…this is an excellent example of misleading reporting. It may be that when the total numbers are tallied after a few weeks and sales have leveled out, the Galaxy may still be outselling the iPhone. The point is, don’t jump the gun, and question whatever news stories you see.

And, right on cue, the new week’s sales rankings for smartphones in Japan are out–and the 16GB iPhone is now #1. The 32 GB iPhone is now #2.

The Galaxy S? Dropped to #5.

Like I said, jumping the gun with partial figures out of the full context is, to say the least, not a safe or accurate thing to do.

Again–as with the previous posting–I am not making any statement about the superiority or quality of either phone. I’m just saying, question stories that you see in the news. They’re not always accurate.

Update / Side Note: Samsung released the 7-inch Galaxy Tab along with the Galaxy S. The Tab was supposed to be the first serious tablet rival to the iPad, despite charging $600 for a 7“ tablet relative to Apple’s $630 for a 10” tablet. And it’s getting kinda panned in the press. The best reviews say it’s likable but still has “a ways to go,” while the less-generous reviews call it “unfit for humans.”

There’s always the next time.

The big story in Japan’s smartphone world this week: the brand-new Android-driven Galaxy-S phone outsold the iPhone! The news is being trumpeted all over the place, especially on Android sites. The problem: it’s not true, or at it’s very best, it’s highly misleading.

It’s kind of like the story that you see pop up from time to time about how the Sony Walkman outsells the iPod–but then you read more carefully and see that it’s only an aberration caused by a refresh in the iPod line, which is marked by both depletion of iPod stock and customers holding off on buying an iPod until the new model is released. At which time the Walkman fades back into its normal spot.

The Galaxy S is currently being marketed extremely heavily in Japan. You see the ads everywhere, the ones with Darth Vader and Imperial Stormtroopers hawking the device. I can’t say how many times I’ve seen the commercial, which heavily advertises the ability to play Flash video (not only becoming less meaningful as so many sites transition to H264, but also a battery-drainer), and the touchscreen with pinch-and-zoom capabilities (wow, that’s new).

So one would expect that it sells well initially, but even that doesn’t propel it above the iPhone, primarily because the iPhone, in the rankings being referred to, is divided into two “products” by capacity (16 GB version and 32 GB version), whereas the Galaxy is rated as a single product. As the Chosun Ilbo points out, the two iPhones taken as a single product outrank the Galaxy S–despite the fact that the iPhone 4 has been out for 18 weeks (during which time it has occupied to top two spots on the chart) and the Galaxy S is experiencing debut-week numbers.

Not that it’s any big deal, but this is an excellent example of misleading reporting. It may be that when the total numbers are tallied after a few weeks and sales have leveled out, the Galaxy may still be outselling the iPhone. The point is, don’t jump the gun, and question whatever news stories you see.

A few minutes ago, a 4.5 or 4.7 magnitude quake hit about 45 km. north-north-east of us here in Nishi-Tokyo. It was fairly strong here and rolled for about a half minute. The epicenter was just north of Saitama in Ibaraki.

A quake measuring maybe 4.2 on the Richter scale just hit about 50 km northeast of us here in Nishi-Tokyo. Could feel it fairly well, a long, rolling quake. Looks like it was located about 15-20 km northwest of Tsukuba, in Ibaraki prefecture.

My very first day in Japan, some 27 years ago, I saw one of these machines on the street and stood there for a few minutes, staring at it and trying to figure out what the heck it was selling. I can only guss what Japanese people walking by must have thought of this foreign guy on the street staring intently at a condom vending machine. Of course, at that time, my Japanese wasn’t as good, and there was no English on the machine or the packaging to help me out.

Just a few minutes’ walk in a westerly direction from the south exit of Hibarigaoka, you can find what appears to be a small pocket of very, very well-off people. Kind of like a mini-Atherton, to those of you familiar with the south SF Bay Area. You get your first hint when you see the uncharacteristic (for Tokyo) heavy tree cover.

