And a bit closer…

Big thanks to the kind staff at Kakamigahara Caterpillar for letting two odd looking blokes waltz in off the street and request a demonstration. They even gave us a little digger to attach to my mobile phone. It’s got a movable diggy bit and zooms forward when you pull it back, making it the perfect companion for Ricky’s Choro-Q police car and fire engine:

For those of you into Japanese toys, do you Choro-Q or Tomica?

Back to the subject of diggers, One of Rikuto’s books has a picture of the Hitachi EX8000 ultra-large excavator, one of the world’s biggest diggers. I wonder if they’d let us sit on it?

This is one of many beautiful, sandy beaches at the foot of Shizuoka prefecture’s Izu Peninsula. We went down there in Golden Week, and it was Rikuto’s first time ever to see the sea and play in the sand.

Ricky wasn’t scared at all of the crashing waves… in fact, he quite enjoyed splashing around in the water.

You can tell by his trousers in the last part of the video below that he got wet to the waist when he inevitably fell on his bum as one wave caught him by surprise.

We had a great time, thanks to the beautiful weather and wonderful hosts at EigoHomestay.com.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been for the last two months, I’ve actually been very active on the net, most recently blogging on the JapanSoc blog and BloggerTools.net. I’ve also racked up over a thousand posts on Twitter if you’d like to follow me there.

As a self-employed, work-at-home dad living in the countryside, I have a lot of free time. As most of you know, I’m usually glued to my computer screen, but three times a week, my wife heads off to her part-time job, leaving me and Rikuto to fend for ourselves.

We live in Kakamigahara in Gifu prefecture. It’s a city of around 150,000 people, and although it’s only an hour’s drive north of Nagoya, it’s quite different to the mass of buildings that make up Japan’s fourth biggest city. Being on the southern edge of the Kiso Mountains (aka Central Alps), there’s no shortage of hiking trails and parks in which to spend our Slow Times in Japan.

Here’s a collection of photos of us exploring some of the parks in and around the city, with links to each location on Google Maps.

The view from our house

We live at the foot of the Central Alps…

Sohara Nature Park (Google Map)

This is the closest of the city’s major parks. We usually go here for cherry blossoms and barbecues.

100 Year Park (Google map)

This one, although only a 10 minute drive away, is actually in Seki city, but I’ve included it since it’s as near as any of the others. It’s absolutely huge by Japan’s “park” standards and will be years before we’ve explored it all.

Oasis Park / Aquatoto, Kawashima (Google map)

Aquatoto is a “world fresh water aquarium”, surrounded by a park and the Kiso River.

Kiso Three River Park (Google map)

This park is really simple. It’s basically a huge field with some playground apparatus. The best thing about it is there aren’t any ponds or streams for Rikuto to fall in, despite the name.

Hida Kisogawa National Park (Google Map)

We need to explore this one a little more as it’s actual a mountain full of trails and adventurous stuff. When we went, we just used the roller skating track for some pushchair grand prix practice.

Ogase (Google map)

Ogase is popular in Kakamigahara for it’s big pond and fireworks festival. It’s nice to take a stroll around the pond then play in the park a bit.

Kakamigahara Citizen’s Park (Google map)

Kakamigahara City likes to promote itself as a “green” city. Personally, I think the money they spend on parks would be better spent on other things, but our leaders at City Hall have just finished building a second huge park right outside their workplace (see the two parks on the map?).

Kakamigahara Natural Heritage Forest (Google map)

I think this one is the most beautiful of the parks I’ve been to so far in this city. So let me wrap this up with three pictures. The first two from the park and the last one from up in the forest.

Make sure you keep your eyes peeled for other Slow Times in Japan as people send in their submissions for the April 2009 Japan Blog Matsuri (links at the top).

The Surprise Visit
I first came to Japan for a three-month holiday. A Japanese friend had earlier invited me to stay with his family, but I hadn’t heard from him in the month before I arrived, so wasn’t sure whether he would be expecting me. Without even calling first, I got trains and even hitchhiked from Narita airport to his very doorstep in Aichi prefecture, and surprised the heck out of his mum who found me standing on her porch at the crack of dawn.

