Wow – long time no post…

After a grueling week I had a pretty relaxing weekend. On Saturday I had some beach time all to myself out at the little shrine that I like to visit in Okubo. It is one of my favorite spots in Japan, just because of the (relative) isolation.

Sunday I went out with Kuniko’s dad to do some wakame fishing. I’m not a huge seaweed fan, but it is one of those Japanese essential ingredients that shows up in everything. I’ve never dreamed of one day harvesting wakame myself, but Kuniko’s dad offered up the chance and I jumped on it.

I pulled on my faithful 2-size-too-small rubber boots and we drove together to where his friend’s boat was docked, right near Futami. The guy was waiting for us in a little boat about the size of a small pickup truck, and we jumped on and shipped out. The owner of the boat was a little shy but he answered my questions and smiled a lot. I had visions of going out on the sea, but he instead stayed inside a harbor area where there were lots of good clusters of wakame.

The fishing was remarkably easy. He slowed the boat to a crawl, and then threw a stainless steel claw over the side. The claw had a chain attached at one end, and then a rope with a float attached at the other. The float told him where the claw was relative to the boat, and after letting it drag just above the ground he pulled it up, full of wakame. He dumped it out onto the floor of the boat, and then threw the claw in again. Our job was to process the wakame and put it into bags to take home later.

The processing was easy – just cut off the roots the may have been pulled up along with it (sometimes with crabs, shells and fish still tangled up in there) and then cut the best pieces out for ourselves and dump the rest back in the water. There was lots of lime green algae that looked like green cellophane – that was considered low grade stuff so we threw a lot of that back. The captain of the boat just watched as we hacked away, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t do a perfect job, but he let us go at it without much advice.

It was a tiny boat, and half the time I was afraid of falling in. You had to lean way over to hack up the wakame, and just one wrong shift and you could end up in the water. There were no life vests, safety rails, or any other apparent precautions against this. Just relying on good old common sense.

Near the end of the trip Kuniko’s dad was feeling a little nauseous. Luckily we got back before he felt really bad. We threw four big bags of wakame into the back of the truck and he took me home. I took the smallest bag with me – we can’t exactly string out lots of wakame to dry where we live – and said goodbye and thank you to Kuniko’s dad. I think we both enjoyed the experience.

I stopped in at the flower shop before going upstairs and gave them about a quarter of the wakame, and then went up and spent a couple of hours cutting and cleaning the wakame – it took a long time to get it ready to go. Over the next few days we’ll try to figure out interesting ways to eat it.

This week has been a procession of chores, tasks and errands that have to be taken care of, and I’ve had very little time to do any actual studying for grad school. Yesterday I got all dressed up and went all the way to Osaka during the rush hour to interview at a staffing company that Nozaki sensei recommended called OTC. They provide English experts to companies that want to train their employees, both full time and part time.

The trip was fun, the interview went really well, but I couldn’t help feeling like they were going to make a lot of money off of me. They outlined a typical contract, and I could plainly see that every advantage was theirs. There’s a ton of paperwork and training that I am responsible for, and the pay wasn’t that great. Right off the bat they mentioned that they might have a job available for two weeks in south Osaka (a two hour train commute for me) but I’m leaning towards saying no thanks. I’d have to stand during each two hour trip because it is during the rush hour, and that makes it pretty tough to study. They were optimistic that jobs would pop up closer to Kobe and Akashi.

I had a full load of classes when I got back to Kakogawa, including an evening class with junior high school students that went really well. I think that junior high school is my favorite age level to teach – the kids are just right for serious language learning. At that age they think they can pick up English in a couple of years, and so they are trying hard and extremely optimistic. Later when they get bogged down in boring grammar-translation English classes in high school they will start to lose all hope, but for now they are fun to teach.

Today I went into Akashi and went to the correct tax building this time. It was a breeze. I walked into the lobby, they pointed me to a room filled with laptop computers and college girls. The girls were there volunteering to help with the taxes, and they sat me down in front of computer, helped me sort out which papers I needed, and then walked me through the process on the computer. They chatted with me in both Japanese and English, and after 10 minutes I was done and on to the next station. They all waved goodbye when I left for the next station. The other customers in the office weren’t getting the full treatment and gave me some looks, but hey – sometimes it’s good to be the foreigner.