Then you start seeing the very nice houses, for Japan:

Many of them have a surplus of space–actually, a bit cramped by American standards, but a gate and parking space like this, in Tokyo, is absolutely a status sign:

And another interesting sign of status: American mail boxes. We saw quite a few in this area, though they are pretty rare in Japan.

I can’t even begin to guess what some of these plots–maybe as much as 1/4-acre–might be worth. But I am guessing it is a lot.

Who wouldn’t want a peek inside of Mel’s Brain?

Of course, a closer cropping might give a hint:

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.

Yesterday, Sachi and I took a few hours off to walk down to the local Matsuri. These happen pretty often in Japan, sometimes sponsored by the city, but usually taking place at a neighborhood shrine. This one was at Tanashi Jinja:

There was the central shrine area, where people came to pray:

Quite a few young parents came to bless their newborn children:

There was even what looked to be a Sumo ring around the side, though I think it was used more for traditional music and dancing, which we missed out on:

These are “Ema,” wooden tokens marking the prayers of shrine-goers:

Now, on one side of the matsuri, there was the traditional…

…And on the other side, just as traditional… and for many, the real reason to go:

Vendor stalls!!

Right in the gate, Sachi found some dried plums and tomatoes she couldn’t resist–and you can tell from the vendor’s face that he knows he’s got a sale.

Samples of grilled mushroom and garlic, anyone?

And what says “traditional Japanese festival” better than candied apples? Okay, maybe not–but I have been seeing these more and more.

With the tree-lined setting, it was actually quite nice, kind of a faux-touristy taste of an Edo Japan market street.

Potatoes on sale, with vats of butter at your disposal–help yourself! And add some more salt if you feel like it.

Step right up, three darts for three dollars, hit the target and get some Lilo and Stitch crap!

We’re having fun!

And who wouldn’t have fun, what with this traditional–and now, it is traditional in Japan–treat of candy-coated bananas:

Also with sprinkles!

Fried chicken in a cup…

…and pork (theoretically) on a stick! Sachi lives for the Frankfurters.

Of course, no matsuri would be complete without Takoyaki, grilled octopus in a veggie batter.

These are also common, Ooban-yaki cakes–bean paste and custard grilled fresh:

Too much fun for some…

Here’s another matsuri staple: Kingyo sukui, fishing for Goldfish. You always know there’s a local festival when you see a family coming home, the parents guarding the packaged cotton candy while the kids grasp plastic baggies with their new pets.

Sachi just loves the Takuan tsukemono, yellow pickled radish. I can’t stand the smell myself, but I have cinnamon incense for that purpose.

After the chicken and the franks, we got some pretty good yakitori, including a stick of buta bara (pork ribs), seen here in after-and-before stages.

And, we call it a day.

Went to CEATEC today. Lots of cool stuff. Heard one piece of news that may make me change over: WiMAX, already tempting as an Internet-everywhere solution for $50/mo. for (theoretically) 40 Mbps, will be converting to WiMAX version 2 in 2012. The speed of the new wide-coverage wireless Internet? 330 Mbps. Yep–three times faster than current fiber-optic speeds offered in Japan. (Again, theoretically.) And it’ll work when you’re at high speed, like when the bullet train you’re on is going faster than 300 km/hr.

The portable, battery-powered WiFi converters (which take the WiMAX signal and translate it into WiFi emanating from your backpack or pocket) also are available, meaning you can have a mobile WiFi signal with you all the time (that you’re not underground) for your laptop, iPad, and even the iPhone if you want to keep the data plan charges to a minimum.

More on this later.

I have long held that in Japan, you can stop almost anywhere on any street and spot at least half a dozen cigarette butts in various stages of decomposition. While Japan is a relatively clean country, and although smoking rates have fallen in recent years, cigarette butts remain the #1 litter problem in the country.

