silly purchase of the week

my new "exercise shoes"

The packaging is all in Japanese, but I discerned from the various graphics and diagrams printed on both sides that the cushion/arch support forces you to work both your front and back calf muscles as you putter around the house. The one bit of English printed on the box reads, "Let's work out a slackless and moderately tight-muscled nice body!!" (their double exclamation point). By all means, let's.

Lou Reed on Cat Street

germophobic or just good manners?

The other day Terry spotted a woman in his office dining hall eating a banana with a spoon. It was sitting on her plate length-wise, with only the top strip of peel removed. (His iphone camera failed him, so sadly, no photo.) When he told me about it I thought, Only in Japan would you see such a thing, but when I mentioned it to my friend Katherine, she said that when her sister was in college, she spent the summer boarding in a convent in Rome, with very proper young Italian ladies. They never touched any food item with their hands, including bananas and oranges both peeled and eaten with knife and fork. So I guess it's not just a Japanese thing.

Hakuba 47

saizu

The boys, skiing the long and windy beginners' trail at Hakuba 47 last weekend.

Bought Terry this ski jacket at Lafuma the other day and was reminded yet again of how an average size American is considered gargantuan here in Japan. The tag spells it out: U.S. size: MEDIUM. European size: LARGE. Japanese size: X-LARGE.

For the boys' ninja costumes (a popular choice for Japanese Day at school - more about that later) I went to Muji and bought black turtlenecks and black leggings in a women's size small. It was a near-perfect fit.
At assembly. Conor is the one holding his hand to his face.
With his buddies Edmund and Joe, outside the classroom

Hawaii with my mom and dad

We had a great week with my parents in Kauai last month. Here's me sitting on a rock on Hanakapiai Beach, feeling good about having made it there, and eating my rambutans...
It's only a 2-mile hike to that spot on the Kalalau Trail, but it was rocky and steep and muddy, so it took a couple hours. (We also stopped a lot to take pictures, so maybe it would've taken us an hour and a half if we hadn't.) My mom and dad watched the boys so Terry and I could do this on our own, and when we got back, they had sorted out all the shells and bits of coral they had collected from the various beaches, and had given them all names, like "giraffe" and "spaceship." Yeah, Grandma rocks...

But back to the funny looking fruit. Rambutans are the size of nectarines, and they have soft red hairy rinds that you can pull apart with your fingers (though it wasn't quite as easy as tearing a clementine open, and sometimes I had to use my teeth to get it started). The flesh inside tastes like a white grape. OK, more shots from the trail:


view of the Na Pali Coast
On most days we would go to one beach or another. I loved them all but the best one, I think, was in Poipu, on the south shore, the warm and sunny side of Kauai.

My camera is pointed east in the shot below; in the background is Brennecke beach, where it was safe enough to body surf.

These are my parents. Aren't they cute?
That's the Kilauea lighthouse behind them. The bird preserve was closed when we stopped by (for President's Day, of all the nerve) but there were whales.


My Dad checking out Waimea Canyon.


There's a free hula show every Wednesday at 5pm at the Coconut Marketplace in Kapa'a, on the east side of the island.


While waiting for the big luau show to begin -- on Friday night we went to the Smith Family Garden Luau, in Wailea -- the kids took turns jumping off the stage while I experimented with the no-flash setting on my camera.

It was a great show, the highlight being the guy in a grass skirt twirling a flaming baton...

one more

Sapporo's Odori Park, Snow Festival 2009

Sapporo

some pics (I posted a bunch on Flickr too)...

On Friday we went skiing at Bankei, about a half hour outside Sapporo. That night we went to Odori Park to see the ice sculptures, and caught this stage show. It's freezing and the keyboard player (far right) isn't wearing any pants! (Click on the image to make it bigger and you'll see what I'm talking about)

Not all the sculptures were perfectly carved.
I sorta liked the lumpy ones.

Yakitori! yum, yum

the snow was perfect for packing snowballs

view of Sapporo TV Tower (dolphin sculpture ahead!)

On Saturday we went to Otaru, to see the "snow gleaming" festival. Then on Sunday we went to the Tsudome site, where there were ice slides and mini-golf-on-ice and more sculptures. It was snowing hard that afternoon, but before we left town we had to make one last trip to the park to see the sculptures we missed the first time around.

taiko drummers on the Disney ice stage

We saw a park official sweep snow off the Doraemon sculpture. Did he forget about Totoro?

