Every morning I take the train to work.  It is the first train out of Okubo and it leaves at 5:31 am.  Usually there aren’t too many people waiting for the train at my station, but I see familiar faces every day – commuting to work just like me.

The time and location of the station in relation to the train’s course mean that when it arrives, the seats are about 90% full.  Usually if you are in the front of the line, you have a small chance of getting a seat.  Since I don’t get much exercise at work I usually prefer to stand, but many of the people waiting for my train try to get a seat.  This is really important to them for some reason, and you see some pretty surprising and un-Japanese behavior when an open seat is on the line. 

At each station on this train line there are markers on the ground that show the position where the train will stop.  Each marker has two symbols side by side to indicate that people should stand two by two and line up from there.  This is “the way it has always been done” and I think that most people follow this rule.  Some people don’t want to stand next to another person so they line up behind instead, and some people don’t line up at all and just wait for everyone else to board the train and then hop on.  

Down the platform from me there is an older guy who lines up right between the two symbols, effectively taking both front positions for himself.  When the train comes, he can choose whichever side looks best and he has twice the chance of anyone else to grab a seat.  This kind of behavior essentially gives yourself an advantage at the expense of others, and is something you don’t often see in Japan.  That’s one of the reasons I like living here – people tend to be fair about things and think of others before themselves.  

So every morning the guy down the platform takes both positions and people line up behind him properly and probably don’t really care because they don’t want to cause problems by calling him on his behavior and make a scene and disturb the quiet morning and everyone is sleepy anyway, and what does it matter – it is still just Tuesday and we’ve got to see this guy every day after this so we shouldn’t piss anyone off.

One of my students once told me a story about the time that there was a young woman taking both front positions in line early in the morning and so he politely asked her if she was standing on the left side or the right side, and she started screaming at the top of her lungs to “get the hell away from me you crazy old fuck” which certainly disturbed the peaceful morning and caused my student to permanently change his commute time to avoid any risk of bumping into the lady in the future.

But the thing I want to express here is that I think it is really important to just commit to one side or the other.  Make your decision, live with the result whether it is a good or bad one, and then use the result of today’s decision to inform tomorrow’s decision.  Hedging your bets between one choice and another at the expense of everyone else is not really making a decision at all, and I do believe that life will ultimately  reward people that are decisive, even if in the short term the result isn’t ideal.

As for me, I always stand on the right.

Last night we settled in to an evening of watching movies.  Most of the day we spent walking around town shopping for this and that – so it was nice to sit down and relax during the evening. 

The first movie we saw (“Locke”) wasn’t so great, despite having a good actor in the main (and only) role.  So we were looking for something we could count on for good entertainment as a second feature. We took a risk with the movie “Rising Sun”.

It is based on a very dated book by Michael Crichton, written during the bubble economy years of Japan when the USA saw the Japanese way of doing business as a new model.  Turns out this has changed quite a bit since then, but Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes navigating the ins and outs of international diplomacy using bad Japanese is something that shouldn’t be missed.  Kuniko and I spent most of the movie laughing out loud at either the ridiculous situations, the horrible Japanese language skills (some it from the “Japanese” actors) and the 80’s campy feeling of the movie.  It was one of the best rentals ever – after the movie Kuniko got on Amazon and promptly bought the DVD.  

Tonight after work we are going to meet up with some old friends we haven’t seen in a long time.  Micchi (and her family), Yuri (and her family) are going to meet us at a restaurant near our house to have dinner and catch up.  They were all at our wedding and so the timing is perfect.  Yuri lives in the USA now, and she’s married with two kids.  It’ll be fun to see her family – I’ve never even seen a picture of them.  Micchi lives nearby but since her husband is working so hard and her baby is keeping her busy we almost never get to see them.  I’m looking forward to it.

A couple of years ago during my annual health examination at my company the doctor told me that I had better be careful of my health.  My weight was up to 196 pounds (89 kg), my blood pressure was a little high, and my cholesterol numbers were getting high as well.  According to my BMI and my waist size, I was moving towards the “at risk” group.

