Tokyo and iOS 4.0

Today has got to be the furthest I have travelled and returned home within one day…  I got up at 6am to get the train to the airport, flew to to Tokyo and got the train into town, then in the evening was back at the airport flying back and getting home to Sapporo just now at 11pm!  ”What did you forget?” you might ask…   But forgetfulness wasn’t the reason for the trip.  The whole event was a highly organised and coordinated trip to go to the British Embassy (they only have an embassy in Tokyo and consulate in Osaka) to apply to get a CNI (Certificate of No Impediment) which will let Emily and I apply to get married here in Japan.  According to the website I had to attend an “Interview” at the embassy, which I had to apply for (an application so I could apply to get the document I need to apply to get married…), but the whole ordeal took a matter of minutes, with the short walk down the hallway to the next room to pay the fees I was in and out of the embassy in around 30 minutes!  All that travelling for 30 minutes!!

But hopefully it will be worth it!  I took stamps for them so they could send me the certificate in the post rather than going back again to get it, and I got a form that I need to fill in and post back to pay for the actual certificate as I won’t be there to pay for it on the day of issue.  Strangely they wouldn’t let me pay for it while I was there and had the cash, but rather I have to send it.  We had a brief discussion about how I could just go outside and fill in the forms and post them in  that very day which would only take a day or two off the actual time the embassy was responsible for my money…  So I will maybe wait a little while before sending the form in, until that point I was quite impressed by the efficiency of the embassy, but not being able to pay in advance was a sharp jerk back to the reality that the small patch of land I was on was technically British (is it?) and I wasn’t not eager to please and super efficient Japan for that half an hour!  Hopefully it will process and work and I won’t have to rush back to Tokyo with a few days to spare before we actually get married…

Anyway!  A few days ago I upgraded my (already ageing) iPhone 3G to iOS 4.0 and it was lovely for a little while.  But today’s trip to Tokyo tested it to the limit.  I was listening to music and catching up with podcasts (and Bill’s latest messages from First!) while finding my way with maps and GPS, looking up train times online, writing texts and an email or two, tweeting the odd tweet and even watching a YouTube video or two at some points of non-activity.  This was normally not an issue, it could do all of these things fine, and probably still can as long as two don’t happen at once!  But after a short time using it, it started to be unbearable.  It was very slow responding to key presses, particularly on Japanese input, it ground to a halt more than a few times apps were crashing left right and centre and even once it needed an all out reboot!

So long story (slightly) short: I want to go back!!
But it isn’t easy.  From looking around it seems that I will basically have to go through the “jailbreak” process to install the older version 3.1.3 of the operating system…  So my question is, should I just jailbreak it?  My reasons for not doing it before were that it just seemed like too much hassle, and the little risk involved was probably not worth any of the benefits…
But if I am going to have to do it anyway to get back to functionality maybe I should just do it?  Has anyone out there jailbroken their iPhone 3G and have any experience?  Good experiences?  Bad experiences?  What are the risks and what are the main benefits?  Would Softbank go nuts on me?  If I went to the apple store (urgh) would they restore me back to 3.1.3 or tell me I should be glad to have 4.0?

Conference, Norn Irish and rememberance

This past month has been pretty busy with language school, wedding preparations and so on all taking up time. We also had the OMF All Japan Conference in Jozankei, Hokkaido, last week. I was part of the tech team for the conference and it took a bit of preparation and work while we were there, but everything seemed to go well, except for Tre’s laptop! It was great fun roping Oliver and JP into helping out too! (Thanks guys!) So you’ll forgive me for not updating in a little while!

Japan Field Conference is a time that all of the OMF missionaries in Japan come together and spend four or five days listening to teaching (Patrick Fung, OMF’s General Director), have fun (in the pool and onsen!) and fellowship (over delicious food)!

