Well, things are a bit of a mess–more in terms of organization than anything else, it seems. They announced rolling blackouts last night and my school spent most of last night coordinating messages and planning around power and train announcements… so naturally, we wake this morning to find there are no blackouts but the trains are pretty much not running. So we had to just cancel everything today. Thanks, government guys. Smoothly handled!

In the meantime, a lot of people are acting less on information they have and more on information they don’t. The French and Chinese embassies sent out advisories to leave Japan and not to travel to Japan. Well, thanks, guys–now people are seeing those and thinking these governments know something others don’t, and that gets inflated into “imminent nuclear disaster” and so forth. Seems like people are beginning to panic, but mostly because of the effect of other people panicking.

This image was posted on Facebook by a former student, Kaz:

Indeed.

I went to check out the house, and it appears to be perfectly fine–no broken glass, no damaged concrete or plastic, not so much as a cracked tile anywhere. That’s the general result around here. The trains were running normally, with no crowding on the trains. The people who built our house say that they will not be doing more than just a basic visual check with us this Friday, so it’s pretty much up to us to spot any damage that might not be immediately apparent. I’ll probably ask them to turn the gas on in addition to the water, so we can make sure all the lines are holding up OK. Don’t know what else we can do, aside from hiring an engineer, who would be prohibitively expensive and probably not necessary.

As northern Japan is devastated, Tokyo is more or less normal. Train lines have come back up, and those who were trapped in the city are now largely back home. The only things that seem different are a few bare areas in markets. Although the meat and fish (much meat in Japan comes from up north; fishing, obviously, may have been affected by the tsunami) were low in supply, they were still there. What was missing: pastry and instant noodles. Instant noodles made sense at least–a quick, easy food with a long shelf life. People may have feared a quake hitting Tokyo, though frankly I don’t see that as being any more a risk than usual. But the pastry? Not sure why that should be absent…

About a week ago, Sachi and I visited the offices of the firm that built our house. We saw videos showing the engineering technologies to protect against quake damage. The two I recall specifically are wall panels that protect against structure collapse, and structural posts which keep the building from separating from its foundations.

An article from the New York Times says that Japan’s strict building codes probably saved a lot of lives:

In Japan, where earthquakes are far more common than they are in the United States, the building codes have long been much more stringent on specific matters like how much a building may sway during a quake. …

Japan has gone much further than the United States in outfitting new buildings with advanced devices called base isolation pads and energy dissipation units to dampen the ground’s shaking during an earthquake.

The isolation devices are essentially giant rubber-and-steel pads that are installed at the very bottom of the excavation for a building, which then simply sits on top of the pads. The dissipation units are built into a building’s structural skeleton. They are hydraulic cylinders that elongate and contract as the building sways, sapping the motion of energy. …

New apartment and office developments in Japan flaunt their seismic resistance as a marketing technique, a fact that has accelerated the use of the latest technologies, said Ronald O. Hamburger, a structural engineer in the civil engineering society and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, a San Francisco engineering firm.

Later today, I’ll be driving over to the new house to check it out, but I will be very surprised if it shows any damage.

I would, however, like to make a small political point here. The building codes and other rules that saved so many lives? That’s what you call “government regulation.” The purpose of which is not to stifle or dominate, but to protect and safeguard. In this case, it kept people from dying as much. In other cases, it safeguards against damage done by people and corporations. Regulation, far more often than not, is a good thing.

After the shaking stopped, I tiptoed through the stuff covering the floor, and went through the building, helping the staff tell everyone to get out and collect outside. I quickly grabbed my laptop, bag, and jacket–as well as my bike helmet–and headed downstairs. Everyone was gathered out on the street. Phones were down–and still are, 4 hours later–as was text messaging. 3G Internet was still available, but for 15-20 minutes after the quake, no news services had anything. It took a bit longer than that before I found a Google News story about a 7.9 quake, but no news site would load enough to get other information.