I presented the completed paperwork to an unsmiling older lady who didn’t even look at the papers before stamping it and sending me on my way. It turns out this year I actually get some money back, so that is a first for me. It was a very positive tax filing experience. Can’t wait for next year, in fact.

It is tax time again, and this year I received a nice big package of paperwork from my local tax office, including lots of forms in English and Japanese, and a 60 page guidebook on how to fill out my taxes.

Last year I went to the local tax office, filled out my information on one of their computers and I was done in 20 minutes. This year, I couldn’t find any information about that system, just lots of information on a new tax system that they have implemented.

Now, in the interest of simplicity we just file our own taxes, and if you have trouble you go to a special building that they have set aside for helping out people with the new system. My biggest concern was, what happened to my computer filing? They do have e-filing in Japan, but you need to download a big software package to your computer, and that to me is just too 1995.

So I set out today with all my paperwork to the place where they were consulting on the new system, and it was filled with old people. I’m not a big fan of old people, but I guess they were pretty confused by the new system, too. I take a number, I wait in a chair for 30 minutes, and then they call my number and I wait in another chair for somebody to come help me. I can see by the format that once a clerk is free they will roll their chair over to the next open desk (mine) so I wait. And wait, and wait.

It starts to dawn on me that nobody wants to finish with their current customer because then they’d have to go deal with me. I’ll admit, the odds were in their favor that I would be a pain to deal with. Probably don’t speak Japanese, probably will have a very complex tax issue to deal with involving marriages, immigration, children of different nationalities, international tax treaties, etc. Better to stick with the old folks with the easy returns. So I was waiting.

I noticed that a few of the higher ups had noticed me, and after a while a guy came up behind me and asked me if I spoke Japanese. He offered me a little advice on filling out my return, but I jumped on the chance and asked him what happened to the very convenient computer system they had before. He smiled and said they still had it – I just had to go back to the tax office I went to last year. He said in a low voice that most of the people here were afraid of computers so this was set up to help people that like to do things the old fashioned way. That explains a lot.

So I’ll make another trek out to the tax office on Wednesday, but the funny thing about the whole situation is that I knew enough Japanese to figure out that they had a new system, but not enough to realize that some things are still the same, like the computers in the tax office. On my way out of the office an old guy talked to me in English, and it was funny to see that once the ice was broken, lots of people offered to help me.

Always interesting around here…

I started teaching a new student last night. I originally talked with her and her mother in December and helped them decide on a place for her to study overseas in America. She recently returned and wants to keep speaking English, so her mother asked me to teach her English twice a week.

The lesson went pretty well, and I think she did pretty well. She is just finishing up college at Konan University (the same place I took the Japanese proficiency test) and is a cheerleader for the college American football team. Some colleges in Japan have started football teams, and I’d love to catch a game sometime.

After the lesson I went back to Okubo, and tried an okonomiyaki restaurant that I had eyeballing for a while. It was a tiny little place, and the people that ran it were pretty nice. I had a shrimp and pork okonomiyaki and it was delicious. Kuniko was going to get home late from a end-of-the-term party, so I took advantage of the opportunity to eat out. I’m glad I did.

Job searching in Japan is, as you might expect, quite different from searching in America. I’ve done quite a few job searches in the U.S., including a particularly tough stretch in 2001 after the internet bubble popped.

Just like in America, and maybe even more important here in Japan is networking. You know, the hidden job market and all that. There are a quite a few jobs out there for English teachers, and since I am a native speaker there is a dramatic reduction in the competition I face for a job. However, in Japan “job-hopping” is rather uncommon, and remnants of the “lifetime employment” system are still alive and well.

My search now is a little tricky. My degree won’t be finished until November of this year, and so I can’t get a job based on that degree until the end of this year. That means that any job I take now will likely be a temporary thing. Because I’m looking for a job that won’t be permanent, I can’t use a lot of my contacts because they wouldn’t want to recommend me for a job that I leave shortly thereafter. So my search will probably lead me back to a staffing company. I’ve got some leads with two companies, but nothing solid.

