Greetings from Japan, where archaic, useless and disturbing practices (whaling, cormorant fishing) are continued because of tradition. Cormorant fishing is where birds are tied by the neck with long ropes to a boat. The trained birds pull fish out of the water and since they can’t swallow for the ropes tied around their necks, they drop the fish in the boat. It’s preserved as a tourist attraction here. And you better believe I'm going to go check it out.
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A few photos just for fun.


People collect all sorts of things. I collect bad English on Japanese SUV's.

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We now have a functioning webcam. And thanks to Skippy it's been tried and tested. If someone out there wants to webcam-phone-talk with us, drop me an email.

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The hardhats here, which I occasionally must wear, have chinstraps. And you must wear the strap. My company has become sticklers about that in the last years. I believe the strap is not to hold the hat on you in the case of a strong wind. My second guess that it’s in case you are climbing upside down into a machine, which is fairly common. My true belief is that the chinstrap is used when a big cheese comes through the jobsite, so that your hat will stay on when you give the required full waist-level bow to the big boss.

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I have a cell phone over here. Not expecting to make many calls, I got a prepaid version. All across Japan, all incoming calls on all cellular plans are free. (Just one more way Japan is superior!) Since I have a pretty low end phone I don’t have a wide range of ringtones. No problem for me. The Japanese love to personalize their ringtones. Fancy songs, crazy beats, wacky voices. I guess it’s not so different in America.
Well, I didn’t want to call attention to myself, so I set my phone to the simplest, least obtrusive tone it had on it, which was a little bell sound. Ding…… Ding….. Ding. Perfect, I thought. Then two or three times in a row, my phone rang and people hearing it laughed. I thought it was because it was such a cheap phone and such a simple ringtone. But it kept getting laughs, so I asked someone.
Turns out that the bell that rings on my phone is a signature sound, associated with a certain type of bell only rung at… funerals.
So my bell ringing is the equivalent of the death march.
That’s what I get for trying to not stick out… I stick out more than anyone.

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So July is the month when Sumo comes to Nagoya. Sumo is a 2 week tournament held during odd numbered months. It's usually in Tokyo, except once a year in Nagoya and once in Osaka. Below is the picture that I expect to grace everyone's computer desktop. The Japanese have had more than 1000 years of Sumo to get over the fact that these are big huge men wearing almost nothing. Given another 1000 years, maybe I'd be able to get over it also.

That's pure Sumo, baby.

Here is a slideshow of my pictures from the event. Since the Japanese don't break rules, they don't have someone checking your tickets to make sure you're not trying to improve yourself to a better seat. And because they don't have anyone checking, that's exactly what I did. I got a little closer to the action for these photos.



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Japanese proverb:

A pig used to dirt turns its nose up at rice.

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