happylife

What to do

I have only three days left before going back to Vancouver. I feel now that I have a lot of things which I should have done but I didn't. This is the same feeling as I always have had since I was a little boy. I remember I felt like this just before the summer vacation was over when I was an elementary school pupil. I always have the same feeling when I go on a trip or graduate from a school. I guess I'm going to feel just like this when I die. Is it my destiny? I don't like to think like that. I hope to change this feeling but I'm not sure how to change or what to do. This feeling of regret is very depressing and irritates me a lot. Living a life without regret - it's easy to say but extremely difficult to realize.

Japanese style toilet

This is a Japanese traditional style toilet we often see in Japan. Different from Western style, we cannot sit down on it but squat and relax. I think this style is better for public use because it's cleaner; we don't have to touch any part of it while relaxing. The defect of this style is that it's harder to use especially for old people who are not good at squatting. This style used to be more popular when I was a child, but now, it seems to be decreasing in number. Men can use it not only to defecate but also to urinate, however it is difficult to aim precisely at the bowl in a standing position not to get the other part dirty.

Hard work

Nozawa is an attractive town where we can enjoy snow and hot springs at one time, but it is a selfish idea of visitors. The snow is so deep that most of the first floors of houses are under the snow. All the residents have to clear the snow of roofs and streets everyday. It's such a hard and dangerous work that some people die every winter dropping from roofs or buried under the snow. While I was enjoying hot springs tour in this town, I often came across old men or women raking the snow. If they were idle and skipped the work, their houses might be broken under the snow. I think it's a really severe environment to live. The only one help is that they can use the heat of hot springs to melt the snow. Hot water was running through the town so that they can throw the scoop of snow into it. If I were born in this town, my life would have been absolutely different.

Public baths in Nozawa

Nozawa is a town of snow and hot springs. There are thirteen public baths in this town and fortunately enough, all of them are free. I tried to walk around and take all of them, but soon I found that It was harder challenge than I had expected because taking bath needs much energy. I could take ten of thirteen baths. Of course each bath was very good with tasty building and nicely smelling hot spring, but taking a bath ten times a day was too much. Plus in some of the baths I was the only man who took the bath and I had to adjust the water temperature so that I can soak in the bath. It was a little bit hard work and I was tired. I hope to enjoy the baths in a slower pace next time I visit this town.

Nozawa

I went to Nozawa in Nagano Prefecture where the winter Olympics were held eight years ago. My friends picked up me in the midnight of Tuesday and drove there. After more than five hour drive we arrived at the town before seven o'clock in the Tuesday morning. There was a lot of snow left here and there and most houses were buried in the snow. This town is very famous for two things, one is skiing and the other is hot springs. My friends were planning to enjoy skiing and I was planning to walk around the town enjoying the hot springs because my back was not good enough to enjoy skiing.

How many times?

My PC had been in trouble for weeks, and I finally decided to reinstall it. It was actually not my PC but Windows XP that was in trouble. It was so slow that it took almost 15 minutes to start the system. As I had a whole image back up of the hard disk, it should have been easy work but not. The image back up was made almost a year ago and there were quite a few application and data files created since then. Plus, the system itself had a lot of security patch and I had to restart the system more than ten times to install all the updated files. As I don't have a broad band connection in my house, I had to do all the jobs in a comic cafe. It took almost two days to finish the re-installation and I've read dozens of comics during the waiting hours. Now my PC is moving quickly and I'm happy, but I hate reinstalling PCs because it is a waste of time. Thinking about the hours spent for reinstalling PCs all over the world, this incompleteness of Windows is almost a sin.

Sashimi

Sashimi is sliced raw fish. Different from Sushi, it isn't usually served with steamed rice. We Japanese adult people enjoy this traditional dish with Sake, Japanese traditional liquor. We can taste various kinds of fish such as tuna, yellow tale, squid, octopus, and geoduck. The pink food on the small bowl on the top right of this picture is cod liver which was super tasty. Though I can enjoy Sashimi even in Vancouver, I can't enjoy such fresh, high quality, low price, and tasty Sashimi there. As you know, Sushi is very popular all around the world, but Sashimi is not. I think it's because Sashimi depends much on how fresh fish they can get and most people except for Japanese are not used to eating raw fish.

Hard to sail

After enjoying hiking with my friends in Miura Peninsula, we visited a marina near Yokohama on Tokyo Bay. It was a small marina standing among an industrial area. Though there were more than thirty boats in the marina, there was only one pier and most boats were moored. If they want to sail, they have to use a dinghy and call the marina manager to rent it before and after sailing. It's a tiresome job and takes extra minutes. Plus it might take for them more than one hour to come to this marina. I really think it's hard and needs lots of energy to sail in Japan. Japanese sailors have to be more enthusiastic than in Canada. I'm thinking about enjoying sailing as well as flying after going back to Vancouver. I shouldn't waste my great environment for sailing.

A long break

To tell the truth, I'm writing this blog one week after the indicated date. I have some reasons for that; I was too busy enjoying my last week in Japan, and it was difficult to connect to the Internet because of a trouble of my notebook PC, but I know well that it's getting much harder to restart it if I don't write any longer. As I even felt danger of stopping this blog, I've decided to restart it.

Strange feeling

Owing to the Internet, I can get any kind of information in Vancouver as if I were in Tokyo. The only one difference between Tokyo and Vancouver is whether I can get that information automatically or not. As you know, TV is the easiest and therefore the most powerful information device that can control the audience. When we watch TV, we stop thinking and just receive what are broadcast one after another, and then our ways of thinking are unified. A kind of commonsense is formed by watching TV. Of course the detail of our thinking is different each other, but the outline is almost same. I don't know whether it is bad or not, but I feel that something is very strange after living out of Japan for months.