Wow, looking back at what I wrote in the last update I realise how much I
am doing over here, it seems like forever ago that I wrote that one!

Sorry, this is really long, and probably boring in parts, and maybe
repetitive, and unstructured and well, I find its how I like it to be! So,
there are gems among the dross I am sure! All references to time are
completely unlikely to be correct!

Yoshida. Went to an ALT run Halloween party in Yoshida. For the first time
in my life I celebrated Halloween (Yay, learn about American culture in
Japan!) and ended up carving the pumpkins, which took a while to perfect
but was good fun. They also had this mummy wrap thing where people were
wrapped in toilet paper, so I went over and got wrapped up but so many
kids were doing the wrapping two of them got wrapped to me in the frenzy,
so that was damn funny! It was great fun playing with all the kids! On
Sunday I went to the town cultural festival which was really interesting
and there was some great artwork and pottery and pictures of the .dragon
mist.. (a single band of cloud running over the mountains here). There was
some ikebana (flower arrangement) and one of them had a Kangaroo Paw in
it!!!! *laughs* Those cheats! In the office on Monday there was an art
book which I had a look in and the first page I opened it to had these
strange looking dolls on it...and I was like, they look familiar! They
were at the festival and it turns out the guy who made them is a good
friend of my boss and they sell for $6000 or so!! Wow!

Well, soon after the last update I spent the next few weeks in both
preschool and elementary school dealing with crops of sweet potato! Many a
time we picked them and then there were sweet potato parties where they
did everything imaginable with sweet potato..boil, fry, cover with honey,
cook and mash and put in sandwiches with cream, fry and cover with soy
sauce (shoyu) and even cooked them in an open fire on one occasion!

So, in this period I have started spending whole days at preschool with
kiddies anywhere between the ages of 2 and 5. I tell most people I go to
preschool and they are like, wow, that.s my favorite!! I then point out
that I go for the whole day and they are like, shit! I am exhausted after
my one hour that I spend with them. So, what can I say, the little kids
over here are beautiful, and they are amazingly well behaved, they will
play together for hours, making up their own games, having fun and being
nice to each other for that whole time. They also learn heaps of songs and
plays and things so they are really good at that sort of thing, it.s a
pity that their spirit is afterwards crushed in the next 12 years of their
lives. But it is exhausting and more than a little mind numbing to spend a
whole day running around, crawling around, carrying kids around, digging
holes, making lego and the like!!!

So, the education system here...kids are put into groups that they are
expected to hang out with at lunchtimes and whatever, that is assuming
they get a lunchtime! During elementary school they have lunchtime but at
junior high there is only about 15 minutes where they get to do what they
want. Up until high school all kids eat school lunch together! Sometimes
it is good, sometimes bad, but always cheap! So, the kids are taught to
memorise bazillions of facts and regurgitate them later, which is pretty
much the same as our system but I think they are more active in
discouraging independent thinking here! Kids often have clubs before
school (6*30 or 7 start), school from 8-3:30, after school clubs till 5 or
6, then other activities or juku till 10 or so, (juku is cram school, the
exams at the end of juniour high and high schools determine your whole
life in terms of career, there is not enough time to learn everything at
school that they need to know). After that is homework, so many kids don.t
get to bed before 12 or 1 and then have to be up at 6 or 7 the next
day...so oftentimes kids fall asleep in lessons at school. In the country
here not many people go to cram school. Everyone has to do after school
clubs, I see some kids that don.t here but then again they just walk
around the school during lesson time! But this is the worst school in the
district. Bullying and violence are everywhere. Every second day at least
at juniour high a kids comes into the staff room crying cause they have
been bullied. There is little or no heating in the schools and some
Japanese people, when asked, are of the opinion that suffering is good for
kids cause it toughens them up for later life...which, I dunno, maybe it
works but I always thought that kids should be having fun and not
suffering unnessesarily..

Just after the last update I found 30 pics of famous places in AUS and
they were colour printed, framed and after a lot of work put up with
explanations in Japanese for the cultural festival here, lots of people
saw them and commented on them so that was good for internationalization
methinks! I took those photos round all the elementary schools and they
made a great fun lesson. Its always fun to tell the kids that crocodiles
eat people! The other lesson I have been doing is a Christmas one where I
show them some pics, we sing some songs and make Christmas tree shaped
Christmas cards. I love these lessons, planning them is fun, the kids have
a great time and they learn heaps about the outside world and a bit of
English too, it.s the most rewarding part of my job over here! The kids
know many of the famous Christmas tunes and some people have Christmas
trees even though its not an official holiday over here (no day off
sadly!). The house across the street from me even has Christmas lights up!

Apparently many people in America who work in LA live in Phoenix and
commute by plane cause it is cheaper than living in LA all up and only
takes 45 mins on the plane. Check out a map!

