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Camp Japan
No, not THAT sort of camp, silly; I mean the healthy dib-dib-dob-dob thrashing about in the countryside with sticks and ropes and campfires sort of camp.
Felix has just arrived back from a two-day camp up in the mountains organised by the good city of Mihara along with 71 other tinies of primary school age (and a few brave parent volunteers). He got to split wood, make a fire, cook dinner (and presumably do the washing up!), set up the tents and make a comfy campbed out of newspaper. They did lots of fun wholesome stuff such as make things from wood, look at the moon through a giant telescope and play games around the campfire. And in a really nice touch, they’d handed out bits of cut bamboo the week before which Felix and I had to fashion into his own personal cup and pair of chopsticks armed only with a saw and sandpaper, just like in the hardware ads on the telly. Plus we had to make an Indiana Jones style flaming torch by wrapping some bits of old cotton (last year’s pyjamas) on the end of a pole, which the kids carried with them when they went for a night-time walk through the bush. Needless to say Felix got hardly any sleep and arrived home completely shattered but it was all good clean fun. I have great memories of doing this sort of stuff as a kid. Maybe I’ll have to go along next year as a volunteer for a bit of vicarious nostalgic enjoyment.
Meanwhile Ruby, not to be outdone, was over on the neighbouring island of Ikuchijima with her soccer buddies on a day of fun and frivolity organised by the Sanfrecce soccer team. Given that her school contemporaries have turned out to be a dismal failure in the friendship department, it’s nice that she gets to do this sort of stuff together with her soccer teammates, who are unfailingly nice and friendly. (Why are they so much nicer? We’ve decided that Ruby’s year level at school (especially the girls) must just be a Bad Lot; being stuck together ever since kindergarten has sent them a bit loopy.) They swam at the beach, cooked things on the barbeque for lunch, played games and generally had a great time from the sound of it.
With both kids out of the house on a Sunday, Eleni and I took the opportunity to head out for lunch at good old Cafe Hoxton 15 mins down the road overlooking the sea. Having only ever had coffees there before, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that they do excellent pasta and pizza so we duly earmarked this place for a family dinner sometime soon. It’s so ridiculously hot at the moment that we’ve been eating out a bit more often in a bid to reduce hot sweaty cooking activities to a minimum (plus you get to sit in an air-conditioned restaurant for an hour or so).
Also we discovered a rather nice beach directly opposite Cafe Hoxton, which will come in handy after our local beach officially closes for the season on August 31, at which point Ruby will be officially forbidden from swimming there by her school. This gives us a backup option so that we can just throw a blanket over Ruby’s head and spirit her away down the coast where nobody will be watching while she splashes about.
Y’hear that Japan? We’re gonna BREAK YOUR RULES. Such rebels.
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Weekend wrap
And what a big weekend it was, not least because we had a long weekend with a public holiday on the Monday.
But first of all, a weather update. Summer has arrived here with a vengeance. It’s been over 30 all week and of course ridiculously humid which makes it feel like over 40. Japan is in the middle of a record heatwave according to the news.
Just my luck eh. I’m a winter-lover by nature. I’ve never liked summer; I see it as an extended period of stupidly hot weather to be endured until normal programming resumes at the start of autumn. But I seem to have a knack of creating abnormal weather conditions wherever I go.
Let’s recap shall we:
• London, 1989 – record temperatures across Britain. (Also the sunniest summer on record.)
• Italy in 2003 – Heatwave across Europe; one of the hottest on record.
• Japan in 2010 – Record temperatures for early summer with predictions of hottest summer for 100 years.Thanks alot, weather gods.
Even in February 2009 when I was in Tokyo visiting clients with plans to whip off for a couple of days of skiing…. you guessed it: record mild winter, no snow.
And while I’m sweating it out over here, back in Melbourne they’re having a wonderful cold winter at the moment, the lucky things. So you see, I seem to bring the heat wherever I go. I suppose it could be argued that global warming has something to do with all of this, but I refuse to let scientific theory stand in the way of a good conspiracy theory.
Ahem. The weekend wrap.
