Blog updates, small changes

 Hi folks!

When I started this blog in 2008 I named it after an in-joke between me and my sweetie. 14 years later,
more enlightened folks have since argued that the label "gaijin" might be too poisoned to re-appropriate. Besides, I long ago stopped using it, in favor of "outlander" (because the Sean Connery scifi flick is way kewl).

So I finally get around to doing some housecleaning and renaming things.

This is now BIG OUTLANDER's joint. Unfortunately, I have also shrunk in the intervening years but "kinda-medium-height outlander's Japan visits" sounds naff.

Any visit updates?

Covid has kept me away from Japan since spring 2019, when my sweetie and I did fun inflatable-kayak outings around Kamakura and hiked Mt. Kintoki (both trails; unfortunately cloudy at summit - no glorious view of Fuji-san). Also brought a tiny folding steel camp stove and grilled much meat on a beach.

Maybe I dig up some pictures and put them up here?

I swear I will get back to Japan, as soon as they let common, garden-variety tourists in again.

...to be continued.

Beach Yuzu/ Natsu-Mikan marmalade manly cooking exploit !!!

Consider the Japanese Yuzu fruit and its cousin the Natsu-Mikan.

No.. You cannot has natsu-mikan

There it hangs, looking like a big orange or grapefruit, ripe on the tree in the small yard of many Japanese houses. Sometimes the ground is littered with them. You would think you could pick a few up, take them home and have them for breakfast, but that would be a mistake.

First, they are a bit more bitter than grapefruit, and not quite as soft inside. Also, Japanese law and custom takes a dim view of "gleaning" fallen fruit, even when it has rolled out onto the sidewalk. I have been staring at Yuzu, treed and fallen for 7 years of visits and never have had to guts to snag one.

Until now.

The first step to perdition was at a park full of plum trees in full bloom. "Please do not pick the plums, we harvest them" read the signs. But there was nothing about a low-hanging Yuzu on the one lone tree in the middle of the park's plateau picnic area. Amazing how a walking stick extends one's reach. One swipe with the stick and the Yuzu is mine.

Once home, we peeled it and tried it. Fairly grapefruit-like, but with a lot more tough rind inside.

Tart!

(I wonder what the difference between tart and bitter is?)

A few days later, the waves at the beach are high, the wind fierce, the sun bright in the sky, the surfers out enjoying the ride and I am out walking on the beach. There in front of me on the sand is a Yuzu. A beach Yuzu! Umi-Yuzu 

Obviously fallen into the ocean and washed up.

It is in perfect shape; no bruises, holes, mushy bits or whatever.
This Yuzu is a legal find. Beach gleaning is a culturally accepted practice hereabouts; I have seen office ladies in inappropriate heels scooping up wakame seaweed along the water's edge, so into the back-sack goes the Yuzu.

To be followed by 4 or 5 more.

Now comes the fun.

My friend relates that the Yuzu used to be used exclusively for seasoning as a dressing with soy sauce. Later they were used for marmalade and jam-making. Can I whomp up a passable Yuzu marmalade?

All your natsu-mikan are belong to us!

The interwebs are full of grapefruit marmalade recipes; most involve scraping, peeling, zesting, boiling, straining , cheese-clothing and much more kitchen stuff that can go wrong and waste time. Fortunately there were also a few microwave recipes on-line.

The secret to manly cooking is to take the easiest bits of each recipe and combine them, so as to do the whole thing as easy as possible. And use free raw materials, so that if it fouls up you can jettison the ensuing compost.

This time I got lucky.

Take 3-4 beach Yuzu, wash the skins to get the sand and salt off them.

Cut them up into slices, chunks, bits. Do not remove anything.

Plop the bits into a big enough microwave-safe bowl, cover with plastic wrap and nuke for 20 minutes.

Remove from gamma ray forge, puree with stick-blender thing. Add a few ounces of boiling water to make the puree-ing easier.

Do not splash hot glop on you! It sticks and will burn clean to the bone! No wait, that's napalm, but the glop looks almost as dangerous.

Add sugar to taste - appx. 1/3 to 1/2 volume of Yuzu glop will work fine.

Puree again with stick-blender.