As we waited out on the street, we could see the 40-story high-rise being built to our north, with four giant construction cranes towering over it–and even in the aftershocks, those cranes were swinging around like tree branches in a heavy wind.

I hit an incredibly lucky break of sorts today. As we needed documents from city hall for our upcoming home purchase, I decided this morning, on the spur of the moment, to take my scooter. I hardly ever do that anymore; I drive in maybe only once every two months nowadays. But I did this morning, and it was a fairly major break for me. From what I hear, trains are still not running, and one can only imagine the crowds when they start up again. I have heard that as many as 70 students at my school are still there, and may have to sleep there until trains start up again, maybe not even tonight. (I am Skype texting with one of them as I type this, in fact.)

The first thing I did was to take my scooter to the local gas stand; I didn’t think I had enough fuel to get me all the way home. I actually figured that the gas stations, naturally, would be shut down–but surprisingly, they were not. In fact, far from the long lines I imagined, there was almost no one there. I filled up and scooted over to the school grounds where everyone had gone. People shared stories–being on the subway, having relatives near the epicenter, speculation about the effects, and so forth–and otherwise just tried to recover from the event. Several of my students and I had planned to go to Akihabara tomorrow to buy computer parts of the Computer Making Club; when I suggested we postpone the trip, at least one student–who wants to make her own computer alongside ours–was very disappointed.

After it seemed clear that I would not be of any use, I did what I had been planning to do but was torn over: go home. On the one hand, I felt like a selfish heel, scooting on home while everyone else stood around in a dirt yard in the windy cold with probably no way to get home until the next day. But I also was unable to contact Sachi, and fearing she was even more worried about me than I was about her, well, that won over. By this time, it was about 50 minutes after the quake had struck.

As I started driving home, I noted so many people outside, especially with their dogs. So many had left their buildings and gathered outside. Offices were beginning to shut down, and people in the city were beginning to go home the only way they could–by walking. People were out on the streets in numbers, with crowds at every bus stop. The buses, overcrowded of course, were the only way many people had of getting even close to home. The trains were down, of course, and I certainly would not have wanted to try to flag down a taxi just then.

Interestingly, traffic itself was rather normal. I expected a huge traffic jam, a parking lot from one end to the other–but that wasn’t how it was. Instead, the streets were no more crowded than usual. I drove down Ome Boulevard, and while there was congestion here and there, it was not something I would be surprised at on any day.

As it happened, my brother and his wife live right along the route I was taking, so I stopped by. My sister-in-law was home, but my brother was still at work, and they were communicating by Skype. Just as I left, he indicated he would walk home–a three-and-a-half mile walk, but it was the only way. I got back on my scooter and continued going.

There was really no special damage along the way. Oh, fire trucks were present here and there, and a few old buildings seemed to need some help, but mostly it looked like business as usual. Businesses, in fact, were still open, everything except the trains seemed to be operating as usual. Every red light, I would get out my phone and retry texting Sachi, though it didn’t work all the way home.

Finally, I got home, and Sachi was there, doing fine. Some furniture had moved a few inches, and there was some spilling on the floor, but nothing broke and everything seemed OK. The electricity is still on everywhere I could see, the Internet never went offline, and water is running–but the gas is off, at least in our apartment. There may be an emergency switch somewhere, I’ll have to check that out.

About an hour ago, I got through to someone on my cell phone, but that was the only call that went through–I have not been able to make calls before or since. We had nabe for dinner–a stew you boil right there at the table. We used an IH (induction heating) hotplate, while continuing to watch the nonstop news on TV.

So, we’re just fine here–Tokyo was not hardest hit by far–but we’re still getting hit by aftershocks. A rather big one just hit, the 20th or so quake that, on any other day, would rate its own little blog post. We expect these will keep happening for a while.

Quite a day.

