More computer fixing adventures in Yokohama

I am back in wonderful SW Ontario, but my friend's immanent move to Yokohama has led me to revisit this blog and update a few things:

When we last left the "build-a-bilingual XP computer in Japan" thread, I had just gifted my friend's brother in Yokohama with a $60 P4 2.4ghz rebuilt Fujitsu, running XP-pro with English and Japanese login settings. Felt good to know that if I ever moved to Japan, I would not be completely helpless. Did I mention that this was only half the battle?

It seems that Brother-san's nicotine encrusted Sony Vaio sub-desktop did NOT have a plebian 15-pin vga connector on it. OOOPS! So we just do what I do back home: grab the first monitor one sees at a junk shop or mooch one off a friend that is upgrading, or garbage pick one - right?????

Wrong!

Space is at a premium in Japan, chucking an old monitor out in the trash without expensive disposal license stickers is illegal - and your neighbors will shame you to death long before the some official busybody shows up with a ticket. Of course that means that no junk store will ever accept your used wonky PC system - even for free. As well, the japanese consumer does not like dirty, scuffed- up used gear, AND, you will not find a dinky PC shop close by, so forget it and buy a new, overpriced machine!

Also there is the issue of Brother-san's old, wonky computer. Sony VAIO; cost a bit in it's day: P4 1.3GHZ, could use some ram, good enough net-crawler if de-junked and given some more ram, but dammit - it keeps shutting down after 5-15 minutes! I had instructed him on how to clean the power supply and blow the dust out of the case - and he had been a real good sport and had done it. Might as well fix it! It would cost Y2000 to legally throw it away!

I had to follow through. A matter of honor (or honour as we say here in Canada)...

I had spent 35 minutes figuring out that the power supply fan was not turning, and that it was shutting down when the internal temp sensor tripped. After all this, I finally paid attention to the bios boot-up messages and HOLY CRAP! in perfect english the thing was warning me to check the power supply fan! DUHHHH! Facepalm.. Thank you Sony. Wonder why the warning was in English. Nice to get a confirmationof my diagnosis though.

Following through; cleaning the power supply had not cured the fan problem. (and yeah.. lots of safety warnings about how a PC power supply can throw 600V at you and store a nasty jolt after being unplugged - adults here, not sticking fingers onto hot stove element, etc. . .) Time to find a generic 3 wire 70mm pc fan and swap it in. Again, just look by the side of the road, and ...

Oh yeah; one does not do that here!

Did I mention that in sunny SW Ontario, scrap PC bits can be found by the side of the road - if you get to them before the metal scrappers snag them., at used stores, in dumpsters behind University buildings, at the municipal dump xfer station, etc.. Why does cheap waste disposal correlate with easy civilian re-use opportunities, while a strong recycling/ high-cost disposal regime mitigates against re-use and repair??? Oh well, never mind.

It was time for a morning PC PARTS RUN! wheeeeeeeeeee!

Now I must say at this point that my friend was being really, really, Really, REALLY patient with me. Perhaps she was getting a kick out of watching me interact with her brother, because she endured not only a trip to a huge electronics/ PC parts store, but a trip to a gigantic combined HARD-OFF, BOOK-OFF and GARAGE-OFF store! Gahhhhh! piles of too much stuff! Clutter! Tomorrows expensive gomi, today!

Brother-san was enjoying it! He got to drive us around Yokohama, and it had been an age since he had set foot in a Hard-Off store. So there we were, looking for a vga monitor, a 70mm fan and some ram. Found a nice 16" LCD for Y3000, some ram for the Sony for Y500, and a usb external CD burner for Y500. (buy it for the case! Put a newer superdrive in it, use on either machine when a dvd burner is needed, or stick a hard drive in it as a backup drive!) But no 70mm fan (3 wire). Even had the nice folks at the counter plug it all in to prove it worked - which was a good thing as our first monitor choice turned out to be a dud, even though it had been checked before putting it out on the shelf.

Onwards!

So now we had to go to the dreaded PC/Electronics chain store - the one with the 2 page flyers full of custom cases, motherboards, big screen TV's, etc, etc.

First mistake: telling the saleguy that we wanted a power supply fan!

