It is sunday and we are at the office after church. Melissa is talking with her parents on the cell phone, and Callan is quietly enjoying a tube of frozen sugary green stuff (japanese equiv. to an otter pop) so I will take a minute to finish my toilet story.
As I was saying, there are few technological marvels in Japan that rival the automatic toilet. Imagine for a moment, if you will, Captain Kirks chair inwhich he sat for seasons on end, exploring the far reaches of outerspace, going where no man has gone before. Now imagine that chair with a flip top seat, and a flush handle and you begin to get a picture of what its like to `go like no american has gone before.`
Of course, the first half of using a japanese electronic toilet is the same as the first half of using an american toilet. Nature has dictated that much, and I dont think even the japanese would mess with that. On a japanese electronic toilet it is the clean up that the Japanese have `improved` on. There is of course the `western option` hanging in a role on the wall, but for the more adventurous, next to the role of toilet paper is a remote control with buttons labeled in perfectly legible japanese, which is of course not a problem as long as you read japanese. Heres a guide for those who need one.
The top button is stop. Its bright pink and is the most important button. If anything goes wrong, hit this button.
The second button is oshiri, or `bottom` this controls a spray of water that hits you in the bottom.
The next button is bidet (I think that is how you spell it.) And it is not for men to use.
The next button controls the pressure of the water,
the button below that controls temperature.
On our toilet there is also a button for `massage,` and finally a button for a blow dryer.
There is also a button for heating the toilet seat in the winter, and an option for large or small flushes depending on your need.
I imagine that with a little practice one might get good enough that one would not feel it necessary to finish up with the `western method` but I am not to that point yet. In fact, I dont even mess with the buttons.
But, just in case you are ever stuck in a jam in a japanese electronic toilet, if you push a button and cant get things to stop, just remember to hit the top button.
Mata ne.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Day 24
Who ever designed houses in Japan did not have the average american in mind. Take the kitchens for example: the counter (or actually the sink, their is no counter) only comes up to about the height of the bottom seam on my pants pocket. When one stands at the sink to do dishes, one must be careful at what angle one hold the plate, or one could soak oneself in the crotch repeatedly during a round of dishwashing.
Of course, while short counters are expected in a country where the average height for women in Japan is about 5 feet two inches, the kitchen cabinets are an enigma. The cabinets in our kitchen, and in most kitchens (all of the kitchens I have been in, or seen on television) start at the ceiling and come down to just about six feet from the ground ( I can just stand under the cabinets in our kitchen). Even Melissa and I have to get a stool in order to reach the back of the cabinets. If a 5 foot 2 inch woman in japan tried to get into the back of the cabinet they would need a two foot step latter.
Another hazard of living in a traditional japanese home is that the doorways are all very low ( in the case of our house just under 6 feet tall). I know this measurement with precision because I am just under six feet tall and if I stand up in the door way, or if I am walking through a doorway without paying attention, my head makes contact with the door frame (the latter is of course more painful, and has happened a half dozen times since we moved in). As a missionary these low door frames were notorious for flooring particularly tall missionaries who werent cautious enough walking through their apartments.
I mentioned earlier that the kitchen has no counter space. There is a little , but it is more of a drying rack for dishes, and is actually part of the sink ( which incidentally is almost large enough for Callan to lie down in, and would be an olympic size pool for a new born). I wish we had a little less sink and a little more kitchen. Our stove is a two burner gas counter top stove that looks like a residental version of a coleman camp stove. The fridge, as I have mentioned before I think, holds about two days worth of produce, and is about four feet tall. We have a toaster oven, and a microwave that we think doubles as a mini conventional oven as well, but we havent tried anything out yet.
I should also mention the toilet. There is perhaps nothing that demonstrates better Japans dual preoccupation with being ultra clean and ultra hightech than the hands free automatic toilets that are very common in new and remodeled homes (including ours) and come complete with heated toilet seats, your choice of large or small flushes, and a remote control to boot. I will need more time than I have now to talk about that, so for now....Ja mata.
