The Old Country

Greetings from ... JAPAN! Where you get exceptional service and don't have to tip! What a country! What a ripoff in the States!

Yes, I am back in the Old Country for only a week's business trip. A note about business hotels in Japan. It's like stepping back in time. Maybe to the 1950's or so? (And not just in their attitudes towards women.)

1) There are strange hair care products in the bathroom.

There is aftershave, which is a bit outdated. There is also both "Hair Tonic" and "Hair Liquid".

I have no idea what either of those do, but I haven't tried. Maybe today.

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2) Some of them use keys. Not key cards. They us actual physical keys.

And they expect you to drop off your key at the front desk when we go out for the day, and then you come to the desk to pick it up on the way back in. It's how they know you're not in the room so they can clean it. When you stop at the desk to pick up your key on your way in, they give you your messages then. It's all pretty cute. I pretend I'm Cary Grant when I walk up to the desk. "2542 my dear. And a Vodka Collins."

I haven't got treated like Cary Grant yet. Maybe I'm not using enough hair liquid.

Don't start thinking the Japanese are completely old school. You know of course about the high-tech toilets. Common features of the business hotels.

One more nice thing about Japanese business hotels is they have great bathroom mirrors. Many of them have this no-fog area in the middle of the mirror. Brilliant! Step out of the shower and the mirror is perfectly shave-ready! Why can't my mirror at home be like this!

So the good news: Fog free bathroom mirror.

Bad news: When standing in front of the mirror, I can see a perfectly fog-free view of my chest and abdomen. (Remember? I'm tall.)

But it's okay, after shaving my chest and abdomen ("When in Rome," I say) there's plenty of alcohol-based aftershave to give me that lively fresh feeling.
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I was able to take a side trip to Koukura and Nagasaki. Nagasaki is a long way down there. From Nagoya (where my plane landed, nearly in the center of the country) it was nearly 5 hours and $300 by train. Youch.

Yummy seafood in that area.

They have a Peace Park there, obviously. A bit humbler than the Hiroshima equivalent, but lovely and simple. Photos of the trip.

On the train ride back through the tunnels, where cross-winds are less of a concern, the Shinkansen reached 300km/hr. (180 mph.) My own personal land-speed record. The Japanese people around me were not giddy with excitement like I was. Instead, they were asleep. What a country.

... it's not what you think

I haven't written for a while. That is clear. Some bloggers are once per day, or every other day. I'm once per quarter right now. Sloping down to once per fiscal year I think.

The why is not as clear. Even to me. I have a lot of summary thoughts about my time in Japan, and I'm ready to spill the (soy) beans on it all, but I'm waiting. Waiting to notice more things about life in America and how Japan differs. And especially waiting on myself to find a way to make it funny. That's the real challenge. I must abide by my motto: If you can't say something funny, don't say anything at all.

So for now, let's focus on life in the Greater Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky Metropalagia (GCNKM, not the official name). There are things about every area that make it special. This area has those things too.

First on the list: Cornhole.

You heard me.

It's a game. Stop laughing. It really is. It's a backyard/tailgating game played to pass the time while drinking beer.

Each player gets 4 bean bags (1lb each, filled with corn, not beans, duh!) Players take turns throw ing at a wooden box (30 feet away) that has a hole in it. Your bag lands and stays on the board, you get a point. Your bag goes in the hole, you get 3 points. Scoring is done cancellation style - so only the difference in scores is recorded each round. Very simple. But honestly very fun, if you're into that kind of thing. (Did I mention beer already?)

Once we moved to Northern KY, I had to get myself a cornhole set. Where do you find them? Everywhere. There are signs alongside the road which advertise, you can download plans from the cornhole association and build your own, there are homeschool moms making a few bucks sewing together the bags with your favorite team logo on them.What? I buried the lead in the paragraph above? Yes I did. The American Cornhole Association is the governing body for all things Cornhole. (Well, not all things, but things associated with the actual game, anyway.) And you can buy yourself a tournament-ready cornhole set. And some other lovely gear.



And there are tournaments. All over the place. You can't have a church carnival or an outdoor fundraiser of any kind without a cornhole tournament. Our own church has a standing tournament. It's like bingo for people who can stand up. Street corners have signs advertising tournaments almost every weekend. It's crazy.

And you want to know what's crazy? King of Cornhole. There's a big tournament with some serious bag tossers. It's televised locally. There are commentators. Watch as much of this as you can stand. Then try to imagine yourself as the play by play man for the cornhole tournament. "That's a great bag." "He's really in the cornhole zone." "It all comes down to who really wants to be the King of Cornhole." But all kidding aside, this is a pretty dramatic come-from-behind victory. (Did I really just write that?)



From what I know, Cornhole didn't start here in the GCNKM, but it's big here. Friends from Columbus are probably completely familiar with the game. But they might be more likely to call it Baggo, or Corn bags or something more tasteful. But here in Northern KY, we prefer Cornhole.

Stop laughing.

We moved. We've been moved. We were moved. Movers helped.

