audiophilism

You wake up in Toronto...

2012-04-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

In Toronto now. Airport-bashing is too much of a cliche so, for the sake of the reader, I won't document what it took to get here. I'm trying to have a better outlook on life in general anyways, because it could be much worse. For now I am thankful to God for all that he has given me.

My two months in Japan is up; I'm headed back to the States now, maybe for a long time. Japan was a hard place to leave, what with all the awesome people and work yet to be done, but I have some business to attend to back home and I think I'm ready to return.

After a long, wet winter, spring arrived in northern Japan the very day I left Tohoku for Chiba, about five days ago now. The cherry blossoms, which were not yet bloomed in Tohoku were well past their prime in Tokyo. In a laughably modern predicament I and the group I hitched a ride with back to Chiba were led somewhat astray by the GPS, through back roads and obscure neighborhoods in the heart of Japan where we saw the cherry blossoms perhaps on their finest day.

I am looking forwards to seeing everyone back home. Thanks for reading.

On the Pressure System

2012-04-04T05:55:00.000-07:00

No work today. A "pressure system", so called because it originated over the mainland rather than in the tropics, blew this morning's snow more or less horizontal and prompted the Samaritan's Purse higher-ups to cancel all mud-out and carpentry work in Ishinomaki for the day. Though this is unfortunate in that it makes it more difficult for SP to reach it's goal of finishing 450 homes by the end of April, I feel that it was a good opportunity for the volunteers and staff of SP Tome Base to really fellowship and connect. I spent the day down at the base, eating, talking, playing ping-pong, and making music with people who have been in Tome for weeks whom I had not had the chance to spend time with. Ryo and Daniel showed me some pretty impressive licks of the guitar, and we had plenty of downtime to help Michelle learn the chords to play her favorite songs. Douglass is also coming along in his guitar skills, and while he might not know all the chords yet, he has incredible rhythm with his right hand, and he's learning the Redemption Song by Marley. There's a Youth With A Mission group which arrived some days ago and will stay in Tome for three weeks. As of yet, the close-knit group of eight or nine tends to keep mostly to themselves, but I had the opportunity to meet their leader, Mr. Mike, and his wife this afternoon. Toshi, a Japanese fellow who once cut my hair and intentionally left a tail-type thing in the back told me today with a perfectly straight face that he was pregnant.

After preparing the Tome kitchen tent to be taken down after lunch, fourteen or so of us took a trip to a local coffee shop. It's a pretty good mix; some Japanese, some Canadian, some American, some Hong Kongian, some Australian.

Analog TV broadcasts have officially ended in the Miyagi prefecture as of a couple days ago. It's sad to see it go, but I suppose most Japanese are prepared.

It felt kind of strange to help empty the kitchen earlier today. It exists as a tent separate from the main building, and will be taken down as soon as Saturday. I could feel a certain aura about the staff members as if this was the mark of finality, the point of no return; after some of them having spent eight months at Tome, this is proof that Tome Base really will be shutting down on the thirtieth, the end of a great era. It's hard for me to say goodbye to friends I've only known for a weekend, so I can only imagine the mixed emotions the SP staff will feel as they head home.

I think that my Japanese is improving. The other day I managed a moderately lengthy conversation with an elderly Japanese homeowner, with some help from an electronic Japanese-English dictionary Satoshi gave me the other day. The lady was 71 years old, and I believe that she had heard the gospel for the first time from SP. She was a very friendly lady, and offered us mud-out volunteers tea and cookies.

Right now it looks like I'll be heading back over to Ishinomaki for a week or so to stay at the Grace Mission Tohoku-sponsored Men's house, and perhaps head down to Nagoya on the 12th where Pastor Gary of the Nagoya International Christian Assembly has offered to put me up for the weekend, after which I'll head back into Chiba and hang with friends from my time at CCSI for a day or two before heading back to the states on the 18th.