Of course, while short counters are expected in a country where the average height for women in Japan is about 5 feet two inches, the kitchen cabinets are an enigma. The cabinets in our kitchen, and in most kitchens (all of the kitchens I have been in, or seen on television) start at the ceiling and come down to just about six feet from the ground ( I can just stand under the cabinets in our kitchen). Even Melissa and I have to get a stool in order to reach the back of the cabinets. If a 5 foot 2 inch woman in japan tried to get into the back of the cabinet they would need a two foot step latter.
Another hazard of living in a traditional japanese home is that the doorways are all very low ( in the case of our house just under 6 feet tall). I know this measurement with precision because I am just under six feet tall and if I stand up in the door way, or if I am walking through a doorway without paying attention, my head makes contact with the door frame (the latter is of course more painful, and has happened a half dozen times since we moved in). As a missionary these low door frames were notorious for flooring particularly tall missionaries who werent cautious enough walking through their apartments.
I mentioned earlier that the kitchen has no counter space. There is a little , but it is more of a drying rack for dishes, and is actually part of the sink ( which incidentally is almost large enough for Callan to lie down in, and would be an olympic size pool for a new born). I wish we had a little less sink and a little more kitchen. Our stove is a two burner gas counter top stove that looks like a residental version of a coleman camp stove. The fridge, as I have mentioned before I think, holds about two days worth of produce, and is about four feet tall. We have a toaster oven, and a microwave that we think doubles as a mini conventional oven as well, but we havent tried anything out yet.
I should also mention the toilet. There is perhaps nothing that demonstrates better Japans dual preoccupation with being ultra clean and ultra hightech than the hands free automatic toilets that are very common in new and remodeled homes (including ours) and come complete with heated toilet seats, your choice of large or small flushes, and a remote control to boot. I will need more time than I have now to talk about that, so for now....Ja mata.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
obon continued
Well, trying to type with Callan on my lap is a chore...
We arrived in Tokushima in time to relax a bit before church. The Church just got carpet installed last week and it looks great. Before the carpet their was just tan lanolium and it made sacrament meeting very loud. All the members were just as I remember them: friendly, hard working, and a little tired. Almost all the young single adults that I was aquainted with are now married, one with a child, and sadly none of the people I taught as a missionary are currently attending the branch. Two of them, brother Tsumitomo and Brother Shimizu have apparently lost interest, while a third, Brother Watanabe, moved away, and a fourth,Brother Asamine is currently living in a halfway home for poor individuals.
Melissa and I actually went to visit him after church with Callan. He was poor when I met him five years ago, but I guess things have gotten worse. He was very surprised to see us, and seemed happy for the visit. Brother Nakano from the branch apparently home teaches him regularly and he is doing as well as he can. He told me he had lost 40 kilos and said he was currently looking for work. We only had about twenty minutes to talk, but it was good to see him.
Sunday night we went to the Kunimi familys house to stay. The Kunimi family has been involved in the local dance festival for thirty plus years and said they would give us an inside tour of the whole event. At six pm we went down town where they had blocked off 35 square blocks of the city to make way for the several hundred thousand visitors and dancers that filled the streets.
The dance troupes make their way around the city, followed closely by their musicians who play a collection of drums, chimes, and guitar looking instruments, the name of which I should know, but have forgotten.
The festival started several hundred years ago to celebrate the completion of Tokushima castle and has since grown into the largest dance festival in Japan. We were lucky to be here during the festival and to have so much time off.
Callan was at first a little surprised by the noise, but by the end of the night was really in to it. While we took a break to eat our picnic dinner in a public square outside of city hall, just next to a main parade route, Callan spent the entire time running around in large circles with a japanese fan in his hand saying hello to the people has they ran by. He was given several fans in the process and caught just about everyones eye.
By 8:30 pm the crowds were getting thicker and Callan was getting more tired, so we bagged it and went home. We got home at 9:30pm and were in bed by 10.
The next morning the Kunimis treated us to a real japanese breakfast of Miso soup, rice, little tiny dried fish, pounded fish patties that taste a bit like fishy spam, scrambled eggs, and grapes, and we were on the road again by 8:30 am.