The field conference actually only happens every 3 years, the years in between have regional conferences instead and we are divided into Hokkaido and East Japan regions.
But this field conference had something special. A team of short ter missionaries came out from Norn Iron to run a kids programme for all the missionary kids! 
The team was mostly made up of people from Helen Lyttle’s church, Bloomfield Presbyterian, but also had 3 other guys, Mark, Roger and Jonny.  Jonny of course being known by aliases such as Silly McSilly, Marvin the Minstrel and now also Buzz McLightyear!

Now that conference is over I have the priviledge of hosting Roger and Jonny in my flat for a few nights before they head back to Tokyo and on home to NI.  Today I took Jonny to Oasa to see the church and meet some of the people.  Then we went to the local university’s festival to sample some local delights and see the Yosakoi Dancers performing.
Tomorrow we will be taking the team to a nearby lake and volcanic area, I am looking forward as I haven’t been to that area before either!

The service today at church is the last part of my post title.  Here in Japan remembering those who have passed away is a major part of culture, and also of Japanese Buddhism.  As in the west such dedicated official rememberance is not part of our culture (we prefer more personal rememberance of Granny and Grandad), and because Christianity doesn’t revere ancestors as Japanese Buddhism and Shinto do, it seems as though we Christians don’t care about our ancestors to many Japanese.  Which is a reflection of culture rather than faith.
So to enable Japanese Christians to faithfully remember their parents and grandparents without compromising their Christian faith, churches often buy an area in a graveyard for interning ashes of members.  Then once a year they have a special service to remember those who have been called to heaven before them.  This service is a very serious affair and is very moving.  Pastor Horita gave a short description of each member who had passed away since the church began (it is a bit over 30 years old) during his message and after the normal service there is a short one at the grave site.

This tradition fills many gaps that a plain western Christianity would leave in many people’s expectations and hopes.  A Japanese Christian’s non-Christian family might expect to have religious ceremonies of rememberance at the temple and this could result in the deceased Christian being worshipped as a god or spirit.  It also shows non-Christian family members that Christians do care about those who have been before.  And finally it is just a touching way to remember grandparents and parents who have passed away and honour their memory!  But it is a bit unusual to be in the service without knowing what is going on!

Sapporo…

Last Wednesday I was privileged enough to be invite to climb to the 38th floor of JR Tower by my friend JP (The dancing one, not the snowboarding one!) JR Tower is one of the tallest buildings in the city, if not the tallest…

From the top floor you can see pretty much all the city, from the mountains in the west to the fields to the east… So what better place to have a go at making some panorama pictures?! I was quite lazy though and didn’t maintain position well enough to take good pictures for stitching really, but here are four rough panoramas of Sapporo from the top of the JR Tower! The pictures are pretty large, so once you’ve clicked through to the album, you can click to zoom in for a closer look…

Sapporo panorama from JR Tower

If you live in the city see if you can spot your area (For the Higashi-ku folk, you can see the Tsudo-mu community dome in the north picture…

Then on Saturday I went with Emily to Shinrinkouen in Nopporo, Ebetsu, or Nopporo Forest Park and climbed to the measly 8th floor of the Hokkaido Centenary Memorial Tower to find out of use elevators. But the view from the 8th floor was still quite nice, particularly as there isn’t anything to get in the way… And of course the tower looking like the tower of Barad-dûr of Mordor in Lord of the Rings was a bonus!
So I took a more simple series of pictures and made another panorama! The glass was pretty dirty (lots of insects on it, ladybirds and stinkbugs) but here is the result!

From Shinrinkoen

Google.cn

I am sure you have seen about Google’s row with China in the news recently.  Basically “someone” in China was attacking Google’s services (primarily gmail) in an apparent attempt to get information about civil rights protesters.  Google’s response was a bit disconnected in my view… 

Back in 2006 Google made a For-China version of it’s site called Google.cn (.cn being the TLD for China),  Now it had a chinese language version of it’s service for sometime, but it was being blocked by the Great Firewall to avoid people finding things on the internet that might not agree with the governments official take on national and world events, or even worse, might make them look bad.  So, in order for Google to have a workable presence in China, they have to censor their results in a fashion that pleases the Chinese authorities, and so they decided to do that through google.cn.  This move brought a lot of flack their way from free-speech activists and other people who don’t like how China works.

