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!

Avatar 3D

Last week Emily and I went to see Avatar in 3D at the local cinema here. The movie was pretty good and in 3D it was awesome! If you are going to see it and you can, definately see it in 3D.
The story was better than I thought and might even be good for church groups as there are plenty of themes that could be drawn out, even if it is a bit animistic overall. The feeling of a utopian world over a broken sinful one, the idea of living in communion with God rather than trying to glorify ourselves for our own greedy pleasure, the renewal of body and mind that Jake went through entering into the eutopia through the god-like “Eiwa” (excuse the spelling, just took a guess!)
Plus the action was great and it was good fun to watch.

The 3D was especially interesting to me though as I studied stereoscopic technology when I was at uni for my final year degree project.
The technology the cinema we went to was the same shutter glasses tech that we used at uni, it means wearing a bigger set of glasses, but it’s an easy install for the cinema as there is no need to polarise the on screen image, as long as their projector is up to it. If 3D takes off the way some people think it will this will probably be the most common way to retro fit prebuilt cinemas to display it… If you understand what I mean you’re doing well

But yeah, the sensation was just as it was when I was at university, and it was pretty good there. The drawback still comes for me in focus, in 2D my eyes can tell how far away the screen is and know how to focus(ish) to watch, plus I’ve had plenty of practice. But in 3D the image looks closer or further and my eyes want to focus that way, but the screen is the same distance and so focus doesn’t change, I think this is what tires my eyes. It was a bit of a talking point when I we studying 5 years ago and still seems to be.
But actually as I relaxed into the movie and forgot to take special notice of the 3D it became easier, though my eyes were still tired by the end, but that might be because it was a late show that went on to almost 1am!
Emily enjoyed it, but the glasses were a little awkward over her regular glasses and she felt a bit motion sick during the longer action scene in the middle…

But definately see it in 3D if you can!
I hear it’s doing well at the box office too, perhaps on it’s way to becoming a record breaker!

iPhone…

A little while ago Emily and I were shocked at how much we pay for our mobile phones here in Japan.  She had a mobile on the AU network with a bunch of plans and stuff so she could call her parents and me without worrying about the costs sky rocketing, but the plans themselves weren’t cheap.  Then my own phone was the basic model on the Softbank network, which allows calls and mobile mail within the network for free, but the cross network calls and mails to Emiri added a bit to the monthly costs.  So we decided to get Emiri a new softbank phone and drop her AU down to the basic, cheapest plan.  Softbank would also allow her parents to call her for free on their broadband phone.

Now recently Softbank have had a deal on the iPhone, the basic plan, so called flat rate data, plus iPhone 3G actually works out at the same price as a regular phone, maybe even a little cheaper.  However Emily didn’t really want an iPhone, she would rather have a phone that was more like the one she already had…  So I thought I could take the chance I had missed before and get me a nice shiny iPhone.

The iPhone has many advantages to life in Japan, first up it has a nice English interface, not the afterthought most Japanese phones have.  This is particularly good in regards to input, Japanese phones usually don’t have the predictive text and even the regular input method takes way too many button presses to use English.  But then they aren’t designed for english users.  The iPhone can switch easily from Japanese to English and a multitude of other languages if the fancy takes.  Not to mention the apps, the music etc etc etc

But the rub with the iPhone in Japan comes with data.  In other places it is a completely flat rate deal, but Softbank’s “flat rate” data service isn’t really flat rate.  But rather it is cheap if you don’t use it, but if you do it rises, and then hits a ceiling after a little while.  But the ceiling isn’t overly low, it’s not outrageously expensive either, but its a good bit higher than I would pay for the same service in the UK, and it would take a big chunk out of the savings we were hoping to make by getting Emily a Softbank phone.  Now this is ok, I can be careful etc and try to use Wifi as much as possible, I have it at home and at school after all.  But this is harder on an iPhone than you might think.  And it might also mean me taking a step down in terms of convenience…  Let me explain…

