let's see if this works

Hiroki's grandmother bought him a used piano for Christmas.It seems like uploading this takes a really long time but I would like to see if it's going to work. What does everyone else do-do you somehow make your video file smaller before uploading it? Or do you just end up spending a lot of time waiting?

7 5 3

Back at work. I don’t know why I feel like I can get this done more here than at home. Could be because I have so much time on the computer here. I have also planned lots of my lessons already and so end up wasting time surfing net. I could probably study Japanese…
Last November we took the boy to the shrine to celebrate his becoming 5 years old. Shichi-go-san (7,5,3) is often celebrated here, I’ve heard that it started because children didn’t survive long in the old days, so people started to go to the shrine to give thanks to the gods that their children were still alive. Wikipedia, however didn’t mention that. Anyway, boys go at 5 years old and get dressed up in a hakama or suit. We rented a hakama for him, it was beautiful.



The shop that we rented it from was great. The woman said to my mother-in-law that we don’t need to pay for someone to put it on him (the sashes should be tied elaborately, especially if you are going to get pictures done) and that she would teach us. So she did. My mother-in-law tried it a couple of times and then the saleswoman told us we could take it home to practice with. We had wanted to use it the next week. She also told us that she was going to give us a special deal-we said that our price range was around 15,000 yen or about $150 but the one she showed us first was about double that. Gulp. She said if we liked it we could rent it for our price range. Nice. She was really good at sales, I think. Anyway, we rented it and ended up borrowing it for a week longer since we couldn’t get to the shrine on that weekend. It was great, didn’t cost anymore money or anything. My poor mother-in-law ended up practicing and practicing tying the sash (she used a garbage can) and in the end Hiroki kept looking down at it while she was tying it and saying “That’s wrong, you’re doing it wrong!” Rat.

She finally did it!

Ok I am at work procrastinating. I have been wanting to write for a long time-there are so many things going on that I wanted to write about. First, of course, was the winter holidays. I had a pretty time, once all of the cleaning was done (finally on Dec 31st!) Actually, we didn’t really get all of the cleaning done but it was more of enough for now. My mother-in-law was leaving a lot of it to me, as I think she was pretty tired. But in between Christmas and the cleaning, we did manage get away for a night to a ryokan, or a Japanese inn, and the only worry we had was ‘Which hot spring should I try next?” Pretty nice, actually.


And something else I liked about that ryokan was that it had French food, yum! Of course dinner was served in our room. We took advantage of the fact that it was my mother-in-law’s birthday and got extra cake served with dinner. We had a whole bunch of cake, and it was all really tasty.

Cake and chocolates, mochi (rice cakes made from super fattening rice) have all contributed to my weight gain for the start of the year. I have to cut back on all of my snacks again to get back to where I am a little more comfortable.
Other things I have been itching to write about-living here in Japan. Things have gotten increasingly strict for foreigners here. Last year we had the idiot minister of justice announce to the press that he had a friend of a friend who was in Al-Quaida and that person had come into Japan several times. The way he announced it was so unclear it seems like he was warned about one of the bombings but he didn’t do anything about it, like warn anyone. He later changed his statement to say that he hadn’t known about any bombings and he didn’t really know the person who was in Al-Quaida, anyway, he made the government here look as bumbling and inept as they are, I suppose. The upshot of his whole statement was that Japan needs to protect itself against foreigners (which I will always be living here) and therefore the government made the program to fingerprint every foreigner every time they leave and re-enter the country. Every time. And not only that, but they will keep the records for an unannounced period of time (I think I heard like 70 years or something ridiculous like that) and they will give other government officials any access they need to the records. As in any police office around the country can access the fingerprint bank any time to use for ‘solving crime’. Maybe I am paranoid, but I don’t believe that first of all, the government is capable of not leaking our fingerprint information. I also am slightly paranoid that a police officer could frame any foreigner for any crime. Maybe I have been reading too many websites about this, but I just don’t feel comfortable that they’ll keep fingerprints for that long. Actually I have stopped reading a lot of sites like that as I have been feeling more and more paranoid-I’ve heard that I can actually (technically) be deported from the country for traffic violation. Anyway, it has made me feel not so happy about things here. It was brought up again today, with the headline in the news that permanent residents may be required to prove their Japanese proficiency. Sigh.