We’re still getting aftershocks every 5-10 minutes. The last one just hit now, and several are recorded as being as strong as 6 on the Richter scale. Another big one could hit, so we have to be careful. The original quake was brought back up to an 8.8.

The images on television are rather shocking; not the quake, but the tsunamis that are rolling in. Buildings along the coast submerged up to the second floor. Fires in places, including Daiba in Tokyo. Right now the death toll is at 19.

As I mentioned before, we were on the 6th floor of LCJ when it hit, and it progressed in stages. Everyone ducked for cover, getting under desks and in doorways, as papers and books and drinks spilled onto the floor. In the library, the bookshelf braces held, more or less, though books littered the floor. Thankfully, the elevator was open on the 1st floor at the time, so no one at the school was trapped nor had to experience the quake while locked in the car.

People moved out to the street, though not as quickly as they should have, perhaps. After milling around on the street for a while, we all went to the local school grounds, where we could wait for things to settle away from overhanging power lines.

Here are some images from the school; click on each for larger versions. The first is what my office looked like afterwards:

Here are a few images of the library:

On the way to the evacuation area, a local school’s sports field, we could see some structural damage from a building or two:

But a little farther north, one street was blocked because a retaining wall for earth in a local temple’s graveyard gave way:

The death toll went up to 20 while I was writing this, but seeing the films of tsunami, I would be amazed if the toll does not go into the hundreds. It’s still just four hours since the quake hit.

I just got home. Luckily, I had driven my scooter in to work this morning, a rarity for me–and it allowed me to get home and see if Sachi was OK, and to let her know I was.

I was in the office on the 6th floor. It started small, like “Oh, do you feel that tremor?” Then it got stronger, in stages, each new level greater than the last, until we finally got to the stage where you knew this was a big one. Books flying off of desks, everyone diving for cover. It lasted long, too. Right away, you could tell it wasn’t local–the slow start, the sideways-rolling motion. But for that minute or two when we were experiencing it, there was the question of whether or not the building would collapse in some way.

Of course, it didn’t. Here in Tokyo, it felt huge, but not so terrible we couldn’t stand and walk unsteadily. Not as bad as being on the ground in Loma Prieta, I’m told. But big. Pictures to come, but our office floor was covered with papers and books.

Everyone was OK. No one around us was hurt. All the students were OK, but everyone was outside, and it was cold and windy today. I imagine they are still trying to get back home–but everyone was OK.

They are now reporting that it was an 8.4 on the Richter scale, hitting at 2:46, followed by offshore aftershocks of 7.0, 7.4, and 6.6. We certainly felt those as well.

For a quake that big in Tokyo, it was about 230 miles distant from Tokyo, about 70 miles off the northern Japan coast.

We just felt a big aftershock right now, the second big one we’ve felt since I got home.

More soon.

We’re not quite there yet, but we’re appreciably on the way, and might be 90% of the way should nothing untoward happen. We’ve been looking to buy a home for either a few months or a year now, depending on how you count it. We started about a year ago, looking in Kanagawa, when the bank told us that I didn’t have much of a chance of getting a loan until I got my permanent residency. So I got that, and we started looking again late last year.

We’ve been going around to properties in the area since December, looking at several properties each weekend. We’re using a real estate agency known as “Suumo,” a Seibu firm. We tried looking at some properties in neighboring towns, but they just didn’t work out for us. The area we live in now, Hibarigaoka, is nice: two large department stores, lots of supermarkets, restaurants, and other shops. The train station is an express stop, and connects up with two subway lines, connecting to almost any other lines you could think of. It’s not too close to Tokyo, but not too far, either–about the right balance. Sachi didn’t want to live any farther out, and any farther in would be too expensive. The next station in, Hoya, had some possible properties, but the area was just too plain–not much there at all, just houses for a long way.