OOOPs! No store in Japan is going to sell you a part that involves you sticking your pinkies into a clearly dangerous "no-user-serviceable-parts!!!!!!!" situation. Was I Bakka? As my friend translated, I quickly recovered: Bad translation! got it wrong; I need a Case Fan! Oh.. ok.. those are safe, this aisle over here... Y1100 later we had our part -even had the right connector!
The store had the full complement of high-end PC parts for building an ultimate game machine, etc. Cases, power supplies, mo-boards, the whole mess: I felt at home. Omnilingual!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnilingual , www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445)

. . .As well, a small moral victory: on the other side of the store in the refurb section was an identical Fujitsu mini-desktop, refurbed, worse specs that ours, going for ($180) no monitor included. My friend gets to watch me and Brother-san do an exaggerated victory pantomime, and later endless re-enactments of the exclamation I made when I saw the price for the store model. Brother-san thinks my GAHHHHHHH! noise was a hoot.

After a fine lunch at a reasonable buffet restaurant, a ride back to his place, and a bit of poking around with a screwdriver and some pliers, Brother-san now has 2 workable computers! I also brought the old wireless router that was left after I had done an upgrade for my friend (and for me too! I needed a fast wireless connection to her internet service for my month's stay) and now used the old one to do a quickie file xfer of MY DOCUMENTS over to the new beast, giving Brother-san a quick tutorial on setting up a home network.

Well, at least he can now give it away to some friend, or sell it off to HARD-OFF for Y500 ($6) without having to pay to dispose of it. I recommended installing it in their mom's room and setting the google Chrome homepage at a Youtube search for "Enka". Perhaps I went too far.

What did I learn? D.I.Y. is still very much a niche market in Japan. Almost as weird as cosplay.
And there are lots of strong structural reasons why. Fortunately with a first-world supply chain, and robust online retail and used markets, a determined tinkerer can waste hours fixing obsolete PC iron. Heck - If I this had been a Tokyo-based operation, we would have run wild in Akihabra. Rakutan, Amazon.jp and Yahoo.jp could have also supplied the parts needed, if we had another week to waste on this project.

"My job here is done!"

We had much more fun in Yokohama after playing with junk PCs. I got to see a nice local Setsubun ceremony (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setsubun no bean throwing - please! safety first!) and spent an afternoon in Chinatown just before Chinese New Year's celebrations, ending up with an evening stroll along the harbour-front and a walk-about on the teak-wood "starship hull" cruise ship port. Remember the trekkie movie when they have to go out on the surface of the saucer section? Now imagine a dock/ building roof/ walk-way thing that is kind of like that, only made of ultra-precisely fitted together teakwood 2x4-ish planks that streches 2 long city blocks! Wow! NO SK8TBRDS Allowed!

Yokohama is NOT the comfy little bedroom community half-way between Tokyo and Narita airport that I have grown fond of -it is an exciting Metropolis with grown-up big-city attractions (and inconveniences) Next time, I will be going there. 2 hours by train from Narita. I had better learn to pack light! I want to ride the big ferris wheel!

Ps: my friend and all her folks and friends made it through the horrible 3/11 quake and aftermath. She had been planning the move to Yokohama for a while, and was not to be detered by the catastrophe. I wish her a safe, uneventful, easy move at the end if the month!
And to all in Shizu Station, who put up with her friend, the tall ambling gaijin - I thank you, and I will miss you!

More about snow monkeys

As if there aren't enough pictures of the snow monkey hot spring on Flickr,
here are mine:
(assuming the flicker embedded slide show trick works...)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58896081@N04/sets/72157625805638429/

Of course, I am back home now, in frozen SW Ontario, trying to catch up with all
the stuff at work, and at home that was put off.

But I still have a few more posts for THIS trip, which I will get around to as
soon as I can catch my breath and do the dishes, laundry, shovel the snow,
back taxes, stuff at work, morestuff at. . . . WAugghhhH!!!! I wanna go BACK!

No crying...

More info about the hot-spring snow monkeys:

They are Japanese macaques - and really quite common in rural areas of japan.
This bunch found a hot spring, took it over, and became a tourist draw.
Their cousins in town pester shop owners, raid stores and hissss!!! at
visitors to temples. This group however are just relaxing.

The Visitor's center, a few hundred yards away has lockers so
YOU DO NOT BRING FOOD, (hanging out of your pack-sack,
like some thick headed tourist, to the hot spring - lest the
enterprising monkeys relieve you of it..

Check out the Live-Cam at:
http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/index.htm

After we got back to Chiba, we cancelled the Kyoto trip..

Who needs 400 year temples after seeing SNOW MONKEYS !!!!!

