Gaijin for Life

Lately Grace has been enjoying the Genki English CDs that I use for my classes at elementary schools. One of our favourite Genki English songs is "What Are You Doing?" I have know idea what the proper response to that question would be for Grace in the context of this photo. Perhaps she does. I'll have to ask her tomorrow. (I won't bother asking Faith since she is still more of a direct object than a verb in this relationship).

Tea Party with Baaba and Aunti Me-me

Grace Falling Asleep at the Dinner Table . . . Again.
(But whenever we give her a nap, we have trouble putting her to bed at 7:00)

This is Grace Playing "Blue Car"

"Blue Car" is our real car. It is a blue Toyota Vitz. Now, as I am not often around to observe Grace's day time activities I have had to consult my wife concerning technical information about this photo. Apparently Grace is driving. I don't know why she has the cart before the horse, but perhaps it is for the same reason that she puts her boots on the wrong feet. If you observe closely you will see some plastic rings under Kuma-don's rocking chair and a wooden boat under my (yes, my) rocking horse. Those are things that Grace has put in the "trunk" for the trip. She didn't say where she was going so we will have to train her to do so before we get her a bicycle.

Dressed Up for Girls' Day

MAP: Protestant Churches in Aomori（青森県のプロテスタント教会）地図・マップ

2009-02-18T08:03:00.007-05:00

View Larger Map・大きくする
In Order to Use This Map Effectively It Is Necessary To Open It in a New Tab or Window

There have been a number of projects taking up my free time lately. One of them is our bureaucratic marathon to get my wife's Canadian permanent residence visa. I will probably write a series of detailed posts on that, as it is probably of interest to people in situations similar to ours. Another project has been this google map of Protestant churches in Aomori Prefecture. My goal, of course, has been to account for all of them but I am sure that I have missed a few "yellow pin" churches. I originally began the project for Aomori JETs in JET Christian Fellowship since the JCF homepage's list of Aomori churches seemed to be pretty incomplete. I didn't realize just HOW incomplete, though, until I started looking up churches. This project has been very educational for me.

Anyway, a few administrative details . . . . I have tried to make this map as bilingual as possible. However, I haven't figured out an efficient way to indicate on the sidebar which churches have English services, English speaking pastors or missionaries, and/or language assistance for English speakers. That information must be obtained by clicking on individual pins. Clicking on a pin will bring up a bubble in which I have entered as much pertinent information as I could gather on the church it represents. Ideally this will include a photo of the building, the church's name and the denomination to which it belongs, links to the church's homepage (if it has one) and to the homepage of the denomination (if it has one), and the names of the pastors or missionaries who minister there.

My intention is to keep updating this map indefinitely. Hopefully it will be of use to others as well as to myself but, if not, at least the project will keep me well informed as to who and what is out there.

A final note: I should point out that there are churches on this map that, on the basis of my own theological convictions, I would never recommend to anyone. However, I hope that I have been able to provide enough information that people using this map will be able to make informed judgements of their own.

Yes, I Broke My Blog; Yes, I'll Probably Take the Time to Fix It . . .

2009-02-15T18:30:00.005-05:00

What happened is, I renamed all of my photo files to reflect the time and date of their creation and that broke all the html links. In the mean time, since in recent months (years?) this blog has become primarily a venue for posting our favourite photos from daily family life, I direct the reader to our web album links on the sidebar.

The primary purpose of this post is to re-evaluate the purpose for the existence of this blog, but since only very sophisticated and knowledgeable writers are qualified to operate photo-less blogs, I will stick a couple of photos in here. (After all, who would read the comics sections of the newspaper if there weren't any pictures? Likewise, what's the point of browsing through an amateur blog if there aren't any photos to look at?)

