Japan Diary, Part Five

June 5 & 6  Wednesday was trash day. Stuff had to be at curbside for pickup by 7:30, so it was my first order of business after waking up at about 5:00 a.m.. In mid-morning I went food shopping at the stores nearest to the house. Had breakfast when I got home, watered and misted the plants*, brushed the cats, was surprised when Minka licked my hand. In mid-afternoon, I had lunch, worked sudoku and crossword puzzles in the newspapers.

*Yang Yang decided it was a good idea to drink the water in the dishes under the plants. I decided it wasn't. When I picked him up and was carrying him to his water dish, he struggled and scratched my arm.

From about 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., I took a nap, then watched some baseball on TV. Unlike my country, they don't have baseball games on TV every day. It seems that every Japanese major league team has one or two American players. A noticeable difference in crowd behavior is that when each team is at bat, there are numbers of fans wearing team colors who sing the team pep song. So there's no quiet time (except maybe between innings and halves of innings).

I got to dinner about midnight.

Cod, sauteed peppers and mushrooms, salad, black coffee (in pot), manhattan, white wine.

Thursday morning, having gone to bed at about 2:30, I was awakened at about 5:00 to feed the cats. I got up at about 6:00, and Yang Yang paid a brief visit at about 6:30.

At about 7:30 I went out to take a walk along the pedestrian promenade.

A view of a side street across Shiroyama Dori (the street the promenade parallels) from the promenade.

Near the farthest point of my walk, perhaps a mile from the point where I started.

I find it a little surprising that they put it in English. This is in an area where I think there are very few English speakers, and few of them who would be unable to handle the Japanese.

A tile embedded in the promenade. This looks like an old map of the area.

Hollyhock.

I saw a couple of maps which showed a fairly direct route from near the annex back to the house via regular roads, so I decided to try it. At one point I became uncertain which way to go, but I knew that going right would either get me where I wanted to go or back to the promenade. Eventually I arrived at an intersection a couple of blocks from my brother's house and got back to the house just after 9:00. After that it was a relaxed day of newspapers and TV and occasionally looking in on the cats. They spent most of their time in the main bedroom, but Yang Yang also liked to spend time looking out from the breezeway between the two houses. Once in a while Minka joined him for a moment.

Yang Yang in the bedroom.

Minka on my s-i-l's bed.

My brother and s-i-l were due back late that evening, so I had dinner early and cleaned up the kitchen.

Chicken livers and hearts (they came attached to each other) sauteed with mushrooms etc. on toast points. Usual beverages.

When the folks got back we had a little collation which included some German cheeses and pastries I had bought. I got to bed about 1:30.

June 7  Friday was my return to the States (via Toronto).

My brother in what I understand is a fairly typical pose with the cats. Minka doesn't curl up in a lap, just drapes herself over one thigh. Yang Yang is not a lap cat at all. (If you recognize my brother, please keep it confidential).

My sister-in-law drove us to the station, where my brother and I caught a train to Shinjuku. There my brother made sure I found the train to Narita. It turned out my flight was delayed, which meant less time in Toronto. So I decided just to stick close to the gate. After an hour or so I realized that the gate I was at was my seat number, not the plane's departure. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to recover from that misreading of the boarding pass.

The flights were smooth and uneventful, although the Tokyo-Toronto leg went well south of the normal route, making the distance considerably longer than normal, but the pilot made up for it by flying about 100 mph faster than normal, so our flight time was about as scheduled. I suppose the change of route was to avoid rough weather.

I arrived home in a downpour from a tropical storm and got drenched just going from the van to my front door.

It was a pleasant and relaxing time in Japan, and my brother was very grateful. He said that if I hadn't come, he'd either have cancelled his trip or spent the whole time worrying about the cats.

Well, that concludes the trip. I may post a follow-up, with some words about the cost of the whole thing and pics of the loot I picked up, but these five "diary" posts give you the basics. I hope it was somewhat interesting.

Japan Diary, Part Two

May 30  On Thursday morning I woke up at about 4:00 a.m., having retired at about 11:30 the previous evening. Since Japan does not have Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time), it was already light outdoors. I went downstairs and had a little snack. The cats wanted one too, so I fed them and read one of the books I had brought (In Search of Order, by Eric Voegelin) for a while. Then I went back to bed, at about 5, but didn't go back to sleep, so I got up shortly before 6:00.

