First of all, Sunami Primary School has taken the monumental decision to EXTEND LUNCH BREAK BY TEN MINUTES. Together with the 20-minute recess break this gives the tinies nearly one whole hour of free time per day, which almost begins to sound reasonable. And what’s even more amazing is that they’ve accommodated this extra time not by extending the school day by ten minutes, as one might expect, but by shaving ten minutes off one of the classes. In other words: ten minutes LESS study time per day. It’s unprecedented and totally unexpected and I expect at least half the parents to be up in arms with indignation. And yet it’s happened. How wonderful.

Meanwhile Ruby’s school, not to be outdone, has started allowing the kids to take drink breaks during PE classes, which represents a monumental culture shift, although it’s not totally unexpected…

The story goes like this. One day last term Ruby came home bright pink and overheated after being forced to sit in the scorching sun for an hour with no hat and no water.

“But didn’t they let you have drinks breaks?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why of course not?”
“Because you’re not ever allowed to have drinks breaks during class, and PE’s a class, therefore you’re not allowed to have drinks breaks during PE.”

It was hard to argue with that logic, so I went up and had a word to the Assistant Principal. His response was essentially that back in his day, there was never any such thing as a drink break.

Yes, and?

I tried to explain that things have changed since then, that we’re now in the 21st century and fluid replenishment is considered standard procedure. He promised to check with the PE teacher but when I asked a few weeks later this obviously hadn’t happened.

So I went to the Board of Education. Luckily schools are run by local councils in Japan so it wasn’t too intimidating. The guy was very nice and agreed with me without hesitation, and he promised to ring the school immediately and instruct them to start providing drinks breaks. The end result of which is that No. 4 Junior High has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, at least on this one particular issue.

Tragically, despite the victory on water, I seem to have lost out on the hat issue; Ruby came home with the news that hats aren’t allowed at school. I don’t know whether it’s worth ringing back my friend at the Board of Education; the school probably already regards me as the Annoying Foreign Parent and there is the danger that too much activating could make life difficult for Ruby over the next year and a half.

On a different note, I’m pleased to report some important progress on the coffee front: Eleni and I came across a magazine listing all known cafes in Mihara and it turns out that there are quite a few tucked away in back streets that we never knew about. We have taken notes and are determined to check out each one in turn, possibly several times for confirmation purposes. Already I’ve found one called Cafe 3g which not only boasts a funky decor but actually makes a very nice cup of coffee. So I realise now that I’ve been a bit harsh about coffee in Japan. Even here in sleepy Mihara, there’s half-decent coffee out there if you know how to look for it.

And finally, there’s even been progress on the weather front: while it’s still hot and muggy, it’s not quite so searingly hot or oppressively muggy. Some evenings the weather is even, dare I say it, quite pleasant.
It’s as if, after causing nearly 500 deaths and hospitalising thousands with heat stroke, M. Nature has finally tired of torturing us all and conceded that it probably is time for autumn after all. And not a moment too soon.

So we took the opportunity to host a couple more friends from Australia for a few days and do a bit of island hopping, putting the cars on the ferry over to Ikuchijima where we all went for a swim on Sunset Beach, an accredited beach resort (this means it has tinny music blaring out of speakers all day long and you have to pay for the showers) with views of the mountains in the distance which impressed our friends no end.

On Thursday we zoomed down to Miyajima, that place with the big red ancient traditional cultural gate thingy in the water, touted as the most photographed site in Japan (How do you measure that anyway? Do they stop people at random and go through their cameras?). In the finest Japanese tradition, the gate itself has already been rebuilt eight times and judging from the decrepit state of the wood near the bottom I suspect an upgrade to Version 9 is due pretty soon. The whole area including Gate 8.0, the shrine and the nearby forest, is World Heritage listed but you can wander around at will.

We stayed at a really great ryokan inn tucked away literally in the middle of this World Heritage forest. Such a wonderful place to stay. Plus our room had its own private pond complete with big fat slow-moving carp, Felix’s favourite fish:

The national park is full of little nature trails and cultural thingies such as this bridge, located on the walk up to the ropeway.