There was a place we looked at a few months back which had a nice location, but it was just a foundation under construction, and was out of our price range anyway. However, our agent called up and said that the property’s owner–a developer who bought a larger property from the prior owner and split the land into two lots (a very common thing in Tokyo)–was cutting the price by about $25,000. It was still a bit high for us, but the agent talked him down another $15,000, and it came in to our price range.

The land parcel is 102 m² (31 tsubo), which is fairly average for this area. The location, however, is very good, and you know what they say about location. It’s a 7 or 8-minute walk from Hibarigaoka station, along a road that almost hits the station. There are tons of restaurants and small shops in the area. There are a few small grocery shops along the way, but 5 minutes in the other direction is a cluster of shops which includes a large, nice supermarket/store, a few video rental shops, and a few more nice restaurants.

The house we’re looking at is just off the roads that lead places, but it’s pretty quiet, so far as we can tell. The back of the house looks over a parking lot for a fitness canter, but it’s on the opposite side from the bedroom (which overlooks a small, quiet street), and the parking lot doesn’t seem to be very noisy at all–though we’ll have to check that. (The agent says he’ll take us for looks over the next few weeks at different times of the day, opportunities we’ll take to inspect the house very closely as well. I’ll also be camping out by the house at other times to check noise levels.)

In short, the location, while not perfect, is excellent. The main down side we can see is that there are no parks nearby–a bit of a disappointment, as we plan on getting a dog very soon. We can still visit parks, just not on an everyday basis.

Now, the house design is nothing special. No high ceilings, no stylish frills. Not even a dishwashing machine, something a lot of new places seem to have. It has a very standard look, nothing that would turn your head. The layout didn’t knock our socks off, but looking at a floor plan doesn’t always tell the whole story.

In fact, I thought that the floor plans were rather dull. One thing I do when I move in to a new place, though, is to plan out how the furniture will go. It helps me understand how the space can be utilized, and really helps with the moving. So I took the layout of this place into InDesign, made sure I had drawings of all our furniture to scale, and then started arranging things. I found that they fit quite nicely. We would utilize the upstairs most of all, and that would be the bedroom–big enough for our bed and furniture plus room to move around–a room for me, like a home office, about 10′ square, quite nice–and another room, about 9′ x 12′, very open and sunny, which we would make into a kind of second-floor living room, with a sofa, table, and the big TV.

Still, the design wasn’t knocking my socks off. So to compare, I took the floor plans for an “ideal” house that had been drawn up just for us. When we were looking at a plot of land in Hoya, a housebuilding firm drew up plans for us based on what we said we wanted. It looked really nice, and we were very interested in building it on some plot of land we might find in the future. Just for comparison, I also put it into InDesign, and started arranging the furniture.

It was terrible. Nothing fit, the living room had no way to comfortably set a sofa and television, and a dogleg between the living and dining areas completely wasted a large amount of space. The rooms for Sachi and I were just too small, and didn’t work for us very well.

Despite being sexier, the “ideal” layout didn’t live up to expectations–and the “dull” layout suddenly started showing promise. That, along with the location being as good as it is, started making the property look a lot more attractive.

Then there was the price; there was nothing wrong with the property (nothing we’ve been able to detect so far, at least), but the price was very good for that area. Just a block or so to the south, about the same distance from the station, were properties opening up–plots of land without houses yet–which were going for about the same as the housed property we’re looking at. Yes, they are about 10% larger, but the prices ranged from 25% to 45% more than our estimate of the land we were purchasing. That seemed to set the local land values such that our land seemed nicely priced, even if you allow for the close-by land plots to also be discounted.

One possible snag–or fringe benefit, depending on how it plays–is that the city of West Tokyo has plans for creating new roads through the town, and one of the planned roads goes through the property we’re looking at. However, the plan will probably not be realized for a few decades at least, if even ever. If it does materialize, it might come at just about at the time we could be looking to sell the house and retire elsewhere. Our agent told us that such eminent domain purchases were usually for good prices, better than market value, and that some people even speculated on such land. However, I’m still a bit suspicious–that the property should be offered to us for a lower price than most in the neighborhood already, plus there being this possible “benefit” way in the future… it’s something I want to look into, though I have to admit I am not sure how I would do it. But I have to wonder if the easier answer might be true–that we’re being sold a plot of land that others may not want because of possible future development in the area.

