I got paid yesterday and the first thing I did was jump on the internet and order up some YonaYona ale. After I bought the entire stock from the local Lawsons they have not restocked, so I am reduced to buying it directly from the brewery over the internet. Luckily the price is not marked up – it is still cheaper than buying imported beer from Carrefour now and then. I’m such a big fan I wrote the company a while back and asked them about locations that might have the beer on tap, and offered my services to promote the beer if they were interested. No answer. Somebody needs to teach these guys how to market beer.

It is back to being hot again today, but I’m hoping it is a temporary situation. I’ve got to trek out into the heat to the Caterpillar factory to teach some classes, and tomorrow it is back to Osaka to visit OTC again and talk about the possibility of a full time job next year.

I’ve been craving Chinese food lately – we had some just the other night but I’m hoping to have some mabodofu tonight. Maybe it is the heat – soup based things don’t sound so good right now. I’m looking forward to cooler weather and hot bowls of noodles.

I gotta get ready for work. It’s already the end of the week….

Monday night I teach at Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and last night I finished up the second term class. Most of the students will stay on for the next term starting in two weeks, only two students will not continue. Yoshi, one of the students who I have struck up a friendship with, is definitely continuing. Once in a while we have a couple of beers after class, and he really enjoys using English outside the classroom.

Yesterday and today have been the first days where it really feels like fall more than summer. I used to say that spring was my favorite season in Japan, but I’m officially changing it to fall. I can work in the house with the windows open, without air conditioning, and there is something about the smell in the air that reminds me of Halloween. It is a good feeling – especially after the long hot summer. The seasonal foods start to change over, autumn-only fruits (like persimmons and Japanese pears), autumn foods (like oden) and autumn-only beers (that taste exactly like all the other seasonal Japanese beers) start appearing in shops. The turn of the season is when you really start to enjoy living in Japan, because with it comes all the anticipation of the next season, and the knowledge that soon enough it will be over and the next one will begin. I used to get upset that seasonal items disappeared from stores after their one or two month run, but now I relish the short window of opportunity – it really makes you enjoy them more.

Tonight I’ll go into Kobe for another class with the very skilled Mitsuboshi Belting students. Hopefully I’ll get home from that class in time to make some easy Chinese food for Kuniko for dinner. The trip there and back should be quite a bit less sweaty – and much more comfortable now that the weather has changed. I’m certain that summer will still make an appearance now and then in September, but I’m really ready to bid it farewell and move on.

It has been a busy weekend after a busy week cramming to get my paper done. I turned in the paper Thursday evening, and spent Friday in Osaka talking with people at my company office. I did manage to sneak in a burger at the Hard Rock Cafe in Osaka before heading back home. In America I would scoff at the overpriced burgers at a place like the Hard Rock, but living in Japan without grilled burgers makes a trip to the Hard Rock a unique dining experience. I even had a Budweiser to wash it down. Ha!

Saturday Antoine and I went on an interesting hike north of Takarazuka. I haven’t looked up the history yet, but there was an old railroad that was pulled up, and we hiked along the old railroad bed through six tunnels (some of them so long that we hiked in complete darkness), over an abandoned railroad bridge and alongside a pretty impressive river. The weather was perfect for the hike, and the tunnels provided air conditioning along the way. We capped the day with a couple of cold beers at the train station and then headed home.

Sunday we did some house hunting. We’re actually looking for land, then we’d like to build a house on it. We found one interesting spot in Okubo, so we have to spend some time thinking about it, comparing it with another piece of land we like in the area, and also think about how we’re going to pay for it. Once I leverage my new degree into a full time job we should have some more options.

This week I’ll need to catch up on all the readings and projects that were on the back burner during the paper writing marathon, so it should be pretty quiet. I want to get back into a daily blogging routine – this might be the week that it finally happens…

Yesterday we had Risa and Anthony over to visit after returning from their trip to the west coast of America. It sounded like they had a great trip – they took a bump on an overbooked flight and instead spent an eight hour layover in Hawaii, were upgraded to business class, and got $400 each. That was a hell of a way to start the vacation. They reported good experiences in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even enjoyed Las Vegas despite the summer heat.

We ate pizza and drank wine while watching their pictures on the Wii slideshow feature. They had some really good pictures – the weather looked like it was beautiful the whole time they were there. Anthony said that he was surprised that Americans were so nice – the Americans he usually bumps into (besides me) are bitter expatriates that frequent the foreigner bars in Kobe. Not exactly America’s best foot forward. But they had a great time and said it was perhaps their best vacation ever.

Today I spent most of the morning working on the paper that won’t end, and actually made some progress. I’m hoping to finish the last major portion of the paper tomorrow, and then have it edited and shipped off by Friday. Lots of re-writes to do on this one, perhaps a reflection of the on-and-off approach I took while writing.