The top of the ropeway is Mt. Misen, I believe the highest point on the island, where you can get stunning views of the Seto Inland Sea — possibly even better than the views from our very own Mt. Fudekage at Sunami, which caused me to experience a minor dose of View Envy. The kids decided that it was appropriate to utilize the scenery for some wacky perspective shots such as Ruby holding up an island:

And Felix with an island up his bum:

Us Orstralians, we know how to appreciate Culture.

The idea of staying overnight was to appreciate two aspects of the big red gate thingy; tide in and tide out. In the afternoon on the first day the tide was out so we were able to wander right up to the hallowed object.

After a while Ruby got bored and wandered off to do a Lady of the Lake impression:

For some reason everyone tries to throw rocks up onto the horizontal crossbar. No idea why.

That night we found a local pub type restaurant where all the men were drinking out of this amazing beer keg tower thing:

It looked like fun but unfortunately only Kaz and I were drinking beer so we couldn’t try one out for ourselves.

Here for no particular reason is a photo of our meal (I kind of like the overhead shot):

After dinner we wandered back in the dark to our forest hotel and I attempted to get some arty shots with our shiny new camera:

(NB: Eleni’s back is still hurting hence the pose.)

This one actually shows the kids sitting on the sea wall. You can hardly make them out but hey, it’s an Arty Shot.

The temple scrubs up pretty well at night-time:

The following day we wandered around a bit more and went inside the temple and I would love to be able to show you 10000000 more shots of the Red Gate surrounded by water at high tide but tragically the camera battery went flat. (The strain of the Arty Shots must have worn it out.) However our friends took heaps of photos for us so don’t fret, they’ll be up here one day.

Miyajima is just one and half hours away from home so we plan to come back again, at least for a day trip if not an overnight stay. Apart from the cultural stuff it is actually a really nice place for walking and I plan to give Mt. Misen a go when (if) the weather finally cools down.

Click here for more Miyajima photos.

I have to say it was rather nice to have all the stalls spread out on a big field rather than lined up along the street (as in the Shinmeichi festival) or jammed in by the river bank (as in the Yassa Matsuri fireworks). We took Felix’s new best friend Shigeta along and the five of us split up and had a nice time wandering freely among the stalls. Since it was a company event there were heaps of stalls put on by various departments at MHI: thus we had the Administration Division selling drinks, the Air Traffic Control Instrumentation Department doing yaki-soba, the Small Machinery Design and Development Division on fried prawns and so forth. Which I thought added a nice touch.

Plus they had a massive stage down one end with the MHI Employees Brass Band playing (I was rather excited to see this given my newfound interest in brass band music) and an entertainer and whatnot. And at the end of the night, what else but fireworks. Only ten minutes this time (MHI has fallen on hard times recently) but pretty impressive nonetheless. This time we cleverly went back and got our car out first and then watched the fireworks from the road so as to avoid being stuck in an almighty traffic jam like last time. Sort of defeats the purpose a bit, since the show was half hidden by the trees, but it was indeed a lovely feeling to arrive home five minutes after it finished.

Eight o’clock on Sunday morning was the annual clean-up day at the primary school. Japanese schools don’t seem to have cleaners: the kids do all the wiping and dusting and sweeping for 20 minutes every day after lunch. Even the annual clean-up is a community event where all the parents and kids are expected to turn up during the summer holidays and spent half a day in the blistering heat scrubbing down the walls and floors. The notice said that it was great way to meet up and socialize with other families. (Aren’t there better ways to do this? I say let’s all chip in and hire some professionals and we can go to the beach together.)

Anyway luckily Eleni hurt her back which gave us an excellent excuse to pike. I feel quite bad about this actually — we really should be doing our bit to contribute rather than making more work for everybody else — but I’m still having trouble getting used to all the ridiculous demands of the schools during the holiday period that isn’t. Ruby’s school also has a clean-up day next Sunday, also at 8 a.m., and Eleni’s back is likely to be better by then but we’ve already said we’ll be away. Yes, I know, I know. Next year I promise to do better. In any case Ruby has a soccer match and Felix and I will be at brass band rehearsal.