In any case, there are many steps along the way to buying a house, and we didn’t want to just sit by and possibly watch this one go by, should it be what we want. So we agreed to start the process of purchasing, comfortable that we could back out at any time over the next month. That involved putting up a million yen on the down payment, though it is fully refundable (the process does include signing contracts requiring 15,000 yen in revenue stamps, non-refundable of course). But in doing so, we have dibs on the property, and can still back out anytime up until March 14.

So we went in to the real estate office and spent much of the day there, as the agent walked us through 12 pages of legal and technical details, telling us the history and quality of the property, how the road in front is not city property so we will have to work with neighbors if it needs work, as well as a host of zoning details and contractual obligations.

Then we signed the forms, handed over the deposit, and arranged to see the house again later this week.

Either we could discover that the place is not what we want, or the bank might fail to give us the loan, or we could be moving into our new house by early April.

It’s a national holiday in Japan today (National Foundation Day), and the first snow day in Tokyo this winter (late again). I’ve commented before about how even a little snow will shut things down in Tokyo. Back in Toyama, where it really snows, where we’d get a meter or two on the ground sometimes, we’d laugh at news footage of Tokyo being paralyzed by a few centimeters, watching video of people on the street struggling to walk straight on icy patches, and train lines being shut down right and left. In fact, this nearly nixed a flight back to America for me once, as it snowed earlier than usual (in the first or second week of December) about a decade ago, dropping several centimeters just on the morning I was to leave. Half the train lines in Tokyo shut down.

Today, it doesn’t seem too bad. Frankly, I like snow. A lot better than winter rain, that’s for sure.

Sachi and I went to the nearby Tanashi Shrine today, hoping to do our hatsumode, or new year’s shrine visit for the season. When we got there, however, we saw this:

Yep. A huge, long line. And what you see above is just the start of it. We have been going to Hie Shrine in mid-town the past couple years, but decided to go local–little did we know that the lines would be longer here. The line went way down the path to the rear entrance, then went down the block and around the corner and snaked back up almost to the side entrance of the shrine. Here’ a video of less than half that line:

The movie above ends about halfway through the entire line. So, instead, we just went to a small side shrine (actually, nicer than the main one) where almost no one was going, with the idea that we’ll go back again tomorrow or the next day for our “official” visit.

Of course, we chowed down on matsuri food; Sachi had okonomiyaki while I had yakitori and a frank. We returned last year’s charms for burning, and bought a few new ones, as usual.

A nice shrine visit, despite the line thing.

10% off!

Interesting–we just had a few small quakes here in Tokyo. One was very weak, just barely felt it. The other came as much as a minute or two later, and might even have been the same quake–but it was stronger and had more of an up-and-down motion to it. All I get on the quake sites is a 4.2 just off of Ogasawara Island, about 1000 km away. That doesn’t seem strong enough to account for what I felt here. But it seems that that’s the one.

Update: I thought so. The revised report says it was a 7.4 on the Richter scale, and now there’s a tsunami warning for the southern coast of Japan. The quake was felt as far north as Hokkaido.

Sachi and I are again on the lookout for a home. We started looking about a year ago, but ran into the problem of my not having Permanent Residency, thus kiboshing the house loan. I got my PR a few months back, but my busy schedule precluded gearing up for a search again. Now that the December break is here, we’ve started again. Previously we went down to Kanagawa to search on the Toyoko Line between Musashi-kosugi and Kikuna; this time we’re focusing on the area near Hibarigaoka, where we are currently staying.