Next month is going to be prime time for a last minute job teaching at a school, and a job teaching at a company could come anytime, so it will likely be one of those jobs that just kind of pops up out of nowhere. My own graduate studies begin again next month as well, so it’ll be a busy month.

Yesterday morning I walked over to the local barbershop to get my quarterly haircut. I’ve been there three or four times, and I’m really starting to like the place. The guy is really friendly, the service is very old fashioned, and now the guy knows what I like so I don’t have to explain it every time.

When you go in there time seems to slow down – you wait for the chair, read a newspaper, chat with the barber’s wife, watch some TV, drink coffee, and soon enough he calls you over. The barber is always talking and asking questions is a really quiet voice, and he is probably the most difficult speaker of Japanese for me to understand. I get about 20% of what he says, and that makes for some pretty one-sided conversations. He doesn’t seem to mind, though. One of the pieces of information I gleaned from the conversation is that the big empty lot across the street from our apartment is going to be a brand new Max Value supermarket in June. That was very good news for us – we missed walking across the street to get milk whenever we needed it from Jusco.

Walking back through the old neighborhood is always interesting. Before they built the train station in what is now the center of Okubo this area was the center of town. There was an old shopping street (商店街 “shoutengai” in Japanese). These shopping streets are one of the foundations of the Japanese market economy since the beginning, streets lined with shops on either side catering to shoppers walking down the middle. Kind of a Japanese version of an outdoor shopping mall. Every town (no matter how small) has one somewhere, and when you see an old abandoned one it gives you a little bit of a melancholy feeling. This one had just a single shop still open, a small fruit stand. In this part of town they’ll probably have about five customers a day – old ladies that have shopped there since they were children. It gives you a sense of how long things have been like this in Japan – somehow more intense than the ancient temples and shrines I walk by every day.

After work Kuniko picked me up and we picked up some sushi and went to her parents’ house again for dinner. She wanted to borrow her mom’s kimono because Kuniko is going to take kimono lessons (how to put it on, wear it comfortably, and walk around without tumbling down stairs, etc) on Saturdays, and she needs a kimono to practice with. Kimono are big bucks in Japan – just to rent one for a day can cost nearly a thousand dollars.

We ate a big meal of sushi and homemade sandwiches that Kuniko’s mom made, and we had some coffee while watching TV and enjoying the heated floor in the living room. There were three big boxes in the corner that I noticed had a giant red sticker that said “FOR JAPAN” in English. It turns out they were full of fruit.

So I can’t say exactly how it worked, and I am sworn to secrecy, but we came home with a box of green bananas (about 80 in the box, 10 of which are ripe) and a box of papayas (8 giant ones). So now we have to figure out how to get rid of them. Part of the secrecy requires that we can’t give them away to other people. Anyway, I ate a couple bananas for breakfast, and just 78 to go. Do you know any papaya recipes?

I got the results back from my other class “Online and Distributed Learning” and got pretty good scores. Not as good as the Language Testing score, but I was pretty happy. I’m gearing up for my next two classes, “Second Language Learning Methodology” and “Computer Assisted Language Learning” – they start next week.

I’ve been doing some thinking about how the sites that I run are largely hidden from public view. This site as well as ApplingBlo are not listed on Google and so they are fairly private. However, especially with the upcoming Computer Assisted Language Learning class I wanted someplace public where I could put links, notes, career stuff, everything that I run across and make it available in a public forum. So last week I threw together CALL Teacher.

This was also an opportunity to try out a new blogging system, Movable Type. Since it was free and open source, and since Haven over at Birdahonk is doing some pretty cool stuff with it (also check out Kerry’s site), I figured it was worth trying out. The install went pretty smoothly, and I just adapted one of the boring templates that they provided into a much more boring design. I’ll play with the design in the future as my thoughts and uses for the site develop.