I have a lovely 1st generation 32Gb iPod Touch that the lovely folk at GCD Tech gave me when I left working with them to come to Japan.  And I would carry both it and my mobile all the time when I was out and about.  It is/was my Japanese dictionary, notepad, calendar, iPod (duh) and more.  It syncs automatically with my Gmail, contacts and Google calendar.  I could spend a trip on the train writing short emails or catching up with things I hadn’t read yet…

Now all of this is iPhone territory right?  It can do all of this, and more!  And it will do it over wifi just like the iPod!  But the issue is that it doesn’t [i]just[/i] do it over wifi…  It does it over 3G as well.  If I have everything automatically updating on the iPod, it could only do it with wifi, so while I was at home or school it would update away, go on the road and it would sit there, not updating.  But the iPhone won’t do that, inder wifi it’s fine, but go on the road it it will use 3G to do it’s updating.  Fine if it’s a prepaid limit, but with Softbank costs rise… 
So lets try and keep it low.  Contacts is easy now as I can sync with Google contacts through iTunes.  But email and calendar won’t sync without Outlook, and I don’t have Outlook, I use thunderbird…  So I have to sync the calendar and mail over the air, but trying to control it and keep it to wifi.  So I can go into settings and set them to manual sync.  That should do it right?  Manual sync on the iPhone doesn’t mean you push a sync button.  Rather it means when you open the calendar or email, it will then sync to keep it up to date.  That sounds ok, but it means if I am out and about and need to check to see if I am free on Friday evening or Monday afternoon or something, the calendar will sync via 3G as soon as I open it up to look.
Email is even a step more irritating.  If I set up Gmail as an email account on the phone set to manual, and the Softbank email account as well.  Now if someone sends an email to my Softbank account, I get a bleep and it says “You’ve got a mail” (it says this even if there are a lot of them) and I can open it up and see what the mail says.  But when I open the mail app to see the email, it downloads whatever Gmail is waiting for me on the server along with it, the opening of the app being the trigger for a “manual” sync.
I have also lost the ability to write emails on the train to be sent when I get home, I have to download any emails that are waiting in order to have the opportunity to reply to old ones or even write a new one from scratch…  And I have to remember to open the mail app when under wifi to make sure they get sent and new ones downloaded…

So I feel like getting an iPhone has downgraded my flexibility, unless someone knows a way to get it to sync some things only over wifi and still let me make phone calls and get mobile mail…  It seems either I take the convenience hit, or I take the financial hit….  Any thoughts?  Another option is to carry both iPod and iPhone….  And another is to give Emily the iPhone and go back to my keitai/iPod combo, she won’t really use the internet, sync or anything, but I do like the ease of English!

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…

Some useful bits and bobs…

A more IT oriented update this time, recently I came across some utilities that are extremely useful… Especially if you like the idea of cloud computing and need to share documents and files with people. I came across them through Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcast network.

The first is called SkyDrive Explorer and is a Windows Explorer extension that allows access to SkyDrive (Microsofts free online storage provider) directly from Explorer. SkyDrive is extremely useful if you ever need to share files that are too large to email or can’t be sure if the recipients email providor is up to the task of a larger attachment. You can upload the file and share it with Windows Live! users privately, or open it up so no password is required for people without Windows Live! accounts. I recently used it to pass two audio recordings to our language advisor at OMFs Japanese Language Centre as they might have been too large to email.
I have used SkyDrive for a while for this kind of thing, it has bags of storage space (25GB for free!) and it’s drag and drop upload has often allowed large uploads. It also (recently) allows the download of an entire folder as a zip file, which is handy for downloading too.
SkyDrive Explorer is in development and currently is a beta, so whether there will be a charge for it in the future I don’t know. Depending on how it’s features develop, it could also make SkyDrive a viable target for online backup of essential docs and files…

The next one is Offisync, a plugin for Microsoft Office (2003 and 2007 only I am afraid).  This appears as a toolbar in compatible applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) and allows direct interaction with Google Docs.  Now Microsoft have their own service for sharing docs and so on (Office Live Workspace), but it doesn’t have online applications (yet…although apparently coming…) and I am not sure if it is as widely used as Google Docs.  But this ability to directly open and save Google Docs via Office on my desktop is great, it might mean I begin to use Google Docs more.  The only drawback is that it doesn’t facilitate allowing others to see the document without signing in.  It allows for collaboration, but others must have a Google Docs account in order to sign in and view, to open it up for public viewing means going to Google Docs itself and sharing it out.  Office Live Workspace is actually a little better in this regard.  Perhaps when Office goes online it might be a real competitor to Google here.