On Saturday morning I put Ruby on to her train for a two-day training camp with her soccer buddies from Hiroshima Sanfrecce. We actually missed the first train because our little local line was out indefinitely due to a landslide on the tracks caused by the torrential rain last week. Unfortunately I had no idea of this and we arrived at the tiny seaside station and waited for the train… and waited… and waited… until suddenly it occurred to me that the train was never coming, so we jumped in the car and did a mad dash across town with the Eggbeater engine screaming as we pushed it to the limit, screeching into the main station at Mihara only to discover that the train had been cancelled altogether and we had to catch the next one. Whatever, it all worked out in the end and Ruby had a great weekend, played heaps of soccer and experienced her first stay away from home in Japan.
On Saturday night, the three of us took the opportunity (i.e., not having Ruby around to complain about it) to check out a local fast food chain called MosBurger that Felix had been eyeing off for some time. It actually wasn’t too bad, in a fast food kind of way. I can report that MosBurger serves much the same plastic food as Maccas (NB: must try the Terikayki McBurger sometime), though the option of burgers made with rice patties rather than sugary bread buns at least represents a bit of innovation.
I’ve actually heard Japanese people defend fast food places like Maccas, MosBurger and KFC with the line that “at least the food is actually cooked right there and then.” And they have a point. Apparently there are now restaurants that are designed to operate with only one solitary operator in the kitchen. Presumably they just reheat and serve. Which makes the other chains look like fresh food champions in comparison.
When we got home on Saturday night I got a call from one of the dads who is a bit of a local legend because he’s president of the school council at the primary school, asking me to take part in a shrine-carrying ceremony the following morning. Not really knowing what was involved, I agreed to it on the principle that it was nice to be invited and nice to experience new and exciting things in the locality.
It turned out to be one of the most exhausting experiences in recent memory. The combination of searing heat (see above) and a bloody heavy wooden shrine with two kids inside chanting and beating a drum was more than I’m used to. Luckily I had to nick out for about two hours in the middle of it all because of a prior engagement; if it hadn’t been for that I probably would have fainted pathetically at some point. Luckily also I had to take the car, because all the other guys carrying the shrine were knocking back beers that magically appeared at every stopover point on the route. The first round came out at about 8:30 in the morning and there were new beers being handed around about every 15 minutes after that. As you can imagine this led to a very hot sweaty drunken group of guys by lunchtime, and the grand finale of the parade, which involved about 20 of us whirling the shrine around and around on its ten-metre sticks with the two boys strapped inside, was positively frightening. Somehow we managed to finish without incident. Tragically I have no photographic evidence.
After I finally got home that afternoon, exhausted and bathed in sweat, it was time to head to the beach. The crowds have finally arrived and it’s now officially a Scene, with people of all ages cantering and splashing or just hanging about looking cool. I had a bit of a nap while Felix demonstrated his impressive breadth of social skills, making friends first of all with some young children (building sandcastles), then with some Year 9 boys (playing catch in the water) and finally with a group of young men who buried him in the sand a couple of times. One of them had a few tatts which got me thinking because apparently the only people with tatts in Japan are the dreaded yakuza. Still, they were very nice with Felix; for instance, they didn’t bury his head. Just so long as they don’t try to recruit my son.
On Sunday night we had a group of friends from Okayama over to stay, the guys that we stayed with up in the mountains at Niimi back in Golden Week. Their daughter Chisato is exactly one day older or younger than Ruby (I forget which) so we’ve kept in contact over the years. It was nice to catch up again and we all went out for a meal of Okonomiyaki (of course!) and ate and drank and chatted and generally carried on. Since it’s the start of the school holidays I assumed they’d be able to stay for a few days, but the visit ended up being less than 24 hours because Chisato’s school has club activities scheduled every day during the holidays except for a four-day break in the middle (the week of 16-20 August being a semi-sacrosanct holiday when the entire country sort of goes to sleep). Which makes Ruby’s club look almost lazy; sure they practice solidly for the first couple of weeks but after that they actually stop altogether for about three weeks. Unprecedented stuff.
Finally to round off the big weekend we went to watch Felix play a match at his usual venue in Onomichi, about half an hour up the road. Tragically it was so hot and dusty that I totally forgot about my plans to pop in afterward to the cute little bakery just near the soccer ground where they sell really nice mini-croissants glazed with maple syrup. What a complete waste of a day. No, only kidding. Besides, he’s got another match there in a couple of weeks so all is not lost.
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Summer Rules
We love a good laugh here at the Sushi on a Stick household.
That’s why we were very excited last night when Ruby brought home the Official Statement of Rules for the Summer Holidays from the Juvenile Control Centre (sorry, junior high school) up on the hill.