Image 1: This is a "Healthy Children at Play" scenario. Modest but clean living conditions; heavily used books scattered on the floor; napping station laid out with plenty of blankets . . . . Big sister is taking charge. She has Kuma-don strapped to her back with a primitive oburi-himo, she's getting ready to "nurse" Mo-chan, and pretty soon she will be putting her little sister to sleep for her morning nap. Once the little one is asleep, maybe the big one will do her a i u e o (Japanese alphabet) jigsaw puzzle . . . or maybe she will just go bug mommy--it depends on the day. If the latter, then mommy can read to her, have her help hang up the laundry, or maybe they will bake cookies together.

Image 2: This is your child (okay, I admit it, this is our child) on Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang. This is what happens when you bring Mr. TV in to "help" out. Big sister's brain is fried and little sister is left to eat Lego by herself. You see, my wife and I got ourselves committed to a rush translation job for some friends on a Friday afternoon so we needed some peace and quiet while we jabbed away at our laptops. After all, translation requires a great deal of focused mental energy. So we broke the glass cover, so to speak, pulled out an emergency DVD, plopped the girls down in front of the television set and told them to stay put. They were happy to do so, but it ruined their behaviour for the rest of the evening. It took at least half an hour of Mother Goose to get them back into any semblance of purposeful living. (Don't get me wrong, we love Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but its important that we watch it and talk about it together as a family rather than just leave our daughters to wallow in the sights and sounds by themselves.)

Now, for the un-illustrated main body of this post. Before this blog became a sort of haphazzard photo-diary of our family life, it was a "JET blog." It was meant to give future JETs a window into the world they were getting themselves into. By personal experience I knew that JETs-in-waiting are just dying for information about what to expect. Unfortunately, things reached a point where I became integrated enough into the fabric of local life that anything interesting I had to say about it--and believe me, there is plenty of interesting and/or hilarious material--would constitute gossip. Dangerously political gossip. Every funny anecdote, every ironic observation, would be at the expense of somebody. And somebody might get mad.

Now, within the first few months of starting Gaijin for Life I realized that googling my village's name in romaji (Latin letters) would bring my blog up on the first page. Before my first year was up I found out that some people in the municipal office checked my blog (not just mine, mind you) everyday. They couldn't read it, but they enjoyed the pictures. Then I discovered that if a picture really interested them they would copy and paste the verbal portion of the post into an online translation engine. Now, for the benefit of monolingual readers who have never experienced computerized translation engines, I will try to demonstrate how this situation could have potentially led to social disaster. Take, for instance, this recklessly lighthearted description of the village's Superintendent of Education I wrote during my first month here:

It is perhaps impossible to convey here without the support of photographic evidence the unique environment in which I am spending my summer days. How can the uninitiated accurately imagine the figure the superintendent of the Board of Education cuts as he slouches in his enormous office in his sleeveless undershirt listlessly fanning himself. His style is that of benign neglect,

Now see how it reads after I use the Excite translation engine (click on the link to have some fun yourself) to translate that passage, first into Japanese, and then back into English:

Perhaps, it is impossible to tell here a unique environment on which I have spent the summer day without the support of the photographic evidence. Is inexperience imaginable accurately because it stoops in a huge office of the undershirt without his sleeve though fanned oneself dull and gloomy by him if it does very when figure is a supervisor of Board of the wound Education?His style is the one of the benign neglect.

Now, the original is bad enough. I was an arrogant, narcissist foreign pig from a big city, breezing into town and writing condescending descriptions of "the harmless local hicks" for the amusement (or so I fancied) of other people "like myself." However, anyone in my village who might have made the effort to try to figure out what I was writing about by using a translation engine would have been left with garbled gibberish putting the good name of one of their public officials in proximity with expressions like "dull," "gloomy," "inexperience" and "neglect." Now that I know so much more about what is actually going on around here (the gloom, the inexperience, the neglect etc.), it would be more dangerous than ever to touch on local issues of any substance--especially those things that amuse or disgust me. And due to privacy concerns, I no longer dare post too many photos of my students or talk too much about my schools.

So I guess what I am trying to say here is, this blog ceased to be a genuine "JET blog" a long time ago, and it would be unsafe for me to attempt to turn it back into one.

