for Kuniko to get home. I’ve had almost the whole day off, but most of the time was used up writing student evaluations. Classes will be coming to an end in the next month or so, and I’ve got lots of extra paperwork to wrap things up.

Last week the computer came back from Toshiba, and since they have completely replaced the CPU fan it is remarkably quiet in our living room. They did a great job with the repairs, and the service was also quite good (in English, too!)

Now that the computer is back, we can use it to listen to music. A while back we got a small stereo system for the living room, and combined with an AirportExpress and a cool plug-in for Mediamonkey we’ve got plenty of music whenever we want it. My hobby over the past year or two has been gradually cleaning up my digital music collection, and now it is paying off.

Today I ran over to check out the house, and there was a new guy working on the roof. I have a feeling that we probably won’t be seeing the carpenter that did the framework much more, and now it will be specialists coming in. The guy was way up on the roof so I really didn’t get much of a chance to chat with him, but he at least said hello.

Also all the windows and doors are installed, so I suppose they can start working in earnest inside the house. I think they’ll be doing wiring this week inside the house, so it is my last chance to think about anything we want wired into the walls. The digital stuff will all be wireless – I can’t think of anything else we might need.

Tonight when Kuniko gets home we’re off to see the new James Bond movie. I’m hoping that it is as good as Casio Royale, but I’m not optimistic. We’ll see…

So if I forgot to mention it before the plans are made and we will be in the USA in March. Since it was looking pretty difficult for Kuniko and me to make it for my brother’s wedding in May we decided to head over to California (and maybe Oregon) in March.

We’ll be in the USA from March 10th to March 23rd. The plan is to fly to San Diego towards the end of the trip to visit with Nancy, Lynn and Kinsey, and depending on where my brother and his fiancée are living (Portland?) we’ll visit them as well. It has been about two years since our last trip to California, so we’re looking forward to it.

The timing will be interesting, because around that time our house will be finished here in Japan. I’m not sure how it will work, but we told the builders and although they were surprised they thought it wouldn’t affect the flow of the process. I have a feeling will be moving in soon after we get back to Japan, and that should make for a pretty busy March.

On my way to work yesterday morning while walking through the train station, I had a chance to meet my congressman, Yasutoshi Nishimura. With the parliament on the verge of dissolution, all the politicians that might be on the chopping block are out in force, and this guy came all the way back from Tokyo to work for votes in front of the ticket gates at Okubo station.

Kuniko and I always goof on the guy because of one of his new campaign posters. The poster has him posed in front of the local fish market in Akashi, surrounded by “regular people” that are all smiling and supportive. The funny part of the poster is that it is clear that he has struck a generic pose, the picture of the fish market is photoshopped in as well as the people, who are slightly different sized and have different lighting and shadows on them. I imagine that he has made similar posters for all the areas where he is looking for votes, and to me and Kuniko it seems like a cheesy effort. The posters are all over town, and so everywhere we go we are reminded of the poor photoshop skills this guy has.

Anyway, so as I walked to work he was there in the flesh, saying good morning to people commuting to work, and bowing and generally being very polite. Nobody stopped to talk to him, nobody was shaking hands (probably because it was so cold) and nobody was debating foreign policy with him. People just wanted to go to work. I recognized him immediately, and made sure that I walked right in front of him on the way into the gates. He looked up and noticed I was a foreigner, and he froze.

I can understand why he froze up. First, he was probably wondering what language he should use to greet me – would I understand a Japanese “good morning”? Is it better to take a chance with English? But what if I’m German or something? Actually, I go through this same mental calculation when I meet Japanese people that may or may not speak English – what would be the best way to show you are friendly without offending? But also he had to be thinking that as foreigner I can’t vote in Japan, so does it really matter?

So all of this happened in a split second – he’s frozen and gulping and in that moment I give him a big smile and say “Good morning!” in English, and he smiled back and said “Good morning” right back. I debated briefly discussing his crappy poster design but thought it was not the right time, so I quit while I was ahead and moved through the gates.

Kuniko and I had a laugh about it that evening over dinner – it was fun to finally meet the guy. I hope his governing skills are better than his design skills.

Yesterday was strange in that almost everything that I wanted to post here on the blog had something to do with trains. I ride trains everyday here in Japan – it is my primary form of transportation and I really enjoy not having a driver’s license (and not needing one), especially coming from the land of the automobile.

Yesterday afternoon when I arrived at my local train station (JR Okubo) I noticed a train waiting there that I had never seen before. JR Okubo is kind of a small to medium sized train station – there are four platforms for loading and unloading passengers. The smallest stations only have one platform for each direction, with large stations like Osaka or Kyoto having more than thirty. At Okubo there is a little spur of track that is apart from the main line, and very rarely JR will put a train there temporarily to get it out of the way of the heavier train traffic. It is a rare occasion though, since the next station to the east has a railyard with plenty of space.