Time to go!

the frozen north

Odori Park, Sapporo, Sunday, around 3 p.m.

We spent the weekend in Hokkaido, at the Sapporo Snow Festival. It snowed most of the time we were there, but we had all the right gear so we weren't cold, and it was beautiful. The boys loved the big piles of powder, and spent most of their time throwing it in each other's faces. The ice sculptures in Odori Park were something, too...

So was the giant slide (called the waku-waku slider) at the Tsudome site. We didn't see too many other grownups going down, but Terry and I waited with the boys for 40 minutes to get to the front of that line, and we weren't going to let the kids have all the fun!

will post details and more pics soon

Volcano erupts near Tokyo

Read about it here

Fun fact lifted from this AP article: With 108 active volcanos, Japan is among the most seismically busy countries in the world. The country lies in the "Ring of Fire" — a series of volcanoes and fault lines that outline the Pacific Ocean.

Oh, and no ash in our part of town, so I didn't know about this until I woke up this morning and read an email from my friend KQ, who lives in New Jersey.

'Irashaimasen!'

I finally learned the name of the ramen place down the street, Tukumo Ramen. (The little flash animation you see on the website ends with "Irashaimasen!" which means Welcome.) This place is known for its cheese ramen. They grate Hokkaido cheese on top of the noodles. Can't say I've tried that, as I prefer miso ramen, and in spring/summer, the grilled chicken and cucumber strips over noodles in a cold sesame broth. There's often a line of people along the sidewalk waiting to get in, standing quietly, in a perfect line, behind a rope. Sometimes the wait staff brings menus out so they can pre-order. It's small and cramped and they have terrific gyoza, only you can't order that until after 3:30pm.

shop window, Nishi Azabu

nice

At Costco in Chiba today, I asked someone if the store had ice packs. I had just bought a pile of meat and nothing frozen to help keep it chilled during the journey home. (My friend Brenda drove me. Thanks Brenda!) A sales guy said "vending machine" and pointed to the exit where another employee was checking receipts (just like they do at the Costcos in the U.S.). Sure enough, there was a coin-operated dry-ice dispenser. Only 50 yen per serving. You slide open the glass door, hook the handles of a plastic bag so that it's right under the open end of a metal chute, close the door, put in your five 10-yen coins, press the green button, and then....it's like a blizzard in there! Crushed dry ice drops out of the chute, and there's a loud whooshing sound, and some of it blows out of the bag, but most of it lands in it. When that's over you slide the door open, grab the bag now half-full of dry ice chunks, tie it up and you're outta there.

spellings

"You know how I did that?" Dylan asked me, while I was testing him on this week's spellings. He had just written the word because.

"How?" I asked.

He smiled and said, "Big elephants can't always understand small elephants."

fire and rum

At a school assembly last Friday, Dylan's class, the Year 2 Pearlberries, presented what they have been learning about the Great Fire of London. Here's a clip.


Dylan is the boy in the middle, in the plain white shirt. You first see him holding up a poster and then he recites two lines. In case you can't hear it clearly, this is what he says:

Dylan: "But surely you could have dialed 999 and called the fire engines to put the fire out!"

Classmate: "No, we didn't have fire engines at the time. We used leather buckets and squirts to try and put the fire out but it was really no use. The fire was too strong!"

Dylan: "The information text we read told us that people pulled the houses down with fire hooks and blew houses up to make fire breaks to try and stop the fire from spreading farther."

Another classmate then mentions the Great Fire of Meireki, which killed 100,000 people and destroyed much of Tokyo (then Edo) 9 years earlier, in 1657.

After the history lesson, a song and dance number! Again, Dylan is the guy in the middle, plain white shirt. Lyrics posted below.




Pirate Song

When I was one, I sucked my thumb, the day I went to sea
I climbed aboard a pirate ship and the Captain said to me
'we're going this way, that way, forward, back, over the Irish sea
A bottle of rum to fill my tum, and that's the life for me

When I was two, I lost my shoe...

When I was three, I climbed a tree...

When I was four, I shut the door...

