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.