Clean off the stick blender, re-cover with saran wrap and nuke again for 15-20 minutes.

Spoon into jars, nuke the jars (minus metal lids) with glop for 2-3 minutes, remove; screw on the lids; turn the jars over so that the white-hot glop sears the inside of the lid and any germoids there adhering.

Let cool, enjoy the un-jarred remains on toast.

Take that Marks & Spencer's

Yup, I can see why it was a tradition to have one in every yard. the compote/ marmalade/ glop is yummy. Very sweet and sour, sweet and tart, citrus-sy.

Win!

Bonus round: A trick from Korea is to mix a spoonful of sweet jam with hot water, as a soothing drink. Add a shot of white rum. Now I can kick back - wait! I have to clean up the mess in the kitchen!

Planning ahead: a data plan on your phone for the trip

I am getting ready for this year's visit in March and I want to ensure that this time I have a data plan for my smartphone, so that I can use Google maps, upload pictures and perhaps, perhaps, perhaps even run a rudimentary translation program.

This is a bit harder than it sounds. I could avail myself of any number of expensive options, or try my luck with the NTT East 14 day free tourist wi-fi hotspots, but there are tons of only-in-Japan restrictions that get in the way.

I have an older flip-phone with a number that I can revive at the airport for $35. Unless it has expired and then it will be $65, Pay as you go, phone and text. Data plans are not available for tourists, unless I wish to rent a "sim" card for $1/day plus insanely high call and data rates.

Free wi-fi? Don't get me started, In Japan it is hard to find; you have to sign-up in advance and outside of Tokyo you are going to have to hike a bit to find a business that is part of the "plan". The NTT 14 day free tourist offer gets you a few businesses. There are other $35 -$45/month plans that get you more. What a drag. Google maps ONLY when I buy a coffee.

Much research later, I think I have a solution!

A data-sim plan. Yes, in Japan you can get a data plan for your phone without the phone plan. Huhhhh? They do this.

It has something to do with security, because all cell phone numbers in Japan must be traceable back to a human, complete with ID, address, blood sample, DNA sample and biometric scan, lest the phone be used for shady business. On the other hand the main phone company on the East coast, NTT East must have built wayyyyyyyyyy too much data capacity into their network, so they make data-only plans available through numerous sub-contractors

So you make your calls on your old flip-phone and you do your maps and lookups on the smartphone or phone-tablet aka the "phablet".

Lets keep this simple and consider a smartphone.

To do this right you need an unlocked Android 4.x or recent (jailbroken) Apple Iphone. You might get away with an earlier Android build on an older unlocked smartphone, but I have heard some of them go crazy trying to connect to a non-existent phone service when a sim is installed while you are getting your data. This runs down the battery fast.

On a newer version smartphone, just pop in the data plan sim, do what needs to be done to register it up and don't try to make calls.

So, next question, who to buy this from?

Look, all of the service eventually comes from NTT East, but prices vary. After much research, I found myself on the phone with the English language rep for ASAHI.NET, signing myself up for 2 months of their LTE 1GB for 900Y/month plan.

A few caveats....

You need a "local" Japanese address to register.

A 2 month (or longer) plan is the cheapest. If you use the whole 2 months the first 2 month are free!

You must return the sim when finished (Kuroneko envelope is 80Y and trackable)

There is a Y3,000 sign-up fee

It takes 4-7 days for the sim to arrive at your Japanese location.

If you try to call their office you must drop the 0 in front of the 03 Tokyo area code if you ever want to get through from overseas. From Canada and the USA it would be 011 81 3.... not 03

The data use is measured in 2-3 day or something limits. If you go over the speed drops to slightly faster than dial-up.

You better know a bit about mobile phones and data plan setups, there is this setting deep in the phone settings that you have to add, it looks like 2 web addresses, thats all. Read their web site's support documents, twice.  They don't do tech support because they have no idea of what type of phone you have and its little tricks.

You better know what size sim you want! Again, check their web site, measure the sim in your phone. You will be removing it and storing it for safekeeping so that you have a phone that works when you get home. You lose it, you are pooched.

Do not lose THEIR sim. Return it when done with it or face a penalty charge on your credit card.

