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Broadcasting to an audience of three (and a goldfish)...
Comment, ramblings and musings... life through the eyes of a Japanologist...
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Monday, January 6, 2003 |
 What I did today
Today, I...
- Got up early (to go to work);
- Went to work for the first time this year;
- Went to the Mayor's New Year Kunji;
- Got another nengajo at work;
- Had to pay 4000 yen(!) for the after-bonenkai drinking party;
- Went to Bebe for lunch;
- Made three kites;
- Drove all around Etajima trying to find somewhere windy to fly said kites;
- Drove all the way down a mountain road... to find it ended in a mountainside;
- Chaired the International Club's monthly meeting;
- Spent most of said meeting eating zenzai;
- Went to Romantei for yakiniku;
- Installed Chimera (a web browser) on my Mac;
- Wrote the first Word of the Week entry.
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 The first day of work this year. It was a real effort to get up at 6.30 after all those mornings of being lazy (and warm) until a civilized hour; I'm sure it was darker this morning when my alarm rang than it was in the mornings before Christmas. In fact, it was so much of an effort to get up at 6.30, that I didn't. I re-set my alarm for five to seven, and enjoyed the warmth of my futon for a little while longer.
When I did get up, I found that it had snowed in the night, if only very lightly, and there was a powdering of whiteness on roofs and cars. It would have been good to have been eased back into early mornings with a warm, bright beginning, but this was obviously not to be.
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Another entry from the sake book. Alcohol and Health: K
Key: A key to good health is to enjoy the right amount of alcohol.
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This morning was the Mayor's New Year kunji. He urged us all to work hard in 2003, to take pride in our jobs, etc., and then mentioned again that he would do his very best to ensure that the problems surrounding the gappei of the four towns were solved satisfactorily. All fairly standard stuff, really, but all the same I think the idea of a New Year's message from the Mayor to all the employees of the town is a good one.
After the kunji, there was the AGM for the Town Employees' Union. I'm a member of the union, but I didn't bother going to the AGM; meetings like this just don't interest me. To be honest, I'm only a member for the sports days and cheap trips the union organises every year.
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Memory comes back to haunt me. (Sounds like something you'd see on a Japanese T-shirt)
After the Town Office bonenkai, we went to Memory, a little bar, and drank until late. Well, today the bill came. For about four hours' drinking, the bill came to a staggering 55000 yen: that's nearly 300 pounds, or to put things into perspective, the last time I went back to the UK, I got a return air ticket for just 80000 yen. Luckily, though, the head of the General Section paid 20000 yen, and three of the more senior men paid 6000 yen each, which meant that the younger members of the party only ended up having to pay 4000 yen each. ('Only'!) It was certainly fun, but all the same I'm glad that there aren't bonenkai (and, more to the point, the associated drinking afterwards) every month!
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 Japan A-Z
Joya-no-kane
Joya-no-kane is the peal of bells rung at Buddhist temples to mark the beginning of the New Year. The bell is rung 108 times, beginning before midnight and continuing into the New Year.
The reason for the bell being 108 times is that Buddhism teaches that people have 108 earthly desires or passions that cause human suffering. With each toll of the bell, one desire is dispelled.
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The International Club's first event of the year is kite-making, on January 18th, and so I decided I'd better have a think about how to make a simple but effective kite, so that I could explain to the members at this evening's planning meeting. Japanese kites tend to be square or rectangular, so I wanted to make a traditional 'western'-style diamond-shaped kite, which would be obviously different. I searched the internet, and (unlike with the origami Santa Claus episode) immediately found plenty of useful sites on how to make a diamond kite, with a cross-shaped frame- exactly what I was thinking of. However, I also found this site, which has details of how to make a kite from basically a sheet of A4 paper, and a barbecue skewer. I printed out the page, and it really does look very easy. It remains to be seen how well the kite will actually fly, but as soon as I can buy some skewers I'm going to try it. It might be too easy for a three-hour International Club event, but I'm sure it will be useful for an elementary school visit at some stage.
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Went to Bebe for lunch again, this time with Nagareda-kun and Shinbe-san (who insisted on paying, even getting up half-way through the meal so she could make sure we didn't get a chance to proffer money). Wendy also came along. As before, the food was very good indeed- better, perhaps, than the first time. These people deserve to do well with their lunchtime venture.
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And still the nengajo come, albeit in dribs and drabs now. I got another one today, from Miura-kun in the JMSDF. When we met last week in Kure, he said he was going back to Nagoya in the New Year; with all the snow yesterday, I wonder if he got back alright?
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Dead end
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The Independent is reporting that food supplies for some seven million North Koreans will run out in early February, unless there is further food aid forthcoming. If the supplies do run out, then this would leave around a third of North Korea's population facing starvation- which could well worsen what the Japanese media is rather euphemistically referring to as the 'Kaku mondai'- North Korea's nuclear threats.
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International Club
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 Web sites worthy of mention...
Googlefight is a good site for wasting a few minutes (or an hour or three). It's a site where you can enter two keywords for a Google search, and the site will compare them to find which has more entries. For example, 'Macintosh' and 'Windows' (7460000 to 60800000 sites, respectively) or 'apples' and 'bananas', or whatever. Fascinating.
(By the way, 'apples'-1750000 sites, 'bananas'-1120000 sites...)
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 Word of the week
zukan-sokunetsu
'Keeping the head cool and the feet warm'. This refers to the Japanese belief that when you keep your head cool and feet warm, your mind stays sharp and your body stays warm, meaning that you can concentrate on things.
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It's something I'd been meaning to do for quite a while, having heard several good reports, but this evening I finally got round to installing Chimera, a web browser for Mac OS X. It's still a beta, so I wasn't expecting that much, but I was very pleasantly surprised. The font spacing is sometimes a little odd (although that might be a side effect of the settings for Japanese text), but nothing so bad as to be unreadable, and in any case this is more than made up for by the speed at which pages are displayed; it's really refreshing to see pages come up almost instantaneously for a change. I look forward to downloading the next release.
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