Category Archives: Japan

Old and Dusty

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They are out of date, but I’ll eat them anyway, because it if it doesn’t kill me, it will give me a writing topic.

I was cleaning out the earthquake kit because it’s time to replace and upgrade the perishable components. As I was digging, I found a few items I’d forgotten about. Two of them are only two years past their “best by” date. One is approaching three years.

Many of the things around them are also past their “best by” date, but if they pass a visual test and a smell test (performed by someone else) I’ll go ahead and consume them.

All this gives me data I can use when I restock the kit. What holds up well? What was a waste of money? Why is the afterlife more full of fire and brimstone than I was expecting?

If I have any doubts, I will throw stuff out. A few years ago an entire bag of beef jerky looked suspicious even though it wasn’t past its “best by” date yet and it ended up in the trash.

I’ve also eaten ancient ramen soup and tried to use ancient instant coffee (the former was okay; the latter wasted water and time as it was one block that didn’t dissolve).

I also have to update the other bags and try to make better notes about the contents.

Or, I’ll just wait a few years and see what’s still edible.

 

 

Walking the Cozy Streets

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The bus was going to take too long so I decided we should walk. It turned out to be a good idea.

Because it was nice weather and because I was “working” I took our youngest one station away to the main town to visit a street dedicated to sweets and candy.

After lunch, we walked up to a bus stop, but quickly figured out that a bus to where we wanted to go probably wouldn’t arrive in our lifetime. Even if it did, because it was Saturday and the streets were going to be crowded, the bus wouldn’t get us where we wanted to go in our lifetime.

As such, I decided we should walk. About a third of the way to the candy street, we suddenly ran into barricades. The streets had been blocked off for a special event (we’re still not sure what it was) and that let us walk comfortably down the center of the street. usually this section is crowded because it’s two busy lanes of traffic flanked by small sidewalks full of tourists.

Eventually we got to the candy street, which is an ally full of small candy stores and sweets factories.  We quickly raided our favorite candy shops for our favorite sweets. Two of mine came with warnings (more on that in a future post) and then we had taiyaki. I had the sweet potato version (sweet potatoes are a local delicacy) and our youngest had a custard version. (Note: I only allowed her to do this because the purple sweet potato version was unavailable.)

Then we walked back. The most interesting things to see were an abundance of people in edo era clothing who were apparently part of the festival, and an abundance of police, who’ve been put on high alert after recent attacks and before cherry blossom season.

We returned home to eat even more sweets, which was probably a bad idea, even if it was a delicious one.

Close But Not Closed

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Today was a mishmash of regular work and side projects and some sifting but not much was actually accomplished.

I was at home all day because I was babysitting and although I managed to finish my “work” for the day, it took a while as I attempted to organize and sort pens and ink.

I have customer with a large order and a hefty stack of ink to put up for sale. I also have a bunch of pens that are in the “no, really, use it one more time” phase of sales.

Somewhere in there I cooked lunch for our youngest.

Tomorrow (today actually) we will go to a candy street where I will pretend that I’m not going to buy the cinnamon candy and ginger candy, but in the end I will walk about with both. I will also be “working” by taking pictures of the area to use for “work” next week.

It is all as silly as it sounds, and it left me feeling annoyed and off-kilter enough that I didn’t actually finish much.

My follow-through was shot and except as a topic, I didn’t care much. Just one of those days.

Farewell Parties

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They were generous with the booze, but not with the food, which is not usually how I like school parties.

Tonight was a farewell party for two English teachers at the school where I work. One is moving to Tibet (long story) and the other has found a full time job and will, within a few months, wish he was in Tibet.

The event started with booze, which was unusual because they usually start with random appetizers of questionable content and origin. After a while we got salad, tuna, tofu, and raw vegetables. After that was more booze.

After enough booze I found myself looking around for a menu. Food hadn’t arrived in a long time and I thought we were expected to order it. During a school party, food is usually a form of self-defense. It provides something to do other than drink and it helps slow down the impact of the booze.

It turned out I was wrong, though. We didn’t have to order because after a while more food arrived.

