This past week was a pretty busy one for both of us at work. During the month of April I have between 8-10 classes per day, which means there is barely time to breathe as I usher the previous student out of the classroom and welcome the next one in. Kuniko’s schedule was also pretty packed with special events at her school, so we were both looking forward to meeting up after work on Friday and getting some Chinese food.

I think that I’ve talked about my growing addiction to Chinese food on this blog before. The key is to find food that hasn’t been Japan-ized and tastes authentic.

Our target on Friday night was Shin-Shin (杏杏) in the Motomachi area of Kobe. It is hidden on backstreets and we have often passed it on the way to Anonym, our current favorite Kobe restaurant. We’ve tried to walk into Shin-Shin a couple of time, but each time they were booked up and we were turned away. We decided this time to go ahead and set up a reservation. Outside the restaurant a flag is flying the name of the restaurant with a big red star, and the bottom portion of the flag must be near a fan blowing out aromas from the kitchen. The good news is that the street in front of the restaurant smells great, but the bad news is the bottom of the flag is stained with the oil that is carried out the ventilation duct. Still, this could be a good sign – we’ve eaten at restaurants with dicey sanitary conditions before and have left satisfied.

Upon sliding open the front door you can see a very narrow kitchen with a few counter seats facing the cooks. I thought that it was the entirety of the restaurant, but the owner led us around behind the kitchen to a quiet room that might actually have been someone’s living room at one time. The furniture of the room seemed more homey than what you’d find in a restaurant, and the quiet room in back had no excitement of frying food and cooks in action. We ordered up some beers and reviewed the menu.

The menu was a bit limited, especially in the dim sum arena, but we ended up ordering a few dishes to get an idea of what they could do here. We started with shu-mai, sui-gyoza, sweet/sour pork, and onion ginger noodles. They started us off with the shu-mai which had quite a bit of shiitake mushroom chopped up and mixed in with the pork filling. I liked the texture of the mushroom in there, although I think Kuniko didn’t appreciate it very much. The shiitake didn’t add a lot of flavor however, and overall I thought that it was a little lifeless for shu-mai. The sui-gyoza were a little better on flavor, but the wrappers were quite thin, and I prefer thick dumpling style wrapped gyoza.

The su-buta (sweet/sour pork) was the big disappointment of the night for me. I couldn’t really taste much su (vinegar), the pork was a bit overfried, and there wasn’t that perfect balance of salty and sour that makes the dish shine. Disappointed!

The last dish that arrived was the onion ginger noodles, served without soup. These were really good. The noodles were flat wheat noodles and the sharp onion flavor went nicely with the cold beer we were drinking. The ginger wasn’t over the top but definitely present, and it made for a really nice dish. I could have eaten several more plates of those noodles.

We decided to leave on a high note and we skipped dessert. It was good to finally try Shin-Shin but those noodles are about the only thing that will get me back there. Kobe is filled with more Chinese restaurants for us to try first.

To change things up a bit we stopped at a bar called Porto Bar, and we had a small platter of cheese. Kuniko had a cava and I asked for the Port list, but it turns out that the Porto Bar had only one port. It was not bad, though – a young tawny port with a lot of fruit – and it was nice break for our palates.

Still slightly disappointed by our experience at Shin-Shin we walked a few blocks to another area with some Chinese restaurants, and we went to a gyoza place to have a few kinds of gyoza – shiso gyoza, extra garlic gyoza, and their regular every-day gyoza. The service there was a bit slow, and the atmosphere a little like warehouse more than a restaurant, but I couldn’t complain about their gyoza. They served them as tiny bite-sized squares, fried crispy on the bottom.

After the gyoza we wrapped things up and decided to head home, but not ten steps out of the gyoza restaurant we found a tiny Chinese place specializing in shorompo (Chinese soup dumplings). We waltzed in there just before they closed and managed to eat three baskets of dumplings. The Chinese husband and wife that ran the place were nice enough to let us in and cook us our last meal of the night. Delicious!