GMT runs a pretty tight outfit down in Ishinomaki. It boasts a forty-person rooming capacity, four buildings, and an "army tent" used for Sunday worship and sometimes for meals. High school grads and college kids from as far as Nagoya will often travel up to stay at GMT buildings for days at a time, and usually they will work under Samaritan's Purse doing mud-outs. These kids are always a joy to work with, full of energy and a passion for Christ.

One evening after a long day of mudding out while staying at the GMT men's house with three young Japanese fellows we had about two hours to kill, so Ken suggested we take a walk down to the ocean. It seemed about as exciting as anything else, so Ken, Motoki, Ryo and I put our boots on and headed out towards the south in the most direct path to the coast. We crossed over several now-vacant lots, a cracked road which runs parallel to the shore, and a bamboo-enforested area before reaching the final parallel road at the base of a fifteen foot tall gravel sea wall which ascends at a forty-five degree angle from the ground and can therefore be climbed without a terrible amount of effort. This is a lonely street with a distinct smell, where the traffic lights perpetually blink yellow. It would resemble a ghost-town but there is no town, only two or three buildings which, by virtue of some inconceivable circumstance, managed to stand in the face of a forty-meter wave. In the distance, the basic frame of a preschool and playground can be seen, hardly recognizable even up close, completely devastated by the tsunami. After climbing the sea wall, the Japanese fellows and I spent more than a half-hour skipping rocks over the dark sea into the vacant, solid grey-blue eternity of the evening sky as the setting sun could be warmly felt shining brightly from the right. Afterwards, it was decided that we should get some sweets, so we all ran back down the sea wall and headed east down the lonely road towards the Seven-Eleven. We passed the preschool on the way back, and briefly discussed the tragedy, mostly in English which the guys are pretty good at. As the sun set, it became chilly and we headed back for GMT.

Anyhow, my roommate Riku seems to be dozing off here, so I'm gonna have to turn the light out and get to bed. God bless you if you read this whole post, and I hope you all have a nice day.

おやすみなさい

Life in Ishinomaki

2012-03-17T02:02:00.000-07:00

みんなさん、今晩は。

Since Wednesday, I've been set up nicely in a home in Ishinomaki, about a two minute walk from the "Hope House" in the heart of the city. I have been continuing to do mud-outs with Samaritan's Purse, but for the past couple days I have been working with an entirely Japanese group from Chiba and Tokyo. These high school and college kids, now on vacation, were a joy to work with, but unfortunately most of them departed for home earlier today. I will be in Ishinomaki probably until Monday, when Higurashi-san will hopefully be able to give me a ride back to Tome. Sunday and Monday are the weekend days for the mud-out crews, so I'm not quite sure what I'll do over these next couple days. Maybe I'll study Japanese, or just go exploring. All in all, I like living here in Ishinomaki, and I hope I'll have another chance to do so before I head back to the states in late April.

Thanks for reading.

Life in Tome

2012-03-12T05:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since my last post. Sumimasen.

A lot has happened since December. After months of planning and of getting over some mysterious intestinal disease, I am now working for Samaritan's Purse and living with the Higurashis, an Australian/Japanese family of ten kids which moved from Chiba to Sendai several months ago. Their home in Tome is traditional Japanese in that it is mostly wooden, barely large enough to house twelve people comfortably, and hasn't been updated much since it was built fifty or sixty years ago. It sits in a quiet farming community, with a small town nearby which I've only just today had the opportunity to ride my bike through.

I arrived in Narita airport maybe three weeks ago, and stayed several days in Chiba in the same place that I did during my internship with CCSI for the last three months of last year. After spending the night in Higurashi-san's mother's house a couple days later, Higurashi-san and I drove to his old home in Chiba (now his display house for his pool company) and loaded into his pickup, among other things, a refrigerator, and oven, a grill, and a dog, and then we departed for Sendai, a six-hour drive which wound up being closer to eight due to adverse conditions. Mr. Klause, a Tokyo-born missionary of American decent, gave me a ride to the Samaritan's Purse for the bi-weekly open dinner, where I signed over my soul to SP for two months in a painless, no-nonsense deal. Actually all I signed was an agreement not to sue, but SP has definitely proven very easy to volunteer for.