A Computer running XP in Japanese and English. . . Hooray!

While recovering from the snow Monkey visit (OUCH! Sore muscles!) I might as well crow a bit about a minor tech challenge victory I scored during the first week or so I was here. . . building a scrap PC, tracking down a copy of Windows XP pro, and forcing the whole setup to be bilingual Japanese + English, and legal. Wow! Yawn!

Ok. I was getting over a severe case of bronchitis/ mild case of walking pneumonia, and my friend was occupied with family matters and had no time to babysit me. When I heard her complain that her brother foisted off booking the flight of visiting relatives onto her, because his computer was too slow to do the online reservations, I though: "why not?"

Getting a "junk" PC was the easy part. The local HARD OFF used tech store had some for 6kY (appx 73CA$) but the 40gb hard drive and 256M of ram looked anemic. A night of browsing on Yahoo auctions found a nice 2.4ghz celeron Fuijitsu with no hard drive, cdrom only 512Mb ram for 1000 Y. (12.20CA$) delivery and COD brought that to 2300Y (28 CA$) Thank You and Kudos to SUPERJUNKPC who sells on Yahoo.co.jp auctions. A google search turns up that these were common office machines in JP 6 years ago, and are a plague on the land.

The hard drive, a 200GB western digital IDE came in at 1,500Y delivered. Add a keyboard used, from hard-off for 100Y (and about 1200Y worth of other stuff including blank CDs, and misc. not used) and we are ready to go. Best of all, the beast had the all-important (if you care about such things) Windows XP Pro COA / License sticker on it, meaning that it is "allowed" to have a copy of Windows on it.

.. Of which I do not have.

Time to get a bit grey market. The way I see it, software piracy is a matter of intent. Since I intend to stick XP on a machine licensed for it, no harm no foul. You think differently? You are either an ex- USA and Canadian lawyer, who has practiced copyright law in Japan, and is fully versed on current case -law, and has a lot of 2k$/hour time on your hands, or you are an ignorant greasy little net-troll who can go piss up a rope. I mod comments anyways, so no posting for either of you... Neener neener neener!

The challenge is: Get the machine all set up, but it has to be in Japanese, which I do not understand, and I have to set it up in English, which the intended user does not understand.

Step One: grab any XP Pro cd iso one can find in dark places, as long as it has SP3 slipstreamed into it. We need the SP3 because the hard drive is bigger than 120gb. Burn the iso, pop into the machine and install.

Grrrrrrr! stupid thing installed with a pie-r8 serial number/ license key!! grrrrr! Can't connect to the net like that! Find an XP key changer, use it to get the legal license key into the beast.

Step 3: Find some drivers: At least the lan driver so it can connect to the net, and the video driver. We hope the automatic driver search can find the rest. OH.. one more thing.

Grab an Anti-Virus program and get it into the machine, via usb key BEFORE hooking it to the net. AVIRA runs in japanese, is free, and doesn't steall too much processing power.

Install, reboot, install, reboot etc.. Curses to Fujitsu for not putting the sound drivers up on the net. Find some other drivers for another machine, unpack the installer with win rar, point the manual driver install at the directory one unpacked into, and yes, yes, yes, done..

Now for the Japanese part. Thank all the gods of Japan, and one demi-gawd in Redmond that this particular piece of Fujitsu office - iron came with an XP Pro sticker. XP pro is the one thing that can ran multiple languages, and in that I mean. . .

JAPANESE MENUS...

That's right, not just typing Japanese in, and seeing it in the browser, but having ALL the menus in Japanese, even the context menus and help balloons.

For this one requires the XP Pro MUI aka the Multilingual User Interface pack.

The idea was that in your office, Joe Blow logged on at the workstation at 6pm and got English, and Joe Takahashi logged in at 6am or whatever and got Japanese.

The full MUI pack is 3 CDs and hard to find, even on rapidshare (hint). You need only the one CD image (iso file) that has Japanese on it ...

Hey.. this would work for Bulgarian too, or Russian, or?

Yup, in fact the worldwide demand for local language XP installations is what helped me find this

stuff without TOO MUCH trouble.

A Usb key with the root of the CD image and the Japanese subdirectory was all I needed to install the MUI. Yup it worked fine with SP3 English in. Just for fun I ran SP3 Japanese too.

Then the MUI Japanese help file updates.

Finally, connect the the interwebs, update everything watch the Microsoft legit-check bless the beast and then switch over to Japanese.