Both potentially very useful little apps, both still in beta and free for now.  I will be using them and if they are rubbish you’ll find out soon!

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?

Surf envy…

On Saturday a bunch of us went to a beach near the Ferry Terminal Emiri and I went to Ibaraki from.  We were celebrating Stephanie’s birthday (A JLCer with Pioneers Mission from Canada).

The beach wasn’t the cleanest of beaches, quite a few of Japan’s beaches or coastal areas that haven’t been turned into cliffs have the misfortune of being dumping grounds for the Pacific’s garbage…  That combined with prolific fly-tipping in Japan and more relaxed views on garbage dumping in other east asian countries brings a lot of garbage to Japan’s coastlines…  This beach wasn’t so bad though, most of the drift was wood and natural stuff, but the odd piles of plastic bottles, a tv here and a sofa there, probbaly dumped and washed up in a storm.  This particular beach also had the privilege of being next to a ferry terminal and a port that is home to an oil processing plant!  But, all things considered, the water was pretty clean, and pretty nice temperature for swimming!

JP, a surfing and snowboarding missionary, was along with us, the waves were pretty small, but there were a lot of surfers out in the water.  I had a serious bit of surfing envy!  The beach was fun, and I did a bit of swimming and even brought the volleyball to the sea to have some fun, but the sea isn’t nearly as much fun when you aren’t catching waves…
So I’ve been searching for surf kayaks on yahoo auctions…  I need a kayak, a paddle, a car, wetsuit and all the gear….  I don’t think it’s going to happen!!

Here are some pics from our day at the beach!  It was still fun, and I got a bit of sun too!!

Saturday at the beach

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

Quick update to prove I’m not dead yet…

With all the fake online reports of celebrities deaths following the series of famous bucket-kickers recently (too insensitive?) I thought I better pop up here and dispel any rumours that might have started that I am dead! I’m not dead! I’m not even famous!

Anyways… I just have been quite busy with study, church, life in Japan, and so my blog here has fell into a little bit of a lag!

Something at the more geeky end of things, I have recently reformatted my computer. Since coming to Japan I have done a fair bit of installing and uninstalling to try things and test things that might have proven useful but maybe didn’t etc and that ended up clogging my system up a little bit, not a great deal, but a little bit. So I thought I’d clean up and start fresh!
Now Sony put Windows, drivers, etc on a seperate partition then you make the discs from that and can recover the space if you like, which I did, well rather installed Win 7 beta, then the release candidate, on it.
So self-made recovery discs in hand, backups safely made and verified and mentally prepared for a few hours of offline life as my computer is rebuilt I set about reinstalling. So I went ahead and booted on the recovery discs, formatted the drive and began the Vista install sequence. Everything was going well until I got to disc 2 of the 3 recovery discs and after a lot of whirring it stopped reading and the install was aborted! The disc came out of the drive and under close inspection it had a bit of a scratch on the surface that was causing the problem!
What to do? Clean hard disk, no recovery partition, dud recovery dvds and no second computer to fiddle with things through… I did the only thing I could, I installed Windows 7 Release Candidate as my main operating system! (for those who don’t know, Win7 RC is the pre-release, final check over of Windows 7 before it is officially released in October, just to make sure it works and catch any major last minute bugs).
So thats the end of it really, I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate on my Sony effectively… Its running exceptionally well, certainly as well as Vista had become after legions of patches and updates, and much leaner. The interface changes are welcome, making the taskbar a bit more docky (but in a good way, leaving out the irritating bits of OSX’s dock and keeping the useful bits of the Windows taskbar…)
So yeah, Sony said I’d have to pay 50-odd Euro to get some new UK recovery discs sent to me (well sent to NI, then more to ship here…) So with the offer on Windows 7 for $50 in the US, £50 seems likely in the UK, I might just go on ahead and go for Win 7 instead of worrying about Vista… I still have my Vista key and can easily get my hands on a DVD to get the upgrade. Failing that I might just get my hands on the DVD and use my vista key to go back to vista. I mean really Sony can’t get away with charging me for software I already own can they?!