The trouble is, by the end of the evening, a lot more booze than food had arrived, which magnified the power of the booze. (In defense of the restaurant, they served bourbon neat, even though it wasn’t on the menu and were generous with the amount.)

On the other hand, they were generous with the amount, which means I’ll soon have regrets. Especially as there wasn’t much food.

 

Bad Holiday Habits

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I’m in the middle of a holiday, which means I’m pretty much back in university.

My schedule has started to reverse from normal working man daylight hours to vampire hours. I stay up later than I could and get up later than I could and do less writing than I could. That said, it’s mostly relaxing.

I manage to do the work that’s not work that the company I work for requires. I do that even though today’s “work” required lots of disc searches until I realized that I’d probably lost the text I was searching for in a memory stick crash a few years ago. I’d managed to recover the photos after the crash (which involved Linux and lots of swearing) but I’d lost all the other documents.

This means I’ll actually have to write some stuff–or more accurately, write it again–but I get to count trips downtown, even if I’m only shopping, as research.

I’ll do some of that tomorrow (more accurately, later today) when I take some pictures before having lunch.

Here Goes That Again

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Tomorrow I’ll go back to work without ever leaving the house and that has me kind of cranky today.

I’ve written before about the period of “house arrest” the company I work for subjects me to, but this year there have been some changes that might make it more interesting.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the powers what are want to develop a database of information about the different areas we live, because, well, because they can and they need something for us to do to justify paying us when we have nothing to do just to show us they can make us do things.

That means that taking the girls sightseeing will count as “research” toward the project (How to Enjoy My Town with the Family, etc). Granted, I’ll have to eventually produce some kind of writing, but since I’ve already written something like that for the company the first time they tried something like this, I’ll just revise what I’ve written (after doing “further research” of course).

Some where in there I’ll actually have to do some actual work related to the school where I work and there will be a “training session” of some sort that will count as a “work” day.

That will end with the actual job starting. (There are other complicating factors, but more on those in a future post.)

The 18th Mitsukoshi Fountain Pen Festival

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It was the food that made me mad and that probably jaded my reaction to today. Well, that and the long wait.

To understand what’s wrong with the Mitsukoshi Fountain Pen Festival (and the Maruzen version, for that matter) you have to imagine the oldest, most prestigious department store in your town or city holding an annual festival featuring socks.

The store invites a few makers who demonstrate different techniques for making socks, and who will fix your worn out socks if you’re lucky enough to get an appointment, they may even offer a Sock Festival exclusive pair of socks, but mostly what’s being sold is stock from the store and it’s being sold by the clerks who sell it every day. They can recite materials and manufacturing techniques and statistics and even let you handle some of the material but they do so without passion. They have a product, they sell it, but it’s no more important to the store than the food being sold nearby or the fine China on the other side of the festival space.

Today, to get to the Fountain Pen Festival, I had to walk through a large food event that brought dozens and dozens of noisy people. The food displays ended right across the walking path from the fountain pen festival but the noise traveled quite far. During a special fountain pen art display, and short speech by the head of Pelikan Japan, the speakers had to use microphones to speak to the dozen or so people gathered to participate or listen whilst behind the audience food salesman hawked their wares.

And, of course, pictures were not allowed.

Despite this, I set out to have a good time, and tried to crash the Sailor pen experts repair line to get my Nagasawa Profit’s nib straightened. He sent me to a different counter to get an appointment. Although it was noon, my appointment was for 3:15. This wouldn’t have bothered me except I was pretty sure that in the time it took me to fill out my name on the card he could have straightened the nib and been done with me. I was annoyed enough that I went to Maruzen for lunch (yes, I had lunch at at bookstore. So what? I had ice cream too.)

One thing I like about the Mitsukoshi pen festival–and it is my favorite of the two–is that many of the manufacturers, especially Pilot, Platinum, Nakaya, Eboya and Pelikan have sample pens for  you to try. In the past, though, they’ve also had two tables of samples, complete with lots of notepads. This year, though, the tables were gone and it took me an hour to realize that they’d been moved to a single table mixed in with the counters. I’d thought it was a pen manufacturer and had passed it a couple times.