Done!

Did I mention one needs a working machine with a cd burner, hooked to the interwebs to track all this stuff down? At least Japanese high-speed internet is very very fast - it will take longer to figure out the advantages of using google.ca instead of google.com (which will auto-forward you to google.co.jp and put EVERYTHING IN JAPANESE grrrr!!!) than it will to download your stuff.

There were a few more glitches with the hardware, of course, but that's the official way to do it.. The bios "forgetting" that the hard drive existed had nothing to do with the XP install (pull bios battery, wait, reset the bios, put the coin cell back in..)

Also stuck in CCleaner (run in Eng, then toggle over to JP, set to auto-clean at start),

and a few other tweaks and to have a serviceable light use XP machine, that wont get into too much trouble.

Hooray...

So, for all you gaijin teaching English in Japan, who want to know how to do it, and how to set your machine to be either Japanese menu or English .. Just follow these steps, and read the details on each software bundle you snag.

You can either run as one user and ride the Region and Language options tab in the Control panel, or set up two USERS, one Japanese, one English and practice using XP/JP for work.

Damn! looks like Bill got one right.. And don't mention that fashionista Jobs. . .
50$ would get you a used 2nd gen. 4Gb ipod. . .

The machine that changes history is the machine the masses can afford.

All over the world..

Monkey Onsen HAI!

http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/day0/11/main.htm

Tired as heck! More later..

WOW!

Yahoo auctions, resolved. . .

Of course, the best way to pay off a bunch of outstanding debts on Yahoo.co.jp is to find someone (like you friend’s niece) who has a Japan Post savings account and a Japanese credit card. (All hail Mayu! resolver of yahoo messes!). The aforementioned Kuroneko dodgy currency xfer method worked well too. My friend has declared an absolute moratorium on further Yahoo purchases, and as I am approaching my Air Canada luggage weight limit, I better comply. Future posts may involve “How to send big heavy parcels via Japan Post Sea Mail for $50, because I need to get that extra 10kg of STUFF home.

Meanwhile, I have been a busy gaijin! Visited Yokohama for a day! Did some shopping, was fêted and filled with Asahi’s best beeru at a cosy neighborhood eatery by my friend’s brother and generally had a BLAST. Did some computer maintenance, and tried to get my friend’s brother to hose out the power supply of his woefully underpowered pc. Left a replacement with him too - which will be the subject of a future extra special Dai-gaijin exclusive: “How to build a bilingual Engrish-Japanese XP professional pc system for under $50, using only yahoo auctions and your neighborhood Hard Off store.” STAY TUNED!

For now, getting ready for a long train trip to the legendary Monkey Hot springs near Nagano - home of the previous Winter Olympics.

http://myoko-nojiri.com/snow_monkeys/index.htm

http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/index.htm

I swear I will not jump in with the monkeys!

Japan Post is a Bank too!

Ok.. so most japanophiles know that the post offices in Japan also serve as a local savings bank.

Wow.. they do everything, including deliveries on Saturdays and Sundays!

Us furreign visitors can use our alien bank cards at their ATM’s and pull funds over into yen, and only pay a small (yes, get used to it) $4-5 fee. Savings account depositors can also transfer money by ATM or internet, to each other fee of charge - a method that is popular for paying sellers when you go nuts on Yahoo.co.jp online auctions.

As a foreign visitor, You CANNOT set up a savings account, not without the residency card, as well as your passport.

That means that when you want to transfer funds to pay off that Yahoo auction, it will run you a Y525 fee, and a personal session with a confused JP clerk, far more embarrassed about their lack of English, than you can possibly be about your lack of Japanese.

OUCH!

To get even with them, I am sending all in-japan correspondance by Kuroneko letter at 80Y ea. - Black Cat Courrier/ Transport (kuro neko = Black Cat) doesn’t freak out when your letter is a bit over the strict edo era weight limits that JP imposes. Every 5th shop in the area serves as a kuroneko dispatch, and the local Kombini (Family Mart) is open late. They will ask you whats in the letter.. you are not supposed to tap 500 +100 Y coins into a card to send to people, to pay off your Yahoo auctions. So just say “CARDO” and shrug.

Buy Online in Japan and annoy lots of people!

When we last left our hero. . .