The trains that run on the JR line are for the most part pretty much the same. They run back and forth across the Kansai area, and everyone is very familiar with them. But there is a type of person in Japan – call them train nerds – who enjoy taking pictures of trains and are trying to “collect” pictures of as many trains and train lines as possible. Across Japan trains are an integral part of the culture, and each part of Japan has many different types of local trains, and several different train companies, each with different kinds of trains for different routes. That means a lot of trains to “collect” and the train nerds love it.

You can sometimes see train nerds camped out at the end of a platform with tripods and camera equipment, waiting for a train to come in to take a perfect picture. Some of these guys travel all over Japan in search of rare trains to photograph in a harmless but somewhat odd (to me) hobby.

Anyway, when a new train is sitting at Okubo station it didn’t take long for some train nerds to show up and try to get some pictures. The train itself wasn’t so exciting – it appeared to be a train used for teaching new drivers (I didn’t want to use the word training), and the style was more the tourist style than the commuter style.

As I was walking down the steps I was surprised as a train nerd coming running down behind me, gently pushed me out of the way and got to the platform in order to snap some photos. It was that exciting. A few minutes later the train left and headed west, so I guess it was good that the guy made it in time to get the shots.

Several minutes later a cargo train came rolling by on the way to Osaka, but this cargo train was covered in fresh white snow. There were cargo containers on board, and even these were topped with a thick layer of the white stuff. Probably 50% of the load was snow. It was the first time I had seen anything like that, and it was quite beautiful rolling by in the sunny but cold weather in Okubo.

Two minutes later my train came in. I sat inside the warm car, opened a book and was shuttling off to Kobe for work.

The other day I noticed that somehow Google finally managed to find this blog, after a three year campaign of trying to hide it. Eventually what got me was somebody linking to this page from somewhere else, and that was all it took for the Google spiders to sneak around my robots.txt file and swarm in here like the last Matrix movie.

Actually, I don’t think I mind, really. It will cause me to consider more carefully while I’m doing my job search, but for the most part things here will proceed normally. Which is to say, slow as molasses in January.

The roaring of the laptop has reached levels where I can’t hear the music I’m playing over the noise, and so finally it is time to do something about it. Tomorrow morning the folks at Toshiba are sending someone over to pick up the computer, and hopefully it won’t be too expensive to get it running quietly again.

So from tomorrow morning, I will have limited access to the fredricks.net email accounts, and no access to instant messenger. You should still be able to get a hold of me at my gmail account (username is bfredricks). I don’t know how long I’ll be without the computer, but luckily we have a backup to use in cases like this.

Yesterday was a day off here in Japan – “Coming of Age” Day. This is the day in which people who turn 20 this year celebrate their advancement to “adulthood”. They can drink, they can smoke, they can vote, and hopefully they can be more responsible. The day is always interesting because the women dress in beautiful winter kinomo and they can be seen everywhere, especially around train stations. The men usually dress up in suits – not that interesting. Unfortunately Kuniko and I were locked up in our house yesterday and we didn’t really get to see anything.

Kuniko was working on a test for incoming junior high school students. It is a huge job, and she is supposed to do it over the course of several months, but because she has been so busy she kept putting it off. Finally she couldn’t put it off any longer, and she buckled down and did the whole thing over the course of about 12 hours in front of the noisy computer.

I was here on call for Nozaki sensei, who was trying to finish her thesis. It was tough because I would sit around in front of the spare computer waiting for an email, and then I would have to rush through and edit the documents, send them off, and then hang around waiting for more emails. The whole day was like that, and Kuniko and I were both pretty busy. Luckily we had a stash of red wine to help pass the time, and it turned out that we both got a lot done.

I’ll bid a sad farewell to the laptop tomorrow morning, but hopefully I can use the old one to keep the updates and mail going.

O what power ye wield green plastic branch. Years ago, received a lucky branch from a far away shrine in Nishinomiya, and if you are the type to believe in these kinds of things there is plenty of evidence supporting the power of the Nishinomiya Ebisu lucky branch.

The trick with the lucky branch is that if you go to the festival again you need to throw away your old lucky branch, and then buy a new one. So on our day off this weekend we traveled together back to Nishinomiya and waited in a line worthy of the pope himself to get a new lucky branch for the new year. After getting a branch we walked through the matsuri sampling a variety of foods. Usually there are pretty traditional stands: takoyaki, crepes, grilled corn, yakitori, castella, fish on a stick (which is a lot different from fish sticks), taiyaki, and cotton candy. This year there seemed to be more foreign foods available – turkish kebab sandwiches, chinese fried dumplings, even a ramen place. After walking around for several hours we headed off to Sumiyoshi to meet Antoine and Miwako and see their new place.