So basically, as I understand it google.cn is the site that gived the filtered results and the rest of google doesn’t.  Google doesn’t seem to offer its other services through google.cn and presumably they aren’t part of the agreement with the Chinese government like search is.  But by using proxies and routing connections through other countries, clever folk can access Gmail and it offers pretty secure (SSL) and pretty anonymous (no name etc required) email based outside China, a good thing for folk who might be trying not to get noticed or found protesting against their government.

But the disjointedness to me is between Google’s findings (that “someone” was attacking their services from China) and their response  (to remove filtering from their in-China search).  Why does removing the filtering balance out the attacks?  And surely Google must be aware that China will just ask them to leave or just block google.cn…  Perhaps Google is planning to remove themselves from the Chinese market and simply wants to make a big noise about doing so, while squarely pointing out the attacks made by ”someone”…  And I think good for Google.  They are a corporation, not a government agency, and they can withdraw from China if the fancy takes them.  If other corporations followed suit, China might think twice about it’s policies on censorship which in turn would mean it would have to think twice about abusing people’s civil rights as there wouldn’t be anywhere to hide.

But the truth is that out here in East Asia Google isn’t the same big deal it is in the ‘western world’.  Here in Japan no-one talks about Googling things, not many people use gmail, harldy anyone is on picasaweb, Blogger isn’t the blogging site of choice, Android has still to make any real appearance, YouTube is used a bit, but isn’t as clear a winner…  The big internet mogul in Japan, and in most of East Asia, is Yahoo!  In Japan Yahoo! provides search, online auctions and shopping, maps, news and weather, online TV, financial information, entertainment news, games and more.  On top of that it is one of the largest internet service providers in the country, it is in cahoots with my mobile phone company, Softbank, and my future parent’s in law even use Yahoo! as their telephone provider for their home.  the most common email address out here is @yahoo.co.jp.  Google is even advertising on TV to try and up it’s market share here, I never saw a Google advert in the UK, they didn’t need them.  If this is anything to go by China won’t worry about google leaving, there will be some other company that everyone uses.  If Google left Japan, most people probably wouln’t notice anything other than improved efficiency at the office because there is no YouTube.

So yeah, that’s my take on the whole thing…   Perhaps a well intentioned, if frustrated, move by Google, but will it have any of the effects people are talking about?

But!  Be aware I am no expert on China or Chinese politics, quite the opposite, but my mission agency’s background is in China, originally being the China Inland Mission before being kicked out and deciding to serve the rest of East Asia (including Japan! ) and so there is still a lot of interest in and prayer for China within the organisation…  So the story is of a little bit of interest to me, but this rant is the extent of my reporting ability on the subject!

Bloooooddd…… I’ll get it!!

Emily and I went to give blood today! Emily had never given blood before and I hadn’t in Japan either. It was pretty daunting to go through all of the questions on the computer screen checking if I was ok to give. There were lists of diseases that, had I had them in the past 6 months, would have meant I couldn’t give. Then lists that if I had at all would mean I couldn’t. These were pretty hard to understand, but made easier by the fact I haven’t had any diseases in a long time… Maybe since chicken pox as a kid!
Then came some lifestyle questions, questions about going to the dentists (which I did on Saturday, but the lady said it was fine as he just poked about and said everything was fine), questions about tatoos and piercings, and then the clincher…
It wanted to know if I had ever lived overseas. Of course I have, so I clicked 「はい」 (yes) and chose Europe from the list that followed.
The next question took me a little by surprise, althought I had been forewarned that I probably wouldn’t be able to give blood.
Had I stayed for more than one night in the UK between 1980 and 1996?
Well yes, of course I have. 「はい」 again.
Then the system asked me a bunch more questions and the lady printed out a sheet, before pointing to a massive poster on the wall saying that people who had stayed for more than one night in the UK between 1980 and 1996 you can’t give blood… I hadn’t noticed the poster, it really was massive, but in my defence there were loads of massive posters and it takes ages for me to try and read them! The reason given is the old favourite BSE, I hadn’t even thought about that whole episode since the foot and mouth outbreak made us remember it. But just in case I am a mad cow (ok, it’s really CJD in people…) they don’t want my blood.