So there it is, I’m still alive and running Windows 7…

Football, Flutes and Formalities

I realised I haven’t really been posting much about Japan recently…  I mean I’m living here, spending a lot of my time studying and learning Japanese, talking to Japanese people, learning about Japanese culture… And I haven’t written anything about it since my David Mitchell video link…  It was a great video though!

So today I am going to talk about something Japanese!  Japanese love hierarchy.  Well I don’t know if they love it, but they certainly stick to it!  Recently in my Japanese classes I have moved on from basic hierarchical language that surmounts to every day politeness when talking to people to specific language that is designed to illustrate to all around your deference of position to another person.  This is a well known feature of Japanese (I think) but it really is a point of great interest and insight to Japanese society…
The two types of polite language I have been studying in a bit more depth are honourific, the other is humble.  Honourific language is used when speaking to someone who is on a higher plane than yourself about them, what they are doing and so on.  Basically it is used to give honour to someone else.  Humble language on the other hand is used when talking to someone on a higher plane than you about yourself, basically humbing yourself and things about you.
In reality this kind of stuff isn’t used by everyday folks in everyday life at home and on the street.  It is used in places where obvious deference is deemed important, places like the work place where you use this kind of language when talking to your boss, or when talking to a customer, or someone from another company to show your respect and deference to them, thats not the only case, but an easy one to understand I think!

I think thats enough talking about language study really…  If you are learning Japanese you know what I mean and I am sure you feel my pain… If not you will probably lose interest should I go into any more detail!  So lets leave it there and move on to the other interesting observation re hierarchy.

Recently I joined a windband with Alaric, another OMFer from the UK here in Sapporo.  On my first day people were asking the normal questions: Who are you? What do you do?  How old are you?  Where are you from? and so on.  If you are, like me, a spritely young thing you won’t find anything overly wrong with that, but if you are a bit older you might wonder why people are asking how old you are all the time…  But that is one of the most common questions I have been asked since coming to Japan (And, might I add, the response is almost always surprise at how young I am!).

The reason?  Well it is quite simple, if you are older then you move up the hierarchy, if you are younger then you move down.  As a little 20-something I am a good bit down the hierarchy from the other tenor sax player in her 30s (36 to be precise, and she had no qualms in informing me).  Ultimately it probably doesn’t actually make that much difference to how I am treated or expected to act at something like windband, particularly with me being a foreigner and also apparently looking deceptively old to Japanese eyes (probably the beard).  But it lets everyone know where everyone stands and so everyone knows how to act when appropriate situations arise…

The football pitch is a different story however.  I have been going to Futsal (basically 5-a-side rebranded by Brazillians…) most Fridays with some guys.  We go to the hall, pull a number from a hat and all of the groups play in their teams on a rotation, each game is 5 minutes long, or first to two goals and the winner stays on to play the next team…  A draw means both teams go off and the next two are on.  All kinds of people show up to play, from junior high school kids (15 year olds) through high school, university, young workers through to a few 20 and 3o-something missionaries.  The quality of the football is very high (til we are up to play!) and everyone has a good time. 
You might already have guessed how this related to hierarchy…  While waiting for our turn to come around (we do a lot of that) and watching the games as they go past, it doesn’t take long to see that the players often play differently with the different teams, older players will happily be more boisterous and less considerate when playing against younger players and should a throw in or other set piece be disputed, deference is usually, and quickly, shown to the older player.

Now this isn’t really age discrimintation, it is pretty much just the way society works, it is how our society in the west used to work (another great David Mitchell video could go in here), and kind of, to a much, much lesser extent, still does…