There’s mirth aplenty to be had from reading through the two sheets of closely-typed A4 paper. I can’t do it justice here so I’m just going to pass on a selection of my personal favourites.• Do not eat or drink to excess.
• If you discover any health problems, such as tooth decay, seek medical advice.
• Avoid staying up late and/or sleeping in.
• Observe the rules of the road. In particular, on a bicycle, do not dink your friends, ignore traffic signals or ride in the rain while holding an umbrella in one hand.
• Do not drive a car/motorbike without a licence. (So if you’re 13 years old and want to drive a car/motorbike, be sure to get your licence first.)
• Do not sit up until late in the evening watching TV or playing video games.
• Do not go out at night. (Here it helpfully provides the definition of night as “after the sun goes down”. Thanks for that.)
• When going out, students should ideally wear school uniform or, if not, appropriate attire for junior high school students. (And here it adds that the choice of attire may be left up to the parents. This seems very magnanimous of the school. Can we be trusted with such responsibility? After all, apparently we’re incapable of supervising our own children at the beach.)
• Do not go into department stores or supermarkets unless you have good reason to do so.
• Students are forbidden from visiting karaoke clubs, game centers or cinemas without a parent present. (Thirteen year olds? As if.)
And right near the end, the very best one of all:
• If possible, make time to talk with your family members. (Fat chance of that! You should see the pile of homework that Ruby came home with today.)I was speaking with the principal recently and he finally set me straight. It turns out that the summer holiday is not actually a holiday at all; it’s just that the weather is so hot and oppressive that it would be impossible to study in the classrooms, which don’t have air conditioners, so instead the school sends the students home to study there for a month before calling them back in September when the weather starts to cool down. He was smiling as he said it, but he was deadly serious.
And now we know what the teachers are doing staying back until eight o’clock every night: writing up useful lists of rules like this. Incidentally there was also another two-page Statement of Rules on Swimming, but I accidentally screwed it up and threw it straight in the bin.
So if anyone out there can think of any other zany rules we could add to the list, feel free to leave a comment. Prizes for best ideas. Must be 32 words or less, neatest correct entry wins.
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Hard rain
One month ago I wrote about the onset of the rainy season. Since then we’ve had a bit of rain, to be sure, but nothing much to write home about (or blog about).
That is, until this week.
This week the heavens really opened and we’ve had four days of almost constant rain, including several truly thunderous bursts where the sky went all dark, the roar was deafening (well, pretty loud anyway), the lightning flashed and the thunder cracked, and the garden turned into a big lake. The power even went off a few times, just to add to the enormity of the occasion.
But the best thing of all is that school was cancelled, not once but twice, or in Felix’s case, three times. He had the day off again yesterday, despite the fact that the rain had all but stopped. The reason for this is that the decision to cancel school is based on the official warnings put out by the local weather bureau at six in the morning. If the bureau still has a heavy rain warning out, the phone tree starts up and we all start calling each other with the happy news. Yesterday the bureau still had a warning out at the magic hour, despite the fact that there was no rain forecast for the rest of the day, so that was that.
It may seem a bit pathetic to cancel school on account of rain, but it’s been pretty fierce in this part of Japan. Already two people have been swept away by a river in our city of Mihara alone and many more are missing and a few rivers have burst their banks, so although our particular spot is OK you can understand the overly cautious stance. Plus the school would be abrogating its responsibility to make the tinies walk to school in bad weather conditions.
I used to do quite a bit of translation for a government department responsible for public works and disaster prevention, and every document started off with “Japan is frequently visited by a wide range of terrible natural disasters including flooding, earthquakes, volcanos, typhoons” etc etc, and I used to think what a pack of wimps, stop carrying on will you. But when you consider that there’s 120 million people crammed into this tiny country of which 70% is covered in steep mountains, you start to understand why they’re so paranoid about landslides, fast-flowing rivers, eruptions, tidal waves and all the rest of it — because these things do happen, and quite often too.
Anyway the kids were rapt. Felix immediately set off to visit various friends (particularly the one that has the fully sick video game) while Ruby read a few books, watched a movie and re-ran a few of her favourite Glee episodes. Today however there is no rain and normal programming has resumed and all is quiet once more at Sushi on a Stick central.