So that was our Friday night – a very high calorie food marathon, and that was just the beginning of the weekend. Saturday night it was grilled cheese Cuban sandwiches, and then Sunday night we made Thai and Korean mini-pizzas for dinner.

I think I need a few days of salads to balance things out…

Pictures from this trip can be found here!

You might recall that for our ten year anniversary we had planned on going to Singapore for a couple of days. You also may recall that we weren’t able to take a trip to Singapore because I apparently couldn’t count properly.

So at the end of this school year, we worked out a schedule and we tried again, this time with brand new passports. We made it there and back safely, completely satisfied with the experience. I don’t think we’ll make it a priority to go back to Singapore in the future, but we had a great time while we were there.

The way our trip worked out was that we left late at night from Japan, slept on the plane, and then hit Singapore from about 6:00 am the next morning. Anytime you can make your plane your hotel you end up with more time at the destination, so that worked out great. We were suitably impressed with Singapore’s Changi airport, but things were a little slow that early in the morning, so we caught a metro train from the airport into the center of town.

The city was easy enough to navigate with various applications on our smartphones, and we started out with a view of the bay in front of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. The symbol of the city, the Merlion, sat on the edge of bay, and because we arrived so early it wasn’t yet spewing water. However the area was almost completely deserted and the temperature was relatively cool. Later the day really heated up – I don’t think I could ever live in Singapore in that tropical climate.

My impressions of Singapore were overall fairly positive. The city was filled with banks, and when we looked out over the water there were hundreds of cargo ships awaiting a berth in the port. Also just about everywhere there were signs of affluence. Ritzy shopping malls, Ferrari dealerships, jewelry shops, and brand goods were scattered everywhere. It was clear that conspicuous consumption was in vogue in this city.

Racially it was an interesting mix. Outside the banks and the shopping centers you saw groups of caucasians talking on phones. They were probably assigned to the local bank office from another country. They seemed like they were doing well financially and they wanted you to know it. Afterwards the native Singaporeans walked around, also looking fairly well off and convincing you that you are indeed in an Asian capital city. Finally, there were lots of people working manual labor – watering gardens, moving heavy items, taking care of white kids. In just the short time I was there it seemed like just about all of these people were very dark skinned. I don’t know much about the social and ethnic situation in Singapore, but this point stood out to me.

The architecture of Singapore was fairly modern and creative. It felt very much like Hong Kong, with building designs that stood out and felt individual. Coming from Japan where architecture is much more conservative it was fun to see the variety and style of the buildings there. I really enjoyed the design of the Park Royal Hotel – almost completely covered in living green growth. There were also more art installations around the city than what I am used to.

Our hotel was another good example of interesting architecture. Marina Bay Sands Hotel looks like it was transplanted directly from Las Vegas. It is a very luxurious hotel and we really enjoyed our stay. The grounds are beautifully (if not surreally) maintained, and the pool on top with the infinity view of the city was nice to splash around in. Our room was huge and very comfortable, and from the 47th floor we had a great view of the city.
At night we hurried back to our room because we had a perfect spot to watch the light and water show presented every evening in the bay in front of the hotel. We settled in for the show, but it was pretty underwhelming. Maybe this show is a placeholder until they invest more money in a show with (much) more impact.

But perhaps the most important thing to talk about is the food! We were really excited to try as much as we could during the few days that we were there, and I think we got a good representative sample of Singapore cuisine. We ate most of our meals at hawker stalls – kind of like indoor/outdoor food stands gathered in one place. Each stand sold some different specialty, and you could walk around a try whatever you liked. They cooked the food right in front of you, so you can just watch for a while and get a feel for the dishes.