Back to the weekend wrap: on Sunday Ruby’s soccer team (the Mihara one, not the Hiroshima Sanfrecce one) organised a Gala Day involving four teams playing friendly matches. The weather was 36 degrees (and did I mention that the humidity makes it feel even hotter?) but the Japanese are made of tough stuff and there was never any doubt that it would go ahead. I went along too and can confirm that it was exhausting just watching, let alone running around. However Ruby acquitted herself very well for a pathetic foreigner and she in fact said that it wasn’t that bad once you got going. Leave that stuff to the kids I say, it was hot enough in the tent.

On the festival front, next Saturday is the annual Pirates ‘n’ Fire Festival on the nearby island of Innoshima, which should be a bit of fun. And on the heat ‘n’ humidity front, we finally capitulated and purchased a second air conditioner for the downstairs rooms. Due to the backlog of demand it doesn’t arrive until next Tuesday but we’re counting down the days. Since we’re only here for two years we’d been trying to avoid spending the money but in the end the heat just got the better of us. Eleni justified the expense by saying she’ll be able to work more productively in a cool room to pay it off, which I thought was excellent logic. (Actually I couldn’t care less about the logic; I just want to be able to exist in the kitchen without having rivulets of sweat running down my back. And we’ll be able to start cooking again, which is kind of handy.) The summer shows no sign of abating as yet, so although we’ve left our run a tad late we should still be able to get good value out of our new purchase.

And of course it will be massively welcome next summer. Only one more Japanese summer to go, then I swear I’m never doing this again.

And then I thought, why the hell not: it’s my blog and I’ll whinge if I want to.

So here we go.

I absolutely hate summer in Japan. Here’s why:

1. It’s so incredibly humid. Being from Melbourne, which has a dry summer, I’m not used to this sort of heat at all. I hate sweating, and the humidity makes you sweat ten times more. You can’t move without breaking out into a sweat. Morning walks and soccer practice with the kids are out of the question. The lawn hasn’t been mown in months. The kitchen is like a sauna if you try to cook. You end up not wanting to move a muscle or do anything.
2. There’s no respite. I’m used to the changeable Melbourne weather, where even during summer we might have a spell of excruciatingly hot weather (including days over 40° C, the idea of which horrifies most Japanese) but you always know there’s a cool change coming along a few days later to give everyone a breather. Not so in Japan. The weather has been over 30 for more than a month now.
3. There`s no escape. Inside our house during the day it’s 30° – 32° C downstairs and 35° C upstairs. So all four of us often spend the entire day camped upstairs not moving in Daddy’s office (where Daddy cleverly had an air conditioner installed back in May. Just as well too, because when I went down to the electrical store to ask about a second one for downstairs I discovered that they’re out of stock due to the heatwave and won’t have any in until September. By which stage summer will, please please O mighty weather gods I beseech you, be almost over.)

By way of scientific evidence, here`s a screenshot of the weekly forecast issued this morning:

As you can see, though the weather may vary from sunshine to cloudy and even rain, every single day is maximum 34, overnight minimum 27. As yet the bureau hasn’t issued the forecast for Saturday, but… no prizes for guessing what the temperature is going to be.

Though the recent heatwave in Japan is officially over, the temperature just keeps going up. The reason is that the heatwave brought unseasonably hot weather for July (ie 31-32° C when it should have been high 20s), but now it’s August so we’re now into standard August weather territory (33° – 34°). And did I mention the humidity? That makes it feel even hotter. (It’s true! My new favourite weather website lists the actual temperature together with the “Feels Like” temperature, calculated via a special formula that includes the humidity level. Today, for instance, the official temperature is 34 but the Feels Like temperature is 45. And I can confirm that it really does feel like 45 degrees.)

The upstairs office is our salvation; that and the ice-maker in the fridge. When I chose the fridge back in January, in the middle of winter, it never occurred to me that the ice-maker would come in handy. I’d always regarded ice-makers, at least the ones that deliver ice into your cup via a huge hatch that takes up half of your fridge door, as the height of dagginess (= uncool, for international readers). But ours is fantastic. It has a little tank of water in the fridge section that magically transforms into cubes that plop into a little compartment in the freezer section and you open it up and there they are just waiting for you. I love to sit in the kitchen in the cool of the evening listening to the fridge disgorging a fresh new cube every few minutes. (Maybe I should get out more often.)