A few benefits...

The English support staff guy was really helpful and patient.
He did not need my passport number, blood samples etc.

They could process my Canadian credit card! Most Japanese companies cannot, outside of airport kiosks and Amazon Japan.

They do not care about limiting what phones you plan on using, so you can bring a spare device just in case

They do not care if you "tether", that is set your phone to act as a mini, personal hotspot so that your laptop can do a teeny tiny bit of internet because you have none whatsoever where you are staying.

They don't care if you use Skype, Line, Google Voice, etc

Their prices cannot be beat, and starting March, they are going up to 2GB/month!
Same price. So if I run this right, they whole thing will run me 3,080Y, 3,980Y if I mess up ending the plan 15 days before I leave or if I leave early. That's full data for a month or 2 for under $40  Yes!

Of course they are hoping to be your ISP for a longer stay, or if you need more data, a mobile hotspot, or the job interview goes well and you get hired. Their plans are very competitive, if not the absolute cheapest, and the English support staff is a real help too.

Finally, if you go over your entire data limit, guess what happens? It gets slow! That's all. Their cheaper plan is real slow unlimited, so that's what you default down to.

So I called from here in Canada (14 hrs plus, so 9pm for 10am Tokyo) and signed up.

After 15 minutes, they have my friend's address and home phone number and the contract and manual and password/ sign-in stuff is on the way, to be followed by the sim card -  "usim" as they sometimes call it, in a week. All on my Canadian credit card, 3,000Y charge, somewhere around $30.

The whole mess will be waiting for me on arrival.

Before I get on the train to the airport to leave, I will visit a combini (convenience store) and send the sim back via 80Y kuroneko envelope.

I will remember to contact them before the 15th of the month in the month I plan to cancel at the end of.

So, very soon after I get to Japan,  I will try out my new no-name Chinese dual sim GSM/WCDMA 3G 7-inch Android "phablet" that I scored on ebay for CA $50. So what if it is woefully underpowered and LIME GREEN (yikes) It was $50 Canadian, and recently the canuck buck has really been taking a beating, so it was really US $37 or something.. If it gets broken or banged up, no great mischief.

If it works out, the Softbank flip-phone pay-as-you-go sim goes into slot 1, the data sim goes into slot 2. The "phablet" can switch between them.

If it fails to work for some reason, the data plan sim goes in my smartphone and the pay-as-you-go phone sim stays in the Softbank flip phone, where it will start the trip - because Softbank will not even look at it to refill your account unless it is in a Softbank phone.

So it will be, for 20 minutes at the Softbank counter at the airport...

Softbank, Docomo, NTT East all run on WCDMA (3G), so make sure your gear can do this, has a sim slot, etc. Note that US/ Canadian mobile phone companies do not all support this, so check your phone. No sim card, no luck. Do not mistake the micro sd memory card for a sim card. Also, some providers have phones with sim card-looking things, but they are not. Telus does this in Canada, sometimes, I have no idea which US companies do it.. Just Google your phone, if it says WCDMA 2100 you rock, CDMA, EVDO, GSM only? Sorry, phhht!

Google maps! Picture uploads, email!

If this was in Indonesia, I would buy a sim from a stall vendor for $8, with local number and data plan and be done with it. And probably have to jam $40 worth of airtime into it as the trip wore on...

Too much phone fraud in Japan, so security is tighter.

They will however have to get over the lack of free wi-fi around business districts sooner or later, it is like 2001 again and the Olympics are coming in 5 years.

I will update this once I arrive and get it all working, but so far it feels right.

Thanks to ASAHI.NET

UPDATE: The Chinese Android phablet turned out to be a bit mis-labeled. 2G/ GSM phone only and no GPS module. Woefully underpowered as well. A bit of negotiating with the seller - who had been snookered by his wholesaler won me a pretty decent price reduction. Someone will be getting a $30 2G Android Phablet for xmas next year. 

Meanwhile my old unlocked Softbank ZTE blade is working fine as my data-only phone, with GPS and twitter posting. Unfortunately, it is really chewing batteries so I have to keep it on "airplane mode" most of the time. My old Softbank prepaid flip phone had not yet lost its assigned phone number (number lasts 60 days + 360 days since last refill.) and was easily reactivated for Y3,000 (appx CA $33) at the Softbank counter at Haneda Airport.