I went to what was meant to be a kite festival in Ikazaki. Yup, they just
get together and fly kites. Apparently around march the big festival is on
where they have massive kites and also kite fighting where they attach a
knife to their kite and try to cut the string on another persons kite,
sounds like great fun to me! I went to the kite museum in town which had
some of the big one (and some cool small ones) strung up around the place
and a few videos....unfortunately it was raining, didnt start raining till
I had driven for about an hour to get there and there was no kite
festival.....they had a cultural festival there anyways with some
beautiful ikebana (flower arrangement) and pictures of 60 different
dragonflies which are found in the area. And some huge gourds, some of
them in a natural state, some painted nicely, and they gave us foreigners
free udon! Its just like, hmmm, foreigners have come to see this and they
know the local JET (who wasn.t there at this stage), they must be jets,
lets give them stuff....you could probably travel round the country
impersonating a JET and get help from the government anywhere, all you
would need is a list of names! *smiles* SO after that we went back to the
guys house and watched office space and some of the deer hunter and
listened to music and the others drank beers and he cooked us this yummy
noodle thing with a spicy tomato chicken sauce (YUM!) with more chicken in
it than meat in the local store (apparently he found it cheap!). So, there
were a few jets, one of them is a complete tosser though, but we had fun
around him anyways! *smiles* I decided to come home in the evening cause I
was feeling a bit sniffly (maybe was the cigarette smoke as well) and cant
handle the idea of getting sick again. It was so windy back here the pole
that I hang my washing on outside A(with the washing on it) fell down, it
was pretty scary!

The CIR (people on the JET program who work in the government offices, can
speak more Japanese!) in Ikata organized a tour of the power station
there. It was really exciting to be in a nuclear station and to have a
look around. It turned out to be a very informative trip as one of the
jets that came along was a nuclear physicist and had worked in power
stations before! Turns out that in Japan they process most of the waste so
the end material is only evil and radioactive for a few hundred years
compared with America where they don.t process it and are left with stuff
that is evil for tens of thousands of years..all cause of economic
reasons! I organized for everyone to come to my town afterwards and have
dinner at the little restaurant here, which I dearly love, and it was
excellent! Unfortunately everyone had to go home afterwards so there was
no party!  For dinner we ate yakisoba (soba (noodles, thin and yellow)
with meat and veggies, YUMMY!) and karage (fried chicken) and onigiri
(rice balls)

I.ll send some pics!

Last night I went to the restaurant as usual and the master said....ahhh
tonight I have cooked some meat for you and I went, Wow, Thanks!! He
bought out this plate with more meat than Ive seen in one place (well at
least not deep fried meat), must have been about $10 worth of meat in this
amazing garlic sauce with some capsicum and lettuce....it was soooooo
good, so yummy and exactly what I wanted and when I went to pay he just
said saavisu (service) which translates in the dictionary to being given
something for free.....just absolutely amazing.

Then the other day the person who writes the newsletter for ehime, whom I
correspond with a bit...well, I asked them if I could borrow some books
cause I thought they would go to halloween, but the werent going but sent
two books in the post with the mikan....amazing....so much generosity!

The people here certainly are generous!

Last night I played my first game of softball, in three innings I got out
in the first, hit if far enough for two people to run home in the second
and one person to run home in the third, a very successful evening even if
I did completely miss a catch cause the ball goes swirling off to the left
a long way when you are fielding in right field (I didnt know!!!!
*smiles*). Was great fun really!

Playing out the rest of the softball season was good fun...hit a few
balls, made a few good catches. The best thing of all was that the people
on the team laughed at silly mistakes that people made, and seriously paid
each other out which is so untypically Japanese that people I have told
here are amazed. I wonder if they are just people who don.t care about
what is right of, being that they are all farmers and fishermen, that they
have the more down to earth nature that these sorts of people seem to
have. The guy who got me onto the team once beat a professional sumo
wrestler that I saw in Nomura. (when he was 9 years old though!)

Today I went to preschool and we climbed the mountain on a little path
throught the forest and saw heaps of huge spiders and little buddhist
statues every 20 meters or so and we collected donguri (these big seed
things the trees drop) and ate lunch at the top (yum). Was good fun!

I went to the big Halloween party in Ikata that they held at the school.
They had a haunted house and lots of fun games and this strange thing
where students yelled out things from the third floor window about who
they loved, or what teachers should do to make life easier, or whatever
they wanted really! Some of the things they were yelling showed that it
really was a freedom of speech occasion and that they could criticize the
teachers and everything! After that I went Mikan picking up in the
mountains, was really peaceful and nice and fun and a great view of the
bay, which has a number of interesting looking islands that I will have to
get a sea kayak to go have a look at cause they aren.t far away!

Bought a guitar! Awesome!