So Emily gave blood on her own, and went all woozy in the middle of it. I think she has a bit of a blood phobia, she broke out into a sweat at the sight of it and took a little while to recover. We had planned she wouldn’t look at them doing it and maybe that would be ok, but the distraction she found was the next bed over which, of course, had someone lying in it giving blood! So that didn’t help so much! But all credit to Emily, she continued and gave her quotia!

Afterwards the lady at the desk kindly informed me that soon they will be revising the limit on people who have been to the UK so that those who have been for upto 30 days will be able to give blood, I explained that I had spent 14 of the 16 forbidden years living there.  Interestingly it is specifically the UK, if I had been born and raised 75 miles south on the same island, i.e. in the Republic of Ireland, I’d be certified BSE-free for giving blood in Japan!
I guess I will just have to keep my blood all to myself!

P.S.  Extra bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the post title comes from!

婚約式 – The Engagement Ceremony

Photos!

On Sunday the 22nd of November 2009, Emiri and I got officially engaged.

Now I thought we were engaged before, but that’s only part of the story here in Japan.  Japan has a lot of traditions that stem from the Buddhism and Shinto religions, from Confucianism and just from having a culture and people of it’s own.  Marriage, as you’d expect, has a whole bunch of these traditions, one of them is 結納 (ゆいのう ‘yuino’, for more info) which is basically an exchange of gifts between the bride and grooms’ families.  This exchange of gifts formally marked the engagement of the couple and there are a few other things around it that I won’t go into, largely because I am not at all sure that my understanding is correct!

The church in Japan quickly recognised that if Christians are to get married they should have something to go in place of these various ceremonies and traditions, as they are based in buddhism and shintoism.  Otherwise, families and onlookers may feel something is not right and the engagement and marriage aren’t valid.  So in place of this engagement process the church created a 婚約式 (konyakushiki – engagement ceremony, or betrothal ceremony).  While the original Japanese traditions have pretty much died off, the engagement ceremony in the church is still done.  This is what Emiri and I did last Sunday!  We did it at Itayanagi Chapel in Aomori, where I spent 3 months of my short term year, and Emiri attended for 6 years and actually lived in for a few!

We went down by Ferry last Monday, spent the week half on holiday (although Emiri had a lot of homework) and half preparing for the ceremony.  We got to go to the Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday (Surprised I could fit in my suit on Sunday) and on the way home the following Monday stopped in Hakodate to see Nari-Nari and Hana-chan, who used to live in Aomori, but now live and work in Hakodate.

Overall the ceremony was great.  I had kind of expected it to be a kind of formal proposal of marriage, or agreement to get married or something like that, like a formal pandering to culture…  But really it was more significant.  It really was about us gathering with friends and relatives to aknowledge before them and before God, His work in bringing us together, and then promising to seek to honour Him as we prepare to get married.  In that regard it really was a strong affirmation of the purposes of the marriage we intend to, and are preparing to enter into, particularly in a modern culture that doesn’t hold marriage in the regard that it used to be held.

Some detail about the ceremony itself…

Irritation… cultural irritation?

I have noticed myself being irritated at a few things recently.  Some of them are possible justified, others are long standing dislikes of mine, but some are new!  And some really aren’t consistent, swinging with my moods, energy levels and so on, which is pretty normal, to be honest.  But as I thought I realised some are culture stress, as things don’t work out the way I want or expect, sometimes because of new culture, sometimes because of misunderstandings, and sometimes simply because I have relatively recently moved from one culture to another.