This double-phone approach came in really handy one evening in Yokohama: there are places where the softbank 3G signal can't connect and suddenly you are unreachable when your friend is trying to meet up with you. But NTT Docomo's data plan (through Asahi.net) still gets a signal, so email works.

Retrospective: A small mountain pass near Kamakura

Time for another retrospective post!

The last few times I have visited the area around Kamakura, I have had the fun of hiking the mountain passes, or kiridoshi. Before there were highways, trains and tunnels, these passes were how you got from one town/ valley to the next. Usually they had at least one temple or shrine at either end or in the middle. The climb can be steep, but there are always well-worn steps carved into the rocks, or wood and dirt steps set into the sides of the hill paths. Most of the towns and cities that they join maintain them as hiking paths for their citizens; it is a common sight to run into people walking their dogs, or just walking on a day off and enjoying the exercise.

Kamakura has at least seven famous passes into (and out) of it. I think I have managed to hike at least 5 of them including a spectacular one that has a  short tunnel carved into the rock face of a hill, and is fenced off as dangerous. Guess how many folks navigate around these fences...

The really odd thing about these passes is how many of them end up (or start off depending on your route) at the end of a residential street. Sure, there will be a park or a temple at some end but surprisingly enough, plenty of them also have paths that just come out at the end of small boring everyday streets. It must be great being a kid if you live close by.

Or this can backfire: Another pass one town over has one of its trails end right above a high school, with at least 500 meters of 60 degree angle stairs descending to the sports field. P.E. classes must be some unique form of hell at that school.

The Monkey Garden shrine pass (I think it is officially called the Nagoshi or Nagoe Pass) between Zushi and Kamakura is quite tame in comparison.

Head west down one of the main roads towards Kamakura and you will end up at the nondescript gate for the Monkey Garden Shrine. From there it is an uphill climb, past houses on the grounds, past the cemetery, (off to the side of it is a garden plot area that makes up the modern successor to the "monkey garden", where monkeys were supposed to help the shrine priests grow their food) past the dug out sandstone chambers in the hill, up to where the path divides. To the right a trail continues along the ridges of the hills, eventually ending at a second pass into Kamakura and shortly thereafter, near the eighth, intra-Kamakura Shakadō Pass. But the direct, historic path is to the left, past the back wall of the ridiculously large bubble-economy-era chateau property (rumored to have a 3-car elevator to get to it from the road way below) and then along a short trail into Kamakura, If you look carefully at the Google Maps covering the area most of the path is marked out, at least the part that detours past the samurai tombs and ends in the hills above Kotsubo. Strangely enough however, the other path into Kamakura is not yet Google-mapped.


View Larger Map

There is a historic marker where one of the leading lights of Japanese Buddhism passed by some 800 years ago. if you turn leftward shortly after (at the handy way-sign) you will be heading along the more popular route and soon pass a gated monument to the souls of those who died while using the pass, and a smaller monument for the souls of the animals that perished on the journey. It seems to be always guarded by cats.

A bit further is the fenced-off and gated "Samurai Tombs" area, which used to be overgrown, but recently has been cleaned up. Unfortunately it is only open a few weekends of the year. There was too much mucking about with the artifacts by jerks, so now access to it is restricted.

If you keep going along the path you would end up at the end of a residential street in the little fishing village between Zushi and Kamakura. Because it goes through an area with tight rock formations, this route is what is usually considered to be the main "Nagoshi/ Nagoe Pass", except that it doesn't really get you into Kamakura!

Backtracking and continuing westward will get you right into Kamakura. This is the part of the trip that is missing from Google Maps. No worries; the distances if you ignore the inclines and descents are in the range of long city blocks. Even in January, the last leg of the hike is through a nicely forested section until you emerge along a narrow path right up against the retaining walls holding back the hillside over the main JR train line tunnel.