Sumiyoshi is a small upscale part of eastern Kobe, situated on the hillside of Mt. Rokko. The neighborhood is generally nicer the higher up you go on the hill, and after meeting at the station Miwako drove us pretty far up the hill. They are living in what Japanese people call a “mansion” – what Americans would probably call apartments. They are generally fairly large in terms of floorspace (the same as a small house) but on one level in a larger building. The downside of mansions is that they are much like renting an apartment in that you are still living close to lots of other people, you responsible for shared areas and you are somewhat limited in terms of what you do with your place. The advantages are that because of the high density design of the buildings they can be placed in areas that would normally be quite expensive for a house to be built, and they are usually pretty convenient as far as shopping and train stations go.

Antoine and Miwako had just gotten back from a short honeymoon in Okinawa and were getting ready to get back to work. They suggested that we drop in since we were on our way back from the matsuri, and so we brought a cheesecake and relaxed in their living room. The interior design of the place was pretty close to what we are in the process of building, so it was that much more comfortable. Antoine gave us the grand tour, and let us check out the balcony where they had a beautiful view of eastern Kobe from the hillside.

We had a nice time chatting with them, and sooner or later we’ll have to have them over once we get settled into our new place. We walked back to the station from their place since it was all downhill and made it in about 20 minutes, so they are not too far away from the JR line which is very convenient. Antoine’s work has him using a station that is a little closer, so it should be a good homebase for them from now on. We were really impressed with the place, and they both looked very happy coming back from so much time off.

Kuniko and I caught a train back to Okubo and I had to do a little bit of thesis work for Nozaki sensei before bed. She is getting close to wrapping things up, and it will be a relief for her (and me) when it is all finished. I feel like I know more about vocabulary acquisition among Japanese high school students than I really ever wanted to know.

Today was going along just fine, actually. I spent the morning in the heart of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, teaching business English to company executives. One of them even invited me to a ship launching, with the breaking sake bottle and everything. After work I headed all the way to Higashi Kakogawa and spent a few hours helping Nozaki sensei try to wrap up her thesis. Then I was done for the day, so I took a train back to Okubo around four in the afternoon.

I bought a couple of bottles of local sake and had them wrapped as presents at the Vivre store near the station, and then headed over to our new neighborhood to check on the house building. It is going quite well, with work started on the second floor. The builder was working alone today and trying to get his things in order before it got dark.

We chatted for a little while, and then I gave him the bottle of sake as a combined “New Years gift and thanks for building our house” present. He didn’t quite know what to do about it – at first he didn’t look like he was going to accept it. Finally he reached out and took it, and said thanks, and then we moved on to other topics. I could tell he would have rather been up on the second floor hammering nails than talking awkwardly with this foreign dude that keeps showing up, but where could he go? I let him off the hook after about five minutes, took some pictures and then headed off.

On the way home I stopped in at the MaxValue supermarket across the street and did a little shopping. As usual I had my own “eco” bag, so I put a big cardboard tag into my basket to indicate that I didn’t need a plastic bag. The clerk was someone I had seen there quite often – we shop there every day so we know everyone (at least by appearance). She rang up my groceries, and told me the total in Japanese. Here’s where things got weird.

She said the total was 726 yen, but I heard 716 yen, and put down 721 yen, hoping to get just a 5 yen coin back. She said the total again, and I realized my mistake and threw in another 10 yen coin, still expecting to get 5 yen back. But somehow she miscounted the coins she now had, and she pointed again at the total on the computer screen – totally giving up on speaking Japanese to me. So now I’m thinking I’m still mistaken, and she’s thinking she must be right because I already screwed up once, and probably because I don’t look like most of their customers. And meanwhile, the line is backing up, and they are probably rolling their eyes wondering why I don’t learn Japanese and make everyone’s life easier.

So I count the coins for her in her hand, and the total comes out 5 yen over, and I think she realized that she had enough money to process the transaction, so she just goes ahead and does it. I get my five yen coin back, and we parted ways probably equally confused about the whole thing.

Anyway, walking out of there I felt like I had just gotten off the boat. Between confusing my house builder about gift giving protocol and convincing a line of people in the supermarket that I couldn’t handle a simple grocery transaction – I felt pretty lame. I guess my point (if there is one) is that you never really do completely fit in here – sometimes in a good way and sometimes like today’s adventures.

Tonight Kuniko is doing a school party tonight after work, so I’m on my own tonight. I’m thinking about running over to Red Spanky for cocktails later on – it has been a while since I hung out over there.