Let’s start with something unique (for me) to Japan, and relatively inconsistent!  I have been getting annoyed when school kids, specifically middle school or high school kids, shout “Harrowww!!” at me in the street.  Some days I don’t mind at all and will even reply with a friendly “Hello!” of my own.  But on other days I see a group of kids and deliberatly cross the street and speed up my pedalling to avoid it, and when it comes stare ernestly forward as thought I had no idea that a kid I have never met is trying to engage me in a conversation that won’t progress further than bauldering a common salutation across the street…
Don’t get me wrong, I am usually fine with having a chat with someone who is interested in finding out where I am from that extends beyond an interjection, and I am ware that my failure to interact might inadvertently discourage these kids from trying to engage a foreigner in such a conversation in the future…  But being treated this way was fun for a little while, but it’s worn a bit thin and I’d kind of like to be treated a bit more like I was a permanent feature in the locality than a temporary exhibit…  But still I am a foreigner and not the normal face!

A long standing irritant for me is taxes and finances.  Recently I’ve been doing a bit of all that.  But now I am a bit more settled things might become more regular and once I have learned how to do stuff it might remain a bit more consistent!

A smaller one is a result of moving to Japan from UK.  Movies in Japan take a while longer to come out, bigger movies take shorter time, smaller movies take a bit longer.  Recently I have rented a few movies that looked pretty good and recently released just to get home and find it is a movie I saw last year, or even in one case a few years ago!  It’s particularly irritating when the movie wasn’t that great anyways!

One irritation that swings big time for me is racism in Japan and reactions to it.  On one aspect I am surrounded by people who really are quite at home with foreigners most of the time and so maybe I don’t experience so much of it.Sometimes the racism is ignorance, and harmless, easy to ignore and when people make a fuss it irritates me .  Sometimes it is pretty serious, like when kids are being bullied at school or by peers for being different.
But occasionally I will hear of something or even see something first hand that is downright racist and would be stamped down on big time in the UK.  When this happens I find myself swinging between feelings of annoyance that it has happened, is happening or even can happen and feelings of irritation that someone is making a big deal out of something that really isn’t that directly damaging to anyone.  One such example of this is a recent blog post about a McDonalds campaign here in Japan.

Anyways maybe the summer ending, winter looming on the horizon is making me more irritable?

Change of power

Today saw the Japanese equivalent of a general election take place.  So in the run up, with the loud-speaker cars driving around disturbing my extra hard study time (definitely not nap time, no no, definitely not), the news going nuts over politics and everyone (ok, some people) talking about it, I spent my time with Mr Yagita, my “language helper” talking about politics and learning how it all works in Japan!  Here is some of what I found out (memory problems and later verification by Wikipedia mean accuracy is not guaranteed!)

The Japanese government system is very similar to, having been based on the British parliamentary system and a Prussian system of constitutional monarchy. The National Diet (国会 – Parliament, not fish and rice…) are two houses, the lower “House of representatives” equivalent to the Commons in Britain, and the upper “House of Councillors” which is sort of the equivalent to the Lords, initially Councillors were not elected, but high ranking nobles. After WWII things were shaken up a bit, everything became a bit more democratic, the Councillors became elected individuals rather than hereditary noblemen.

So today Japan voted for it’s House of Representatives.  A bit like the UK there are two main parties and then a bunch of smaller ones.  The two big players are the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan – 民主党) and the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party – 自由民主党).  There is a whole bunch of history about these two parties that Mr Yagita sort of skipped through at pace, one interesting point thought, is that 50-odd years ago, Mr Aso’s grandfather, Shigeru Yoshida, (Until today, Taro Aso has been Leader of the LDP and Prime Minister of Japan, but that might change) was put out of power by, current leader of DPJ and apparently becoming Prime Minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama’s grandfather, Ichiro Hatoyama.  The reason wasn’t an election, but a merging of two parties and Yoshida (Aso’s grandad) being ousted as leader by Hatoyama, but the story doesn’t end there, in the midst of US/Soviet hostilities, CIA papers reveal a plot to assassinate Pro-US Yoshida and put Hatoyama in place as a more militaristic leadership, but Hatoyama’s government didn’t rearm Japan after all…

Another interesting point is that the house of representatives has had a LDP majority for all but a short time (11 months according to BBC article, two and a half years according to Wikipedia).