So I took the wake up call for what it was, and the next day I bought an exercise bike on Amazon.  Since then I’ve been riding the bike for about 45 minutes a day, about 5 days a week.  

Each year since then I can compare my results with the previous year, and each year things have gotten better.  At first there wasn’t a big dramatic change, and I remember feeling cheated a little – like exercising wasn’t really the answer.  However I kept with the riding, and now my Pavlovian response to exercise is a desire to watch reality TV (instead of the other way around).  

Yesterday I got the latest annual results, and I was pleased  with the numbers.  Everything is in the healthy zone (and that is the healthy zone for Japanese people, by the way) with the exception of my LDL cholesterol which is still a little high but still lower than last year.  My weight is down to 185 pounds (84 kg) and my blood pressure is back to a low-normal level where it should be.  

So I’m sure I’m about to be hit by a truck.

Anyway, good news on the health front but I’ve still got to keep up the work.  One of the downsides of all this exercise is that I’ve noticed that some of my clothes (especially business wear) aren’t fitting well anymore, and I will probably have to buy a new suit.  Those are expensive!   

Last night I celebrated the good news with a vodka tonic and a night off the exercise bike, but this weekend I’ll get back in the saddle and ride.  I have to stay up to date with Survivor and Amazing Race, after all.

I know that I’ve still got lots of years left of working age, and as a teacher, my body isn’t really going through much wear and tear through the years.  As long as my brain is still operating correctly I should be able to work quite a bit longer.

However, it is hard not to think about retirement when you live in a country that is absolutely dominated by senior citizens. Just about everywhere you look there are old people walking around, and those are just the ones that are mobile enough to leave their houses.

The retirement system is under some stress here in Japan, with no end in sight.  In companies, the mandatory retirement age is 60 years old.  At that point, you have to leave your position… you’re done.  They have changed some laws and over the next ten years the mandatory retirement age will gradually slide up to 65, as a means of keeping people in the workforce.  There aren’t enough young people to keep it going, so they’ll keep the old folks working.

That’s probably a good thing.  Most people cannot access their pension payouts in retirement until they 65 years old, so for the longest time there was a five year gap when they had no regular income from their job, and they had no income from the pension system.  

Some retirees were rehired by their company at low-low wages and classified as special part time employees, thereby sidestepping the retirement regulations and also keeping their company salary budget lower.  The workers are just happy to have some income until the pension check comes in, and so it is a win-win situation.  However, not all people work for large, major companies in Japan.  Smaller companies cannot afford to keep the old folks on the payroll, and so they are cut loose at 60 and they have to fend for themselves.  Most old folks get a part time job directing traffic, working night security, or driving a taxi.  They hope to scrape by somehow until their pension comes in.

When the pension check comes, however, it is not a whole lot to live on.  In fact, it just barely covers the minimum to sustain a modest lifestyle. However, riches and freedom at the end of the rainbow is not really what people are looking for. From what I’ve heard and seen, workers don’t work their whole lives towards a goal of retirement, they work their whole lives because they love to work. 

There are a lot of retirees that succumb to depression and loneliness once they retire, which causes more visits to the doctor to socialize with other seniors. Because seniors here in Japan often go to the doctor every day to take care of the mild aches and pains they experience, it turns into a social event.  

My student once told me a joke about this phenomenon: two seniors in the waiting room of the doctor’s office were talking about a third senior that they hadn’t seen arrive yet.  “That’s odd,” one of them said.  “I guess he just wasn’t feeling well enough to come to the doctor today.”

Yesterday Japan celebrated “Culture Day” as a national holiday.  Most people had the day off, and that included me (but not my wife).  This was unusual for me because holidays that fall on the middle of the week tend to be rescheduled on another date to make a long weekend.  The work of shutting down all the equipment and starting them back up again just for a Tuesday holiday is apparently quite a big deal.

I enjoyed the day off, though.  I spent most of the time in the kitchen, making a pasta sauce, making enough soup for an army to take for lunches this week, and also an Italian pepper soup that we’ll be playing around with during dinner time the next few days. 

