But times have changed. It has been a long time since packing up flat number 3D in Stranmillis Court and moving on to new pastures.

So it is time to move on. Orumu.org will be our new home. The Flat3D content has been archived to this wordpress.com site, so it is still available.

But all new things will happen at Orumu.org!

Here is the almost final result (in Japanese of course!) – www.tsugarusoba.com

But it’s not as incriminating as it sounds! Honest! Recently we moved to Emily’s family home in Ibaraki, to wait out our time until we get her UK visa sorted and can head NI-ward. A painful result of this is that we are here long enough that we need to move all of our registrations.

In Japan everyone is registered.  You can’t work, get insurance, or really do anything without being registered if you are here for any length of time. Emily is registered as a member of a Japanese household, Anna is registered as a member of Emily’s household… and I am registered as an alien, linked in some ID number based way to Emily’s household.

This is all well and good and makes things run smoothly most of the time. Health insurance, tax, licensing and all those kinds of things involve the system in some way, normally using it as a way of proving who you are.

But when it comes to moving it is a pain. In this case we are in Ibaraki just long enough that if we want to continue our health insurance (in case we need a doctor and still want to have some money left over) we need to move our registrations to Ibaraki.

So what is this to do with the police? Well we had to re-register our car as well. It had to get new number plates (seriously) and a new certificate and in order to get all of this we needed a friendly police volunteer to come round and verify that we have a parking space for it. Then after a few days we had to go and pick it up.  So trips 1 and 2 to the police station.

Then we needed to get our driving licences updated to match our new registered address. So yesterday we went again to change our addresses. Trip number 3.

Then today Emily went to renew her driving licence as it is due to expire this summer and we will be in the UK. The downside is that we will have to hand her licence in when we apply for a UK one for her, but to give us a little more time to do that we renewed her Japanese one and also applied for an international driving permit that she can use to drive for a year.

So in another week or so Emily will have to go for a 5th time to the police station to get her international permit.

Someday Japan is going to realise that the world has moved forwards and invest in some sort of electronic system that is country wide, but until then we will continue to run from office to office (and police station as well) to get all of these registrations sorted each time we move to a new place…

Due South (click)

Not only were we too early for the cherry blossom in Aomori, but it had already finished in Ibaraki, and as we planned to drive through the night to avoid “Golden week” traffic we wouldn’t get to see it on the way down either!
In the end we did manage to take a family photo with some “Yaezakura” cherry blossoms, but no real hanami for us this year!

After a gruelling overnight drive, we arrived in Ibaraki safe and sound. We will stay here with Emily’s family until we get her visa sorted and move to the UK in late June.

Due South (click)

Aomori was where Emily (student at Hirosaki university) and I (short-term OMFer) first met. When she went to Sapporo to study at Hokkaido Bible Institute her church in Aomori, Tsugaru Church, sent her off and have been praying for her since. So it was great to catch up with friends in the churches there. While in Aomori, we stayed in the ever-changing Itayanagi chapel (stairs in a new place this time!) and got to visit the other chapels of Tsugaru church.  The cafe next door also had a bit of a makeover while we were there!

When I was a short-termer I spent most of my year in Ajigasawa church, and we had an opportunity to visit and although John and Laurie weren’t there, it was good to catch up with Mary, her husband Yoshiya and baby Elisha. I also got to meet Masa, he was the only man in the church while I was a short-termer and so featured in a few blog posts back then! Since those days he has had a rough time, moved to Ichikawa (near Tokyo) to find work and has long since sold his Subaru and home in Aomori. But when we met he was upbeat – God has been faithful in leading him through a dark place and back into the light.

We also went to introduce Anna to her great-grandparents in Aomori. Emily’s paternal grandparents are apple farmers along with her uncle.  We could only spend one night with them on our whirlwind tour, it would have been nice to spend longer with them.

Due South (click)

We stayed in the OMF Sapporo guest home while we finished packing up our flat.  It was a long process, and meant a lot of hand-wringing and head-scratching as we decided what to keep, what to throw out, what to try and sell and what to give away…  Most of the furniture etc we had we were given, so we wanted to pass it on to be used by others. Anything we decided to keep we sent to Emily’s parents in Ibaraki in boxes to keep for us.