But today this has all changed, the vote counting widget on the front page of the Japan Times says that, come September, Japan will have a new Prime Minister and, potentially, a vastly different government.  Though it seems that really noone knows what kind of changes might result, if any at all.  As in any electoral campaign, I guess, promises have probably been made, but with no experience of living under a DPJ government, who knows whether they will be viable or manageable.  What’s more, no one really seems to be interested in the party’s policies, rather just keen for a change of leadership as the LDP has offered problem after problem and Prime Minister after Prime Minister.  Although a fast PM turnover rate is not new in Japan!  Japanese PMs tend to retire easily when trouble arises.

One of the more interesting aspects of the race for us Christians in Japan is that while Aso followed his grandfather’s footsteps into Roman Catholicism (Norn Irish voters unsure of what to make of that…) Hatoyama doesn’t share the Christian faith of his grandfather.  I have even heard that Hatoyama verges on the anti-Christian side, possibly resenting his mother’s faith.  Personally I am not sure that it will really make much of a difference.  Aso didn’t really make anything out of his faith that I am aware of while in office, and I can’t imagine Hatoyama going to any lengths to disrupt Christianity in Japan.  But if changes come, there will undoubtedly be some that help Christianity, and other’s that hinder or oppose, but it seems most likely that both of these scenarios will be unintentional, with other matters being the focus of any decisions at hand.

We are living in interesting times here in Japan!

Summer Holidays – Week 2 – Aomori

Over the past weeks I have had a lot of things I wanted to blog about, I thought there and then, “This would make a good blog post!” however, I usually forget to blog about them.  Which is probably for the best as often things that I think will make a good blog post turn dull and boring when I get my typing fingers on to them!

The big news of the past few weeks however is that in the second half of my holidays, for which Emiri and I went up to Aomori on our way back to Sapporo, we got engaged!  After three years of getting to know each other and ultimately seeking God’s guidance, it was finally the right time.  I had hoped to propose to Emiri on her birthday, but as it landed on a Sunday and we were back in Aomori, Emiri had been really looking forward to going to the various church services she had been part of for years, and helping out at as she spent her last months in Itayanagi helping out at the church there.  So my plans were postponed til Monday, maybe we could go to the seaside and find a nice quiet spot on a beach…  maybe we could have if the heavens hadn’t opened and poured all day!  We ended up going to see a (mediocre) movie, but having a very nice dinner at a shabu-shabu restaurant in Hirosaki.
In Japan the traditions before getting engaged are a bit different to the UK, so when I went to talk to Emiri’s father about the whole thing the week before in Ibaraki, he was extremely helpful and understanding.  At the end of the day I think our approach ended up somewhere lost between the UK and Japan, but regardless of cultural affects we were both aiming to arrive at a place where we were both clear as to what was happening and had expressed any thoughts and asked any questions.  The four of us (Emiri’s parents, Emiri and I) ended up sitting down and having a good talk about the future and how things would pan out etc.  From my current understanding , in Japan usually the guy proposes and then together the pair seek approval from parents (on both sides…This is all a bit complicated and would take a bit to explain here, so I won’t bother…)
Anyways, upshot of all that is we are engaged!

So here are some photos of our time in Aomori, and I will post some on Flickr for all the folk behind the great firewall who can’t see the picasa ones!

Summer ’09 in Aomori

Summer holidays! Week one – Ibaraki

Here are some pics from the first week of my holidays with Emiri, we went to Ibaraki and stayed with her parents there.  It was a good week and below is a link to some photos with lots of captions!

I just realised that although Emiri’s littlest (although final year in highschool) sister, Seika, was there too, but she was studying everyday (in summer holidays!) from early morning to late at night so she could do well in university entrance exams!  So there aren’t many pics of her, but I am not sure it will necessarily be a summer she wants to remember!!

Anyways, here are some pics:

Summer ’09 in Ibaraki