The Underwear
When I officially moved to Japan the following year, my suitcase got left in Rome. Alitalia Airways gave me 3,000 yen in department store vouchers which I used to by some fancy brand-name underwear… which I wore until my suitcase showed up four days later.

The Youth Hostel
In 1998, I got a job at ECC. During my first few weeks on the job, I was living in youth hostels until I got a place of my own. I was eventually kicked out of one, probably because I was leaving for work with a suit and tie on each day.

The Long Walk
When a girlfriend broke up with me, I won her back by walking through the night from my apartment at one end of Nagoya to her place at the other. I couldn’t afford a taxi and couldn’t wait till morning to see her. I think it took me about 6 hours to get there, which she thought was very romantic.

The Gomi Hunter
In the late ’90s, there weren’t any strict rubbish rules at all. In fact, once a month, people would throw out perfectly good household appliances so they could upgrade to the latest models. My friend Kazu and I would drive around Nagoya looking for the best freebies. I picked up a TV, video recorder, and even a washing machine from the street during our midnight gomi-hunting trips.

The Lock-in
One of Nagoya’s most infamous nightclubs is the ID Cafe. My friends and I knew it was a nightclub, but wondered why it was called “Cafe”. One day, on a sunny afternoon, we saw that it was “open” (”open” was painted on the wall inside the entrance) and figured it must double as a coffee shop in the day. We walked in, took the lift up to the third floor and found ourselves locked in! It’s hard to explain so I won’t try, other than to say it was not a cafe, it was not open, and it was two hours before one of us squeezed a finger under the metal cover that was bolted over the elevator button so we could get out.

The Car Chase
I knew a wealthy family man called Mr. Watanabe who had an amazingly sporty Nissan Skyline GT-R (which looked a bit like this). He had a police detector on the dashboard and I remember one day when we were on the highway it started beeping. Moments later, a rather dangerous driver flew past us in the outside lane, and I was suddenly thrown back in my chair as Mr. Watanabe slammed his foot on the accelerator and chased down the speedster, flashing his lights and honking his horn at him! Within seconds, the guy in front had slowed right down and both cars drove calmly by the police who had gathered at the roadside with speed detectors. Fast times in Japan indeed!

The Cat Killer
I unintentionally killed a cat by emptying aerosol cans in the air when throwing out the rubbish. The cat, who was circling around my feet, started running in circles, high on deodorant maybe, when suddenly a car came round the corner and flattened him. I waved at the driver to stop and together we lifted the cat from the street and placed him alongside the rubbish for the morning’s collection. Yes, I feel guilty about that!

The Pain in the Rear
I once had a really nasty cyst in my… erm… bum, that was so sore I couldn’t walk or sit down. Instead, I had to hop from foot to foot constantly which was quite a sight for my students. After three weeks of enduring the pain, I plucked up the courage to see a bum doctor. The young, attractive nurse read me the following instructions in English:

Pull down your pants and show me your anus.

to which I responded in shock,

I’m not showing you my anus! I’ll show the doctor, but not you!

Minutes later I was on my back with my knees against my shoulders, exposed bum in the air and wooden stick clenched between my teeth, while the doctor entered the problem area with a sharp knife. That was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, but I was all mended within a day and incredibly grateful for their help since I didn’t have any insurance and they didn’t charge me a single yen!

Those are just a few tales, and I’m bet you’re glad I shared them, especially the last one!

Note: I’m writing this at nearly 5am. It’s been a long night of upgrading the site and I know there are some loose ends. The FAQ and blog will be updated in due course, and any bugs you find (there are always some) will be eventually squashed. Oh, and I deleted all your profile bios by accident, sorry about that!

For occasions such as this JapanSoc overhaul, Deas from Rocking in Hakata has created this fantastic video logo for our favorite social bookmarking site. Watch, gasp, then download the high definition version for your own JapanSoc-related videos.

Incidentally, Deas made a very cool JapanSoc OS X widget and some great social bookmarking icons, too. Thanks, Deas!

Who’s behind the new JapanSoc.com?