I remember back in the 80’s seeing a Japanese letter-to-the-editor translated and published in the English paper, in which an older Japanese woman complained about people eating while walking in the streets, the main criticism being that such behavior prompted littering. At the time, I thought that while this could be true, I didn’t (and still don’t) see many people in Japan eating while walking–but you saw (and still see) people smoking and walking all the time, and using the street as an ash tray–rather liberally, I might add. It’s not just butts, either. I have seen, more than once, a smoker crumpling up and tossing on the ground an empty cigarette pack as he walked up to a vending machine to buy a new pack, even though the machine had a built-in trash receptacle.

I was reminded of that this morning when walking to the train station. A guy in front of me slowed down suddenly and so I started to go around him–and almost got hit with a lit cigarette as the guy flicked it away, behind him and to the right, without any attempt to glance at where he was flicking. I made an annoyed sound as I passed him and he started and immediately apologized as I passed–but the thing is, that did not represent an isolated action. That’s habit. In Japan, they call it poi sute, “poi” being the onomatopoetic sound for flicking something away, and “sute” being short for throwing trash away.

Which is not to say that many smokers in Japan are not polite or considerate; many, of course, are. But the ones who are not do stand out a tad. Using the street indiscriminately as an ashtray remains a strong habit. On my way into school, prompted by the near-miss with the flicked butt, I did a few random stop-and-counts, and got the same depressing results as always. I even spotted a lit cigarette on the street, the owner no longer in sight. Whether he (or she, though maybe 2/3rds+ of Japanese smokers are men) dropped it by mistake or wastefully discarded it before it was even partly smoked I don’t know–but it makes for good art at the top of the post. I snapped the shot and then ground it out. It may have been dropped or thrown from a vehicle; despite having ashtrays, many drivers in Japan still discard to the street, something which more than annoys me when driving a scooter.

Japan is less of a “smoker’s paradise” than it was before, but still remains more than a little friendly to the nicotine-inclined. Back in the 80’s, it was horrific–I remember the 10-hour flights over the Pacific where smoking was allowed, making the “non-smoking” areas rather a poor joke, especially the seats close to the smoking area. Smoking was allowed on trains, in all offices–well, really, everywhere. Even at home it was hard to get away from it, as smoke pours from the windows and balconies of neighbors. I bought a dining room table used once, and wondered what the reek was after I got it home; it took months before the smoke smell stopped being a pain.

Even after smoking was banned on trains in Japan (though until recently and, for all I know, still today, smoking is allowed on some cars on long-distance trains), the platforms were still havens. Recently, they are much better, but even as of 5 years ago, smokers defiantly disregarded the smoking areas. I think it’s mostly better now that most platforms allow no smoking at all.

Non-smoking areas in eateries were just as bad a joke, with the border between sections more a matter of imagination than of actual segregation–but that remains mostly true even today, with most normal restaurants being smoker-friendly and “non-smoking” areas, when they are offered, still (a) not significantly separate enough to make them actually smokeless, and (b) more often than not in the bad seating areas. McDonald’s has, for a long time, relegated non-smokers to the poorer seating areas. If there are seats in the basement and on the 2nd floor, there was usually no question about the smokers getting the 2nd-floor area, with the non-smokers usually getting only half of the basement–which is to say, not really any space at all.

Beginning the change to non-smoking establishments were places like Starbucks, which completely banned smoking inside, and later some Subway sandwich chains. McDonald’s started to get a bit better more often, and now plans to ban smoking at one-third of its outlets as they are renovated over the next several years. (But only one-third, and slowly; the shops near train stations will remain smoking areas.) Some places, like Narita Airport, and even a prefecture now (Kanagawa) are beginning to impose eatery bans and other restrictions. Many busy streets in Tokyo ban smoking among pedestrians, thought the ban is still ignored and even the smoking wardens (usually pairs wearing no-smoking bibs) rarely if ever fine anyone for breaking the rules. The photos taken above, including my discarded-butt count, were on a no-smoking street.

Nobody is pretending that the paradise is no more, but the smokers here are beginning to feel the pinch more and more.