Because of the day off in the middle of the week I lost out on my planning time that is usually scheduled for Tuesday.  That meant more planning on Monday and moving quickly this morning.  It also meant that I didn’t have time to write this entry until my lunchbreak today.  But hey, I’m flexible.

Last night Kuniko and I spent a little time discussing where we’d like to go next year. The two places that came up are Eastern Europe and Africa, but a lot depends on our schedule (and contracts) next year.  Summer in Africa may be a little too hot for us – we like to find cooler climates for our summer trips.  Moscow’s weather was perfect for our previous trip.  No decisions yet, but our schedules should be coming into focus around December and January.  Hopefully we’ll be able to choose an interesting destination.

The weekend was a little bit more interesting than usual.  On Saturday night we went over to the Yamaji’s for dinner.  Anna was out of the hospital and she looked very happy to be out of there.  Unfortunately her husband caught a cold and couldn’t join us for dinner.  The Fukumi’s also came over, and Haruka enjoyed being the star of the show.  He is starting to talk now, and although most everyone else could understand his kidspeak, I was completely lost.  Baby talk is quite a bit different than adult talk in Japanese, and I can barely understand the adult talk anyway.  So I spoke to him in English and it went pretty well. 

Besides all the usual neighbor gossip that tends to go around the table at these parties we heard that there was a new Italian pizza restaurant that had opened in town.  Since we didn’t have anything really urgent on Sunday night we decided to go check it out.

The place is actually just a five minute walk from our house, and a little off the beaten path.  I think they will have trouble getting customers to drop in, but they were certainly busy when we arrived.  We had made a reservation in advance, and they were turning away customers at the door. 

Unfortunately, the atmosphere of the interior left something to be desired.  Overly bright LED lighting in a white restaurant made me feel like I was in a hospital or an office, not a place to relax over a glass of wine and some pizza.  The furniture was kind of cheap, and something about it just felt artificial and not really organic.  

But we don’t mind a bad atmosphere if the food is good, and so we ordered some antipasti, a pizza, and a dish of pasta.  The antipasti was pretty standard, but it didn’t really match up with the vast selection of Chiro in Akashi.  Not special, but not bad at all.  

The pizza came hot out of a big tile pizza over in the back of the restaurant.  The pizza oven looked pretty cool, with the name of the restaurant, SYUMONE, written in blue tiles on a white background.  The pizza itself was good – it was my favorite dish of the evening.  The red sauce was a little fresh rather than rich, but no complaint here – yum.  

Finally the pasta came out, and it was a little disappointing.  It looked like something we could have done better ourselves, and the taste was a little plain.  There were a couple of chunks of meat that had been cooked along with the sauce, but they didn’t really blend in with the flavor of the dish.  Disappointing!

They did surprise us by having a wine list, and we could pick from three Italian red wines, two from Sicily.  The wine was OK – if a bit simple – but it was helpful to get us through the pasta dish. 

After dinner we thanked them and left, but I doubt that we’ll go back.  However, I may order some takeout pizza from them sometime and bring it home.  Their location is exactly between the train station and our house, so it would be convenient to get takeout.

Unfortunately, last evening after the dinner I started having stomach pains and feeling nauseous.  I was worried that I ate some bad food, but Kuniko ate the same stuff and had no problems at all.  Maybe it was the restaurant, maybe it wasn’t, but it will make me think twice about visiting again.

One of the risks of living in a foreign country is that it is tempting to take one’s experiences as a representation of the whole, and to generalize about a culture based on the activities of the people that happen to be around you.

I largely am able to avoid these kinds of things by adding, “In my experience…” or “To me, it seems that…” to the beginning of my sentences.  That covers me semantically, but I also need to make sure that mentally I don’t start prejudging people that I meet for the first time. 

Having said that, I do feel that after living here in Japan for 12 years that I am able to make some very generalized observations about Japanese people and Japanese culture.  One of those observations applies to specialization. 

