501 Blues: Winter 2004-2005

I have been working on getting a different car since last summer. My old car, a white Toyota 4wd wagon was too big and consumed too much gas for Japan, so I got a K-car. These are the tiny Japanese cars I have been chattering about for awhile. I don't fit into them without severely bending my legs, but they are small, and cool, and use very little gas. Because K-cars are smaller class vehicles I save about $400 per year on taxes, $30 per month on insurance, and about $40 per month on gas. In Japan they have mandatory 2 year car inspections. As soon as I bought the car, the previous two years had run out, so it was in the shop for awhile. The "Works" is a manual, so I had to go back to Kofu and update my Japanese driver's license as well, and passing the test took another month of driving school. Despite already knowing how to drive a stick, taking the classes improved my driving skills. I finally passed the test and was able to start driving my new car about two days before Christmas.

('92 Suzuki Works)

(Fuji in background)

(The Suzuki Works is not so good for long distances, bumpy roads, or parties of 3 or more, but it is good on these small Japanese streets. It has a 400cc twin cam turbo, the same size as most motorcycles. This photo gives you an idea of how small it is)

Small and simple ideas motivate me. My purpose for being in Japan is to live in a foreign country and speak a foreign language. Doing so brings daily challenges and rewards. Japan is not a physically demanding place to live, not like the current situation in many South-East Asian Countries. Japan has fresh water, clean air, a stable government, and convenience stores. Japan is a post-modern country.

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need... We are the middle children of history, no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives." --Chuck Palahniuk, Tyler Durden in "Fight Club."

My generation's purpose, if not to secure personal (monetary) fortunes, is to conquer ourselves, our doubt, and our fears. We must work to apply this idea.

(Fuji Sengen Shrine New Years Morning 1am)

Apple/Mac is the king of computers. Macs are powerful, stylish, and easy to use. Windows PCs are fun to play with and generally less expensive, but they are counter-intuative and complicated. PCs often crash and are much more susceptible to viruses and hackers than Macs. Furthermore Windows was from the start, just a rip-off of the Mac operating system. I finally went and bought an Ibook G4 this Christmas from the Apple Store in Ginza because I had used my old Gateway laptop for 6 years to the point of exhaustion. Technology is rapidly advancing, as usual. Mac OSX is multilingual, so I can type and read Japanese just as easily as English in any application. All the photos on this blog were taken with my keitai (cell phone), and transfered to hard disk via email.

(Apple Store Ginza Tokyo)

I went to my host family's house in Tokyo shortly after Christmas to participate in mochi-making. Mochi is generally small hard rice rectangles that can be saved for months. To eat, you grill the rectangles in a toaster oven until they become gooey and then cover them with seaweed and soy-sauce or red sweet bean paste. My host family is a center in their community and they give a lot away. Traditionally to make mochi, one pounds cooked rice with a large wooden hammer until it becomes gelatinous, but since my host family has to make so much, they bought a machine that does the pounding work. The machine actually bounces the cooked rice around until it becomes one gooey ball. To finish the process we had to grab the gooey rice from the mochi-machine and then press it into large squares to cool until it was ready to be cut.