So school holidays started a bit early for Felix, but you won’t be surprised to hear that Ruby’s school has simply rescheduled the missed days during the school holidays. We got the “holiday” timetable yesterday and it turns out that the original quota of five weeks has been encroached by extra days at the start and end of the holidays, plus full day brass band practice for the first week and a half, plus a couple of “compulsory attendance” days in the middle for good measure. We told the teacher that we’d “probably” be away for these, but even if we’re not we might have to “pretend” that Ruby is “sick”.
Civil disobedience has never felt so “good”.
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Half-yearly report
Can you believe it? We’ve been here a whole six months already.
I’m sure you’re all itching to know: how has Japan shaped up? Has it met our expectations? Are we having fun yet? So I hereby present the half-yearly report, conveniently divided into individual members of the Sushi on a Stick household.Felix
Felix has settled into school life without problem. He has picked up the language well, even slipping into the local dialect, and is not having any trouble keeping up with the work. Indeed, he loves studying kanji characters. A couple of months ago he brought home a new kanji dictionary and he still reads through it to discover new and interesting characters and then point out their distinguishing features. A true language nerd in the making. Meanwhile he’s made quite a few friends and often goes around to play at their homes after school. On Wednesdays after school he heads off to the local temple with a few friends to study Japanese history and culture with a couple of volunteer fathers. I can’t imagine why he chose to do this, although the free Coke and sweets may have something to do with it; also the fact that he scores a lift home afterward. He likes playing at the local soccer club and has made a few friends there too. As of last week Felix has also joined the junior swing orchestra and become more inspired to practice his trumpet. All in all, I think he’s quite happy being here in Japan.
Ruby
At this stage of proceedings, it seems that Ruby has drawn the short straw on this whole Japan thing, thanks to her draconian school. I’ve already ranted about at great length about the school (such as here, here and here) so I won’t go on about it any further, other than to say that junior high has proven a major culture shock. On the study side, however, Ruby has applied herself admirably to the intensive homework regime and managed to get some impressive scores on her mid-term and end-of-term exams. Outside of school, she’s kept busy with her two soccer clubs and the junior swing orchestra, not to mention the occasional shopping trip for yet another pair of shoes.
Me
Well I love it here and feel quite at home. For a start, things are so cheap. Prices are the same now as when we were here in the early 90s thanks to a couple of decades of depression/recession, so food is cheap, clothes are cheap (and good quality too), electrical goods are cheap, eating out is cheap. Here we can eat out once or twice a week (usually we go for the cheap-and-cheerful okonomiyaki). Also Japan has great cakes and sweets, which make up for the lousy coffee.
I’ve had plenty of work to keep me busy. One regret is that I haven’t had any interpreting jobs (meaning business meetings and factory inspections as opposed to translation at the computer). I like the idea of getting out of the house every now and then. Of course, the reason I haven’t had any interpreting jobs is because I’ve been too lazy to go out and look for them. I did have some new business cards printed and I bought a new suit back in March, but that’s as far as I got. I think I lack inspiration, I’m getting too old for this. Back in the Tokyo days I was keen as mustard and studied like crazy, but these days I’m content to sit back and let the kids do it for me. I can’t even write kanji characters properly any more. The kids laugh at me, but then, that’s their job I guess.
Eleni
Eleni possibly has the most varied and interesting experience of all of us. On Mondays she takes an English class for a group of Mature Ladies. On Tuesday she takes an English class for a couple of very immature ladies (kindergarten girls). On Wednesdays she has Japanese drumming classes (see video of her latest performance here). Every second Thursday she does flower arranging, and every second Saturday she takes more English classes for kids down at the local community center. In between all of this she does a bit of proof-reading work (set up by me through one of my Tokyo companies; a true husband-and-wife team effort) and catches up with all the friends she’s made through her various classes and group activities, from whom she gets lots of handy recipe and gardening tips. (Which reminds me; I must post a photo of her fabulous veggie garden.)
Family
I think we feel part of the place now. We’re familiar enough with the town of Mihara to know where to get the things we need, but still unfamiliar enough that there is plenty to discover. Sometimes we hear second-hand about “those foreigners down at Sunami” so word has obviously gotten around. And we’ve managed to ingratiate ourselves with a few locals to the point where we’ve already had a few gifts of bags of fresh vegetables from people who either have a tiny plot somewhere or know someone who has a farm nearby. At the moment we’re inundated with potatoes for some reason.