Kuniko is back to a regular work week starting today. She did manage to get some downtime this summer since we didn’t really have the time or money to travel. Hopefully the energy she has saved up will keep her going well into autumn.

So what’s new?

I’ve been busy working on an assignment due in my sociolinguistics class, so not a lot of time to blog. It seems to me that the closer I get to finishing my degree, the more difficult it is to write assignments. This particular one is going agonizingly slow. This morning after four hours I’ve only written two paragraphs. Partly that is due to the subject having to do with Japanese language dialects. I have to research things in Japanese (takes a long time) and then translate it to English (also takes a long time) and then work it into my paper and cite it correctly. It is surprisingly satisfying to list myself as the translator in the citation.

Last weekend I attended a wine tasting at the Sheraton with Antoine, Chiemi and Ai. Kuniko was stuck at a seminar that day, so it was just the four of us. They had a decent selection of wines but a surprisingly small turnout compared to the last time we attended. I hoped that my explanations about wine and winemaking were understandable to Ai and Chiemi as they were in broken Japanese most of the time.

Sunday we’ll be having Risa and Anthony over for dinner to talk about their trip to the USA. They did a whirlwind trip through three cities (SF, LA, Vegas) in under a week. It sounds like they had a good time – it’ll be interesting to hear their impressions.

That’s about all for now – tonight I have my last class of the week (at Shin-Cat) and then I’ll be able to focus on getting this assignment done by the end of next week.

Kuniko and I are working through one of those epic weekends of alcohol and debauchery that makes every morning seem like a like the day after running a marathon. Not that I have ever run a marathon but I can imagine pretty well what that must feel like. Especially after the last couple of mornings.

Friday Kuniko had just one little meeting on Port Island south of Kobe, so I went with her into Kobe, killed some time shopping and then met her afterwards at the new IKEA store on Port Island. I haven’t been to IKEA in a long time (not since living in San Diego) and we enjoyed walking through the store and remarking on all the interesting items for sale. The furniture itself was priced very well for Japan – furniture here is usually really expensive. We’ll have to come back someday when we’ve got a house to furnish. We did score a bag of food items from the import section at the end of the store – lots of cheese!

After that we rushed off to Akashi to partake in a giant yakiniku feast, and then finally came home and eventually crashed out.

Yesterday we both had the day off (luckily) and after sleeping off the beer and meat-fest from Friday we did a few chores and then went off to buy some new chairs for the living room – ours were looking pretty grim. We got two chairs at Nitori, and then rented a few movies on the way home. I had to do a little convincing in order to rent “Almost Famous” to watch. The cover of the DVD looks like this in Japan – doesn’t exactly look like a rock and roll movie.

Then it was a wine, cheese and movie afternoon. French bread, cheese from Sweden and some roast beef and prosciutto along with a couple of nice bottles of wine – a Bogle old vine zinfandel and a Iron Stone cab franc. Somewhere in there we took a nap, and so we ended up having to stay up late in order to get sleepy. More snacks and lots of water and juice to rehydrate. In the end we went to bed after 1 a.m. tired out from relaxing so much.

I just answered the doorbell to find a startled Japanese guy trying to sell English language lessons for kids. He spoke almost no English and I pretended not to speak Japanese – my standard salesperson-at-the-door strategy. Determined to go through with his spiel, he mustered up “No children?” in English.

And I just smiled and shook my head.

For the longest time I had a request in to ride along with a friend of Kuniko’s dad on one of his octopus fishing trips. Periodically Kuniko’s dad (Niro) will send home a frozen octopus or two with us, and I wanted to see how people went fishing for them. Luckily the time was right, and this morning at 5:30 a.m. we went out to the harbor and jumped on board the little boat to see it first hand.

This was my second time fishing – the first time was for seaweed a while back. That time we stayed close to the shore, but this time it was out onto the open water. The owner of the boat put it on full speed and handed me the wheel so he could crouch in the front of the boat and smoke a cigarette. I really enjoyed piloting the boat. He had a pretty good engine and a clear day, and it was exhilarating to stand in the front with the wind blowing through my hair and the sun rising to my right. After a while he directed me to his favorite spot, and we stopped the boat and rearranged for fishing.

I learned a lot today but the thing that stood out as the most important part of fishing for octopus is having your boat positioned correctly. The octopus float along on a salty current underneath a less salty layer at the top. The boat should be positioned perpendicular to the flow of the current. The water will slowly turn the boat, or the wind, or the flow of water from other boats, so you always have to readjust the boat.

From the boat the fisherman throws out colorful hooks attached to a thick fishing line. You throw them out as far as you can in a fan shape away from the boat, so they are floating along in the salty current layer, and they make colorful and attractive targets for octopi to grab onto. There is no bait – they are attracted to the shape and the color. The fisherman holds onto all the strings in one hand, and if he feels a tug on one of the lines he yanks the line which sticks the hook into the octopus. Then it is just a matter of dragging the line in as quickly as possible before the octopus gets off the hook (which we managed to do about 80% of the time).