This is the best part of the trip for me: the little neighborhood high in the cleft of the hill may have to put up with train noise for 16 hours a day, but at least there is no diesel smoke (the trains are electric) and the hillside forms a pocket micro-climate that must be slightly warmer than the rest of town, because every house seems to have a garden and a citrus tree.

Remember when you look at the photos: this is January! A bit of winter scruffy-ness with the foliage is unavoidable.

As you descend to track-level and navigate the rail crossing, you can see a further garden plot right between the two train lines!  If you blink when you are on the train coming out of the tunnel, you will miss it. Before the crossing you can catch a glimpse of a humongous cactus that someone has as their back yard "tree".

From then on, it is a 20 minute walk to the center of town and the main train station unless you take one of the back streets and stop at every temple and shrine along the way. This is historic Kamakura, so of course, there is at least one every block: shrines are generally free to explore, temples generally charge a small admission fee.

Here is the Flickr slide show of the whole hike, January 28, 2014:



https://www.flickr.com//photos/58896081@N04/sets/72157650041129096/show/with/16003829098/

Retrospective: How to get sick in Japan

I'm not in Japan right now, but I thought I'd add something useful to my blog, and since winter is setting in here in Dogpatch, "What could be more useful than the differences in everyday minor medical emergencies between Japan and South Western Ontario?"

What if you are up in the wilds of Canada and that 2 week chest cold turns into something a bit more nasty? I smoke too much, and have smoked for much too long, so a chest cold can easily turn into bronchitis or worse. Over here in the land of free medical care this means a trip to the "walk-in clinic" and not too early on in the cold, or you will get to sit around in a waiting room full of crying children and finally a lecture about antibiotic resistance. "Thanks Doc, never heard that before, I'll be back when I am drowning in my own phlegm". We pay for our own prescriptions (and our dentists, leg casts, glasses, etc) here still. And the local tribe of white-coats think they are saving the planet by keeping antibiotics from anyone they think is poor and therefore irresponsible.

Good news: if you get that sick while visiting Japan, it is just about the same, only better and a bit more expensive because you are an uninsured tourist.

My 10 day cough kept getting worse and by a certain Monday, I was finding it hard to breathe. Yup, bronchitis or worse. Clear phlegm,  hacking cough, could feel my lungs with each breath. Of course I picked a long holiday weekend to die on, so even though it was Monday, the usual conveniently located doctor's offices were all closed. Fortunately Google found me an Emergency Clinic open not too far from a train line.

Well, screw the train. Pay $18 for a taxi and just get there now! My friend came along to help and interpret. The clinic was pretty well what you would expect; a big operation full of coughing folks and crying infants. After a check in and a 30 minute wait I saw a doctor, pantomimed my distress, coughed and wheezed and was given a prescription, filled on the spot for 5 days of Cipro and expectorants.

Now Cipro isn't usually used for bronchitis in North America, but as it can knock out Anthrax, it is a pretty strong antibiotic - which is what I needed. My friend did a bit of translating for the doc, mentioning an allergy to one class of antibiotics and a past history of pneumonia, so I guess he went for the big gun.

I paid the almost Y9,000 tab in cash and pocketed the little envelopes of pills, after gulping down my first dose.

A bracing, wheezing 15 minute walk back to the train station (interlude with longing looks at the butcher-block like shogi table out in the trash: Verboten!) Y280 back to the local train station stop and another 10 minutes walk and I was beginning to feel a bit better, or at least relieved that I had once again cheated death.

Don't you dare accuse me of hypochondria. Pneumonia is the real thing.

Now to attend to the lose ends. Wait until evening and fire up the Google Voice number so I can call CAA's traveler's insurance line; "Nope I am not in the USA - using the interwebs phone...  I am in Japan, got sick, had to, etc. Just letting you guys know. Thanks for getting the reimbursement form in the mail to me so it will be waiting for me when I return."

CAA charged me about $120 for a month of traveler's insurance and two months later reimbursed the clinic bill and the taxi bill. So kudos to them.  In previous years, I had used  a company called Special Benefits, who were a bit cheaper and they coughed up for the nasty spill I took on my bike as well. So both firms are ok by me, but CAA is a bit cheaper once you reach "a certain age". I think I got a $9 discount for being a member. Either firm can set you up over the phone in under 10 minutes if you are hale and youthful, but the Special Benefits firm wants paperwork for us middle aged geezers.