After packing up the long journey began…  First stop, Hakodate!
We stopped to visit Tim and Miho and their family – a British/Japanese OMF family in Nanae, just beside Hakodate at the very southern tip of Hokkaido. It was a great chance to catch up with them and some other friends. Particularly to hear about the trials and joys of life in the UK as we plan to move at the end of June.

We also made a trip to Lucky Pierrot, a Hakodate-only hamburger restaurant… they made world news a while ago for their whale burger, but there was no sign of it on their current menu!

Windows Phone feels smooth and nice on the devices I have tried right from the outset.  It feels iPhone-ish in simplicity…  When I have played with Android devices they have felt a bit more clunky, a bit more like using my old Windows Mobile PDA felt… Useful, but everything had to be learned. This might be the sort of thing that fades with use, or it might be because I was trying it on a Japanese model (in Japanese…), but the Windows Phone was in Japanese too!

Windows Phone also seems like it would be much easier to sync and use for music, just plug it in and sync with Zune, like iPhone and iTunes…  Android doesn’t seem to have anything, and 3rd party things (eg samsung’s software) always make me feel just a little bit uneasy. Like when I got our printer and HP installed something like 40 different pointless tools that I never use…

Finally I plan to get Emily a smartphone as well, so she can message in Japanese if she wants to, maybe use Skype and use it as a dictionary (so very handy)… among other things.  And Windows Phone just seems like it would be easier for her to use.

BUT!

I’d also love to play at some app development.  Not necessarily sell anything, just poke around and have some fun… have the freedom to make a little widget that does something the way I want it done… that sort of thing.  To do that on Android is free… To do it on Windows Phone seems to mean subscribing to Microsoft’s App Hub at 100 bucks a year.

The number of apps available on Windows Phone is nowhere near that on Android.  I know most of them are probably rubbish… but it would mean having Skype that isn’t in beta, having a choice of Japanese/English dictionaries (not all are created equal!) and so on…

So I am sure you see my dilemma! Or more likely you stopped reading way up there somewhere… but it was fun to post about anyway!

The discussion focussed quite heavily on the moral and ethical difficulties that center around running a company, choosing who to lay off and when, and how to decide how much people get paid (whether everyone should be paid the same or based on performance).  There were diversions into pro-baseball (could have been football in the UK), Japanese and American fiscal policies and even a quick dip into warrior culture and top-knots (unfortunately Michael didn’t get the joke).

It was a very interesting show! It made me wonder why all of the panellists missed the point that a company exists to make money for those that own it (stockholders or private owners). It made me think about the point of having countries, how taxation should be beneficial to society as a whole and a lot of other things.

But probably more than anything, it made me realise that justice is simply not enough….

One of the students pointed out that the concept of justice is quite objective. We justify what we want to be just by our own standards.
If I am a low-earner that wants good healthcare from the NHS, I will see a high rate of tax for high-earners as a just thing. After all they rose to a high wage on the shoulders of the society that I am part of.
If I am a high earner I would probably find more justice in a lower rate of tax for high earners and a privatised healthcare system. I work hard for my salary so why should it pay for healthcare for those who aren’t worth as high a salary?!

Often our kind of built in desire for justice is seen as a good starting point to think about a God who is just, a God who will judge with perfect justice to the point that those judged will have no room to complain or question the judgement received.

The fact is that this just God doesn’t stop at justice (and we should be thankful!) He pushes clean through justice and beyond it into merciful grace. He tells us to love our enemy, to love our neighbour as ourselves.  He embodied these very principles in dying at the unjust judgement of man, to save us from the very sin that meant we should die at His just judgement.

It seems to me that until we follow Jesus’ example we aren’t going to find a justice that truly satisfies us.

I know this is an important computer as it is full-disk encrypted, so it needs a password on boot to begin loading Windows, which can only be entered in person in front of the computer. As the RD often works from the location of his main ministry and a reboot would mean not being able to access the system and do any RD work, often updates are left uncompleted or undone. And for this installation the computer will need to restart to finish installing some updates in order for the Office 2010 installation to run properly.  So I need to be here to enter the password when it reboots!

So here I am in the RD office installing Office! One of the less complicated parts of helping OMFers with their IT!