As you read in the previous post, I am exploring the joys and sorrows of buying stuff online, while in Japan. Why Bother? I should just get out and do tourist stuff!!!! Well; my friend is preoccupied with emergency family matters, and my back is killing me. And I am still getting over that nasty case of bronchitis that almost killed my chances at a visit (Don't worry, I was loaded up with antibiotics before I left - Not contagious at all, yup!)

So time to learn to buy stuff online in Japan!

We'll start with the easiest: Amazon.co.jp and your new friend, GOOGLE CHROME.

Nice thing about Chrome, it keeps asking if you want to translate the page you are viewing.

A little auto-translation is a dangerous thing. (more on this later!!!) Fortunately, Amazon.co.jp offers its own "See this page in English" feature. A lot of stuff is sold with free shipping. And it takes Canadian credit cards! (wow! this will be a problem later, with other sites)

So Time to pick up a replacement cell phone battery for 800Y.

That was easy.

In the previous post I mentioned Rakutan, Here you get English pages that are brief machine-translated versions of the original pages. I didn't try using a Canadian credit card here - most of the stuff offers C.O.D shipping

Before you mention exchange and other fees on your credit card, let me say that fees of some kind are unavoidable. Wait until you try to change your Canadian cash at the Airport! YIKES!

Bloodsuckers!! You just have to put up with it.

So, emboldended by my Amazon and Rakutan experience, I should be ready for Yahoo Auctions, right?

HA! Behold the pit of gaijin despair! ! ! So much neat stuff, so hard to get your paws on it ! ! !

I won't even go into the hell of trying to buy stuff while OUT of Japan. Having a nice stable address in a good neighborhood is just the beginning.

Sign up, cruise some auctions, whack the TRANSLATE button often, and find that treasure you have been looking for! Well, kind of. . . First, no paypal! Something called Yahoo Settlement, also xlated as Yahoo Phlegm A good description....

Then multiple shipping options, few C.O.D options, and multiple banks to transfer to listed.

Seems that Japanese online auction folks like bank xfers!! They really, really like them. They like them better than cash! And a bank account is what YOU as a visiting furreigner aint getting!

Besides, even if you got one, the fee you pay to xfer will be between Y300 -Y550.

Unless you do it by card/ atm from Japan Post savings to Japan Post savings account, (of which you will not get, of one) (ooops there goes my syntax!)

So Time for Yahoo Phlegm!

You BID! You Win! you go to pay up! Yahoo Phlegm's nice little online form refuses to take your

damn foreign devil credit card!

OH Shit!

(continued next post.....)

Ouch! - pain relief in Japan!

Today's post is on the mundane subject of finding a bottle of ibuprohen in Japan.

HAH! good luck. I had brought some generic 400mg wall-mart caps, but with my back hurting,

my friend's back hurting from lifting mom, and her ma complaining of phantom leg pains, it became obvious that we would run out soon.

Off to the local pharmacy right?

OH CRAP! No bilingual labels here! And it looks pricey!

So back to the apartment for a net search to print out the kana for ibuprophen,

back to the pharmacy. Well; it seems that ibu is considered dangerous stuff in Japan,

and the most you can get in one pill is 150mg, plus added gunk I have never heard of,

and it is relatively expensive.

So more net searching.. Best deal: Meridon EV, which another foreigner recommends
highly - QUOTE:

"メリドンEV錠 works like a charm. It says take two, but for my monster American headaches I need about 5 or 6. Sometimes I see unicorns playing the bagpipes in my office when I'm working."

So now it is time to get some cheap, without fricking around. Fortunately we have the interwebs:

RAKUTAN, the Japanese amazon (well, there is an Amazon.jp, more on that later) has english web pages and their shops send out stuff fast, with one of the many delivery companies in Japan, for reasonable shipping and a Y315 COD fee. as my friend and I are a bit apartment-bound watching obacha this seems a great deal.. Especially since I DO NOT have to once again face the wall of incomprehensible medicines at the drug mart.

Order in the evening; morning of the day after the next it arrives. Well, they are better than nuthin, but if you are prone to aches, bring a bottle of wall-mart 400mg ibu next time you visit.

Japanese regs on over-the counter meds are legendarily strict: for instance, they really, really,

suspect pseudophedrine, and control it, and tylenols 2's like the stuff was a gateway drug to needle park.

But there are cheaper ways to kill pain in Japan.. A visit to the OK discount center

yields:

Mmmm... iodine flavoured salaryman rotgut whiskey,

Y685 incl. tax ! That's a regular sized bottle, not a mickey!