We’re still managing to spend time together as a family, the demands of junior high notwithstanding. These days, card games in the evening have been replaced with watching the latest Glee episodes downloaded from iTunes — tragic I know, but at least we’re all in the same place at the same time with a happy teenager. In terms of outings, Ruby’s soccer matches in the countryside always provide a good excuse for a Family Day Trip, and now there is the beach just down the road.During the summer holidays we plan to spend a week visiting friends up in Nagoya and also do a few overnight trips around the islands. At Christmas time we’ll head up north to Akita to visit our longstanding friend Eku and indulge in a bit of cheap Japanese skiing. And we might just sneak a few days off school in October or November when the weather cools down a bit and whip the kids off somewhere. So although both kids are certainly finding school more of a challenge than what they were used to in Australia, we’re trying to pack in lots of other stuff to maintain a bit of balance.
Overall mark: B+
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Beach follies
Yesterday was our first officially sanctioned Family Trip to the Beach, which seems worth a post of its own seeing as it’s been such a struggle to get there.
Unfortunately it was low tide so the beach was half empty of water. You can see the waterline on the breakwaters. It was also a bit murky, whereas normally the water is crystal clear and inviting.
Incidentally those breakwaters may seem a bit namby-pamby but the Japanese are not known for their swimming skills (which seems odd for an island nation with the population clinging to the coastline). And we think they’re great, given that the memory of seeing our two kids swept out to sea by a rogue rip just last year is still fresh in the mind.
My favourite bit of the beach is the line of vine-covered shelters up the back. You can see them on the right here:
I’m not very good in the sun so it’s great to have a bit of shade to escape to. Of course, this being Japan, there are vending machines stationed at regular intervals dispensing ice-cold drinks. The only thing missing is an ice-cream vending machine. Yes, they do have them; there’s one at the soccer ground where Felix trains on Saturday mornings with 16 different flavours.
And this being Japan, the beach also has loudspeakers blaring out music all day long. That is, all day long during the official beach opening hours from 8:30 in the morning through to five at night. I know this because I can hear the music starting up from my office window, several hundred metres away up the hill. It’s that loud. I think the authorities, when they designed this man-made beach, decided that it would be not just a nice stretch of coastline for swimming but a proper beach resort with amenities such as showers and vending machines. And piped music. (The other day when Eleni and I went for a swim, guess what was coming out of the speakers? Beach sound effects such as waves crashing and seagulls cawing. To add to the experience, presumably. You gotta laugh.)
This being Japan, the loudspeakers are naturally used to discharge regular announcements at deafening volume welcoming us all to the beach and reminding us of the rules, such as not climbing all over the breakwaters, not lighting barbeques, swimming safely and taking your rubbish home. From four o’clock onwards at ten-minute intervals there are more announcements alerting us to the fact that the beach is about to “close” and encouraging us to start packing up and going home.
To me, the loudspeakers neatly symbolise the Japanese love for information bombardment. Despite what we Westerners might like to believe about rock gardens and Zen minimalism, the Japanese (particularly those in positions of authority with loudspeakers at their disposal) seem to believe that “more is better” rather than “less is more.” A look at any typical Japanese website (like this one) will show you what I mean.
The Japanese are constantly being bombarded with information. Constant announcements on the trains. (In Tokyo, where there’s a station every few minutes, the announcements basically never stop.) Endless tape loops shouting out from the shelves in the department stores. Guys with megaphones at any public event involving more than, say, 20 people. And how about those Big Brother loudspeakers that are stationed in every town and village throughout the nation blaring out announcements, usually early on Sunday mornings, such as the one at 7:30 this morning reminding us all to vote in the election. As a result the locals have acquired an innate ability to just shut it out. I think this is a key requisite for anyone planning to live in Japan for any length of time. Either that or a massive stock of earplugs.
To finish off with: we had Mr. Nishihara and his wife to dinner last night for a barby. The Nishiharas brought these dinky little fold-out tables. It was highly convivial although I still didn’t get the coals going properly and managed to burn the eggplant slices, while the onion was so black that it didn’t even make it to the table. Oh how we all laughed.
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Family visit
I’ve got my mum and two older sisters visiting at the moment. They’ve only been here four days but already we’ve packed in a punishing schedule:
• On Thursday, I picked them up at lunchtime and took them straight up good old Mt. Fudekageyama, the one where I took all those photos of sunrise and cherry blossoms.
• On Thursday night we tried to go out for a meal of — what else — okonomiyaki, but the local restaurant was closed so we ended up going to a nearby place that turned out to serve tasty cheap food and is our new favourite restaurant. I love it when that happens.