Before I give you a run-down of the new features, let me give a big, big thank you to Chris Gaunt of Nihongo Notes and J-Pop Japan. Chris just happens to be a multi-talented web developer, who completely rewrote the JapanSoc template. That’s no easy task when you consider a typical Social Web CMS template weighs in at over 60 files. I can’t thank Chris enough for the work he’s put into the site over the last month, and I’ll be using his services again in the near future. Chris does a lot of freelance work, particularly for Wordpress and Ruby on Rails sites. He’s also a PHP wizard and can dazzle with CSS. Learn more about what Chris can do for your site on his LinkedIn profile.

The engine that powers JapanSoc is Social Web CMS, an open source project which I’ve become heavily involved this last year, developing over 20 modules and contributing to the SWCMS SVN. Together with Chris, we are quite a formidable team!

16 All New Features!

1. The Design

This is what JapanSoc.com now looks like:

2. The JapanSoc Community News bar

Click the bar at the top and it will drop down, showing you links to JapanSoc.org related sites and RSS feeds from the Community Blog and the Twitter #jsoc hashtag.

3. Drop down categories and new ones, too!

I’ve split the categories into a few very generic groups, and using the drop-down “Suckerfish” menu makes it easy for us to add more categories, not to mention them being much more accessible than before.

4. Easy Submit button

When you click on the new submit button, a little drop-down box opens where you can directly add the url you want to submit.

5. Enhanced sidebar comments

Not only is there a little avatar next to each comment, when you hover the mouse over the comments in the sidebar, a tooltip shows you the name of the commentator and the title of the post the comment was made on. Very handy!

6. Avatars have gone Gravatar

I ran a poll recently to find out whether you preferred to use Gravatar or upload your own avatar. The response was clearly in favor of Gravatar, so we’ve dropped the uploading feature altogether. That’s a good thing because it saves you from faffing around with avatars, it saves me from fixing bad uploads, and it gives the site more flexibility in how avatars are used.

7. Nice4Rice or an umeboshi?

I used to have a website called “Nice4Rice” which I customized to allow readers to get a free backlink by “giving rice” to my reviews. It was a lot of fun and I miss that site a bit. Fortunately, I kept hold of the original Nice4Rice rice bowls and have used them in comment ratings!

If you like a comment or agree with it, give the author some rice! If it left a bad taste in your mouth, an umeboshi would be more appropriate. Of course, this is just cosmetic and three umeboshi will still bury a comment.

8. Filter comments to your friends

You’ll see in that image above a small link that reads “Show friends’ comments only”. If you click that, all comments from people not on your friends list will temporarily be hidden. You can view them individually by clicking the show/hide link, or just click the “Show all comments” link to view them all again.

9. Filter stories to your friends

Why limit it to comments? On the top menu bar, logged in users will see a new page called “Friends”. Clicking that will filter all the latest stories to show only those from your friends.

10. HTML in comments

BBCode has been an option for a while now on JapanSoc, but very few people used it. I’m not really surprised because we’re all so used to Wordpress comments. With that in mind, we dropped BBCode (which has left a bit of mess) and now allow limited HTML tags in comments, just like Wordpress. Smilies can still be used, and I’ve added a link to Ken’s Evoticon site which opens in a new tab so you can copy and paste so zany Japanese emoticons, too!

11. Subscribe to comments

This is one of my favorite new features. Instead of just allowing the story submitter to subscribe to replies, now anyone who comments has the choice of getting reply notifications sent to their email box.

12. The Social Bar

This is the big one! Far and away the most significant addition to JapanSoc is the social bar. When you log in, you’ll see the social bar glued to the foot of your window, showing your own user stats and links to your inbox, profile and settings.

13. Send a Quick Message

In the Social Bar is a Quick Message icon which gives you an instant messaging form so you can send out to your friends. Whenever you send a message, your friend will be notified by email (unless they turn off email notification), and if you get a message, the inbox icon will light up to indicate you have mail. How very convenient!

14. View other users in the Social Bar

The best thing about the Social Bar is that when you click on somebody’s username or avatar, anywhere on the site, their user info will be loaded into your Social Bar with a spot of Ajax so you don’t even leave the page.