Many Japanese people that I meet here work at a company where they are considered generalists.  In university they study some topic, and occasionally they get a job at a big company that allows them to use their university knowledge to help the company succeed.  However, it seems to me that a vast majority of people hired by major Japanese companies are asked to forget whatever they learned in university, and start from scratch learning their new company’s business.  They learn about how to work at the company, and maybe after five or ten years they are transferred to another department which may or may not be related to their previous work, and they start to learn something else.  They are treated as a general worker (many Japanese workers don’t have job titles) and are expected to do whatever work is assigned to them. 

However, when a Japanese person is given a task (or chooses one for themselves), they throw themselves wholeheartedly into it.  This task becomes their entire focus, and they will do whatever it takes to improve their skills in doing it.  Many older Japanese people are praised as masters of one art or another, and the greatest praise is reserved for the people that do one thing so well as to be the best.  What you actually do, whether it is artistic or not, or useful or not, these questions don’t need to come up.  Someone focused on something, got really good at it, and gained the respect of other people because of it.  

I see this a lot in the daily lives of the people around me.  They want to become better at English, so they hire a teacher, they make a study space at home, they spare no expense for materials, and they give up their free time in the hopes that they can become “better” at English.  School kids join a sports club and so they practice after school every day, at least one day of the weekend, and every fiber of their being is about doing well in their sport.  

What all this means to me is that there isn’t a lot of room for people who dabble. The people that try lots of things just a little bit, the people that are slightly talented at several things have no improved social status or respect compared to the people that focus on one thing.

Personally I think that dabbling is a good thing.  Thanks to dabbling I’ve been able to find an interest in things I never thought I would, and to try new experiences (especially when travelling).  Getting a taste of something new is, to me, a way of maintaining your youth and wonder in a world that is getting smaller and smaller the older you become.  

One of the things that comes up in conversation with Japanese people sometimes is the fact that I have had several different careers in my life.  I worked as a winemaker, a web designer, an English teacher, and there’s probably lots of other little jobs I did in between those.  For the Japanese people I talk to, the idea that you could be working in a wine company and in the back of your mind be thinking about web design, well, it is a totally alien concept.  For them, you work in job A so there is no room to even consider thinking about job B.

Because of this focus on single-minded improvement in one task, I do think that sometimes Japanese people have less flexibility and don’t do as well “thinking on their feet”.  Sudden situations that come up and require quick decisions and skills that are perhaps not as practiced as others may be a challenge.  

Japanese people tend to thrive in a world where there are clear rules, black and white distictions, and clear direction. Give them a task, allow them time to practice it, improve it, repeat and repeat it, and you’ll get the best quality work you’ve ever seen.    

As I alluded to in the beginning of this post, these are simply generalizations and I am sure there are plenty of exceptions to what I have observed so far, but I do think it is a really interesting aspect of the culture.  

Last weekend Kuniko and I were doing a little shopping and we came across some Munich-style white sausages for sale at a nearby supermarket.  These are really hard to find in Japan, so we snapped them right up.  I had planned on boiling them up this weekend, but some plans came up to party with the Yamaji’s.  So last night we had a little Oktoberfest celebration.  I got some German sauerkraut, I made some warm German potato salad, and I got a couple bottles of Oktoberfestbier, one from Spaten and one from Hofbrau House.  

It turned out pretty good, especially considering that it was a school night.  It also brought back great memories of our time in Munich.  We want to go back!

Kuniko and I always remember our summer trips and it is just about every day that someone brings up some memory or funny situation that happened during one of our trips.  We’re already eager to get started planning another trip, but we’ll have to wait until the end of the year so that our job situations clear up.  Where to next?

With my new schedule this term, Wednesday turns out to be the day that my workload absolutely peaks. There are several special classes, and due to a coincidental timing issue, I need to write at least one new lesson plan in between all the busy times.  Luckily today I have a little free time after lunch, but that will in fact be used by someone from my department switching out my computer for an upgraded model.

The good news is that after work I’ll meet up with some coworkers and go have dinner at an Indian restaurant in Kobe.  One of my coworkers is, in fact, Indian himself, and I believe he was involved in selecting the restaurant this evening.  I have high hopes.