• On Friday Ruby got to take the day off school to open her birthday presents (including a pair of headphones with microphone for the iPod which unleashes the potential for a whole new swag of apps that involve singing, such as the Glee auto-harmonizer; Ruby could be heard warbling in the background for the rest of the day) and then, seeing as it was such a lovely hot day, we all went down to test out the local beach. In the afternoon I took the visitors for a spin down the coast to visit my cafe of the moment Cafe Hoxton and take in Ye Olde Townne of Takehara which has a very well-preserved Old Bit. We stumbled across it quite by accident when we were driving through Takehara one day but had to hurry back home for some reason that escapes me, and I had been looking forward for some months to exploring the area at a more leisurely pace, so it was the perfect opportunity to do just that.
• Friday night was the official birthday dinner for Ruby at the local onsen. The mother of one of Ruby’s friends works there and had arranged a surprise in the form of a chocolate cake, so we feasted on dinner and cake while gazing out at the views of the inland sea. Highly convivial.
• On Saturday morning I took Felix to soccer practice which as luck would have it is just near a rather fine temple complex called Buttsuji (the kids think this name is hilarious; can’t imagine why). I like this place not so much for the temple but because it’s in a lovely shady mountain patch with a stream running through it that is reminiscent of the Dandenongs back in Melbourne (only with more Kulture, obviously). I forgot to take any pictures but this photo shows my favourite part of the complex where you walk along next to the lanterns.
• On Saturday afternoon I took my two sisters (mother having officially retired hurt with a sore foot) on the ferry over to Ikuchijima, the next island across from here, to see Kosanji temple (two temples in the same day; that’s a record for me) which features, among other things, a huge expanse of imported Italian marble from Carara including hills and pathways and all manner of weird and wonderful sculptures. Once again, we’d visited it months before with the kids but hadn’t had time to check it out properly. The marble is just the craziest thing: in this unprepossessing town on a tiny island in southern Japan there’s this enormous white world of stone. What on earth was that monk thinking? Still, it’s an experience, and there’s even a cafe made out of marble which we duly visited. Inside there was a genuine espresso machine and I had high hopes of a decent cafe latte but tragically it was not to be.
• On Saturday night we eventually satiated our desire for okonimiyaki. All agreed that it was the best food in the world in space and that my description of it was not at all over the top. Or not much, at any rate.
• On Sunday we took the visitors down to Onomichi which has lots of temples and culture, although they ended up spending most of the morning wandering through the local shopping arcade, the one where Felix and I had the bunsen burner coffee last week. At lunchtime we watched Felix play soccer combined with mud-wrestling, then for lunch we went to our favourite sushi place, the one where if you place an order the little plates come out to you on a special Shinkansen train. We ordered a whole lot of things that were already circulating on the conveyor belt, just so we could show our visitors the special train. (Also you get fresher sushi that way, since they have to make it right then and there. Although if you tried this on too often I suspect the chefs might be tempted to spit quietly on your plate before sending it out.)So it’s been an action-packed four days that’s for sure. The wonderful thing about having visitors is that you get to go to places that the kids are bored with, such as Mt Fudekageyama (the mere mention of it brings groans of disapproval), Takehara (even worse) and Buttsuji (smirks plus disapproval). Plus there are the inevitable serendipitous discoveries along the way, such as the local restaurant that turned out to be quite good. (I often remember fondly how we went on the Tram Restaurant in Melbourne once when we had Japanese friends to visit. We would probably never have done it otherwise. It may be the height of dagginess but it’s actually great fun.)
And tomorrow we’re off on the ferry for an all-day island-hopping jaunt in the Eggbeater. The action just never stops here at Sunami-by-the-sea…
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Here comes the rain again
The rainy season is officially here. (Having said that, as I type this it’s a lovely warm day with hardly a cloud in the sky but according to the news it’s officially on.)
The rainy season began in style with a decent belt of rain that began yesterday morning and continued all day right through Felix’s two matches, as a result of which he got soaked to the skin and covered in mud, which of course he thought was excellent fun. Apparently the rainy season is not like the good old days when a delightful light drizzle fell continuously for about a month. These days, what with global warming ‘n’ that, it’s all sudden rainstorms followed by clear days which is most disconcerting for old-timers. However one thing’s for certain: there’ll be lots of rain comes things will get humid and sticky.