Both times, we more or less randomly chose a realtor; without a specific recommendation, it’s a crap shoot anyway. The last time we found someone in Kosugi, and either there just weren’t many homes available in the area, or the realtor wasn’t very good. He showed us something like 3, maybe 4 houses per visit, and most were not very good at all.

The guy we found in Hibarigaoka is certainly putting a bit more effort into it–today we saw about a dozen properties, with some interesting prospects, spending about five hours running around the area. And unlike the Kosugi realtor, this guy didn’t waste our time with obvious dogs, like that house behind the railroad tracks. One or two were certainly questionable, but all had some potential merit.

Naturally, there is quite a bit of leeway in making the choice–very similar to finding an apartment, but some new wrinkles added in. We would like a new home, of course, but that always carries a premium. Closeness to a good train station and shopping is important. A quiet neighborhood is also very preferable. Our personal preference is for a room downstairs Sachi can use for her reflexology and aromatherapy work; to have a big enough LDK (living-dining-kitchen), at least 13-14 “jo” (tatami mats), a bedroom that hopefully is 7 mats or better, and one or two extra rooms–small is OK–for private work rooms for myself, and then another for Sachi if there’s on to spare (she would have the work room downstairs as well). It doesn’t matter to us if the LDK is on the 1st or 2nd floor. More important is getting sunshine and having enough closet and/or storage space. Space for a garden or even just a bit of leg room outside is a nice plus, but not necessary for us. And of course you have to consider whether that parking lot next door will become a construction site, with a building going up that will cut off your light and box your house in.

Of all the places, we were able to rule 3 or 4 right out. We saw two places near Higashi-kurume Station, which is just beyond our preferred zone; one was too small and strangely shaped, the other too far out. One was inside our zone and just barely within our walking-from-the-station comfort distance, but it was too far from any shops and high-tension power lines loomed too close for our comfort. One place we went to only because we were in the area, but we knew it was out before we even saw it. It was on a narrow road with no sidewalks, but tons of traffic, including frequent buses. The place was not only noisy, it frequently vibrated due to trucks roaring by outside. Pass.

Some were possible, but missed at least one key point, like a workroom for Sachi, or a big enough LDK. Most in this category simply didn’t interest us so much.

Of the original prospects, five remained as potential keepers, but none were particular standouts. One was an empty property, but less than 5 minute’s walk from Hibarigaoka. The land space is good–about 100m²–but zoning laws require that we use no more than 40% of the land area for the building, which in Japan is pretty restrictive, lots being as small as they are. Unless we built a 3-story home, we’d be restricted to no more than 80m² for the whole house–barely enough for us. The good point is the location–convenient to everything–and the fact that we can design our own house. One bad point is that it is down the street from a railroad crossing, which has a warning bell clanging almost constantly (trains come every few minutes most places in Tokyo). It also means more traffic than usual for the small and narrow street. The crossing is about 90m away. Sachi feels that it would not be so loud inside the house–but we couldn’t know for sure until we bought the land, built a house, and went inside.

Another place, not too much farther out in the same neighborhood, is the very first place we saw. It’s about 12 minutes from the station, just a minute’s walk from a small shopping area with a good supermarket. The LDK is a tad too small, though acceptable. The LD part of it has a high ceiling with large windows high up to catch the light–almost too bright! The house is 2 stories, but there’s a small roof balcony–more attractive in summer, for certain. The front of the house has enough room to park a car sideways (we won’t have one, but Sachi’s customers might) and still leaves space for a bench or chairs or whatever, if we wanted to relax in front of the place. It’s almost perfect–but off just enough to make us hesitate. One other point is the cost–it’s a few tens of thousands of dollars beyond our hoped-for price.