When I was five, I learned to dive...

When I was six, I met some chicks...

sometimes I get a good one

My iphone takes crappy pictures normally but I like this one, of Shinjuku at night

they do sell everything

the $20 doggie umbrella, available at Tokyu Hands

Kua 'Aina

On Wednesday, some 15 hours after Obama's swearing in, I took the boys to dinner, to a "Hawaiian sandwiches" joint in Aoyama. We had been meaning to try this place, Kua 'Aina, mainly because it seemed to be the one good burger restaurant in town that we hadn't tried yet. The point is, there was this big framed photo of Obama by the register. The picture shows him at the Kua 'Aina in Honolulu. Now I had been kinda down this week in the days leading up the inauguration, I think because I had been feeling completely disconnected to what was going on, removed from this Big Moment in History, so out of it, being so far away, and the fact that the live coverage was at 2 am local time didn't help.

But seeing that photograph, which shows a beaming Barack in a gray T-shirt and Chicago White Sox cap, standing at the counter with two of the shop's employees -- I don't know, it just cheered me up. And when we got home, after the kids were squared away, I went online and watched a bunch of video clips of the events and read some of the articles and blog posts and looked at some friends' inaugural ball photos on Facebook, and, bit by bit, that bummed out feeling went away. I used to live in Washington DC, and I'd been to two previous inaugurations (the first Bush in 1989, Clinton in 1993), but this week was the first time in the 16 years since I'd moved away that I actually missed the place and wished I could've been there, watching a Jumbotron with the huddled masses.

Around here, at least around the British School, nobody was really talking about the inauguration, and why would they, anyway, right? But the election had been a hot topic of conversation in and around the halls of the school and at the Starbucks where the moms tend to congregate after drop-off. I had Brits, Aussies, French and Japanese moms all talking to me about it. One Japanese mom told me she had been moved by Obama's acceptance speech, when he talked about the "old lady." I had people patting me on the back, giving me high-fives, congratulating me for electing the right guy. "I'm so happy for you," they would say, sometimes pausing for a moment and adding, "you are happy, right?" One English lady who lived in Westport, Conn., for two years (and absolutely loved it) said that on election day she wished she was an American just so she could've voted for Obama. It was exciting. We finally had a cool president! No more shame over the screw-ups, no more having to join in the eye-rolling, (like yeah, I know, we suck) because now we didn't suck. Back in November, a week or so post-election, Garrison Keillor wrote that "We all walk taller this fall." Well I certainly did. Maybe the inauguration was anti-climactic on this side of the world. But it would've been nice to get a few more of those high-fives.

Mooo

I love this sign outside our neighborhood Freshness Burger.

Its the Year of Beef, baby.

Tokyo Tower

I wanted to go to the top of this thing during Christmas vacation. Monday Dec. 29 seemed like the perfect day. Terry had to go to work, the sky was blue, the boys and I had no prior engagements...Alas, when we arrived, the mile looked to be about a mile long. Needless to say we didn't get on it. We went grocery shopping instead. What fun! Like bulls in a china shop...Anyway...Later that day Terry told me that the tower was celebrating its 50th anniversary. And that all the Japanese schools were off that week too, for New Year's (the most important holiday of the year in Japan). Ah, yes, of course! And next year I will attempt to go to the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day! (what a dummy)

I did get a few nice photos from the ground though.

Ghibli!

Hayao Miyazaki's animation studio has a very cool museum in Inokashira Park, in Mitaka, a suburb west of Tokyo. It's great for kids. There's a giant cat bus to play in, with piles of big black poof balls with eyes to throw around (modeled after those little creatures in My Neighbor Totoro, made of soot I think); a trippy zoetrope with 3D models of the Totoro characters, spinning around on a circular platform (a strobe LED makes it look like they're in motion -- there's Mei jumping rope!); loads of watercolor sketches and a few cels from Totoro and other Miyazaki movies; film reels you can manipulate yourself; a theater showing an animated short (in Japanese) about a lost dog (the film changes every few months I think); and a gallery showcasing other animators' work (right now it's the 1954 British animated feature version of Animal Farm, which is actually being re-released here, we're told, and will soon be showing in a couple theaters in Shibuya).