Already on my daily walks across the mountain (Eleni having abandoned me for the more sedate pace of her middle-aged lady friends who get together at 8:30 in the morning) I’m noticing the extra added humidity in the air. The good news is that our local beach just five minutes’ walk down the road is remarkably clean and nice. We tested it out last Friday. Although it was roasting hot, there was virtually nobody else there, presumably because the beach has not been officially opened yet: the formal beach opening ceremony, with the mayor coming down and everything, is not until July 3. In the meantime I trust we won’t get prosecuted under local by-laws for swimming without the mayor’s consent.
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Weekend wrap
Hello all, and here is the news.
Ruby has mid-term exams coming up and has assigned herself a gruelling study schedule over the next couple of weeks, including regular breaks for tapping furiously on the iPod and downloading new episodes of Glee. So on account of the revision regime she and Eleni stayed home on Saturday morning while I took Felix to soccer practice. The soccer ground they use on Saturdays is a little way out of town in the countryside and surrounded by fields. While Felix is busy at practice Eleni and I normally take the opportunity to go for a highly convivial walk in the fields. It really is a lovely spot out there.This week I noticed, in a city slicker sort of way, that it must be planting season — the planting machines and the trays of seedlings sort of gave it away.
On Saturday afternoon we found out by chance about the Satsuki festival on at the local arts and culture center (called Poporo; who on earth thought of that name?) so we headed down to have a look. It wasn’t an ancient traditional culture type festival so much as a string of performances by local band/music/choir/rock groups, plus a flea market, together with the regulation line of food and drink stalls. At the flea market Felix and I spotted an enormous remote control Mothra toy [Mothra is a classic Japanese monster from the same stable as Godzilla. Check out the 1961 trailer below. Fast forward to 1:30 for views of Mothra.]
Tragically the Mothra toy cost about $200 so we had to pass, but it was in any case a lovely day for the festival: low 20s and sunny. Before too long it will be low 30s and oppressively humid so we have to make the most of the good weather. I took a photo of the main stage, although it looks a bit small and pathetic from so far back. But I’ve included it here just to show off that Poporo roof, which looks as if a giant metal Mothra might burst out at any moment.
This morning (Sunday) we headed down to Onomichi, a small town about half an hour down the road, to witness Eleni’s debut peformance of wadaiko (Japanese drumming). She’s been practicing every Wednesday with her new best friends down at the local community center and today was their first hitout with Eleni in the group. Here they are in full flight:
The performance was for a volunteer organisation which hosts exchange students in Japan. Afterwards they gave all the students a go and invited our two to join in as well. Felix was up there like a shot but Ruby was unable to take part, being too cool for that sort of thing.
At lunchtime we went for a walk through picturesque Onomichi. In a couple of weeks my two sisters and mother are coming to town, so we’re busy checking out interesting places to take them. We’d actually been to Onomichi a few months ago and wandered along the seaside section of town, and I remembered being singularly unimpressed. But it turns out that all the picturesque stuff is up in the hills BEHIND the town, silly me. You catch the cable car up the hill and wander around these cute little winding paths in the hillside admiring the trees scenery temples cherry blossoms sea views etc etc. There are even a couple of little cafes tucked in amongst the culture, and near the cable car station at the top of the hill is a shop selling ice-creams with flavours such as green tea and black sesame (sounds weird but actually delicious). So now I rate Onomichi quite highly; the black sesame ice-cream in particular is worth bringing the family for.
When we got home I did a bit of mowing with our shiny new push-along lawn mower:
I’m not quite sure why but I’ve always wanted one of these. Now, finally, I have realised my life’s ambition: a push-along lawn mower. Just like Dave Sullivan.
And finally, Felix and I finished off the weekend in style with a visit to the local onsen. That’s our third visit now, but our first time on the left-hand side. Men and women are segregated (obviously) and they swap the sides daily; our last two visits were on odd days so we were on the right-hand side, but today was an even day so we got to try the left-hand side. Verdict: more massage spots, better views, but smaller selection of baths. On balance, we prefer the right-hand side.
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Ruby offered to do the washing up
Yes, that’s right: Ruby actually offered to do the washing up tonight. Of her own free will!
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I think that deserves a post all of its own.
This blog is about the adventures of a family of Australian barbarians spending two years in the islands of southern Japan. Stay tuned for regular updates on the food, the culture, the earthquakes, the wacky festivals, the school system and more. 
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