One of our favorites was popiah, a Chinese based dish that was kind of like a mini-burrito wrapped in rice paper… delicious. Of course we tried the laksa, but we were a little disappointed with the noodles. They were a little bland and didn’t seem to want to absorb the flavors of the delicious soup they were floating in. I also convinced Kuniko to join me for some dim sum – and I finally got to try the salted egg yolk buns. They met my expectations – steaming hot, sweet and salty. We had some more at the airport on the way home – I couldn’t get enough.

There were some other great moments – discovering little eating places under old buildings, having (very expensive) cocktails at the bar on top of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and watching another world unfold before us as the rich and powerful ran up colossal bar tabs. I’ll never forget how our bartender’s face fell when I ordered a traditional cocktail instead of his recommended drinks. The short visit to the butterfly garden at Singapore airport was also a strangely relaxing experience before we boarded a flight home.

So I’m really glad we finally got to go to Singapore. Like I said before, I doubt that we’ll go back anytime soon. Mainly the culture is so money and status-oriented, the temperature was a little oppressive (especially in the afternoons) and it is such a small country that I think we covered pretty much everything that we were interested in already.

So Cheers to Singapore, thanks for all the Tiger beers, and we’ll start to look forward to our next trip to South Korea.

Last night we had a chance to go visit Chu-Chu and her husband at their place in Nishinomiya. The past few times we were able to get together at restaurants and at our place, so it was nice to have a change of scenery. Their apartment was on the ground floor of a medium sized apartment building close to the JRA horse racing track. We really liked the layout of their place – it was so comfortable and they decorated it very nicely.  

Ko-chan (Chu-Chu’s husband) was in charge of dinner, and he made some really delicious Korean foods for us. We drank beer and ate chijimi (three kinds!), lettuce wrapped pork, various kinds of kimchi, raw chicken in spiced Korean paste, and even some gimbap. It was great to have so much delicious food in front of us, and the beer just kept coming. They have a cute little dog as well, so he came over and kept me company while we were there. 

The only downside was that it was on a Sunday night, so it was a little tough to come to work on just four hours sleep. I think I ate a little too much garlic, but thanks to lots of breath mints I should be able to get through today without too much aroma wafting at my students.  

We had a really nice time with them, and I hope that we can get together soon. Some of the discussion was about maybe visiting Taiwan together at the end of this year. We’ll see if anything develops!

It has been a long time, and I definitely owe the blog an update. I have a good excuse for not writing lately, however. I’m just getting over the flu, which knocked me out of work a total of five days, spread over two weeks. This is unprecedented for me to miss so much work, and the timing couldn’t have been worse with the decision on whether to renew my contract or not still up in the air.  

Good news, I renewed my contract, and I’ll be gainfully employed through 2017. The people in the human resources department that I work with were very understanding of my situation, and since my boss recently got over the flu himself it wasn’t a big deal to take some sick days.  

Two weeks ago I had a brutal cold which brutalized my voice and my immunity system, and the week after that the flu moved in and sent my fever to about 40 degrees C, which is in the “red zone”. The doctor had me laid up with an IV and kept me pumped full of meds. I had a weird reaction to some of the medication – it was giving me shortness of breath and I kept waking up thinking I was drowning – but once I cut that medication things got better soon.  

One of the side benefits of the flu is weight loss. Hooray – it’s one of the most dangerous ways to lose weight ever! Now I’m tipping the scales at my lowest weight in eight years. I’m sure it’ll come back to a more normal weight soon, but in the meantime it is nice to see the low numbers.

With a new contract comes new travel plans, and the first part of this year looks a little busy. We’ll be off to Singapore in a couple of weeks, to Seoul, South Korea in June for a weekend getaway, and then we decided to go ahead and travel to Eastern Europe for the summer. We had considered Northern Europe or possibly not traveling and saving money this summer, but in the end we decided that we should go ahead and go while we have our health and the fleeting remains of our youth. More on that trip later, but we booked the tickets from Osaka to Zagreb, and back from Prague to Osaka over two weeks in August. Can’t wait!