Clicking the avatar or name here will take you to their main profile, but you can also use this bar to add or remove the user from your friends list, send them a message, visit their homepage, their Twitter page, look at their JapanSoc favorites, see if they are currently online, or return to your own Social Bar stats.

15. New-look Profiles

We’ve decided to drop the MySpace style profile and keep things simpler, but more focused on getting you connected with the viewer.

As you can see, your own sites and social network profiles get loads of attention, as do your friends and fans who will appear in your Social Bar with just one click! These are the icons Deas came up with, and there are others for Lang-8, LinkedIn and iKnow! too.

16. Oyakata

The Top Users box in the sidebar has been fun to watch over the last year, but what happens when everyone’s a Yokozuna? JapanSoc Sumo no longer ends at Yokozuna. When you get 15,000 points, you’ll be moved to the Oyakata box, a sumo stable of fame! Hat tip to Jordan for the suggestion.

Wrap-up

That’s about all of the major changes, though there are many smaller ones, too! Remember, you have to be logged in to enjoy most of the new features, so if you haven’t registered yet, please do! Visit JapanSoc.com.

He also said his first English word yesterday… I was hoping for “daddy” or at least “google” (in the hope of striking it rich as the “Google baby”), but no. Rikuto’s first English word was “crash!” – the result of me pushing him around on his Thomas the Tank Engine car and screaming “Crash!” every time we hit something.

Incidentally, his first Japanese word was wan wan (doggy-woggy?) and he’s added korrya! (what the heck!) to his vocabulary, too. I suspect he got that one from his mum!

Instead, I resolve to be a good parent and further my ability to provide for my family. While that doesn’t make for especially good blogging material, those are the things that top my 2009 agenda.

I’ve not always been a stay-at-home, family man, though. When I first came to Japan, I was very much the explorer, visiting dozens of places between Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Japan Sea. I often stayed out all night, opening doors to window-less cafes, bars and clubs, not knowing what to expect inside. For a long time, learning Japanese dominated my free time and I was excited to practice what I learned with as many new people as I could. Everything was new, everything was fascinating, and I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing it.

To make the most out of your time in Japan, I advise newcomers to be courteous to the natives, respect Japanese customs, learn as much of the language as you can, and then completely let yourself go! Only you can make 2009 full of memories to cherish forever.

This was part of the January 2009 Japan Blog Matsuri.

This week is our turn on “gomi duty”, and today, there was one bag leftover. It really is potluck whether the garbage men take everything or not and unfortunately on this occasion, they didn’t. Normally if there is rubbish left behind (usually because the transparent bags give away any attempts to hide unburnables) I would take the bag up to the incinerator and let the professionals sort it out for me. Of course, since the country is on holiday for New Year, I donned some gloves and picked through the rubbish myself.

Air freshener containers, plastic bottles, cardboard, job-hunting magazines, used makeup stuff, balls of hair, potato peels, generally really gross leftovers from dinner… and half an envelope! BUSTED!!!

Wait a minute! This woman, Hiromi, isn’t one of our group! In fact, not only has she broken all the rules of rubbish etiquette, but she’s put out her rubbish in the wrong gomi station!

Here’s the thing: Hiromi’s apartment block is right in front of our gomi station, but due to some geographical misfortune where the line dividing neighborhoods runs right between our gomi station and Hiromi’s apartment block, she would have to walk for 10 minutes, hauling her bag of rubbish to her designated gomi station.

Not that I have any sympathy for her. I went straight to her apartment and rang the doorbell, wondering what her reaction would be to a pissed-off foreigner returning her bag of rubbish. Fortunately for her, she wasn’t in, so I left the bag on her doorstep with the envelope fastened to it so she would know she was caught out. Don’t worry, I have photographic evidence in case she dumps the bag somewhere else – after all, because of New year, the next rubbish day isn’t for another week!

I love my baby grandson, Ricky.
He’s such a cute little fellow to me.
He lives so far away in Japan,
A strange country across the sea.

Read the rest here

The timing is a bit off since we’re having the house painted right now, but that just adds to the realism…

Fortunately, we still have a pleasant view out the back window, so long as you ignore all the power lines…

My former neighbor, but still same city dweller, Jason, offers another view of the mountains around our city from his own window.