Good! Has a nice day at junior high, the school principal can speak pretty
good English and we talked about philosophy and cognitive science and
stuff....though she had to look up a lot of words it was great! She even
went ahead and bought the Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged, all in all
about 1900 pages of tiny difficult English, she reckons it will take the
rest of her life to read. Last time I saw her I asked her what the best
qualities were to be a good person in Japan. Hard work is number one (but
often they don.t work hard here, they work very long and very slowly and
dawdle about and make up silly little jobs, its strange), and then to
maintain harmony and fit in with the group. She seems like a smart women,
she is very nice, but she agreed that if her friends starting stealing
things from a shop then she would too, its ok if everyone is doing it!!!
Interesting!

XXX, Was a pretty slick film in terms of special effects and scene changes
and stunts and whatnot but the main character Vin Diesel just couldn't
pull of the one liners....he is no arnie! *smiles* Will anyone ever match
Arnie?? I doubt it very much, maybe you have to have a funny accent to be
able to be successfull with one liners in an action movie? Who knows?

We had a little English teachers party organized by my English teacher at
school in a beautiful old traditional style Japanese pub that was just big
enough for us all...and the food there was excellent, eggplant, gyooza
(like dim sims), sweet and sour pork, this beef only just barely cooked in
a yummy sauce, noodles, eggplant....YUM! We went to karaoke afterwards for
a little while but everyone was pretty tired so it wound up at about 10.

One weekend I went up to Matsuyama to the culture festival there, it was
surprising to see foods from India and Nepal and all over the place!!
Bought some nice jam and peach wine and saw some fine harping by a
Scottish ALT. Went to Dogo Onsen (hot springs baths) but didn.t go in, and
haven.t been to one yet which is pretty slack! But around there is a
little shopping mall where I bought some Christmas stuff. Not including
laquared mikan (mandarin) skin bowls! It.s a shame cause the building the
onsen is in is a beautiful old wooden thing but inside is all concrete and
all around there it.s a shithole.

Just sent to the school music concert where the all the schools either
sang or played instruments. It was good fun! I taught the kids of one
elementary school the words for Puff the Magic Dragon and they sang really
well so that was cool, when I went into the hall about a zikllion kids
yelled out my name and waved. I am a celebrity of sorts methinks!
Tomorrow night I am going to a big piss up for the softball team. (which
turned out to be great fun!).

Yeah? DO you now what it is in degrees?? Sometimes here it is really quite
cold at night, outside at least, and sometimes if it is cloudy and there
is no wind the evenings are still really nice so that is a bit weird. The
other strange thing here is that the atmosphere over the ocean is always
sort of hazy...most places in AUS you can see all the way to the horizon
from the beach but here some days I can't even see island that are a
fairly short distance away. I absolutely love fog, the other night I had a
dream that I was working in a city which was foggy all the time and it was
great, makes the world seem completely different eh?? *smiles*

Yesterday I bought Robocop, Warlock and Ice Pirates for about $13. Pretty
cheesy films but should keep me entertained for a few hours. Have you ever
seen Ice pirates?? One of the craziest comedies ever. Along with my other
crazy favorite a film called Watch Out Were Mad.....its so funny but I
have been looking for it for years and have never found it, maybe I should
just buy it from amazon or something. Talking about buying things, I think
I am going to blow most of my next paycheck....tomorrow....and actually
buy something. Since I have come to Japan I have saved all that money and
bought one book and food and some small travel expenses....its like my
income is unrelated to my life cause I hardly use it....time to spend
methinks! I am still living in that state of mind where I don't feel like
I have money and I can't bring myself to spend any of it. I think one
month I am going to have to take my pay and spend it all on things. Its
weird what being a student for so many years does to your ideas about
money! *smiles* Look out Tokyo. Don.t get any ideas Ash! *chuckles*

The dudes at work have asked me to stop playing games on this
computer....for no reason other than its just not the done thing, and
apparently some people have noticed, and *shrugs*, who knows, I guess
people just do things cause they do in most places in the world. They also
said something about being really happy when I first got here cause I was
studying Japanese hard and learning about culture, I guess implying that I
am not doing those things now, but I only really look as sites about
culture or maybe a few science magazine sites when I.m at work, I never
play games in work time and nearly all of the emails I send are to people
about what I am doing in Japan, thus helping to make it more accessible to
the world really.....now three people I know are signing up for JET next
year because of what I.ve been saying.

So I.ve been talking to a women who has been here a few years, she is on
the JET program working in the town office next town over, and her
Japanese is pretty good but she hasn.t been able to make any good friends.
Apparently country Japanese people are very polite and kind but always
think of foreigners as outsiders....even for periods of 10 years or
more....which sorta sucks.