I’m wrapping up my term with the new employees over the next two weeks. They have a final presentation to do in class and also for their boss – both of them in English. I’m also going to have a final conference with them to advise them on their strong and weak points and steer them towards the best way to continue their studies. I have really enjoyed teaching this group of students – they tried hard in every class and were serious about learning. I hope I get to work with them again in the near future!

My adopted town in Japan isn’t anything special by Japanese standards. It has a shrine north of town, the usual pachinko parlors, ramen shops, yakitori restaurants and bakeries. The town continues to grow around the train station, like so many other towns in Japan. Hundreds of years ago each town was anchored by the shrines and temples still liberally scattered throughout the landscape of Japan. With modernization came the dependence on high speed efficient transportation, and with that towns moved away from the shrines.

One of the things I like most about the growing town of Okubo is that there is an old side, and it isn’t too hard to find. North of the station and a little to the west is a part of town that would be easy to miss. Between a lonely liquor shop and a lively bar that doesn’t open until 8 pm there is a gap, and once you walk through the gap you enter a quiet forgotten world.

What I am talking about is called the shatta-gai, a shutter street. In the best of times these streets were lined with shops that sold everything – clothes, fruit, meat, TVs, haircuts, everything. In a time before big supermarkets and online shopping, this was the center of town. In big towns the shutter street is as wide as a regular street, but here in smaller Okubo it is the width of a sidewalk. People would walk down the street doing their shopping and greeting each other, exchanging stories and gossip. The store owners would stand near the entrance and call out to passersby with the unique qualities of their goods, and try to bring in more business.

In some cities these streets are still lively and active, and they are called shoten-gai, shopping streets. But with time and technology and volume purchasing and deep discounts it became harder for the shoten-gai, and starting in small towns the shops began to shutter one by one. Like everywhere else in Japan change came gradually, and at first they cut back their opening hours until it wasn’t worth their time to stay open at all. They drew down the clanking shutters for the last time and went on to do something else with their lives. And shop at the local supermarket.

I discovered the shatta-gai in Okubo by accident, after drinking at a local place I was curious to find the tiny gap and feeling a little like the kids going through the wardrobe to Narnia I walked through and found a dusty, silent alley lined with shuttered shops. It smelled like a bin of clothes from a garage sale, and there was a lone fluorescent overhead light illuminating the center. There were plenty of shadows and dark corners remaining, however. Above each shop was a sign that advertised the name of the shop, but these lights were off permanently. With names like “Angel”, “Eloise”, and “Fish Shop Yamamoto” you had to imagine the places behind the dingy shutters. After a short way the shatta-gai turns to the right, and the night I went I found that one shop was open. It was a fruit stand, and of all the things to sell in the lowest of low traffic areas, fruit seemed like the worst possible choice. I walked by and an old man was reading a newspaper with the radio playing a talk show in the background. He was leaning comfortably in a folding chair, and he didn’t look up from the paper or recognize my presence in any way. The only way I could tell he was alive was that he was maintaining a vertical position.

The fruit seemed fresh enough. He had watermelons, big grapefruits, cantaloupes, and packets of strawberries. In the back on display were some containers of apples designed to be given as gifts, and the prices were extremely expensive. I imagine that just one of those sales could keep him open the rest of the week, and maybe that was the point. The guy never looked at me and I moved on with my curiosity satisfied. I think he knew I wasn’t a buyer, and I guess after sitting in that shop for most of his life he can tell pretty quickly who is a buyer and who isn’t.

At the end of the shatta-gai I walked out into the regular street, which was surprisingly close to my barber shop. Above the shatta-gai there is sign advertising a fish market, with the symbol of a red snapper inverted – a symbol of celebration and good luck in Japan. The sign is hand painted, weathered and faded, but perfectly symbolizes what is inside on the street. Nobody is going to have any false hopes after seeing the weather-beaten sign almost falling off the hinges.
Older people in Japan often lament the progress of time, just like old people do everywhere. Japan changes and evolves much slower than my home country of America, so there are many opportunities for an amateur sociologist like me to see what life was like years ago.