In other social news, we’ll be heading over to the Yamaji’s place on Saturday to help them celebrate the successful discharge of their daughter Anna from the hospital.  She was stuck in there for a type of pneumonia, but I guess all is well now.  Her husband will also come visit – the gang will actually be all here.

This week we have a recently hired new executive of an American subsidiary company visiting for meetings.  He was hired from another big manufacturing company, and he’s meeting with everyone to give and get feedback about how things are going overall with the company.

Apparently he doesn’t speak Japanese.  

This is good news – we need more non-Japanese in higher level roles in this company, but already even to me the stress of this change is becoming clear.  People I almost never talk to ask me to check the English of their documents before meeting with him.  My own department head asked me to translate a meeting agenda completely from Japanese to English.  Suddenly people who usually don’t use English are having to work with it, and that is causing some concern.

We have a translator on staff here at the factory – an American guy like me who is really friendly and whose full time job is translation.  Unfortunately he is close to retirement and may be heading for the door soon.

That will leave just me as a native English speaker, but there are a few people with English as a second language who could step in and translate as necessary.  

I’m really hoping that I don’t catch much more translation work.  The good point about translation is that you can work at your own pace (usually) and that there is a clear start and end point to your work.  The bad point (for me, at least) is that it just isn’t that interesting.  I like teaching English, my experience is with language teaching, and my master’s degree is in language teaching and learning.  

Once our translator retires, though, it’ll be interesting to see if they start looking to push me into the role. 

Thursday night after work Kuniko and I were sitting around the living room thinking about where we should go to celebrate my birthday.  Our first thought was to check with Chiemi.  Kuniko’s old school friend is an expert on picking good Italian restaurants, and within 15 minutes she had done some research and presented us with her top three choices for the Osaka area.  Wow!

We picked the best looking one, called La Cantinetta, and made a reservation for three.  Chiemi would give us a guided tour of their menu in person.

When we arrived we discovered that the chef was actually an Italian guy, which is a little rare.  He spoke great English and really made us feel welcome.  We ordered from all over the menu and everything he brought out was great – including a baked lasagne style dish that was a mind-blower. Chiemi brought a birthday bouquet for me, and we had a nice evening watching the customers come and go.  There was no wine list, as the Luca (the chef) said that nobody bothered to read it, so we selected a bottle based on the region that I wanted, and came dangerously close to ordering a $200 bottle of Barolo.  In the end we went with a Valpolicella Classico Superiore that really went nicely with the rich pasta dishes.  

Hopefully we’ll be back soon – Osaka offers a whole lot more culinary attractions than what we get in Kobe, and it feels like we’ve just scratched the surface.

The rest of the weekend was pretty low key.  We enjoyed the cool weather, and grilled some vegetables, did some laundry, and spent time just recovering from our work week.  It was nice to have a couple of days to get over my cough, and today it feels like it is nearly gone.  We’ll see once I start talking to students, though.

Oh, and one other interesting event happened this morning.  I was walking from our house to the train station, at around 5:15 am.  The streets were empty and it was dead silent, as usual. As I walked I could see the faintest flashing of lights on the horizon, and at first I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, but after closer scrutiny it appeared to be a plane.  This plane was very high up, and I could barely make it out as it headed away from me to the southwest. 

I opened up an application on my phone that some of my students recommended to me.  It shows the air traffic around you at the moment, and at that time of morning there was only one plane around me.  It was an EVA Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Taipei.  I could easily imagine the passengers on board, packed into economy under blankets in the dark cabin, with just a couple more hours left in their 11 hour flight.  How I envied them their arrival in Taipei and all the good food that they’d be able to enjoy.  Maybe it was because we’ve spent so much time on long distance flights but I could easily imagine that planeload of passengers and what they must be feeling like as they fly unknowingly over a American guy walking to the train station in a quiet Japanese town.

Last night I once again made a trip to my dentist to continue the ongoing saga of repairing my teeth. 

The short story version of it is that the fillings that I got way back in high school are pretty old these days, and underneath them, bad things have been happening.  The dentist is working on the third of the four fillings that I had.  At first we thought that just two would need work, but a sharp pain last month told us that we’d need to continue to the third filling.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we go ahead and look at the fourth while we’re at it. 