Eventually, I sat down and started testing different pens, but the table also featured a woman whose job, it seemed, was talk incessantly to the man sitting next to me. I’m still not certain if I crashed an appointment or not, but at that point I was in “don’t understand if it’s not convenient” mode.

(Note: this mode is a variation on “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission” but in this case it’s easier to pretend you don’t understand what’s being said and just keep doing what you’re doing.)

Whilst checking out the Aurora table and the Optima’s and 88s, I saw a bottle of Aurora Blue-Black ink. It quickly became mine. (Later I came back and actually tried the pens.)

The only thing I bought:

Pilot had a special event where a handwriting expert (at least I assume that’s what he was) asked you to write with a pen that was wired to the board on which you were writing and that was connected to a computer. This action produced a computer read out of how you write, including the writing angle, which helped him choose a Pilot nib for you.

Finally, at 3:00, a Sailor counter person took pity on me and sent me to the Sailor repair man. As I predicted, he took less than five minutes to pull the feed and straighten the nib. I could have done all this myself, but as I hope to sell the pen, I thought it best to let an expert handle it.

After my pen was fixed, I exited as quickly as I could. If it hadn’t been for the noise, I’d have probably enjoyed it more. Well, except for the three hour wait. I doubt I could have handled that better.

The Missing Ink

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Last Sunday I failed miserably, but not in the usual way.

The 18th Mitsukoshi World Fountain Pen Festival started this week after years of forgetting I finally remembered to call and try to schedule an appointment with the Sailor pens ink blender.

The call-in, drop-in time was 10:30 last Sunday and I had the number entered in my phone and right as it clicked 10:30 I pressed call. I got a busy signal.

Oddly, She Who Must Be Obeyed also helped by calling on our landline. After 20 minutes of attempts, all we got was a busy signal. I suspect this means that there was a line of people at the store  and they stole all the appointments. Because, let’s face it, if I didn’t get what I wanted it was because of theft. Something like that.

(Note: There were only about 40 appointments available over the two days.)

This won’t stop me from attending the pen festival, but it probably means I won’t buy anything. I will try to sneak into line at the Sailor booth to see if I can get a pen fixed. I’ll also play with as many pens as I can. Then I’ll run away before temptation sets in. Probably.

 

The First Day of the Many

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As has become my tradition, the first day after the end of classes is spent planning the rest of the days before classes begin again.

For the first few days I am still, technically working at the school where I work, but starting next week the company I work for expects me to show work even though there is no work for me to do.

Because of this, I’ve already been planning what I plan to do for those days.

The twist in the plot, though, is that the company I work for wants us to write about what there is to do where we live so that, um, because, um, well, I don’t really understand why. Some new guy has a vision of how to help new people get information about towns because, I guess, in his head he lives in a pre-internet world where such information is not readily available. (Or, he’s the new guy and he needs to “build something” to show his worth, and he has an entire army of people forced to do work when there is no work to do at his disposal.)

The only good thing about all this, and perhaps this is the actual method behind the madness, I can take my youngest shopping downtown and call it “research” (Visiting town X with children; Things to do in Town X with children, etc.)

It also means I can go shopping and count it as work, as long as I write something eventually.

Goodbye Until Then

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I did a little dance today, which is not something I usually do. In the end, though, the dance will probably jinks me.

Today was the last day of pass back classes, which means today was also the last day I’ll see my worst class in their current configuration.

The scheduling Gods being what they are, for each grade I teach,  the last pass back of each day was my worst class for that grade. Oddly, the scheduling Gods also conspired to make sure that my last class was my worst class of all my classes.

After I got back to the office, as a half joke/half celebration, I did a short dance I call the happy dance, which is a few seconds of dance based on the AWA Dori.

The problem is, because I have second year junior high school (8th grade) next year, the odds of me having most of the same students in class is very high. This means they’ll be especially bad. Second year JHS students tend to be so bad that they’ve even got their own syndrome. (Note: the link explanation is very good, but it leaves off the most insidious version of the syndrome: “No, honestly, I just don’t give a damn.”

That said, I only see them once a week, and that helps a lot. On the other hand, bad classes tend to be bad enough that they shorten the lifespan.

This means I have a lot to look forward to next year. But not for a couple week, at least.