Anyway, the CALL Teacher site is a public one, and there will be no mention of this site on there – we’ve got to keep it on the QT. As for ApplingBlo, probably most of the stuff that I would put there will end up on CALL Teacher or here, so I’m going to burn that site down. So, if you are looking for information on learning another language using technology, check out CALL Teacher. If you want a glimpse into my boring life, just keep coming here!

Living together with someone from a different culture is enormously interesting. Maybe because it is the kind of person I am, but I enjoy bumping into little situations that are culturally unexpected. Some people might get frustrated, some people might ignore it, but I always find myself thinking, “Wow, that’s cool.” It helps that I live with Kuniko, who is infinitely patient. It’s as if a long time ago she decided that we’re going to have times when we completely don’t understand each other, but the good things more than make up for it.

Generally he handle our day to day communication in English, but there are times when we stray into Japanese. We strive to avoid mixing the languages mid-sentence, but we don’t seem to mind changing languages sentence by sentence, which probably is weird to hear but seems natural to us. Sometimes one language has a better way of expressing an idea in that particular situation, so we use that.

Last night after we came home from dinner at Kuniko’s parents (where I got a pretty good Japanese workout) we were doing little chores around the house and Kuniko mentioned that she was looking forward to our brunch on Sunday. The restaurant is having a special course based on shrimp dishes, and since I love shrimp I was all excited about it as well. I said something like “Woo, yeah, shrimp, shrimp, let’s eat shrimp!” while smiling and Kuniko gave me a look like “What the hell are you talking about?”

I think the last thing she expected me to do after an evening of polite Japanese with her parents was act like a junior high school cheerleader and do a shrimp rally cheer in English. The last thing I expected was for her to think it was weird.

Like I said, I love it when this kind of stuff happens. She just shakes her head and smiles, and I usually try to measure if it is worth it to try and explain it or to just let it slide as “Bryan sure is weird sometimes”. Last night I let it slide, but it did remind me how culturally different we are, and how lucky I am to have someone as open-minded as my wife.

The week is coming to an end, and I feel like I didn’t get anything done. I took care of lots of stuff that has been on the back burner for a while… setting up a backup system for my computer files, working on a new website, stuff like that.

Tonight after work I’m going to meet Kuniko at her parents’ house for dinner in kind of a mini-birthday celebration. It has been a while since I’ve been over to visit so I’m looking forward to seeing everyone.

Despite some serious searching this week I don’t have a job lined up yet for April. My current job just kind of fell into my lap from out of the blue, and I don’t yet have the degree to go for the kind of job I really want, so I’m in this kind of weird middle ground where I have to find something just to get by. I’ve done jobs like this before (like at Barnes & Noble in San Diego) but it is hard to get motivated when you know you’ll be gone soon. Hopefully something will show up on the radar soon.

I got the results back from one of my classes the other day – Language Testing, and I kicked ass. I ended up with about a 90% for the class, which was a big jump up in score from last term. Haven’t heard yet on the other class.

This weekend I have a seminar in Osaka in the evening, and Sunday Kuniko and I are going out for brunch and then a movie. That’s about it for the update. More later…

On Saturday I wrapped up the last of my assignments and sent them off, and now I have some breathing room until school starts again in the beginning of March. I’ll be working on a couple of projects at home this week, as well as seeking out my next job and doing some reading on CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning).

Kuniko’s birthday is tomorrow, but since we both have engagements that evening, we did a birthday dinner on Saturday night in Kobe. We tried a restaurant that Kuniko had heard about on TV, and it was really good. We had a ten course meal with a bottle of New Zealand merlot, and then we went to the German wine store to try some wines and we ended up bringing back two bottles. We also went back to the House of Pacific to enjoy the bar (not the restaurant). The bar is maybe the nicest bar in Kobe (so I hope it doesn’t get popular). We had a couple of drinks there, and then headed home. It was a nice romantic evening away from it all.

We had a nice day together on Sunday, watched a few movies, and now I’m getting ready to head off to work on Monday. This week I should have more time for posting, so maybe I can get back into a routine again.