Once you pull the line in you’ve got a pissed off little octopus with eight arms flailing around trying to attach themselves to anything (so you can’t bring them alongside the outside of the boat when bringing them in – I learned that the hard way). They’ll squirt water or ink to try to confuse things, but we just slipped them off the hook and throw the hook back out. The boat had a hole in the middle with a wooden lid that led to a net in a bucket of water – you remove the lid and toss the octopus inside the hole and it is stuck in prison until you get back.

It took a while to set up, but soon we were throwing and reeling and I was starting to get a hang of things. I wasn’t used to dealing with the live octopi, they would scramble away from us at a surprisingly high speed and sometimes it was tough to catch them and throw them into prison.

About halfway through the trip I was sitting in the middle of the boat watching the lines intently for any sign of pull, and suddenly I felt somebody touch my leg. I looked down with sudden horror to see an octopus start to wrap itself around my knee – he had pushed off the lid of the prison and there were several of the little guys making a jailbreak. I jumped up startled, and when Niro and his friend saw what happened we all broke out in laughter. And I kept a close eye on the prison lid from then on.

We spent about two hours out on the water, surrounded by other fishing boats pulling in nets with more conventional fish. Another boat was pulling in octopus another way – they had laid a long rope with plastic pots attached at intervals in the water the day before, and now they were reeling it in – the pots make great little hiding places for the octopi until it gets yanked out of the water. The sailors were pulling the octopi out of their temporary homes adeptly in far great numbers than we were able to do with just hooks.

Still, it was a pretty good haul. We caught about twenty octopi, and as we headed back to shore all I could think about was how the hell they were going to go from live imprisoned octopi to dead edible octopi in my refrigerator. When we got back to the harbor, the fisherman started the (rather gross) process of cleaning (and killing) the octopi, which I will describe in the next paragraph – so squeamish readers beware.

The “head” of the octopus is actually more of a hood, so the fisherman would pull the octopus out of prison, and actually pull the head up over itself – turning it inside out. From there it was easy to pull off the two brain-like pieces inside the head, effectively killing the octopus rather quickly. Then he pulled the guts out of the middle and flung them overboard, leaving the still-thrashing legs, the empty “head”, and the eyes and “mouth” of the octopus to be removed later with a knife.

We gathered up our share of catch, thanked the fisherman for a great experience and headed to my place. The guy was really nice to show us the ropes of octopus fishing, and he was really patient with us. It was a nice relaxed pace as well – he did the whole thing barefoot too.

Back at my place Niro took over and showed me how to cut out the eyes and mouth of the dead octopus, then we rubbed them in a huge amount of salt to get rid of any toxins left on the surface of the octopus. After that we rinsed them off and we were done. If I liked raw octopus (I don’t) I could eat it as sashimi at this stage, but I prefer it boiled, so after Niro headed back I boiled them up and then stocked the fridge and freezer. I even had an extra that I gave to the florist downstairs (who was thrilled to get local octopus) so it was a good haul.

I tried as best I could to take some pictures but I was too busy hauling them in to really get many good ones. Take a look at the pictures I did manage to take in the photo gallery.

After I got everything cleaned up and put away I was surprised to find my computer making some evil noises, so I spent most of the day working on getting on that repaired, which culminated in a trip to Nishi Akashi and an hour sitting in a computer shop while technicians cleaned out my notebook. Now things are working fine, and it is running a lot cooler. I think there was a significant cloud of dust inside the poor thing. As soon as I got home from getting the computer fixed I had to clean up and then go over to Kawasaki to teach a class. So I’m pretty tired out now.

Tomorrow Kuniko will be back from her study camp, and things will hopefully run a lot smoother tomorrow. I’m running behind on my studies thanks to the computer problems – tomorrow will have to be a catch-up day.

A recent visitor to our home in Japan, Brian Haven is changing jobs (and careers?) and joining a startup company that is beginning to form. I wish Haven all the best with his new adventure.

All the relaxation over the next week has been great for both of us. Kuniko’s batteries seem to be recharged and hopefully she’ll have enough “genki“ness to get her through to the next set of holidays, sometime in December. She’s off at a summer study camp for the next two nights with her students, so I’ve got the place to myself for a little while.

As for me I’ve taken the last week off from school to spend more time with Kuniko, so it is back to the books starting tomorrow. I’ve got just a little catchup to take care of, but I should be on schedule after tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning at 5:30 a.m. Kuniko’s dad will drop by my place and pick me up to go octopus fishing. I’ve already done seaweed fishing so this appears to be the next step. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works. It should be a dark, wet, sweaty hour in a tiny boat filled with live octopus and sharp hooks. Sounds like a perfect Monday to start my week.