Moral of the story. Pay the extra for the traveler's health insurance!

A similar song and dance in South Western Ontario would have ended costing about half as much, or more than in Japan if I was a tourist without our wonderful socialist health insurance (for which the flame of the glorious people's revolution still burns in my heart to honour! Just teasing the cousins, ignore me)

One more lesson learned: Don't wait until you are about to drop and it is a holiday.

I hope to be back in Japan for March 2015. Cherry Blossoms for sure this time!

auctions.yahoo.co.jp X Japan Post Bank! Gambatte, Dai Gaijin !

Into my second week here, and a few minor injuries are keeping me from fully enjoying the nice weather and fine hiking paths around Kamakura. One of the posts I missed doing last year was about the mountain trails that linked the small coastal valley towns before trains and roads made travel faster, easier and less picturesque. Fortunately plenty of other bloggers have done so, so a quick Google of the term "kiridoshi" will get you plenty of neat pictures and information. The term means "pass", and there is usually a temple on one end or both or sometimes in the middle. These paths are often over 1,000+ years old and now are maintained as municipal hiking paths. Great fun - of which I am not doing right now...

So it was inevitable that I would end up on Yahoo Japan's auction site, furiously riding the Google Translate extension on my browser and looking at all the neat stuff that I, as a visiting furreigner, could bid on as long as the price din't go over Y5,000 (appx $CA55).  I want a used lens and another low-end android cell phone! Be careful what you wish for, boyo!

Unlike Rakuten, you usually can't march down to a combini store and pay at their odd electronic kiosk (used for bill payments, ticket sales, etc). Nope, you need a credit card (Western cards not accepted), a yahoo wallet account (sorry you can't have one) or an auction that offers COD shipping. Or you need to pester your friend living in Japan - who may hold a dim view of your habits of collecting odd bits of used Japanese tech junk as souvenirs. Sometimes you can get away with sticking the cash in an envelope and sending it "registered courier" via Kuroneko delivery service (Did ya know they were a sponsor of Ghibli's Kiki's Delivery Service?).

Sometimes you get a seller who just wishes the irritating tourist who won his auction would give up and go away.

Behold the object of my desire: one more ZTE "Blade" android smartphone. (AKA the Softbank Libero 003Z)  About 4 years old, a bit under-powered , Android 2.1, GPS, wifi, and very very unlockable, with a heap of hobbyist hacked custom operating system re-loads available for it. Also nice and small, so it fits well in your pocket. One day I will bust mine, and I want a backup. Hooray! I won the auction, now to settle up.

Of course Yahoo Japan has not fixed their credit card input section since last year. What do you mean input my name as on the card in Kana? I heard that one can use strange custom character called double-byte or something to do this, but the last time I tried it drove me mad, so this one is a fail, again.

Using Google xlate, I offer to tape the Y3500 into a letter and Kuroneko the seller the cash. "Just pay with Japan Post transfer" comes back as the reply.

Last time I tried something like this, I was told that Japan Post will not let me open an account because I am a short-term visitor. But I never tried a simple deposit to/ cash transfer. So off to the nearby Post Office for a bit of research...

First off, the Post Office does mail, banking and bill paying, so the 7 or so wickets are divided between these functions. Then I noticed that you had to grab a numbered ticket. Then a bit later I noticed that there were 3 different series of numbered tickets: separate ones for mail, banking and bill paying. Banking it is, grab a ticket, sit down and smile.

Now it may be my imagination, but both wicket-staff seemed to have noticed my presence and began to slow down whatever they were processing. Obviously a troublesome customer - let the other idiot deal with him. Eventually, the young guy left his window for something, leaving the young woman to deal with me. So up I waddled, with 3 pages of printed out web page, with the "Just pay with Japan Post transfer" part, in the original Japanese circled, as well as his Japan Post transfer number info circled on the next page with an arrow and the Y3500 drawn with thick magic marker next to it.

Well today is my lucky day! Instead of the expected crossed forearms "you can't do that" sign, I get a lot of polite instruction that I cannot understand, and then a calculator showing me that the transfer fee is going to be Y5,100 (appx $CA 5.50)

OUCH!