Yeah, apparently it is pretty damn hard to get your hands on some whale
meat....but I have been invited to BBQ next year by a guy who regularly
sells his beef for about $120 a kilo, so that should be cool! He has 80
cows at about 800kg each..of course you cant eat them all but you do the
math! He is the captain of the softball team for some reason....hmmmmm

There was an article in the paper today written by a women from America I
think....about how she asked Japanese women if they would send their kids
to private school or cram school, they all said no and all sent their kids
to those schools.....they blatantly lied to their 'friend'. Apparently its
just something they do, its ok to lie. Everyone does it so its ok sort of
thing again. By the same token many news stories are completely made up
just to achieve a certain effect.

Up until a few hundred years ago the Japanese used the word aoi for the
colours that we call blue and green. Now they have midori for green. Thus
the name of the liquer.

Karaoke is really big here....in the city there is a parking space
surrounded by small portables which fit about 10 people each, you rent the
portables for karaoke!! Weird!

On the way to the city it was nice and sunny till we went through one
tunnel and came out the other side into thick fog....apparently its famous
in that town, and then about 20 minutes later through another tunnel back
into beautiful sunshine again, it was absolutely awesome!!

Went to a sumo tournament in Nomura and the weekend was awesome, there
were two professionals there and a bunch of sumos in training from Tokyo,
some of them were just awesome, their sheer size and power.....just
unbelievable....the best bit of the day was a sort of king of the ring
thing where one person would be in the ring and about 12 people around it
and they would go in a fight him in extremely quick succession, if he lost
the winner would take over...was great fun to watch! Another interesting
thing was the huge line of people with babies there....the babies were
handed to the sumo one at a time and he did some bowing and the sumo leg
waving in the air. Some kids loved it, some cried, the parents were happy
with the blessings! Many of us guys were raring to give it a try, I wonder
if I could push one of them. One of the smaller ones could push the
biggest one around with his legs just locked, I wonder what the bigs ones
could push!

Well, I am trying really hard to find the good things in their culture but
mostly it is just completely fucked up, from my point of view. And from
what I hear about the increasingly rebellious nature of people in Tokyo
(is it true??) some people here are starting to realise how silly it all
is! If you get a chance try to find a copy of Dogs and Demons by Alex
Kerr. The most obvious and striking example is that kids are told at
school that you have to be able to put both feet flat obn the ground to
ride a bike safetly..for the rest of their lives the bike seat is as low
as it can go...which is inefficient, and bad for your knees, but its just
what everyone does! So, this is more harsh than I really am, but a lot of
things are not logical, well Aus is the same really but...I dunno. This is
a weird country!

Today was fun, chbristmas lesson again and one of the teachers invited me
out to dinner sometime! Yay! Also went to their cooking class and sampled
all their different potato salad creations, they were yummy!

They bought me a new winter futon a while back which I have started using
as it is actually getting quite cold here now!

Had a few excellent weekends recently! Last weekend I went to Ozu, did a
bit of shopping, bought some veggies (they are cheap at market like shops)
and some cheap videos. Had a look in some Japanese book shops and well
over half the books in the shops are Manga (comic books). Since I have
been in Japan I have only seen one person reading a .real. book!! There
were a few rows of manga for women and every single one of them (without
exaggeration) had a bright pink spine!! *laughs* I hung out with another
Alt for a while and we went to a paper factory in a small town. The paper
in the shop was beautiful and I ended up buying paper which I have no need
for but is just so nice I couldn.t help it! After that we went to a pizza
place and I had pizza and ribs and Danish berry beer with a few other alts
and had some great conversation. A wonderful evening! I also got the
guitar and had a bit of a play on it waiting at the train station. Its so
nice to have it! This weekend I went to Matsuyama and met up with Zach (a
really cool guy, philosophy/linguistics majors, has some interesting ideas
about running a commune and an adventure tourism and language school sort
of thing) and went and saw the castle. It.s a really nice one actually,
but not as good in terms of fortifications as the European ones. I dunno
if wood is the best material to make all the buildings inside the castle
out of even if it is beautiful! After that we went to an alts house with
some other people and all cooked different things, was a yummy feast and
great conversation and music till 3 in the morning! Two weekends ago went
to a persons birthday party, again, awesome food, and the day after that
was the sumo. Going out here is expensive and in most cases I have spent
more on each weekend that I would have on about 2 weeks of living in Seto!
Got my tickets for Tokyo (for about $340 return with a night in a hotel)
from a travel agents friend so they are about 1/2 price...awesome!

Lets see, what have I forgotten?? Well, I could go on forever about
strangenesses..I am looking forward to going to Tokyo and having a bit of
a holiday, this is the longest I have had a .normal. job without a
holiday! I have still been slightly sick all this time so its off to the
doctors again at some stage.

Am having a great time really even if work is a bit unsatisfying at times.
I think I.ve found some really great people to hang out with now!

Any questions? Comments? Stories of your own? I would love to hear from
you!