It is back to work after a very luxurious (and high calorie) weekend. We did some shopping, had plenty of good food, and spent a nice romantic Valentine’s Day at home. 

Yesterday for Valentine’s Kuniko made a delicious Beef Bourguignon, with a vinaigrette salad of field greens, gorgonzola cheese and walnuts. She also put together a mushroom pate to spread on dark bread – yum! We opened a Rafanelli Zinfandel with dinner and finished things off with some fresh chocolates infused with various liquor flavors. These chocolates had the consistency of butter and mild flavors of Cognac, grappa, and more. We were eating like kings!

 However, now it is time to go back to our regular meals. So many intensely flavored heavy foods really slows you down – I think some light salads and vegetable nabe sounds good for the rest of this week.  

Friday we’ll head to Anonym for Kuniko’s birthday – so we’ve got to start getting hungry now!

Whenever we return to Japan from an overseas trip, I am always struck by just how many old people there are in Japan. It is easy to say, “There are a lot of old people in Japan” but if you look at the statistics it is pretty startling. A few years ago a full 20% of the population was aged 65 and older, and in 30-40 years they expect that it will be more than 40% of the population over age 65.  

When you think about lots of old people living in a country, it is easy to imagine some of the effects. High governmental spending for medical care. A crunch on the national pension system. Lots of slower people walking around town.  

However, there are some even deeper effects that I have started to notice the longer that I live in Japan.  

The trains are filled with travel advertisements for domestic trips in Japan. They show older people walking around empty villages, smiling and remembering their youth. TV advertisements focus on sore muscles, aching backs, green tea supplements, insurance, insurance, and more insurance.  

Shops and restaurants serve foods that are popular with older people. Most menus seldom stray from the dishes that are traditional and popular, and coffee shops that cater to old people with lots of time on their hands during the day are especially popular.  

Politicians know where the voting power is in the country, and so they push forward legislation designed to pad the nest of the older today, borrowing from the uncertain future of the fewer and fewer younger Japanese.   

Then there are the things that are even harder to see – that lie just below the surface of daily life in Japan. Each home belongs to a neighborhood (or apartment building) association. Each association collects dues and manages a budget, elects members and adds a level of bureaucracy. These are managed by the people with the time to do it – older people that are automatically respected in their communities based on their age.

New ideas, fresh approaches to problems, doing away with inefficient and outdated systems – these are jobs for the young. Unfortunately there aren’t many young people these days in Japan, and so things move along as they have always been.  

It may sounds like I’m complaining about it, but that’s not the case at all. As a foreign person living in another country I keep my eyes open, observe how things happen, and comment when I feel like it. I’m perfectly happy to float along this river wherever it leads, and take notes as I go. It is not my job to change anything, and as a foreign person it would be next to impossible anyway. Best just to go with the flow and enjoy the experience.

One of our recent activities is to visit some of the old places in Japan – places that are mainly frequented by old people and feel like they haven’t changed much since the 1960’s. There are a lot of these kinds of areas in Japan – whole neighborhoods that are a living snapshot of another time. The bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and shops are a little darker, a little worn, but filled with older people who like things just the way they have been for the past 50 years.  

It is easy for us to step backward in time by shifting away from the nightlife areas of Kobe and Osaka, and we’ve been digging into neighborhoods like old Akashi, Shinseikai, Tsuruhashi, and Nagata. It is the part of Japan that is harder for foreigners to experience, because it takes sort of a sixth sense to figure out what areas to visit and you certainly need to be fluent in Japanese to navigate the menus and conversation. We feel like explorers from another world – there is usually a 20-30 year age gap between us and any other customer. They don’t seem to mind us – we are almost invisible – and we can sip our sake and laugh and enjoy an afternoon of time travel.