Oh well, chalk it up to research expenses and reply with a polite "Hai".

Next comes the transfer form: She cannot fill it out - I have to (I guess this makes sense). So she laboriously guides me by marking a note pad with what I need to fill in where, including the katakana for mobile phone account (I'm guessing) which I render in a horridly illegible way, but close enough for rock and roll. Finally all is done and she pantomimes that I can go have a seat and wait. No problem, I saw this with the last customer.

A few minutes later, I notice she is running into trouble, but is a bit worried as to how to bring up the subject. Finally she motions me back - there's something wrong with my name. I hope she doesn't want it in katakana! Nope: avoider guy next wicket over is back and has a few words of english - enough to tell me that my full name is too long! You to have a name that is at most 13 characters total to transfer funds via Japan Post. After another bit of back and forth, I settle on my first initial, last name, and after much confirmationthis seems to to be acceptable. Four minutes later, I get my change, receipt and get to thank both politely and profusely. I even throw in a "gomenasai", which is a serious "I'm sorry" apology rather than the more formulaic "sumimassen" excuse-me variety.

So....

It can be done! But the cash in the envelope sent kuroneko will run the cost of the envelope, plus Y90. Credit card payment from a helpful friend will run Y158. A bank transfer from a friend will run Y300- Y400.  Rakuten's 7-11 kiosk system is easier and in the middle range of these fees, but the best deals for stuff are on Yahoo.

Now for a bargain used lens.. Something aspherical,  Canon EF mount, zoon to 200 or 300 mm, no scratches or fungus. Japanese camera buffs are the pickiest in the world and bargains are available o'plenty, but summers are humid and mold spots in used lenses are common. Lets see how this one goes. Or I could try hiking some historic passes again.

Hayama fish market

One week into my vacation and a small problem has developed: I am really out of shape, and have managed to pull the achilles tendon in my left heel. This is going to cut down the number and range of walks I can do. Also, my friend's knees are hurting. Fortunately the buses run regularly up and down the "shonan coast". Here is a chilly visit on Sunday to the Hayama produce/ fish market at the docks... We made it as they were almost ready to close up.

Some fuji-porn from the marina...

The tiny beach next to it...

Mt. Fuji will come into view

The beaches near Kamakura afford a striking view of mt. Fuji across Sagami Bay. On cold, clear winter afternoons, the haze that sometimes obscures fuji-san lifts and people line up on the beaches to view the sunset

Contains %1 fruit Juices

In Japan it is traditional, as in many civilized countries, to bring beverages with you to a house party. Perhaps house party is too big a term - this would be more of an evening get-together where food and drink is partaken of with friends in a safe, pleasant and non-budget busting manner. Everyone goes home before the last train. In either case, tradition dictates that the unconsumed remains of the evening are left with the host: which explains how I had the opportunity to sample an Asahi beverages brand Cocktail Partner. I later found out that it contains %1 real fruit juices and %4 alcohol - if I had known this, i would not have mixed it half and half with shochu to create what only could be described as a blue citrus-y analogue to Prestone anti freeze.

Which reminded me of the in-flight movie I watched on my way here: Rather than Iron Man 3, I decided that I wanted something Japanese, (it would be subtitled) and cheesy. Air Canada provides free beer and seat back monitor movies to anesthetize its patrons during the 11 hour flight so why not see if i could make out every 20th word of dialogue and see what was popular in live-acion entertainment lately. What i found would later remind me that can of Asahi Cocktail Partner.

You see, this pretty young girl is the heiress to a vast industrial fortune, but she also likes her independence, so she maintains a secret life as a police detective. Taking time off to go on a cruise ship vacation (the liner is owned by her company, crap! it is named after her) she runs into her police boss guarding an ugly mcguffin and has to switch back and forth between evening dresses and office lady (OL) clothes, all while shadowed and assisted by her pretty boy butler/ bodyguard. There are lots of designer accessories, low quality slapstic, two afro-topped buffoon criminals, an unseen international master thief and two murders, as well as token gaijin actors (bulgarian?) who do their english lines with worse accents than the Japanese folks when they speak a few words of english.