On our way to Japan we were packed by an American crew and unpacked by a Japanese one. On our way home, it was the opposite.

And for as kind as the American crews are, I am still embarrassed for all the Japanese people who come over here. The efficiency of the Japanese crews is amazing.

When our goods arrived at our new house here, I instructed the crew that we keep shoes outside. That they must take their shoes off when they enter the house. It was difficult for them to get their heads around. How were they going to bring goods in the house, and stop to take their shoes off as they do.

I wish I had video of the Japanese crew carrying out our couch. It was two guys carrying a couch toward the front door. Nothing strange there. Until they reached the entry way where the shoes are kept, they paused, one at a time, to step into their shoes blindly while carrying the full load of the couch. I would have loved to show that to the American crew. "It can be done," I would have said. Then I would have added,"...and you know what? Nobody gets tipped in Japan."

Another source of embarrassment for me. Japanese people come over to America and get subpar service (by their standards) for which they have to pay extra.

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OK. Back to Japan. More data to share.

Japanese people, for all their healthy ways, do eventually die. Though I just heard the oldest documented person alive currently is a 114 year-old Japanese woman.

For the body of the departed, cremation is the only way. Not a whole bunch of space available in Japan to lay out full graves, so their cemeteries have stacked up urns.

This cemetery is in Kyoto. The big stones are the family markers, surrounded by smaller stones around containing the ashes of the family members. I took the picture below of the turtle because it was my favorite family marker.




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Now how do they get there. In a hearse, obviously. But a hearse in Japan doesn't look like the one you and I are used to. For one, they are smaller. I guess smaller people, in smaller boxes require smaller cars. Secondly, the Japanese usually go for Buddhist rites for their departed. So the hearse becomes ornate, like a Buddhist temple.

This one it typical, thanks to Miss Tracy for the contribution!


Below is one we saw in Kyoto. The natural wood look is not common, so it must be super fancy. Kathleen and the kids and my brother Daniel are there.





A video of the the hearse being loaded. (Listen for the bell. It's a sound known across Japan as the bell of farewell for the departed. I didn't know that when I set my cell phone ringtone to the same sound...)


One more thing about hearses. It's a childish superstition that when a hearse passes by you have to cover your thumbs. You make a fist with the thumbs inside. If you don't, the superstition maintains, you will not be able to see your parents on their deathbed. Pretty grim superstition to lay on kids.

It has something to do with the thumb being the 'parent finger'. I never saw anyone doing that, but I've heard that adults do the same, just to be sure.

Mata ne.

Sugar, sugar

Remember my post about Japanese bottled green tea? I wrote in praise of it. No calories, no sugar, no fake sugar. Just cold green tea, and it is delicious. I listed it as one of the things I was going to miss about Japan.

A couple of people wrote back to say that such tea was widely available in the states. So my spirits were lifted.

Since we've been back, I've been on the lookout for it, hoping that maybe America had caught on to the magic of plain old cold green tea.

Not so. There are green tea drinks in my local store, but they are all sweetened.

Even in the designer fancy pants tea aisle, there are such things as 'diet' tea. Can you imagine? The assumption is that tea MUST have sweetener in it. But nothing unsweetened!

I'm in Kentucky, close enough to the American South that 'Sweet Tea' is a common drink. When you order iced tea, you get asked 'sweet or unsweet'. And the answer is almost always sweet. A yankee might ask, "Why not just get tea, and then sweeten it yourself with those handy little packets on your table?"

Silly northerner. It doesn't taste the same. It really doesn't. If you like sweetened tea, boil the sugar into the water. It makes a big difference.

So, I'm praising Southern sweet tea, but condemning the sweetness at the same time.

Oh conflict of conflicts! Boredom of boredom! How bout some photos for the fun of it.

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Near Nagoya there is one of the ceramics centers of Japan, called Seto.

We got a chance to take a ceramics class in Seto during our last week in Japan. It was just like that scene from Ghost, except our experience was much more tasteful, and Patrick Swayze only stopped in for a second. However, unfortunately he wasn't dead.

We had a great instructor, who stepped us through the thing patiently. Under his guidance, we made some great pieces. But when he left us to try by ourselves, we failed miserably. It was still fun.






One of Kathleen's completed pieces, now in our home.



On the bottom of handmade ceramics is the name of the artist or the studio that produced it, typically in Kanji (Chinese Characters that are used for people and place names). We, as foreigners, don't have kanji for our names; we use the phonetic alphabet that is used for foreign words. Well, for the sake of our ceramic creations, we created ceramics names. (Nommes de Wheel?) I chose Kyo Jin, which means Giant. Kathleen chose Typhoon Flower. Her name can be mispronounced in Japanese to sound like Katrina, which the Japanese have heard of. (Typhoon = Hurricaine.) And she likes flowers. So it's there, on the bottom of her creation. Very rare one-of-a-kind handmade rice bowl! One of only a handful of pieces made by the exclusive Typhoon Flower ceramics studio!

Until next time...