We spent the morning at the castle ruins park by the train station, did some window shopping at a department store, and then met up with some other english teachers from Marugame for lunch at a sandwhich shop in town owned by an american. We payed 950 yen (about 8 bucks) for a foot long sub and another 350 yen (2.90) for some chilli spice fries.
On the way home from Tokushima we stopped in Takamatsu, my second area as a missionary to see if there was anyone at the Church. We met brother Tabakodani who is in charge of the building, and he gave us a tour. The downstairs had been remodeled because it had flooded really bad last year. Brother Tabakodani told us that an american family had just moved out of the branch and left all their childrens toys and some food storage and if that if we wanted some we could have it. We were greatful to take with us a five gallon bucket of white wheat (now all we need to do is find a grinder and we will have whole wheat flour, which is impossible to find at a regular grocery store) some beans, and a four wheeled kids bike for Callan.
Now we are home and we are done playing for a while until our first paycheck in september.
Oh yeah, also, we just got the internet figured out at our house and it should be all ready to go in about two weeks. We have IP phone service with calls to America only costing about 2 cents a minute. We will keep everyone up on the details as we get more aquainted with how it all works.
mata ne
We arrived in Tokushima in time to relax a bit before church. The Church just got carpet installed last week and it looks great. Before the carpet their was just tan lanolium and it made sacrament meeting very loud. All the members were just as I remember them: friendly, hard working, and a little tired. Almost all the young single adults that I was aquainted with are now married, one with a child, and sadly none of the people I taught as a missionary are currently attending the branch. Two of them, brother Tsumitomo and Brother Shimizu have apparently lost interest, while a third, Brother Watanabe, moved away, and a fourth,Brother Asamine is currently living in a halfway home for poor individuals.
Melissa and I actually went to visit him after church with Callan. He was poor when I met him five years ago, but I guess things have gotten worse. He was very surprised to see us, and seemed happy for the visit. Brother Nakano from the branch apparently home teaches him regularly and he is doing as well as he can. He told me he had lost 40 kilos and said he was currently looking for work. We only had about twenty minutes to talk, but it was good to see him.
Sunday night we went to the Kunimi familys house to stay. The Kunimi family has been involved in the local dance festival for thirty plus years and said they would give us an inside tour of the whole event. At six pm we went down town where they had blocked off 35 square blocks of the city to make way for the several hundred thousand visitors and dancers that filled the streets.
The dance troupes make their way around the city, followed closely by their musicians who play a collection of drums, chimes, and guitar looking instruments, the name of which I should know, but have forgotten.
The festival started several hundred years ago to celebrate the completion of Tokushima castle and has since grown into the largest dance festival in Japan. We were lucky to be here during the festival and to have so much time off.
Callan was at first a little surprised by the noise, but by the end of the night was really in to it. While we took a break to eat our picnic dinner in a public square outside of city hall, just next to a main parade route, Callan spent the entire time running around in large circles with a japanese fan in his hand saying hello to the people has they ran by. He was given several fans in the process and caught just about everyones eye.
By 8:30 pm the crowds were getting thicker and Callan was getting more tired, so we bagged it and went home. We got home at 9:30pm and were in bed by 10.
The next morning the Kunimis treated us to a real japanese breakfast of Miso soup, rice, little tiny dried fish, pounded fish patties that taste a bit like fishy spam, scrambled eggs, and grapes, and we were on the road again by 8:30 am.
We spent the morning at the castle ruins park by the train station, did some window shopping at a department store, and then met up with some other english teachers from Marugame for lunch at a sandwhich shop in town owned by an american. We payed 950 yen (about 8 bucks) for a foot long sub and another 350 yen (2.90) for some chilli spice fries.
On the way home from Tokushima we stopped in Takamatsu, my second area as a missionary to see if there was anyone at the Church. We met brother Tabakodani who is in charge of the building, and he gave us a tour. The downstairs had been remodeled because it had flooded really bad last year. Brother Tabakodani told us that an american family had just moved out of the branch and left all their childrens toys and some food storage and if that if we wanted some we could have it. We were greatful to take with us a five gallon bucket of white wheat (now all we need to do is find a grinder and we will have whole wheat flour, which is impossible to find at a regular grocery store) some beans, and a four wheeled kids bike for Callan.