Another place was the only used property we saw. The location is very good–less than 10 minutes to several nice shopping areas, including two major department stores and a good-sized and reasonably-priced supermarket. It has two very large rooms upstairs–almost too large–and a fairly spacious downstairs as well. The price is a few tens of thousands of dollars below our limit, and we could possibly even talk it down a bit more. The problem? It’s used. It smells moldy. Does that mold smell even ever come out? I’ve seen places that are renovated (“reformed,” as they say in Japan) and later re-acquire the mold smell. Also, the design is quirky; for example, in the LD area, there’s a raised three-mat tatami dais, which would be perfect if we were to put on puppet shows or something–but for us, it’s superfluous. Plus, there’s a post almost right in the middle of the room. I would hope it’s superfluous and not load-bearing, but if it’s superfluous, I can’t begin to guess why it’s there. If we got the place, there would definitely be quite a bit of remodeling done. I don’t know if remodeling usually entails new flooring and replacing every glass door and window with double-paned glass, but if that’s in the usual budget–and if that mold smell can be banished–the place would be great.

The two remaining places were in the next town over. Both were places pretty distant from shopping, not exactly convenient for anything. But the houses were both cheap and either were spacious or felt that way, in ways just about perfect for us. Had one of them been in a location we saw the previous three in, we probably would have gone for one of them. Both were very nicely made, the rooms were all just about right, and one of them–one I really liked–was in a very, very quiet area. But that one was also inconvenient for Sachi–distant supermarket, for one, and maybe hard to find for her customers for another.

It’s not as if we expected to find the perfect place in the first week or anything. We still have to try to get life insurance, which apparently is kind of a precursor for a loan, and then we have to get the loan approved. Heck, if we run into roadblocks with the loan, the whole idea might go down the drain.

But it’s a start.

The Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces have been known in the past to be somewhat, erm, unconventional in their public outreach efforts, such as the infamous dancing-sailors “Seaman Ship” commercial. This time, they’ve come up with an iPhone app to teach you the correct Naval salute, using the phone to test angle, speed, etc. Also, they have this cute video with comic overtones to show how to do it. Nicely done.

“Off” is perhaps one of the most intentionally abused prepositions in Japanese English. “Big Off,” “Off Sale,” “Hard Off,” etc. Here’s another one:

An interesting question to print on a trash can:

Then throw it away.

Just wanted to know if anyone reading this has tried WiMAX in Tokyo, knows how to deal with UQ, and can give advice. I am thinking of switching to the service, but their plans are, erm, rather “detailed.” Looks like with a one-year subscription you can get a good rate (¥3,880 per month), but cannot make out the technical details associated with it. They also have a “multiple devices” option, which I would need if Sachi uses the Internet at home while I use it away, but I can’t discern if by “device” they mean a device which changes the WiMAX signal to WiFi, or if they mean a device which gets on the WiFi network created by that device. Huge difference–we have half a dozen computers and mobile devices we would use with WiFi. There’s also a trial you can do for free–as you can imagine, with all these, there are so many details, dealing with just a web form is less than ideal.

I created a special temporary email address, shown in the image below (sorry, even temp addresses get scammed almost immediately); if you have any info, I’d very much appreciate it if you could let me know. Alternately, you could leave information in the comments. Naturally, when and if I get the service myself, I’ll be blogging on the experience.

Thanks!

There was a smallish quake a few minutes ago; the initial reading has it as a 4.2 on the Richter scale, and put the epicenter a few miles northeast of Chiba City. We felt it here as a short but solid jolt.

I had my first social-insurance health check in a long time yesterday. In Japan, you have two basic types of public health insurance: first, there’s shakai hoken, which you qualify for if you work more than 30 hours a week, and your employer pays into it along with a pension plan. Then there’s kokumin hoken, which you usually get if you don’t qualify for the first type, and which you have to pay for yourself and has no pension component. For years I’ve been on the latter type, but due to a local redefinition of work done outside the classroom and office, I’ve gotten onto the shakai hoken plan.