The smell of the grill wafts up and down the street from the fan blowing just behind the lantern, making it sway deliciously. Chicken on a stick. Ahhh.

And not just in Japan, but out in farm territory, when you see vending machines selling 10kg bags of rice.

Not too long ago, there was a bicycle sweep at our apartment complex. This happens in Japan from time to time. In many places in Japan, bicycles are, if not a disposable item, certainly one that depreciates quickly and is forgotten about. Parked bicycle congestion is rampant, with people having bikes but either choosing semi-permanent parking places, or abandoning them outright, in the damnedest locations. If you see any group of parked bicycles in Japan (except for carefully regulated and attended lots, especially near train stations), odds are that half of them are covered with dust and have flat tires.

It seems that everybody has bikes, but most people don’t use them most of the time, and eventually just forget about them. Sachi and I are of the maintaining group–we have ’em and use ’em. Not so with others. It’s sometimes frustrating, in fact, trying to find a parking space, but most are taken up by grungy old wrecks that obviously haven’t been touched for a year or two, and would require serious maintenance before being ridden again.

That is undoubtedly why the complex had this roundup, likely a regular thing every few years. First, they tagged the bikes where they were parked, noting that if the owner did not remove the tag, the bike itself would be removed. This was already in progress when we moved in. They gave everyone notice and left this going for some time, so that everyone could see what was up and make their move if they so wished.

After a certain time, they took all the bikes which were still tagged and moved them to the place pictured above. Yep–every single one of those bikes is a throwaway. They left that pile, impossible to miss, out there in the middle of the complex for a few weeks, giving owners one last chance to wade in and reclaim their bike. (I never asked if it was kosher to just take one for yourself or not; probably not, I’d guess.)

Now, the bicycle parking areas are much more open. But they’re already filling up again, and all too many bikes that remain are still covered with a layer of undisturbed dust and resting on flattened, airless tires.

Ah, Japan.

If you’ve lived in Japan, you could not have failed to see this. In August, when the heat and humidity are turned up beyond high, the two- to three-inch cicadas (“semi” in Japanese) are everywhere, and are quite loud. In traditional insect fashion, they buzz then mate and die. So you see first this, above, and then just parts after the ants get to them.

Of course, they run low on gas the last few days and so many of these bugs are still alive while prone like this. I gave this fellow the obligatory “you dead?” nudge with my foot, and he took the momentum I offered and righted himself, with a few insectoid thank-you clicks.

Find a nasty close-up of the fellow here (full-res, but cropped), if you swing that way. Me, I can put up with a lot of stuff, but insects tend to get to me. The bigger they are, the worse they are. And these cicadas are sizable bugs. Snakes and frogs and other amphibians and reptiles I think are cool; Sachi weirds out when I catch the local salamanders, which I think are cute as hell. But the cicadas are too much for me.

Recently, at their peak buzzing fervor, they started coming to my home-office window at night. Makes sense–I stay up after midnight, it’s a big frosted-glass window all lit up like an insect welcome mat. So it begins when you hear them flutter up and then bump against the glass. And these bugs have mass, it’s like a small stone hitting your window, kind of loud. Flutter clickclick flutter BONK flutter BONK BONK clickclick flutter. Then they start their trademark high-pitched, very very loud mating-call buzz.

The other night I was trying to get some work done and they started up. So I went out with an umbrella to poke at them until they went away. Problem is, these things, in classic bug form, are attracted to light as if it held them by a bungee tether. And this night, it turned out there were three of them. Just by approaching, all three started flying about–golf-ball-sized buzzing insect horrors, all blurry wings and sharp edges and too many chitinous spindly legs and bulging thoraxes, three of them flying fast and randomly about. Please, kill me now. I run for cover till they settle, then come back and poke at them with the umbrella, before they spook and start the process again, whereupon I bravely and boldly squeak like a little girl and run for safety. Repeat this about a dozen times until two of three have settled elsewhere.