And to chase it down, so called "class2" discount beer:

Y489 icl tax per 6-pack..

It says SUPER FINE, in English no less, so it must be good

(well it is better than american beer, at least)

This is better than Kentucky!

The good news is that next morning, you can down a litre carton

of fresh carrot-veggie-fruit juice mix for Y110, fresh at the local

discount grocery store. %5 discount if it sits for a day on the shelf!!!

No unicorns yet.. darn. . .

One more thing...

Yoshida Sensei is still right down the street at his Acupuncture and bone-setting clinic.

And, he is still giving me the gaijin discount (or perhaps those are his regular low-low-prices???)

One hour of heat packs, acupuncture needles, and Electro-muscle zapping, and I feel tired , but a lot better. I am still too much of a wimp to try moxa, so he tapes me up, like an athlete!

Dr Yoshida is the best!

Must avoid booze afterward though - it makes the inflammation worse.

He's Baaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Well, as promised, I have made it back to Japan.

I have been here a little more than 1 week, and have managed a few interesting trips and activities.

As usual, i am most interested in day-to-day stuff, as opposed to big, expensive tourist attractions - which I cannot afford in any case.

So far:

How to buy ibuprophen in Japan.

More fun with cell phones.

Hunting Bandai kaiju figurines.

Buying stuff on rakutan, Yahoo.jp and Amazon.jp

Visiting the old haunts, and a few new:
Hard-Off, Katstudai, Yukarigaoka, and BEAR CROSS!

Bicycle maintenance

and

SUMO!

As well as...

Care for Okasa-san, and comfy low chairs

and

It might be warmer, but it is still WINTER here..

Let's start at the beginning:

After a long long Air Canada flight from Toronto to Narita Airport,

I get to deal with a few surprises.. The first is the guy in the blazer with

a radio and what looks like airport badge who is escorting me through baggage retrieval,

customs and immigration. He was waiting right off the plane ramp wit a sign, with my name on it.

I assumed that my friend had arranged for him. When I cleared everything, and got out of the gate, No Friend waiting.. So off to Information, where I got directions for the Softbank cell phone booth, the money exchange, and some information about my escort. Turns out he was a free service, because I had registered for assistance when I boarded my first connector flight to Toronto. The registration did NOT get me a better seat for free on the 13 hour plane to japan -no free seats, jammed with philipino travelers returning home, but it got me a free escort at Narita, and help with my bags. Thank You Narita..

More on Air Canada hatred later.. But first: You Bastatrds! You keep sending me emails with %20 discount codes AFTER I have booked my flight.. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

Back at Narita.. Currency exchange; don't do it at the airport. Your bank can't be any worse.

CA$ 40 became 2,990 Y . At current rates, their squeeze was %6 more than it should be.. Booo! HISSS!

Meanwhile at the Softbank counter, my prepaid sim from last time had run out, so it was another 3,000Y for a new sim and 3,000Y of minutes (90Yper.. a bit expensive, but deal with it..)

45 minutes later and a new sim and number, and I am connected. I will later find out that some phones and sim cards got swapped around and now I have 2 Softbank phones with phone numbers, so no biggie.. BONUS: the Narita Airport softbank booth took my Canadian credit card, so 3KY=appx CA$37

In the meantime, I had called my friend and found that she could not come to the airport to meet me. She was suddenly sole caregiver to her slightly demented mom, 86 years old, getting over a hairline pelvic fracture, so no time to escort me around. Thats fine, I know how to get to her place.

As usual, the subways/train were superb and easy to manage, except for the last stop, when I got help pulling my bags off the train, across a gap, onto the platform and lost my shoe in the gap.

The helpful salaryman wanted to STOP THE TRAIN.. No way... never stop the train in Japan, at least for anything short of life and limb! My cane easily snagged the shoe seconds after the train left. Score one for silly gaijin tricks.

5 minutes later, I was at my friend's apartment. Hooray!

The next day I pick up a few electric heaters and a padded indoor jacket (hanten) from the local home center. When it is sunny outside, the temperature in Chiba can often get above 45F, but at night, it drops down to a few degrees above freezing. Japanese houses and apartments do not have central heating, or double-pane windows, and custom dictates sweaters and chilly living areas, except perhaps for the kitchen /living room where everyone hangs out. With granny in one room, other relatives on the way, it was time for more heaters.

There goes the utility bill this month!

Next Post.. Granny furniture, fast...