Dentists work a little differently here in Japan, at least for the patients that have jobs.  I go to the dentist after work, so that means an appointment from 6 pm to 7 pm.  Because the time is limited he can’t do so much at one time, so I end up coming back quite often to gradually get everything done.  I checked my records and I’ve been going to the dentist almost weekly since May of this year.  Five months of dentistry!  Sounds like one of the circles of hell.

The dentist himself is a nice enough guy, and like his staff he makes no effort to be friendly or to chit-chat with his patients.  It isn’t surprising for Japan, where the old Asian stoicism is often seen as professionalism.  It is strange to my American cultural norms – after seeing someone weekly for half a year you’d think we could move beyond “Hello”. 

Still, after five months I feel like I know the place pretty well: Wow, today I get to sit in chair number two!  This is only the second time to be in chair two, and I like the view a little better than chairs three and four.  By experience I know that chair two is the primary chair, because chair one is reserved for kids – it has lots of kid friendly decor and pictures around it.  Chair two is nice, but I notice the dust on the ground near the window, and I see there is a little stain on the ceiling right above the dental lamp.  I try not to think about how that stain got there. 

Anyway, the dental marathon will continue, but next week I have no appointment thanks the dentist’s busy schedule.  That just means that I’ll have to chew only on the right side of my mouth for two weeks, but I’m used to it by now.

On my way to work, just outside my office building, there is a used car lot that looks pretty shady.  

I should say there WAS a used car lot, because on Monday this week, that car lot went out of business, and they started pulling things down and clearing things out. However, for the past five years I had the chance to walk by this place on my way to work and make some observations.

I’m not sure why in particular this used car lot looked any more shady than any other used car lot.  Used car places as a rule tend to have a melancholy feel to them – saying goodbye to your old car is kind of depressing, and so a collection of old cars in one place has a vibe something like an animal shelter.  This place was an independent used car lot, which is a little more rare in Japan.  Most used car places are subsidiaries of major dealers – usually right next to the new car lot.

On a big board above this old used car place there used to be a big sign advertising all the reasons why you should stop in.  I remember one of the selling points of shopping there was that they offered five year loans on every car.  Most of these cars were pretty cheap to begin with – only one had a price sticker over $2000 based on my extensive research (walking by every day).  So even the most expensive one split into 60 payments – well, they probably made their money on interest from the loan. 

But the part of the big sign board that really got my attention was written in big Japanese characters on the bottom right of the sign:

“Women Welcome”

It took a while to get my mind around the cultural implications of these two simple words.  

Sure, American car dealers have a reputation for high pressure sales tactics by salespeople working on commission, so maybe the sign could be partly to allay fears in single Japanese women that they would get forced into buying something that they didn’t really want.  However, if they felt the need to write “Women Welcome” that kind of implies that in some places, women are in fact not welcome, and so I spent a lot of time wondering why that would be.

Your guess is probably as good as mine, and as it is clear now, their welcoming women policy didn’t really help their economic condition very much anyway, but these are the things that bounce around in my head while walking to and from work.  

Thanks to my seasonal cold my voice has taken to changing pitch at random points in my conversations.  It is kind of like going back to puberty again.  Before each class I give the students an explanation of how I am fighting a cold and I apologize in advance, but I can’t help but giggle when it happens.  The students are thinking, “Oh great, my English teacher is Squeaky the Giggling Clown.”  

Hopefully time will heal all wounds and my voice will be back to normal soon.  I never think about how often I use my voice at work, but teaching eight classes a day doesn’t leave a lot of quiet time, does it?  

Wednesday is turning out to be my busiest day of the week, with three different kinds of English courses to teach, so switching between them is a challenge both logistic and mental.  Today I did the switch successfully with a few minutes to spare, but I imagine that the law of averages will kick in and one of these days I’ll still be setting up when students walk in.  Maybe it is good to be able to respond on the fly without a lot of prep time.  Or maybe I have too tight a schedule on Wednesday. 