The robot from Castle in the Sky lives up on the roof. We paid him a visit last Saturday.
[Thanks, Stace, for telling us about this place all those many months ago. It just took us a while to get there!]

Ernest takes our picture

Last weekend we went to Nikko, a lovely little town in the mountains two hours north of Tokyo, to do some sight-seeing, and stopped by for a caffeine re-up at this mobile coffee shop near the entrance to the Toshogu shrine, the main tourist attraction there. The proprietor took our picture and posted it on his website. Check it out! (When you go to http://ernest.petit.cc, you have to click on "Diary" then scroll down a ways. We're under Sat.01.03.2009.)

the boys

mochi mystery solved...

Conor says "HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!"

What is this thing he's pretending to be, you ask?

Wikipedia explains:

"Kagami mochi (鏡餅, Kagami mochi), literally mirror rice cake, is a traditional Japanese New Year decoration. It usually consists of two round mochi (rice cakes), the smaller placed atop the larger, and a daidai (a Japanese bitter orange) with an attached leaf on top. In addition, it may have a sheet of konbu and a skewer of dried persimmons under the mochi. It sits on a stand called a sanpō (三宝, sanpō) over a sheet called a shihōbeni (四方紅, shihōbeni), which is supposed to ward off fires from the house for the following years. Sheets of paper called gohei (御幣, gohei) folded into lightning shapes similar to those seen on sumo wrestler's belts are also attached.

The kagami mochi first appeared in the Muromachi period (14th-16th century). The name kagami ("mirror") is said to have originated from its resemblance to an old-fashioned kind of round copper mirror, which also had a religious significance. The reason for it is not clear. Explanations include mochi being a food for sunny days,the 'spirit' of the rice plant being found in the mochi,and the mochi being a food which gives strength.

The two mochi discs are variously said to symbolize the going and coming years, the human heart,"yin" and "yang", or the moon and the sun. The "daidai", whose name means "generations",is said to symbolize the continuation of a family from generation to generation....

It is traditionally broken and eaten in a Shinto ritual called kagami biraki (mirror opening) on the second Saturday or Sunday of January. This is an important ritual in Japanese martial arts dojos.It was first adopted into Japanese martial arts when Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, adopted it in 1884, and since then the practice has spread to aikido, karate and jujutsu studios..."

Here's a shot of the real thing, which decorated our table on New Year's eve...

2009 is the Year of the Ox...

a.k.a. Year of the Brown Cow. GoToHoroscope.com says 2009 "symbolizes strength gathered through unity, harmony, obedience, courage and hard slog."

Happy NEW YEAR

Friends brought over a traditional New Year's cake, which is essentially mochi (pounded rice) in the shape of the bottom two-thirds of a snowman. It looks pretty with its paper decorations and everything but when we cut off the casing and cut into it, it was a huge disappointment. The kids had a nibble, and Conor said he thought it needed chocolate syrup. My friend's daughter said it tasted like "a candle." We couldn't read the directions written on the packaging so perhaps it is supposed to be warmed up or topped with something... Must bring the packaging into school on Tuesday and ask one of the Japanese moms to translate...

UPDATE Jan. 12: I've asked several Japanese women what you're supposed to do with the mochi cakes and they said you're supposed to heat it in some way after you slice it, which makes sense, though I'm not sure that would be enough. The stuff is horribly bland, after all. The woman who runs the ryokan where we stayed in Nikko told me she likes to saute her mochi cake with soy sauce. My taiko teacher's assistant (she plays the bass note -- or is it 'base' note? -- while we students struggle with the other parts) recommended putting it in the oven topped with tomato sauce and cheese, like a pizza. Will have to give that a shot next year.

happy anniversary to us!

Today we hit the one-year mark. It was Dec. 28, 2007 when we first arrived in Tokyo with the kids to start our new life. We didn't do anything remarkable to celebrate today (mainly because I just realized it now, and the kids are already asleep and Terry is playing an Xbox game...). We just had a lazy Sunday morning followed by an outing to the Children's Castle where the boys jumped around in the rooftop ball pit while I read a book and Terry did the crossword puzzle. Then we watched Kung Fu Panda, which, I have to say, I totally loved. The DVD was a Christmas present from the folks at home. Thanks, Murrays!