Today is Monday and I’m back at work getting ready for the week’s classes. We spent a pretty relaxing weekend, and I’m eager to start work with my students again this week.

Last Friday I was able to join the VP, his support staff (Ms. Yamada) and a general affairs worker (Ms. Harada) in attending a wine tasting event at Fuji Industries in Kobe. Fuji Industries has some relationships with Kawasaki, not the least of which is that one of the executives there went to elementary school with Kawasaki’s VP. We met him at the tasting, and he was really a nice guy. The tasting was held in one of the conference rooms in their office, and they brought in some good food to go along with it (mini-quiches, foie gras rolls, cheese and bread, etc).  

The wine selection was fairly good – mainly French burgundies and almost the complete lineup from Cuvaison in Napa. There was quite a big group attending, everyone wearing suits and looking good for the occasion. It was quite a networking event – and I was glad I happened to have some business cards in my wallet.  

We stayed for about an hour and the time flew by. We walked from there to the restaurant that Ms. Yamada reserved, and ended up arriving at exactly the same time as Kuniko. Everyone was keen to meet her, and we had a good time eating and drinking sake while talking. Kuniko really got along well with everyone (surprise, surprise) and they had lots of questions about her job, and our what our relationship was like. Interesting night.

On the way back to the station, the VP had us stop in at a sushi place. He had wanted to take us there for dinner, but they were fully booked, so we ended up somewhere else. The reason we stopped in on the way home was because he wanted to buy us each a sushi roll to take home with us. Later we ate the sushi and it was really tasty – grilled eel and konbu.  

Finally we split up at the station and headed home. It was a rare chance to spend time with some nice people – I’m lucky to be able to work with them. This week I have two classes with the VP, so he won’t be able to get rid of me.

Today Kuniko is taking students to Universal Studios Japan for a school trip. It may be fun, or it may be a pain, I’m not sure which, but either way she’ll be home late tonight. That’ll give me plenty of time to ride the exercise back and try to burn off some of those calories from the weekend.

Here we are and it is Friday again. It really does seem like time is speeding up around here – and for some reason I am acutely aware of it. I don’t mind, I guess, but before I know it I’ll be fifty years old and wondering where all the time went!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was casually invited to join the VP in attending a wine tasting event this evening. I was curious to see if the casual invitation would actually turn into a real invitation, and in fact it did. He also invited Kuniko to come along, but because she can’t get off of work in time she’ll only be attending the after-tasting dinner.  

In a series of “small world” revelations, we discovered that Kuniko has actually met and had dinner with the president of the affiliated company that is hosting the wine tasting event. In addition, one of the people that the VP invited to join the party may actually be dating one of my ex-students (I have to pretend I don’t know tonight) and she has also been to Benziger Winery on my recommendation. Finally, the restaurant that the VP selected is just the next floor up from the “D Wine Bar” that we used to frequent before he jacked up his prices. I guess Kobe is smaller than I thought.

I don’t usually spend much time going out with company VIPs, so this has been an interesting week. In the background of all this is the fact that I haven’t yet heard if my contract will be renewed, so it is possible that all these parties could end up being farewell parties as well. Maybe I should be scouting this wine company tonight for job opportunities…

I’m back in the swing of things here at work after a nice relaxing weekend. We enjoyed a sushi night out on Friday, and then Saturday and Sunday I was mainly on my own during the day to clean the house, read books, do laundry, and shop for dinners.  

Last night after work I attended a nice dinner organized by the company VP. He wanted to thank me for helping him with lessons during the past year, and also for translating his annual greeting speech to the company into English. He invited a couple other people from different departments that I know, and we went out for some delicious Chinese food at Evolve in Sannomiya. Evolve is kind of an upscale Chinese restaurant, with a slightly different take on the traditional favorites, and we had a good time talking and eating. We ordered a bottle of Ravenswood Old Vine Zinfandel, which I didn’t expect to find on a wine list in a Chinese restaurant. I drank a bit more than I usually do on a Monday night, but I was in good company and it was a surprisingly relaxed time considering I sat next to a company executive the whole time.  

