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I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while. Japan has a number of critus fruits of which I’ve never seen mention outside Japan. I use three of these (and lemon juice) for flavouring fizzy water as a lower calorie alternative to the CC Lemon soda I used to drink. (I stopped because it was unavailable after the earthquake last year for a while and having weaned myself off it I reduced my calorie intake by sticking to fizzy water with a little flavouring of pure citrus juices.) The first is the yuzu which is a medium sized (about the same size as a Seville orange) yellow fruit usually with a bumpy at the stalk connection. It’s used in quite a lot of Japanese flavourings. For instance yuzu-flavoured soy sauce is quite common. It’s sharp but not particualrly astringent. Next we have the sudachi which looks a little like a lime and is similarly quite hard, though rounder. It’s imilarly astringent. It’s much more sour than the yuzu and very rarely eaten directly, though $WIFE says her farmer grandfather like to eat them (they had a few trees on the farm). Lastly there is the kabosu a yellow green fruit slightly larger than the yuzu. This is more commonly eaten as fruit than the other two. It’s also used by others as a drink flavouring, sometimes being available on ANA flights when they bring drinks round after the meal service, for example. There’s a number of other critus fruits available in Japan that I haven’t seen elsewhere but as I haven’t tasted them (or their juice) I’ll leave those for another day.

SO I’ve now been sudying Japanese for eight years. In the first few years I was only so-so committed to spending the time on it. After my sabbatical here in 2007 I got much more committed to it and since moving here I’ve started using the Anki flashcard system which encourages me in a number of ways to study quite hard (1-2 hours per day typically, self-study, plus a one hour personal lesson every week). With both my teacher in the UK and my new teacher here, sometimes I’d feel like I was making no progress. That’s because they’re good teachers and are always pushing just beyond my confort zone, so I always feel like I’m working hard, and sometimes I’m failing at things. $WIFE and $COLLEAGUES do tell me I’m improving, though. Certainly I can read more of the kanji I see on the street and occasionally I can keep up with (some of) the substitles (part of the normal broadcast) on news programmes that $WIFE watches. I can even sometimes figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word and its pronunciation because I already know its constituent kanji characters from other words (or on their own).
Today I managed something that I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to. When I bought my current laptop the store didn’t have extra power supplies available, and when I enquired later they don’t stock them as standard and advised going direct to ASUS. Before Christmas I checked with ASUS and they didn’t have stock. Today I checked their website and they had stock in, so I ordered two extras (I need one for home, one for the office and one for the bag). Yes, I do need these – once in the past three months I forgot to unplug the power supply at home when heading into the office – luckily I was able to keep things short in the office anyway and come back home for the rest of the day. Why this is relevant to my improving Japanese is that the Asus Japan website is entirely in Japanese and I was able to find what I was looking for, check they had stock and go through the whole ordering process, while being absolutely certain I understood everything on the way and without having to look any words up in a dictionary. I’ve done similar things before, though I usually have to ask $WIFE to help or at least look a few things up in the dictionary. Now, this is obviously not fluency. I have a long way to go yet. According to my Anki studies I’ve only completed the JLPT2 vocabulary and have another 3000 words/phrases to learn to get to JLPT1 (the highest level and supposedly equivalent to high school gradate Japanese, at least in listening and reading, with some claim to “writing” ability but no speaking test). However, it is progress. I was also able to have a real conversation with $FATHER-IN-LAW and $MOTHER-IN-LAW at the New Year family party without needing interpretation by $WIFE. My grammar used to be ahead of my vocabulary. I think it’s now the other way around and I must add appropriate grammar cards to my Anki deck and interleave new vocabulary with the grammar. I think it will take me until 2015 to be basically fluent and maybe 2017 before I think I could even approach doing my job in Japanese. But, it’s nice to feel progress and have confidence that the work I’m putting in is paying off.

Since first coming to Japan in 2007 I have been researching Japanese government identity registration systems. Although providing some of the background to the papers I’ve co-authored on social and legal aspects of privacy in Japan I haven’t published any of this work yet. The trouble has been that it keeps getting bigger. Every time I think we’ve got a handle on the issue and just have to tie off a few loose ends, I find that the loose ends are actually spaghetti links to a new area that needs covering and which changes our view of the current situation. So far I’ve read material covering Japanese registration of residents back to the import of a Chinese family registration system in the 6th century up to the merging of the database for the current citizen and non-citizen registration systems. A recent book on Japanese immigration, focussing primarily but not solely on the Zainichi Korean question and its development from 1945 to the early 1980s (though including some relevant background from before the war and including a round-up of developments up to 2008) seemed a useful addition to my reading on this subject. I wasn’t disappointed. Borderline Japan (Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era) by Tessa Suzuki-Morris is an excellent examination of the status of the main group of foreigners in Japan. Extensively edited to create a single coherent volume from a number of previously published pieces, this also adds more depth to the constraints of material published as book chapters or journal articles elsewhere, and makes it available in one volume. The xenophobia, communist witch-hunting and duplicity of both the Japanese government and others (notably the US and the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the governments of both North and South Korea) through over sixty years of dealing with the post-colonial issue of those of Korean descent in Japan are dealt with in good but not excruciating detail. I learned a lot about how others living in Japan have been, and indeed still are, treated by the Japanese government and understand a lot more about the dynamics of the political situation here with regards to foreigners rights. The origins of elements of my core research interest, that of government ID registration systems, were clearly visible here although that wasn’t the focus of this book.