Took a little blogging vacation for Obon week, and now I’m back in business. Kuniko and I are going back to work (and study) soon, but I’ll report with more updates from our side of the ocean soon!

One of my most enjoyable classes is with a small group of advanced English students at a Kobe company called Mistuboshi Belting. The group really has fun together – always smiling, good attitude, and supportive of the other members that may have lower ability.

After class last night we all went out to an izakaya for dinner and drinks, and got to know each other better. Unlike in the classroom the conversations were in both Japanese and English, and as usual the more people drank the less English was spoken. I had a great time.

During the dinner I asked them about something at their company that had always puzzled me. When I go into the building after passing security, there is a section of hallway with a camera and two lines on the floor. Once I cross the second line, there is always a short loud buzzing noise. I asked them what that was all about, and it turns out that it is a system to help you remember to walk at high speed. Time is money at that company, and if the buzzer goes off you weren’t walking fast enough. It seemed like most people felt that the idea was a bad one, but I thought it was pretty interesting.

It turns out that most of next week is off because of Obon, so Kuniko and I will have some time to do some fun stuff together. Monday I have to teach at Nozaki sensei’s classroom, but after that we’re free and clear!

Yesterday I was at home all day studying, and staying out of the oppressive heat. For the last five or six days we’ve had clear skies and high temperatures. In the afternoon I noticed some dark clouds on the horizon, and after a few minutes it started getting dark outside. The temperature dropped 10 degrees suddenly, and I turned off the air conditioner and opened up all the windows in the house to catch some free cooling.

Thunder started booming in the distance, the sky turned even darker, and the wind started blowing pretty hard. I closed up the house in time for a massive thunderstorm to come through. I couldn’t see outside because the wind and rain was coming down so hard, but it was past our neighborhood in about 15 minutes. The weather stayed cloudy the rest of the day with occasional thunder, but it did stay cooler than usual.

We talked about it in my class last night and when I got home I saw on the local news that four people in Kobe were swept away in the sudden rush of water and were killed. They showed this video on TV – an animation taken from stills of a camera set up by the city to monitor floodwater levels. The video is pretty amazing – it only takes about 10 minutes for the flood to start.

This year Kuniko asked me to help out at her school by teaching a short lesson to students that are considering enrolling next year. I taught a lesson last year, however this year they were expecting a lot more prospective students. The school had created a new mascot in an effort to market itself better and increase enrollment. The visitors to the school could get a free mascot key chain, and it did have a big effect on the amount of students.

I was doing a bingo game using the alphabet, and we had a pretty good turnout. Kuniko had provided plenty of help for the lesson – we had Iseno sensei, a younger female English teacher that is new to the school, and Risa, the daughter of another English teacher that is married to an American. Risa speaks both English and Japanese fluently and without accent so she could help us out quite a bit.

The games were fun but they did run a bit short. We had aimed for a 30 minute class, but the games finished up in about 15 minutes. Still, everyone seemed to have fun. English classes can be a little scary for the kids because they don’t know if they’ll have to speak English during the class in front of everyone else. We kept that to a minimum though, and gave out lots of cheesy prizes for the bingo winners.

After class Kuniko had to run but she put Risa and I together to go get some lunch. We decided on some curry and rice and sat down together in the crowded cafeteria. Risa is going to be fourteen soon, and she is pretty mature in terms of talking about the unique issues and challenges she faces living in Japan. Although she is half-Japanese and half-American she looks foreign here in Japan, and so she gets a lot of attention.

It was interesting for me to talk to her because although we share some things like standing out wherever we go, it was interesting to get her take on living in Japan and being partially Japanese. That is something I’ll never be able to experience, but perhaps my children will.

Anyway, we talked and talked and had some good laughs. We had some yakisoba and then it was time for me to hit the road. I picked up an embarrassingly large amount of cash payment and then walked down the hill and caught a train home.

Later I met Kuniko on the train and together we went to Higashi Kakogawa station. We met Mikyake sensei at the train station, and then it was on to Nozaki sensei’s for dinner. Miyake sensei had brought some food, we had brought some wine, and Nozaki sensei had cooked a feast. There were pasta shells stuffed with a tofu version of ricotta cheese, paella, stuffed mushrooms, a citrus and avocado salad, curried pork, and plenty of wine and beer to drink. It was fun for everyone to catch up. Nozaki sensei’s houseguest (a Japanese lady named Mika that is moving to America soon) told us about her trials and tribulations in losing paperwork that is required for her visit, and she asked us about how and when we decided to get married. All in all some lively conversation.

We walked back to the station with thunderstorms on the horizon, but they were going the other way and we made it home safe and dry. Next week it is back to the books for me, and I have a pretty full schedule of classes to teach.