Breakfast was about 7:00. Then I read the papers for a while, until the cat Minka started meowing at me. I followed her upstairs, where she got onto a couch in the alcove next to the stairwell. She seemed to want some attention, so I petted her and rubbed her tummy for a while.

Minka, in the middle of the petting session.

(BTW, you can click on the pics to enlarge them. I recommend it.)

Later, I read some of the book I had bought in the airport at Toronto, What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell. At lunch time, my brother took me to the student co-op at the nearby Agricultural University, where we bought sandwiches. After lunch I napped for a while and worked puzzles in the papers (Japan Times and International Herald Tribune). In the evening, we went to a restaurant called Gotsui, which specializes in a cuisine called okonomiyaki. Our food was mostly prepared by a chef in an open kitchen behind a counter. We had several courses, but I don't recall any that were exactly like what the wiki article describes. The items were put on the griddle at our table, and we helped ourselves. Here are pictures of a couple of the courses.

Note the egg and the shrimp in this one.

Bits of the egg yolk are left. The udon noodles are prominent.

One of the waiters was wearing a t shirt with the number 521 on it, and the number also appeared on the menu (a line of beer they offered) and on the restaurant's sign. So I asked my brother what it was all about. Turns out it's a bilingual play on words. Gotsui is a chain of franchised operations. If you separate the name into syllables, go is Japanese for five., tsu is English for two (or at least it sounds sorta like it), and i is one way of saying one in Japanese.

This and the remaining pictures are actually from May 29. Here are the cats on my brother's bed. It gives you some idea of how different they are in size.

Downstairs living/dining area, looking toward south-facing window. Note all the plants.

My brother's work area, to the right of the area in the previous pic. You can also see through to what he calls the sun room. I call it a breezeway. There is a door into the mother-in-law's house, partially visible beside the curtain. So it's possible to get from house to house without going outdoors.

My brother uses the breezeway as a smoking area. You can see into the garden. Yang Yang often looks longingly at the outdoors through the windows.

Looking into the kitchen from the living room area, with a glimpse of the entry hall to the far left.

My sister-in-law's desk, beyond the dining room table. Kitchen is to the left. This view faces east.

"My" room, east end.

South side. That's a massage chair, center right, and cat tower center left.

West end of the room.

Japan Diary, Part One

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had agreed to go to Japan to cat sit while my brother and his wife went to Hawaii.

May 27-28  My trip was on Air Canada, via Toronto. It was about an hour to Toronto, then about 12 hours to Tokyo. I left Boston on the morning of the 27th and, having crossed the international date line, arrived in Japan on the evening of the 28th. From Narita Airport, it was about an hour's ride to the Tokyo City Air Terminal, where my brother met me, and then something under an hour via subway and taxi to his place.

Their house is the one with the carport. Just beyond is my sister-in-law's mother's house.

The house used to have green shutters, and with the clapboard siding (unusual in Japan) it gave a first impression reminiscent of my grandmother's home. My room was in the front of the house, over the carport.

The cats had been on my bed, when we arrived. When I appeared at the door of the room, they both jumped off, and the little female cat went under the bed.

It wasn't long before both of them realized that I was okay and allowed me to pet them, but neither went back on that bed as long as I was there.

Here's a picture of the male.

He's a fairly normal sized cat, while the female much smaller. You'll note that he has a short tail. That's fairly common in Japan, but the female's is normal length for her size.

For my welcoming dinner they had bento of sushi from the neighborhood sushi place, which my sister-in-law supplemented with fried chicken. It was all very tasty.

There was a bento for each of us.

May 29  On Wednesday, my brother showed me the supermarkets and shops where they buy their groceries. Although I don't speak Japanese, the cash registers display the price. The clerks keep up a fairly steady stream of conversation, but it's not necessary to understand what they're saying, as long as you know to put the money in the tray. In the larger markets, they don't bag your purchases. As they check the items out they transfer them from your shopping basket to another, which you take to a nearby counter to bag the things yourself.

There were four supermarkets, two adjacent to the train station about 10 minutes' walk from the house, a convenience store, about halfway to the station, and another supermarket not far from the convenience store.

In the evening my sister-in-law's mother and brother joined us for dinner.


Are there any questions?