As this post has already become longer than reasonable for a blog entry, I will save further discussion of Gaijin for Life's identity crisis for another time.

2008-12-18T17:43:00.003-05:00

My Sister is a Pop Star

2008-12-01T19:27:00.004-05:00

Click on this Link to Listen to Sister #1's Contribution to the Album

If you are family, friend, or relative of the Japanese branch of the Elliot clan, you'll want to click on the above link and listen to Track 2: Song for Erin/Anna

Sister #1's former employers at Hummingbird English Academy started their own music studio where they teach music and produce CDs. This year they produced a CD with six moms singing songs that they wrote for their kids. Sister #1 was invited to write and sing the only English number in the album. You can even purchase a copy of the CD by clicking on this link to visit the Pauole Hauoli Music homepage.

My Niece Erin, Averting Her Face from a Scary Bowl of Raw Tuna

Radio Taiso Before Breakfast

2008-10-19T20:13:00.006-04:00

Every morning before breakfast we obediently submit to the instructions delivered in this video.

Like So . . . Although We Don't Seem to Be Very Coordinated about It

And Grace Sometimes Slacks Off . . . Slacker!

Usually She Puts Her Back Into It, But I Guess the Presence of a Camera Was Too Distracting

When I was a healthy little school kid in Japan I thought rajio taiso was pretty silly because it really didn't seem like much of a work out. Some people would say that it was never meant to be a work out--that it's primary purpose was to nurture herd behaviour and group think. Be that as it may, now that I'm a thirty-something ojisan, doing rajio taiso 1 & 2 makes my body crackle and creek like a barn on a windy day.

Faith Doesn't Do Radio Taiso Yet, But She's Getting Bigger

Kazamaura Report: Another Strange Food

2008-10-17T04:55:00.007-04:00

An Ostrich from an Aomori Ostrich Farm
(or should I say, "ex-ostrich")

I'm guessing that eating ostrich meat per se is not unheard of in the English speaking world. In fact, I understand that it is quite popular in some circles.

But What About Eating It Raw?

. . . At a Happy Little Ostrich Eating Party with Friends?

Not to Mention the Grilled Guts

Again, not a big deal in the English speaking world since eating animal offal has a long and (I suppose) noble history there (can you say "Rocky Mountain oyster," "head cheese" or "chitterlings"?). Nevertheless, I do not share in that tradition and, while I ate my fair share of raw ostrich, I took a pass on the intestines sizzling on the grill. Incidentally, if you are an ex-pat living in Japan, please take the time to explain to your Japanese friends and colleagues--in lengthy, vivid and nauseating detail--that the West has just as long and illustrious a history of eating animal guts and seafood as Japan does. I'm getting really sick of the phrase "only in Japan" (especially since in Toronto I often heard the phrase "only in Korea" applied to many of the exact same things). Yes, we might all eat our animal guts in slightly different ways, and perhaps with greater or lesser frequency as the case may be, but we're really not all that different after all. "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?"
I did not plant peppers this year, but there you are. All kinds of marvellous things sprung forth from my compost disposal area this year, and although I pulled most of the tomato, squash, pepper, and miscellaneous other plants along with the weeds, this one somehow escaped. I originally weeded out all of the spontaneous vegetable growth because I was given to understand that it wouldn't amount to anything, but there are at least four peppers on this plant and they have grown to quite a respectable size now.

Visit to Hokkaido Jiji and Hokkaido Baba (as Opposed to Aji-Jiji and Aji-Baba Whom We See More Often)

2008-10-17T04:17:00.004-04:00

Grace Loves Grapes, and Jiji Has Some Grape Vines

Enjoying Hokkaido Jiji's Roses

Enjoying a Late Night Barbecue
with Cousin Souki and Cousin Yua

Faith Meets Double-Baba
(a.k.a. Great Grandma Nakamura)

This Was the First Time that the Cousins Were Old Enough to Play Together in Reasonable Ways

Showing off Their Ponytails
(I Have a Question: is it correct to say "wearing her hair in two ponytails," or is there a special term for two ponytails?)

