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One of the teachers at my middle school invited me to his house for dinner last Saturday night. It was his son's first birthday, and there's a tradition here where they place a bag with some mochi in a bag (one "sho", or about 8 pounds of mochi!), sling it over the kid's back, and make him walk until he falls over and cries. He told me it's supposed to ensure the child remains healthy.

We walked around his parents' house for a bit while he showed me around. Calling it a house really isn't accurate; it was more like a complex of buildings, the oldest being a Meiji era wood structure built about 150 years ago. It even had a fire pit in the center of the main tatami room, old ceramic stoves, and an old Victrola upstairs, which must have been a hundred years old. The rest of the buildings were used for the family business; the grandfather makes a living making miso and soy sauce. In case you were wondering, you make miso by fermenting soybeans with salt and rice koji (a kind of yeast also used to make sake). The mix is left in an open box, stuck in a hyperbaric chamber for awhile, and then mashed into a paste and sold. Up in northern Japan, most of the miso produced is "red miso" (really more of an orange color), but around Kyoto they make "white miso". From what I could gather, this has to do with the fermenting temperature, and if left for a short time white miso will become red miso. Most miso in America is of the red type because even with the preservatives in commercial miso, white miso would change color and flavor before it even hit the shelves overseas. Of course, none of the handmade stuff has preservatives (and it still has active cultures in it), but with the high salt content it lasts for 6 months before it starts to go bad. I was shown some of the other buildings, where miso was stored in wooden casks; some of the barrels in the back of the storehouse were over a hundred years old.

I stayed for a few hours and had dinner and drinks with the family. I had brought over a Chilean Cabernet that I'd hoped they would like, and in addition to the excellent food and drink I also received a rather large bag of miso and a bottle of soy sauce. Now I just have to figure out how to cook with it.

We've taken in 5 new teachers-in-training at my middle school, straight from the middle of university, not even graduated yet. They're supposed to spend 3 weeks here to figure out how a real school works, I suppose.

I chatted a bit with one of the prospective teachers who planned on teaching English. Her English isn't atrocious, but my Japanese seems to be better than her English. For some stupid reason, she's been paired with a teacher whose favored method is "cover page X in the textbook", probably the least popular and least effective English teacher in the school. I asked her about how their professors were telling them to teach lessons in school. The answer was disturbing: straight textbook lecture. The professor was explicitly instructing her to tell the students, "Open your books to page 22." It's the exact teaching method they've been using for the last 50 years. You know, the one that DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. That's right, drones, just follow the same textbook plan for every lesson and you can't go wrong! I'm trying to get her to use her brain, figure out what the textbook is trying to cover, and come up with her own lesson, but I honestly don't know what I can tell her. The girl has probably never had an effective language instructor in her whole life.

I've given up on the system here. I really have. It's broken, and nobody is trying to fix it. The whole teaching English grammar and vocabulary for a test while claiming at the same time that it's for communication, it's worse than not teaching English at all.

I suppose I should update here with what I've been up to the past week. This last week was "Golden Week", a series of two long weekends. It's one of three times of the year when Japanese people can actually get time off work to travel (the others being Obon and the other being New Year). Since they blow the other two on family commitments, the only time that Japanese people can travel for leisure is around this Golden Week. It's incredibly stupid, because since they all leave on the same day it results in massive gridlock and ticket prices about twice or three times normal. My original plan was to take off the 2 intervening work days and go on a 10 day motorbike trip down the coast of Japan, but as responsibilities and commitments piled on I realized that wouldn't be possible, and most of the folks I wanted to meet in Tokyo were taking off anyway.

Anyhow, I'll go over the major events of the past week.

Two weekends ago on Sunday was the Toramai festival which some of you may remember from last year. Early in the morning I tried to take some photos, but the sky was bright white overcast and the pictures turned out overblown. I didn't realize it before, but the same group that danced on rooftops also went around to each house and local business, so that the people working that day could still see the festival.

For some reason I had promised to meet a local guy for drinks at his house that day as well, a gentleman in his 70s who has a fascination with English. Since I was pretty much stuck anyway and didn't have any other plans, I sat back and enjoyed the food and company. He had told me that when the occupation forces first came through, his first experience meeting a foreigner was an American riding in on a Jeep who gave him a chocolate bar. It's interesting, that guy probably didn't think anything of it, but Mr. Watanabe still remembers it to this day. We looked through some old photo albums of him and his wife when they had lived in Tokyo in the 50s. (He was taking lessons to become a truck driver.) It was hard for me to believe the pictures I saw of the Tokyo metro area back then, with dirt roads and houses that weren't jammed together and stacked 12 stories high. As the day wrapped up I was presented with a silk handkerchief based on a traditional Japanese wood block print. He told me he had bought it in 1955 when he first arrived in the big city. It looks exactly like the kind of gaudy thing a tourist would buy... and it's fantastic. The evening came to a close with all the tigers dancing on the library rooftop at sunset.

The next day was a day off and I had a date, so the girlfriend and I drove to the ocean. I remembered to bring my camera this time, and I got a few decent photos, but nothing spectacular. The area shown below is from a narrow side road along the coast with barely enough room for one car.

Ian came down to Sendai the next Tuesday, and I took half the day off work to join him. We went out to the Thai/Vietnamese restaurant we usually hit up, but it was closed so we went to another place like it on the same street. The place we went to had good food, but the service left something to be desired and the upper floor was full of smoke from someone who had left half an hour ago. I guess nobody thought to crack the window. After that we went to grab coffee to kill some time, then to "The Mall" in Nagamachi to see a movie. Originally we had planned on seeing Babel, but as it was just opening that day and it was the first of the month (cheap ticket day) the lines were really long. By the time we got to the register, there was only one seat left, so we elected to see Spider Man 3 instead. It wasn't bad, but it didn't quite live up to the other two. Then we stopped at an Italian place and ordered a couple monster calzones. Ian finished his but I got about halfway through mine and had to stop.

Thursday I figured I'd head into Sendai again, this time to pick up some electronic parts to finish a few specialized pieces of my ECU. I hopped on the bike around 11am, figuring that most of the travelers should have dispersed by then. Boy, was I wrong. I spent most of my time lane threading the needle through what was basically a parking lot. And for some reason there was a soccer game too, on top of it being the busiest travel day of the year. I saw more erratic driving and agitated drivers that day than I've ever seen before in Japan. But one guy really took the cake. I was cruising at a decent pace in the center lane of a 3 lane stretch in Sendai, keeping a healthy bit of distance from the car in front of me. Suddenly a grey hatchback blew past me, in my lane, despite the fact that he could have passed in the lane to my left or right. The guy didn't get very far though, as there was a rolling roadblock of cars ahead, and a red light about 5 seconds later. The young punk was stopped at the light, second in line, and I rolled up next to his halfway rolled-down passenger side window and gave it a friendly little knock to get his attention. He probably thought I was going to smash the window and haul him out of his car. It would have felt damn good. But instead, I just gave him a stern face and a wagging index finger. I hope I scared the hell out of him in my full armor and helmet, because that kind of irresponsible driving gets people killed.

On Saturday I met the girlfriend's parents. I was a bit uneasy before I met them, but they seem like nice people and they actually don't want to kill me for dating their daughter, which is good. The older brother is really quiet, apparently likes video games as much as I do, and is built like a linebacker. I hope I never do anything to make him mad, because I don't think I'd survive the encounter. But everyone was really nice to me, the mom made lunch for us and before I left she gave me a box of sweets to take back home (and not something cheap, either). I need to think of something nice to bring them next time I visit.

I've finished soldering the majority of my project, but not without some mental repercussions.