Even without a research reason, I think this was a very useful book for anyone living in or considering living in Japan, whether Japanese or not.

My local swimming pool re-opened again today. It had been closed for the last ten days to help save power. Even now it’s only open until 18:30 each day. The Sumida City Gymnasium in nearby Kinshichou, which I go to on Tuesday when my local pool has its weekly closure day, has now re-opened its pool as well (repairs were needed to the adjustable pool floor which was damaged int he earthquake). It closes at 18:00 each day. I’ve been ill with a really bad cough for the last ten days anyway so probably would not have been able to swim during most of this period. I did my usual 50 lengths in just over 30 minutes – a little slower than standard but only just, so not bad after ten days off and while still a little under the weather. So, back to the exercise and diet regime now that I’m mostly well and that the pool is available again.

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So much for lemons. I think there are very limited supplies getting through and we’re not finding them, mostly. Part of the problem is that whole milk just doesn’t work (it sends my skin nuts and Tomoko is very wary of high-fat things as she doesn’t want to gain too much weight just now – an easy thing to do at present and as I know from bitter experience, it’s much easier to put it on than take it off). Our local supermarket hasn’t had any at all available since we bought 1L a few days ago and the other store we went to today in Asakusa had a modest supply, but only of full fat. (more…)

The supply shortages seem to be easing, with some things becoming available again. Bread is now generally available in bakeries, though in quite limited supply at supermarkets. Meat is more available again at supermarkets and fish never really went away. Fresh tofu is limited. Milk is non-existent. Yoghurt almost so. Even soy-milk is almost unavailable, though we did find some of that today. Fresh fruit and vegetables are almost at normal availablility. Most pre-packaged drinks are limited or no supply. (more…)

So, people have been asking how things are on a regular basis, so I thought I’d give an update on the situtation here. (more…)

In Japanese shibaraku (しばらく) means “a short while”. $WIFE just spotted and re-tweeted a Japanese message defining (a-la Uxbridge English Dictionary) the word mubaraku (むばらく — the Japanese pronunciation of Mubarak’s name). It is defined as “about thirty years”.

So last year we bought an apartment in Japan. Well, I say “we” but actually my other half bought it. I still own my apartment in Reading, and she was able to get the mortgage on her salary alone, so it made the paperwork somewhat simpler. However, there are some issues for the longer term. Japan’s family law is primarily derived from the German Bundesbuch civil law system that they imported in the late 19th century. This was derived from the Napoleonic code. Under such systems, the disposition of property after death is not really under the control of the person themselves. If there are offspring and a spouse the offspring receive half the property or its equivalent value (I’m not sure if this is just real property – land, houses and apartments or all assets) and the spouse the other half. This is the same as in, say, France and is something that couples from the UK retiring to France have been warned about in recent years. If there are no offspring, the parents if they are alive inherit half and the spouse the other half. But it gets even worse. Married couples have very limited ability to transfer assets between them and if my wife had made me automatic co-owner of our apartment (i.e. the element of it that she paid for with the deposit – the bank still owns the rest) then I would have been liable for a capital gains tax on that transfer. Crazy, but historically the upper classes in Japan would try to avoid taxes by moving things around as part of dowries and the like and marriages often ended in divorce so property was seprately held (that’s what I’m told anyway). As I’m now paying half of the mortgage for the property, we have to make sure I get receipts from my wife for the payments I make to her for the mortgage. New-build apartments typically over the last twenty years have been depreciating rather than appreciating in value so who knows what happens to things if the worst happens (I’m fervently hoping it doesn’t but there’s always risks). There’s also the question of which set of laws holds sway over my liquid and property assets in the UK while I am resident in Japan but still a UK citizen with holdings in the UK. Under UK law everything would go to my wife if I didn’t have a will and other than that it’s mine to give away (more-or-less – it can be challenged by/on behalf of next of kin).

It just seems a bit weird to need a receipt from my wife for the mortgage payments, really.

Christmas in Japan is rather odd for a Westerner. Just like in the US or Europe, images of the Coke-inspired (i.e. Red and White) Santa Claus are all over the place, as well as the evergreen symbolism of midwinter solstice. Howeever, Christmas Day isn’t a holiday. The current emperor’s birthday is the 23rd December, so that is a holiday, but Christmas Day itself is just a normal day, unless one is among the tiny number of Christians in Japan, where it’s a religious day for them. The build-up is pushed by retailers, with Christmas decorations all over the place. These are replaced on Boxing Day with the Japanese New Year decorations instead. New Year is the big holiday season here, really. (more…)