SP is an eclectic mix of skills and backgrounds, but it sends out teams of about four of two types: mud-out squads and carpenters. The carpenters are almost always professionals, sometimes college graduates in the subject. Usually, I work with my "mud-out" squad, the core of which consists of Nate and Chloe from a Baptist group called "Converge Worldwide", Takahashi-san, an Ishinomaki native, and sometimes Daniel, a Japanese-descended bilingual fellow from Alberta. We work Tuesdays through Saturdays preparing homes made uninhabitable by the tsunami last March for carpenters who will rebuild them.

At first glance, the coastal city of Ishinomaki seems to have been cleared up considerably since the tsunami. The streets are clear, there are large mountains of trash in fenced-in areas around the town, and some new convenience stores have opened along the main road. However, the destruction is also evident; perhaps four in five residential lots on which homes which stood a year ago are now vacant, and few of the few homes that still stand are habitable. Samaritan's Purse offers to do basic reconstruction work for free for any homeowner living in the area who is interested. That is, SP bleaches any wood which was affected by the tsunami and repairs any structures which were made unsafe. Even though it doesn't deal at all with amenities such as electricity and plumbing, SP volunteers and staff find plenty of time to engage the homeowners in conversation (at least the Japanese-speaking ones), and SP shares the gospel with every homeowner who uses it's service. Recently, SP celebrated it's 300th completed home, and it has a goal to complete a total of 450 (don't quote me on that) before it shuts down at the end of April.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the tsunami. It was a very sad remembrance. The emperor gave a speech, which I understood very little of, and there were memorial events all over the city of Ishinomaki.

Tomorrow I get back to work, so I'd better get to bed. If you have any questions or just want to talk, shoot me an email at jcloiacon@gmail.com or look me up on Facebook. I'm the only Julian Loiacono on it.

Thanks for reading.

じゃね。

Japan: Best Pics So Far

2011-12-05T04:36:00.000-08:00

Japanese: The Writing System

2011-11-13T18:13:00.000-08:00

Mastering the writing system can be the greatest hindrance to learning the Japanese language.

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Industrial Guijin: An Unending Panorama

2011-10-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

Mary Beth laying down the law at an industrial train station in Chiba.

Pipi and Kahoru's Drum Concert

2011-10-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

Peipei and Kahoru are sisters that really like to work the system here at CCSI; they come just for the PE and then they leave.

Flashback: the NCSG

2011-10-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

One of the first electrical devices I ever designed and built was a static generator.

Gatorball: The Next Big Thing?

2011-10-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

So recently I've been teaching gym to the elementary school kids at CCSI on Tuesdays. Last week we played Capture the Flag, which the kids seemed very familiar with, and this week we played soccer for about twenty minutes, then I introduced Japan to a new game, one I had only played once or twice as a freshman in high school, but which struck me then as perhaps the best game I'd ever played.

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Christianity and Ministry in Japan

2011-10-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

Less than one percent of Japanese call themselves Christian.
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Japan, Week 2

2011-09-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's only been about nine days since I landed in Narita International Airport, but so much has happened that it feels like longer.

Hard Clipping - Could it be a Good Thing?

2011-08-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

The digital world isn't as forgiving as the analog world once was.
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Space Rock Track submitted by Nailujo +download link

2011-08-19T07:55:00.000-07:00

A technical review of "1201" as submitted by Nailujo...

Download

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Three Tips for Professional Mixing

2011-08-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

So you got seven tracks or so, all of which line up correctly, but it still sounds like it was recorded in your basement. It was, but you don't want anyone to know that. To become a professional mixer takes years of practice, but with these three quick tips, you can make all of your mixes just a littleRead more »