(the boys on Christmas morning)

Goodbye Tree

I had to pull a Dexter today and hack up our Christmas tree (which we had started calling, with great affection, "Old Brownie") into pieces small enough to stuff inside regular size trash bags.

Refuse disposal here is nothing if not tidy, and organized, and getting rid of the tree was to be no exception, at least that was the message I received, despite the language barrier, from the Japanese gent who works in our building. A kind and patient man, he listened as I attempted to ask for his assistance by making wild gestures with my arms, as in, I've got something big I need to throw out. Back home in Brooklyn, we'd just call down to the front desk and one of the guys would (eventually) bring up a Hefty bag big enough to cover a small car, shove the whole thing inside, tie it off and drag it away. This more than earned the Christmas bonus in my mind.

But we are living in the Windsor House now, and it occurred to me that dragging the thing along the breezeway outside our door and into the carpeted elevator and down to the trash room, leaving a trail of pine needles on the spic-and-span tiles of the common areas and the impossibly pristine concrete floor of the garage, would simply not do. I wouldn't dare make a mess like that. Which was why I consulted the maintenance man, and which was why I asked him to follow me home so he could see what I was talking about, and why I then followed him back to the basement and didn't protest when he handed me a small saw, a pair of gardening sheers and a stack of clear plastic bags.

Tools in hand, I went back upstairs and was studying the thing, trying to figure out a plan of attack (Terry had taken the boys to a park so I was on my own), when the doorbell rang. It was the maintenance man, and I thought for a second, he's here to help me! But I was wrong. He had forgotten to give me one more thing: a pair of gardening gloves, the kind with rubber tread on the palms. How thoughtful! No really, I mean it. Arigato gozaimasu. (Sure you don't want to stay and snip branches? No?)

On my own again, I started hacking away, and it was slow going at first, but pretty soon I got the hang of it. I can't say how much time passed before I had the thing bagged up, only that our maintenance man seemed to know precisely how long it would take me because just as I was sweeping the last pile of needles into a dustpan, the doorbell rang again. It was him, with two empty garbage bins and a rolling cart. He'd come to collect the bags! And that was that.

Oh but I didn't let him leave until I could take a picture. Goodbye, Old Brownie!

round-offs and other moves

Today parents were allowed to stay and watch the gymnastics. Poor Dylan was up at 4 am throwing up all over the bathroom floor (we're hoping he aims better next time) so he basically napped on the sidelines while I watched Conor show his stuff, including a round-off dismount off a (small, very low) balance beam -- unassisted! Of course I left the new Flip MiniHD camcorder, a Christmas gift from my mom and dad (thanks guys!) at home so all I have are dark, blurry images shot with my iPhone.

In other gymnastics news: I watched Conor do a handstand against the wall, and a tripod headstand on the mat. And a forward roll on the trampoline. And a straddle jump off the mini-tramp.

This 'I can.' program was the best thing for them this week. Too bad they both missed days due to illness. At least the stomach bug is making the rounds in our house now, as opposed to next week when Terry and I will be busy preparing for our first annual Tokyo New Year's bash! The disco ball is already installed in the living room ceiling...

Merry Christmas!

The cool thing about Dec. 25 not being a holiday here is that, with business going on as usual, the postman was able to deliver to our door one last Christmas package. It was from Terry's mom, and it contained, among other things, an enormous spicy Italian salami, from the famous Volpi shop in St. Louis, Miz-er-ah. Grazie, Nonna! Time to mangia!

Also...

7 more holiday cards turned up in our mailbox this afternoon! Thanks everybody! (Our mass mailing should be landing stateside sometime next week...)

After spending the morning ripping presents open and emptying "stockings" (Conor's soccer socks) of Pokemon cards, Pokemon pencils and little blocks of modeling clay, the boys did go to their 4th day of gymnastics camp. When I picked them up at 3pm, Conor reported that he learned how to do a 'round-off' on the balance beam (with assistance, I am going to assume) and Dylan announced he can now do 'tuck straddle pike twist' on the trampoline. Now they are watching Kung Fu Panda (thanks Aunt Sarah!) and later they will most likely resume building a giant AT-TE out of Legos (thanks Papa Jack!)

And thanks to everybody else who sent us holiday gifts and greetings. Mazel tov.