One of the fringe benefits of the plan is that the employer also spring for a yearly health check, where you go in and have a battery of tests carried out. I had this check-up years back–I don’t even remember when–but it was not quite as involved as it was this time, as they seem to have added a few new tests. Since it’s standard nationwide, large numbers of people are doing it all the time. So when you go in to have it done, it’s not like you’re doing it alone. When I went in for mine yesterday, I was with the afternoon group–about a hundred or more people. And that’s just the men’s floor.

When you come in, they take the forms you filled out, along with a sample you had to collect at home (ahem, you probably know what unpleasantness I’m talking about), and ask you to take a seat. Then they call you up to the desk and give you a number. You go in to the locker room, strip to your skivvies and change into two-piece jammies with the shirt being a tie-off. You then go back to the main room and sit in the seat with your number on it (I was #23), and wait for the tests to begin. They take urine and blood samples, measure your height and weight, take your blood pressure, give you a chest X-ray, an EKG, vision and hearing tests, and the thing where the doctor listens to your heart and breathing and asks to see your tongue. Between tests, you sit back in your chair, reading the usual waiting room magazine fare–unless you brought your own materials. I seemed to be the only one there who did that–I had my iPad, which was quite nice.

After all those standard tests, there’s one more they seem to throw in for fun: they put you on a motor-controlled X-ray platform starting at a 90-degree angle, so you begin standing up. They then give you a packet of seltzer which you you have to gulp down with what had to be a quarter-teaspoon of water, and then–without burping up any of the air that starts to build up in your stomach–you have to gulp down a large cup of gloopy white barium solution, which at least did not taste terrible, but nonetheless was hard to get down with your stomach bursting with gas. If you belch out any of the gas before the test is done, they make you drink more of the stuff.

But that’s just for starters. Once you have this explosive combination in your stomach, they then start rotating the platform, while demanding that you constantly roll over, again and again, in that small, restricted space, while they call for you to stop at various angles so they can take X-rays before telling you to roll over yet again. For giggles, they roll the platform at all angles, including one where you’re angling down head-first and it’s impossible to hang on without sliding [note to health center: friction pads on the handles would be nice], but they keep taking X-rays until you do. Then just to be thorough, a mechanical arm with a large pad on the end is extended to press down hard on your stomach–and you still better not belch out the gas.

One hopes this is some vital test, because if it’s not, then no way it’s worth it. At some point I gotta find out exactly what that was for. When I got off the stand, I asked the technician, “So am I ready for the Space Program?” He didn’t seem to get it. I then belched, long and loud.

Even that wasn’t the end of it. Despite giving no warning whatsoever in the pre-check materials, they then give you laxatives, so the radium doesn’t stay in your system. This being some time after they asked you to choose whether or not you would stick around an extra hour or two after the exams end to get a consultation with the doctor. I was glad I asked them to mail the results–though I found out that you can change your mind afterwards–because they gave no guarantees on when the laxatives would kick in.

As it happened, I chose correctly–they kicked in just as I arrived home. Had I stayed for the consultation, they easily could have kicked in while I was on the hour-long commute back. That would have been fun.

Further hilarity ensues when, after experiencing what Sachi branded as “the white craps,” you find that the barium solution is damned heavy, which results in your thanking the fact that you have a toilet brush.

Were it not for the barium thing, the check-up would be a breeze. With it, once a year seems a bit excessive.

More later, you probably have heard….

Update: OK, that was a 6.9 quake–about 500km south of us, in the Pacific Ocean off the Ogasawaras. Surprisingly, it was rated just a “3” on the Japanese scale here in Tokyo, and there is no tsunami warning as of yet.

However, here in Shinjuku, it felt pretty major. The building (we are on the 6th floor) swung as hard as I can remember any quake I have been in. It went on for quite some time, too, that and the swaying nature letting us know it was distant. But had that hit us directly, I would have expected that to be rated at least a “4” on the Japanese scale.

Sorry I was so short in the original post, I was in the middle of work….