Meeting the Cows at Satoland （さとランド）

Quadricylce Ride

Cousin Yua is Going to Be a Big Sister Soon, so She Was Very Interested in Faith

Family Photo
(first one in a very long time)

September in Brief

2008-10-14T08:07:00.005-04:00

Yuko got a Nice Face Massage

Our Local Park was Rebuilt

We Had Some More Barbecues

Grace Rode a Bike for the First Time
(Sort of--Her Feet Can't Reach the Pedals Yet)

I Voted in the
2008 Canadian Federal Election

We Rode the Ferry to Hokkaido to Visit Yuko's Family
(but more on that in the next post)

Later in the Month We Went Down the Sai Coast for a Picnic and . . .

. . . to Take a Look at Some of the Beautiful Little Fishing Harbours
(Ushitaki, which can roughly be translated as
"Cattle Falls")

I'm Back . . . Again . . . .

2008-08-30T01:14:00.010-04:00

For the last several months, ever since my hopelessly cheep Averatec fried its electronic brain out, I've been stuck using my wife's 7-year-old PowerBook G4. It looks really cool, and its still great for surfing the Internet and watching DVDs, but it has proven itself absolutely useless when it comes to managing photos (tiny hard drive; absolete software). Thankfully, I had a surprise opportunity last week to pick up a departing JETs Dell Inspiron 8500 for a very reasonable price, so I am back in business. After messing around a couple of days with the Windows XP operating system it came with, I did the only logical thing and installed a flavour of the GNU/Linux Ubuntu operating system called Kubuntu. Ubuntu and Kubuntu have really come a long way since I last used them a year ago. The latest version is 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and with it I can play my cell phone video files and manage my iPod Shuffle no problem--everything just WORKS (after installing the usual extras, such as wine and win32codecs, of course).

Anyway, now that I have nearly finished organizing all of my photos using my new laptop, I finally feel motivated enough to finally provide another garden update. This is how my garden turned out this summer. At least, this is what it looked like last week. It looks a lot different now, but that is another story. The marigolds, the basil and a couple of other herbs (the names of which I can never remember) are my doing. The squash, the tomato plants, the pepper plants and some of the mint all sprung forth spontaneously from the compost I tilled into the earth this spring. Clearly I have been ignoring the composting maxim about not composting seeds. Anyway, the winner for this year is--SQUASH. I initially had about twenty squash plants growing uninvited in my neglected garden. I finally got around to pulling all but one of them (following the advice of my Uncle Lenny), but that ONE turned into the monster you now behold. So far it has produced five squash.

Harvesting Abalone (Awabi):
One of the Great Views from Our Back Yard

A Closeup of the Same

A More Artistic Rendering
(At Least By My Feeble Standards)

This month we had a spell of good weather for about a week, and Grace and I were able to sit out on our lawn chairs before breakfast. (The land mass accross the water is Hokkaido.)

Grace In A New Dress;
Faith In A New Diaper

Some differences between Grace and Faith:
1. Grace never threw up. Faith overeats and then throws up on a regular basis. What a Roman.
2. Grace never really needed to burp after a feeding. After a feeding, Faith usually needs to spend the next hour or two doing nothing but burping. Correction, she hiccoughs, too . . . oh, and breaks wind. If we could harness all the gas coming out of both ends of Faith, we would probably not need to buy any propane for our kitchen stove anymore.
3. Grace used to wake up several times a night and fuss to be fed at random times. We put Faith on a parent directed feeding schedule, and she usually only wakes up once a night.

Stop, Guys, That Tickles!

Our Resident Professional Sleeper at Work

Sadly, the weather took a turn for the worse last week and everyone got sick . . . especially Grace. What an evil place this is. It finally gets warm--not hot, mind you--around the last week of July, and by the last week of August the cold rains come and wash away all memory of an almost pleasant summer. Oddly enough, late September and most of October are usually pretty sunny and warm here, so at least we have that to look forward to.