Felix, in light of his longstanding obsession with eating ice from the freezer, has been appointed the Ice Meister: his job is to keep the tank full of water so that we have ice for our water bottles. So what with the upstairs office and the iced water and regular trips to the beach down the road, we’re managing somehow. But I’m counting the days until this sticky sweaty inferno comes to an end.

OK enough whinging. In the interests of fairness and balance, here now is my list of positives about Japanese summers.

1. Our gas bill has halved because we’re all taking cold showers.

That’s all I can think of.

Anyway we’re off to Nagoya tomorrow to visit friends. It’ll be ridiculously hot of course up in the big city but it would be remiss not to travel during the holiday period. And we’ll be meeting up with Naho, a Japanese friend who we met in, of all places, Sansepolcro during our year in Italy back in 2003, and she has started up a PIZZA RESTAURANT in Nagoya with her Italian boyfriend, and I am sooooooo looking forward to eating pizza that the heat and the hours of train travel will all be worth it. And with any luck Naho’s boyfriend may even be able to make us a Real Italian Coffee!

It is still fiendishly hot here, what with the abnormal freak unprecedented record heatwave ‘n’ all, so poor Eleni was bathed in sweat by the end of it but nevertheless the performance was deemed a success.

On Sunday afternoon we insisted on dragging a reluctant and exhausted teenager out of the house to go visit a local island called Okunojima that we read about by happy coincidence in a magazine while sipping thoughtfully on a coffee during our Friday trip to Fukuyama, a largish city about an hour up the road where, incredibly they have a place where you can get a real coffee! It’s an American chain called Tully’s, whose claim to fame is that at one stage their business strategy was apparently to set up opposite every single Starbucks they could find. It must have worked because they’ve expanded into Japan and are doing quite well. And no, we didn’t travel for an hour to Fukuyama in the sweltering heat just to get a coffee; we were there to do some furniture shopping as well.

Back to Okunojima island: it’s precisely 12 min by ferry from Tadanoumi, a nondescript town 15 mins down the coast from us that only gets a mention for having the Aohata jam factory where we did a factory tour and made jam a few months back, plus it’s right near our favourite Cafe Hoxton. Plus it has a ferry terminal. So the kids loved the ferry trip:

Ruby got a bit scared but brave fearless handsome Daddy vowed to protect her from any evil marauding sea-creatures that hopped over the stern:

Okunojima is so tiny that there are no cars on it and you can walk the 4.3 km circumference in an hour and a half. You can also hire bicycles which is much more fun and that’s what we did:

One of the attractions of Okunojima is that it’s teeming with rabbits, which hardly sounds attractive at all if you come from Australia, large swathes of which have been ruined by the introduction of rabbits by some stupid ancestor from the mother country many years ago, although if you’re a city Australian you might think rabbits are cute furry things that live in a hutch. The ones on this island are pretty cute and outrageously tame: they come right up to you as if to say “oi where’s me feed”:

So we obliged them with some carrot sticks and cabbage leaves that we’d prepared earlier:

We also climbed a hill at one point and got some nice views of the mainland:

And there was an old abandoned power station thingy to look at too:

It turns out that Okunojima was a military centre during the war where they produced poison gas, so there are a few ammunition stores and cannon emplacements and spooky war things like that to look at on the way. There is even a Poison Gas Museum but I don’t suppose they have a hands-on interactive display where you get to have a sniff of the real thing.

To finish off we went for a swim at the lovely beach there which was mercifully free of loudspeakers and wizened old men in uniforms wandering around telling you what not to do. All in all it was an excellent day out and we vowed to go back there again sometime soon and do it properly, including the Poison Gas Museum.

When we got home, Felix decided to put on his Ninja suit for no particular reason so I thought I’d better take a photo of him with our flash new camera:

Scary eh?

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.

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.

• 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.

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”.

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+
Comment: Excellent work Japan, but your education system lets you down.