The silver lining is that Thursday and Friday are by comparison almost easy days, with plenty of time for preparation in the morning, and even an empty planning class on Friday to celebrate the end of the week.  Hoo-rah.

One of my students in a one-on-one class asked me today why there are no classes scheduled on November 20th.  I explained that I took the day off to spend my 10th wedding anniversary in Singapore with my wife, and the student had an unusual reaction.  The tone of his voice and his way of speaking made it seem like he had caught me out at doing something bad, and he said that he wouldn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t sure why as I haven’t made it a secret, but there may be some cultural difference at work here.   My guess is that taking time off of work to celebrate an anniversary with one’s spouse is not usual.  Who knows?  I’m really looking forward to it, though.  

Well, the blog is officially back.  At least, I hope it is.  What started as a week off of blogging extended into almost two months.  I enjoyed the time off, though!  

Once we got back from Russia things got busy here at work.  I finished an old term and started a new one, and got caught up in all the work that that entails.  The new term is one of my busiest ever, so I find myself planning classes in the morning before I officially check in to work, and I also end up sometimes using my lunch break to set up for classes later that day.  The good news is that I have four class periods a week with no scheduled classes, so I can actually do lesson planning on the clock.  It sounds like common sense but actually to me it is a great luxury – like staying at a hotel with satin sheets on the bed. 

Kuniko is busier than usual, but still less busy than her previous job.  She’s got a lot of stuff going on with her career and maybe in the future I can get into that more.  For now, it should be filed under “developing story”.

Since my last posting we haven’t had many major developments except for a visit we had from family.  My cousin (really my Mom’s cousin) Steve and his wife Brenda visited from Australia and we hosted them for a few nights.  I really get along with Steve well – maybe because my life slightly resembles his.  He moved away from California to start a life in a new country, and found that the world is a big place and there are many more ways to live your life than the conventional list on offer in the U. S. of A.  We both like wine and my  highlight of their visit is when he walked through our local supermarket’s wine section and instantly and without contemplation scooped out a bottle of Moët & Chandon to celebrate my birthday and our upcoming anniversary.  The guy knows his stuff!  

Brenda was also really good to talk with.  Both Kuniko and I are not really active conversationalists so I’m afraid that she was stuck with some of the verbal heavy lifting, but it was a pleasure to speak with someone else who teaches for a living and to hear about the conditions under which she works. 

While showing them around our area I kept an ear open for interesting expressions, and was lucky enough to hear Steve say “Fair Dinkum!” a few times, and we also learned about the word “mufti”.  My vocabulary is slowly expanding even today.

After the visit Steve and Brenda went off to Kyoto for a five day stay, and we went back to work.  I managed to catch a cold at the tail end of the week, and pushed myself hard to get through the last classes of the day on Friday.  I staggered home and promptly slept for most of the weekend.  I’m back at work now, but the cold is still with me. I’m at the end stage when all the yucky stuff that was in my throat and nose wants to come back out by coughing, and I have to make sure not to send it back down my throat again.  An old friend once called it “lung butter”, and that’s what I’m doing all day – hacking up lung butter.

Moving on from that mental image, I did have a spot of good news at the annual work health checkup yesterday.  I managed to get through the battery of examinations without offending anyone and I’m getting more used to unzipping my pants in public thanks to the many times I have to take off and put on my business shirt.  The moment of truth was on the weighing scale, and I tipped the scales at five pounds less than last year.  I lost six pounds the year before that, so I’m hoping to keep the trend alive and lose another five next year.  In a few weeks I’ll get the bloodwork results back and we’ll see if I managed to lower my cholersterol at all.  They give me a hard time about cholesterol every year because it is just on the safe side of “high”.  The nurse always tells me to stop eating meat, and I  tell her that I eat meat only once or twice a week these days but I don’t think she believes me.  What else would Americans eat?

Well, that’s enough for an update post, but I promise to be more regular in my updates in the future.  My mom and dad have been ragging me a bit about the lack of updates, and let’s face it – they are the only ones who read this anyways so I hope this sates your appetite for Bryan news for a bit!

More to come soon.  Really!