The effect was reminsicent of "The Love Boat" meets "McMillan and Wife", only worse. Our heroine makes excited expressions and exclamatory noises a lot. And she gets to wear expensive stuff.

I later found that the movie was the end of a successful TV series "(The) Afterdinner Murder Mysteries", so it had a following. Bad TV and movies can be found worldwide, but I was hit by the naive charm of the whole thing. Sure it was cloying, and agency-deal derived, and full of placed talent, and placed products  but it was on a human scale, it had an endearing simplicity to it. It was like American TV and b movies from the 70's.

So I watched the whole thing.

It was also sexist, patronizing and poorly plotted as a whodunnit - who cares? The lead is no Makoto Kusanagi. Not to plot a line from one point, but live action Jp drama needs more strong female leads. On the other hand, Hollywood doesn't make movies like this any more, and even TV shows are seldom made this relaxed and cheesy.. It's all Sherlock, CSI, new-Dr Who quick-cuts and edgy plots and camera angles. Too many jolts per minute. The mundane, the unoriginal, the contrived, the formulaic all can be soothing and reassuring. All is right in the world, and everything is exactly where it should be.

It went well with 2 cans of free Air Canada Heineken. I swear I will remeber to bring Alka Seltzer tablets next trip, I always end up with heartburn after these flights.

Almost over the jet lag. Bike back in working order. Hooray!

Next time: the importance of OK stores, or something else...

There was a 2013, but now it is 2014

Hi folks

3:30am near Kamakura and once again I am back in Japan! Hooray!
Mildly jet lagged after 23hrs in transit - the last 153 minutes in the direct "limited express" Sobu /Yokosuta line really taxed the reserves but for 2,200 Y who can gripe too much. That's about $24CA, 130lbs of drag-on luggage no extra charge.

As usual Narita was helpful and pleasant - heck even Pearson (Toronto) worked well this time and I made the connection in time. We'll see how they handle the return: last year they stranded me on a snowy Friday night after 2 flights out were scrubbed - RobertQ shuttle got me home.

So what happened to this blog last year? I got lazy and had too much fun.

This year I hope to have more fun, but also drop a few notes here.

First thing I learned this trip.. When home from previous trip, do not put your Japanese cell phone "someplace safe where I won't mislay it" That meant I had to use the extra one, its sim & phone number were stale-dated, and that meant a new sim, new charges and slightly less smooth going before getting on the JR train. So 3,000Y top up for the phone can be paid on the Canadian credit card - which often does not work in Japan, but the new sim/phone number/ registration is another odd Y3,100 and they want cash, and an hour to register the new number on the network.. If I had my regular jp phone it would have been 5 minutes - the numbers expire after 420 days, so no problem with yearly trips. Oh and all the maps I jpegged and put in the phone , and the 2GB micro sd  with them and last years pix are also safely stored somewhere back in Canada..

No matter, I have a working jp cell phone and can call for help if I do something stupid and get into trouble.

My friend had renovated her apartment last year.. It is all spiffy and very modern looking. The hot bath was wonderful, but jet-lag is jet-lag and so here I am waiting for the ibuprophen to kick in, sitting on a cushion in front of her mini-space heater in the wee hours of the morning - or early afternoon, Ontario time.

Fortunately I found the carton of Sochu on the shelf besides the fridge.

Here is an enigmatic picture from last year. It is good to be back!

maybe next time - the naive charm of Japanese in-flight movies

A new, beachfront venue!

Here I am, back in Japan again! My friend moved to a nice beach-view condo near Kamakura - on the other side of the peninsula from Yokohama. Most of my visit is already over; there was soooo much to do that I have been a neglectful blogger.

What can I say about visiting Japan once more?

The food is still yummy, the good life is still relatively affordable, folks are polite, trains will get you anywhere you need to go for a reasonable fare, and people will do their best to try to understand a foreign tourist who only has 20 words of japanese and can't get the syntax down right to save his life.

So, I hope to fill in this year's blog entries with news of the trip, pictures and random stuff, but I fear that I will have to do most of it after the fact when I am back home.

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...