Now we are home and we are done playing for a while until our first paycheck in september.
Oh yeah, also, we just got the internet figured out at our house and it should be all ready to go in about two weeks. We have IP phone service with calls to America only costing about 2 cents a minute. We will keep everyone up on the details as we get more aquainted with how it all works.
mata ne
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
OBON (Pronounced Owe bone)
I owe this opportunity to write at length to the wonderful people at the ministry of japanese holidays who decided that August 12-16th would be a great weekend to give most of the country some time off. My 6pm class which is usually held on location at a large industrial electricty factory was canceled today because of the Obon holiday and that has left me quite a bit of time to write. And as we still dont have the internet at home, I can only write when Im in the office with nothing to do. Even then, I have to type on a japanese computer with a keyboard designed for typing japanese, which means, as you have probably noticed, that I still cant figure out how to type an apostrophe.
So Obon is the second most important holiday in Japan, next to New Years. During Obon, the tradition is that dead ancestors return to their graves to be with their living progeny. Thus everyone (okay well not everyone, but a lot of people) goes back to their hometown and visits their local shrine or Ginga to clean the grave sites, offer food and flowers, pray, and ponder. The graves are actually miniature sepulcures of sorts that hold not bodies but urns. Families are burried for centuries in the same place.
Besides all the worship, Obon is a big excuse to party. Just about every major city has some kind of festival on or around Obon weekend, and that is what we were interested in. None of my japanese friends are buddhist so there was not opportunity to go visit a grave to see how its done, but a family I know in Tokushima has been invovled in that towns dance festival for thirty years, so we headed south to Tokushima.
From Marugame, Tokushima is about 125 kilometers south east on the local highway. It takes three hours to drive their unless you want to take the expressway, which only takes about an hour and a half, but you have to pay a 2000 yen (about 18 dollars american ) toll. We left marugame Sunday morning at 7 AM on the local highway with every intention of avoiding the 18 dllar tole, but about an hour into our trip the local highway appeared to end at an onramp to the expressway. Their were two smaller roads that went to the left right of us, but we werent sure where they went and since we were trying to make it to Tokushima by 10 AM for Church we decided to take the express way. From where we were it ended up costing 1300 yen (about 11 dollars american).
The legal speed on the `express` way is 70 kilometers per hour,(about 50 mph) but even driving at 85 kpr we were being past on the left and right by surely looking Japanese people who couldnt believe how slow we were going. After holding up traffic for quite a while along a particularly long stretch of single lane expressway, I decided to drive a bit faster.
The expressway snakes through the mountainous country side, sometimes bending around hillsides, and sometimes plowing through them via tunnels as long as 2000 meters (about a mile and a quarter). Passing through large cities the expressway skims over the tops of small buildings on large cement pilons which disappear into nothing as the road touches down in the country side, only to reappear as massive concrete stilts hundreds of feet tall that support the expressway as it leaps off one cliff and spans an entire valley until it reaches the the side of another green hill. About thirty minutes from our home in Marugame the expressway performs one of its most spactacular feats, perhaps bested only by the underwater tunnel that connects Honshu to Hokkaido in northern Japan. From Sakaide City, the expressway makes a dramatic turn north and heads out over the green choppy waters of the Japan inland sea. Just as you think its about as far out as it can get it touches down on an island several thousand feet from shore. From their it wriggles and weaves its way accross the inland sea, bouncing from island to island until finally after nearly 15 miles the expressway again touches ground in Okayama.
The bridge itself is actually six bridges that carry on their backs four lanes of traffic and two regular train lines. There is even room for a bullet train line to be added sometime in the future. The entire bridge chain was completed 1988 and took ten years to build.
The expressway got us to Tokushima an hour ahead of shedule and we were glad for it. Callan needed to get a good run in before sitting through three hours of church. He took laps around the small church building while I follewed closely behind and melissa rested in the car.
The sensation of being in Tokushima again, a place I had served for almost half a year as a missionary, was almost more than I could take. But my 8pm class is about to start, so for now,
matta ne.
ps forgive the typos- no editing whatsoever this round.