This week I’ve been doing a brief lesson on Valentine’s Day in my classes. There is a pretty significant difference between V-day in Japan and in the USA. Here in Japan women need to present boys with chocolate, and boys just sit back and reel it in. Then on March 14th on a holiday called “White Day” the boys are expected to reciprocate. This creates a lot of pressure on the girls – and so my students don’t like the holiday that much. Anyway, hearing that in America it is an exchange of gifts/cards/candy/flowers is a big surprise, and the girls seem to prefer that system…. less risk involved.

Kuniko made some homemade chocolates for me, and tonight we’ll enjoy them with a bottle of wine. I need to think of something interesting to make for dinner, though. Since we’ll both be working late it’ll have to be something simple.

I’m almost finished with my last paper of the term, and then I’ll be free for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to having a little free time to do a little job hunting and research on some interesting topics I’ve run across lately in my studies.

I’m working this week to wrap up my last assignment, and then I’ll have a couple of weeks off before school starts again. So I thought I’d post up two ideas that I had this weekend.

Kuniko and I visited a wine shop in Kitano, the ritzy upscale part of Kobe. The wine shop specialized in German wine, and it was a tiny little place filled with bottles and customers. We couldn’t even get to the bar to do tasting it was so packed. We looked around for a while, but left after deciding that we’d come back some other day when it wasn’t so busy.

Which brings me to idea number one. What Kobe needs is a wine shop specializing in California wines. California wines are vastly underrated here in Japan because the current way of thinking is that the French started winemaking so they must be the best at it. There aren’t a lot of great California wines here to change their mind, either. The California section of 90% of the wine shops I’ve visited is filled with Gallo, Kendall-Jackson, and other low end brands. The way it is usually set up is that if you don’t have money, you go over to the California and Australia section and buy the cheaper wines – if you have money you shop the French section.

A wine shop with premium California wines would do well, I think. People in Japan would have more luck reading the labels since most people have studied English in their past, and I think the style of California wines is a little more Japanese-friendly. With a knowledgeable proprietor that spoke Japanese and also had some street credibility (a winemaking degree or an ex-sommelier) you could make some money in the swanky Kitano district.

I know what you are saying – Bryan, you should do that! You have the background, the Japanese language ability, the connections, and the time. No thanks. The last thing I want to do is hob nob with a bunch of people and talk about wine all day. I don’t want to run a store, deal with employees, paychecks, licensing, importing, local governments, etc, etc. Ick. But I think somebody could fill a niche here.

Idea number two is directed at Taco Bell. The time is finally right for Taco Bell to move into Japan. Over the past year, ever since the popularity of Habanero flavored snacks took off, people have been eating spicier foods. I say spicier (not spicy) foods, but it is an improvement. Most of my students are addicted to taco sauce (we’ve killed a bottle of Tapatio and a bottle of Cholula already), and are always begging for more. And besides, what foods at Taco Bell are actually spicy anyway?

It is not a big jump for Taco Bell. They already have Kentucky Fried Chicken places all over Japan, and if I’m not mistaken they are of the same corporation. So I think it is time to open a Taco Bell and see how it does. I think the price point is perfect for getting people hooked on tacos in Japan. A little taco stand opened in Kobe a year ago, and the other day I walked by and it had gone out of business. They were charging 300 yen a taco which I was happy to pay because I miss tacos, but most Japanese could get a big bowl of ramen for that price and be full instead of one dinky taco.

So come on, Taco Bell. Open a store in Osaka first, maybe Kobe and Himeji next. I think now is the time. Just don’t bring any spicy sauce – people here are still pretty wimpy.

Just a quick post between assignments…. what’s been going on? I wrapped up my Language Testing package and submitted it, and I’m currently working on three different assignments for the Online and Distributed Learning class. I should be through with those in the next week or two, and then pretty soon afterwards I start my next two courses.

During all this I’ve still got to look for a job. I interviewed with a guy that had an opening at a school right here in Okubo, but he wanted someone to start right away, and I was still committed to helping out Nozaki sensei until the end of March. I’m just hanging tight until it gets closer to April and something should pop up.

That’s the quick and dirty update. Once I knock out some more of the assignments I should have more time to post…