During all the conversation and alcohol the VP mentioned that he may go to some kind of reception this Friday at an affiliated company – big companies in Japan tend to form long term relationships with other companies in different industries – and this company is an importer of wine and other foreign foods. Previously he gifted me a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau from the company, and it was quite good. The VP kind of invited me to join him in attending the event, and even mentioned that I might want to bring along my wife as well. He didn’t seem concerned that I wasn’t actually invited by the affiliate company.  

The thing about these kind of spur of the moment invitations is that they may or may not pan out and after further investigation it may actually be difficult to do (“difficult” means impossible in Japanese). We’ll see what happens, but just in case I’m keeping my Friday night schedule open.  

Now to get back to my regular work schedule. It should be a pretty standard week at work, but these days you never know!

After a three week wait, I received my new passport in the mail. The US embassy in Osaka offers the mail renewal service, so I didn’t even have to go into the embassy to get it taken care of. Very convenient, considering how important a document the passport is to people living overseas.

I was immensely relieved to get the passport – I kind of felt naked without it. Here in Japan I carry around an alien registration card, and that ensures that I would have no problem with Japanese authorities. However, I was pretty much stuck here without being able to leave (not that I have plans in the near future).

I’m sorry to have to retire my old passport. Now I have two old passports, each representing ten years of my life. You can really see by looking at the stamps when my life became a little more interesting! When we travel overseas one of the things I like to do while waiting in airport lines is to leaf through the passport and look at the stamps, visas, and scribbles from airport officials all over the place. Each stamp brings back some good memories. Now I’ll just be carrying around a vanilla passport – a blank slate!

The good news is that we’re now officially set for our trip to Singapore (second attempt) at the end of March, and so their stamp will grace page one of my new passport. Just a few months before we can eat, drink, and swim in warm temperatures. Can’t wait!

This week has just been flying by. With my students busy handling some customers visiting the factory, I was juggling classes because of all the time switches and student swaps. The way I’ve designed the lessons for most of my students allows a lot of flexibility, however, and it doesn’t affect my day to day plans that much.

Yesterday a former student asked for my advice. She has the opportunity to move to the USA with her boyfriend for five years. Her boyfriend is being assigned to a branch office (in California) of a Japanese company, and my ex-student was trying to figure out what she should do. She could quit her job and live with her boyfriend (who she had planned on marrying in Japan this year), or she could stay with her current job and continue her career. Changing jobs is still not common in Japan, so it is tough to leave a lifetime contract on the table and become dependent on someone else for your income (for the rest of your life). This situation suddenly came up and took them both by surprise, and my ex-student needs to figure out what to do with the rest of her life within the next month or so. Crazy!

She came to me because I am from California and she was hoping for some insight into life there, and so I gave her the best information I had about it, and listened to her description of her quandary. She will consider the matter for now, and hopefully she’ll be happy with whichever decision she made.  

As for me, it is not often that people come to me for this kind of advice – so it was nice to give my opinion. I wonder if the California I left has changed so much that I wouldn’t recognize it – short visits every 2-3 years aren’t really enough to know what things are like to live there now. My ex-student is pretty clever and she understands the power of independence, so I’m sure she’ll be fine.  
This weekend Kuniko will be at work both days, so we decided to go catch some sushi on Friday night. I’ve been craving crab and this sushi place really has some great presentation and delicious fish. After eating and drinking we have to walk by a large import food store (danger!) and then walk by a huge liquor shop (double danger!) to get to the train station. I hope I don’t spend too much money on the way home…

Yesterday our factory had a VIP visitor in the morning. Caroline Kennedy, the American ambassador to Japan, came by for a quick visit and tour of our factory. Since our company makes train and subway cars for both New York city and Washington DC subway systems, it was natural that she was interested.  