So Obon is the second most important holiday in Japan, next to New Years. During Obon, the tradition is that dead ancestors return to their graves to be with their living progeny. Thus everyone (okay well not everyone, but a lot of people) goes back to their hometown and visits their local shrine or Ginga to clean the grave sites, offer food and flowers, pray, and ponder. The graves are actually miniature sepulcures of sorts that hold not bodies but urns. Families are burried for centuries in the same place.
Besides all the worship, Obon is a big excuse to party. Just about every major city has some kind of festival on or around Obon weekend, and that is what we were interested in. None of my japanese friends are buddhist so there was not opportunity to go visit a grave to see how its done, but a family I know in Tokushima has been invovled in that towns dance festival for thirty years, so we headed south to Tokushima.
From Marugame, Tokushima is about 125 kilometers south east on the local highway. It takes three hours to drive their unless you want to take the expressway, which only takes about an hour and a half, but you have to pay a 2000 yen (about 18 dollars american ) toll. We left marugame Sunday morning at 7 AM on the local highway with every intention of avoiding the 18 dllar tole, but about an hour into our trip the local highway appeared to end at an onramp to the expressway. Their were two smaller roads that went to the left right of us, but we werent sure where they went and since we were trying to make it to Tokushima by 10 AM for Church we decided to take the express way. From where we were it ended up costing 1300 yen (about 11 dollars american).
The legal speed on the `express` way is 70 kilometers per hour,(about 50 mph) but even driving at 85 kpr we were being past on the left and right by surely looking Japanese people who couldnt believe how slow we were going. After holding up traffic for quite a while along a particularly long stretch of single lane expressway, I decided to drive a bit faster.
The expressway snakes through the mountainous country side, sometimes bending around hillsides, and sometimes plowing through them via tunnels as long as 2000 meters (about a mile and a quarter). Passing through large cities the expressway skims over the tops of small buildings on large cement pilons which disappear into nothing as the road touches down in the country side, only to reappear as massive concrete stilts hundreds of feet tall that support the expressway as it leaps off one cliff and spans an entire valley until it reaches the the side of another green hill. About thirty minutes from our home in Marugame the expressway performs one of its most spactacular feats, perhaps bested only by the underwater tunnel that connects Honshu to Hokkaido in northern Japan. From Sakaide City, the expressway makes a dramatic turn north and heads out over the green choppy waters of the Japan inland sea. Just as you think its about as far out as it can get it touches down on an island several thousand feet from shore. From their it wriggles and weaves its way accross the inland sea, bouncing from island to island until finally after nearly 15 miles the expressway again touches ground in Okayama.
The bridge itself is actually six bridges that carry on their backs four lanes of traffic and two regular train lines. There is even room for a bullet train line to be added sometime in the future. The entire bridge chain was completed 1988 and took ten years to build.
The expressway got us to Tokushima an hour ahead of shedule and we were glad for it. Callan needed to get a good run in before sitting through three hours of church. He took laps around the small church building while I follewed closely behind and melissa rested in the car.
The sensation of being in Tokushima again, a place I had served for almost half a year as a missionary, was almost more than I could take. But my 8pm class is about to start, so for now,
matta ne.
ps forgive the typos- no editing whatsoever this round.
A note to our vast readership
To the millions of people out their with enough interest in the minutia of our lives to read this blog I have an idea that will make this miracle of modern communication even more miraculous. We love to read your comments and here what is going on in your life and we love to reply to you. However when you send a comment via the blog we dont get your email address. If you are sure we have your email address then don:t worry about it, but, if by chance you think we may not have it, then please include it in the -from- line or somewhere in your comment so we can email you back. Thanks to all, and again, sorry things have been so sparse, we STILL dont have the internet.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Quick update
I start work in just a few minutes, so here is a quick update. We still dont have the internet at our house (or a computer monitor for that matter) so we are not able to post much. We pick up our foreign registration cards today, we are going to Tokushima this weekend for a big dance festival, and we are adjusting to the heat well. Talk to you later!
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