Because this VIP was from America, I started getting questions from the executives of the company a while back, and the past week or so I have been busy doing interesting projects. I was online researching the proper titles to use when addressing the ambassador of another nation, finding background information that our executives could use in conversation, and also one top executive asked me to watch his presentation, pretend I was the ambassador, and give comments afterwards. I was sworn to secrecy on the visitor’s identity, but the day of the visit I think everyone in the factory knew. That kind of work was very interesting and personally rewarding – I hope I have the opportunity to do it again sometimes. 

As you might expect, the company cleaned up, made a really nice presentation, and showed the best possible side to make a good impression on the ambassador. I was thinking that probably everywhere that an ambassador (or president, prime minister, or movie star) makes an official visit, they must think that everything is going perfectly well. Nobody ever states the challenges facing the company – they talk about the wins and not the losses. I wonder if that might influence the visitor’s point of view – everywhere they go there is no bad news. Luckily our company had plenty of recent good news to brag about, so it wasn’t hard to present ourselves in a good light. And one look firsthand at a bullet train being built – that would impress anyone.

Tonight after work I’m going into Kobe to meet Antoine. It has been a very long time since we’ve gotten together, and I’m sure he’ll have plenty of interesting stories to tell about raising his son and working on his projects online. We’re going to go try a “taco stand” restaurant – let’s hope it knocks our socks off!

This week has been a busy and stressful one for my students, which strangely makes it an easier week for me. At the end of this week we’re hosting some important customers, as well as a VIP (more on that later), so my students are concentrating on finishing up documents and paperwork and they are pretty tired by the time they arrive at my classroom.

Tomorrow I’ll meet up with Antoine for the first time in a long time, and we’re planning to continue the quest for good Mexican food in Kobe. I’ve just about given it up for dead, but Antoine says that he heard about a good Mexican place that he wants to try. My expectations will be high, especially after just coming back from California (and Mexico) so I hope it is a hit.

Kuniko is stuck working Saturday and Sunday, but she’ll have Monday off to relax and catch up. It is a strange schedule, but I think it is definitely better than the brutal and largely unpaid schedule that she had at her previous school.  

The days are getting really cold, and each morning the walk to work is the coldest part of my day. Yesterday I walked to work in falling snow, so I guess winter is finally here. 

Having returned to Japan for the start of 2016 I spent some time reviewing my personal goals from last year, and making some updated goals for this year.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the results from last year.  I hope this year is equally as productive.

At the end of last year I was pretty caught up in my work schedule.  Unfortunately that meant that the amount of time I had for my own reading throughout the day was pretty limited.  This year I made some adjustments so that I have between an hour and an hour and a half of reading time each weekday.  Nice!  I would be happy to read eight hours a day – but I haven’t yet found a job that’ll let me do that.

I’m pretty much in charge of dinners during the week, and in winter that means nabe.  I make a simple nabe four days of the work week, and then something different once a week to liven things up.  The nabe is great – easy to prepare, cheap, healthy (no meat, almost no fat), hot and filling.  The best part is that there are usually leftovers that we can take for lunch the next day.  I change the type of soup that we use for the nabe each day – sometimes spicy, sometimes simple – and then I can avoid buying the prepackaged soups that are delicious but slightly less healthy and cost-effective.

So the new routine is nice – eating healthy during the week (not so much on the weekends but you’ve gotta live a little) and lots more reading time, too.  I’ll stick with this routine a while and see how it works.

We’re coasting into the weekend, and Kuniko and I will have two days off together.  Her work schedule will get hectic after this, with some classes scheduled on Saturday and Sunday the next couple of weeks.  We’ll try to enjoy this weekend by cooking a nice meal together on Saturday, going out to lunch on Sunday in Kobe, and just doing things we enjoy.