But that one last one is stubborn. Another dozen attempts and he sticks to my window area like glue. When I finally get him out, where does he go? Our recessed front door alcove. Where he again refuses to leave–and now I’m trapped outside my own apartment by a bug. If I try to sneak past him, he could easily just fly in the door, and then God help me.

After a full 20 minutes or so outside, I finally get past him (he slowly crawled away when I left him alone), and went back to work.

Egads, I hate bugs.

This is something like the 4th restaurant I’ve seen open at this location in the last two years. It’s always the same: a remodel, redecoration, a beautiful new opening that looks expensive to set up… and then only a trickle of customers over the ensuing months, no more than one or two people in the place at any given time if anyone is in there at all. Usually you just see the cook behind the counter and the waitress sitting on a bar stool talking to him. Then it’s closed more often than it’s open, and finally no activity–until the next remodeling begins and a new name goes up.

The thing is, it looks like a good location, but it’s not. It’s situated between my school and our partner school a block down the street, so there are hundreds of students around all the time. The problem is, they don’t eat at restaurants. They bring bento lunches or nosh at snacks, or just eat at home. If they do eat out, they have long gotten advice on and settled their list of go-to places (and the area is saturated with eateries, another reason why this place is doomed) which include all-you-can-eat lunches for a thousand yen, or that great noodle place which has a 500 yen bowl which is more than enough. But they’re not going to plop down 1800 yen for a nice dish of pasta.

So every time a new tenant starts setting up shop, I want to go in and warn them, “Don’t do it!” But of course, by then, it’s probably too late anyway. Poor sods.

Japan, strangely, seems a bit behind in the HDTV game. For a country where it seems you can’t get anything but HDTVs at electronics shops, not as many people seem to have them as you would think.

Worse, Blu-rays are a tad too sparse here. Of course, this being Japan, they are all over-priced, even more than standard DVDs. $42 is a usual price for a new release. But I can stock up back in the U.S., especially since Japan and America are now in the same region–but then, the videos won’t have Japanese subtitles for Sachi. Damn.

No, the real problem is video rental shops. They have wide floors with dozens and dozens of racks filled with DVDs. However, only recently did they expand their Blu-ray sections to two racks from the lonesome single one they had previously. It’s pathetic, really–take Avatar, for example. Huge hit, new movie and all. I go to the local video rental shop, the closest one to us, a place called GEO. You know how many Blu-ray copies they have? Four. All rented out all the time, of course (I’ve stopped by this place several times before). So I go to the north side of the next train line over, quite a distance away (I’m looking for exercise these days, and I had the time for it then), and find the next-closest rental shop–again, a GEO store. How many copies of this recent blockbuster do they have, in Blu-ray, the logical viewing choice for a movie of that type? Two. Again, rented out. The DVD version they have dozens of, practically a rack full of them, most not rented out. But they have two Blu-ray copies.

I asked the guy at the counter, even though I knew what the answer would be. It was the same last year at Tsutaya in Ikebukuro: “Not enough people have Blu-ray players.” Bull. First of all, if nobody has the players, then why are so many of the Blu-rays always rented out? You have to be lucky to grab a recent release in these places. Sure, Blu-ray adoption is not strong yet, but it’s way stronger than their supply of titles merits. Second, probably a big reason people don’t get them is because they know the rental shops don’t have squat in their Blu-ray sections.

So I move on, knowing there’s a Tsutaya a little further down the road. Fortunately, although they also still have just a 2-rack Blu-ray section, they at least have caught on to the recent-releases idea, and when you check the regular DVD racks, the recent hits all have multiple Blu-rays tacked on at one end. So Sachi and I got movies to watch this week.

Still, it’s annoying that Blu-ray somehow is getting passed over. Of course, if the discs cost half of what they do and you could find a decent selection at rental shops, then maybe people would find reason to start using them more. Just saying.

I’ve been meaning to try out the local version of Netflix, Tsutaya has this thing called DISCAS. Before now, I have always been stopped cold by their indecipherable home page, very badly designed, which even their shop people could not figure out for me. But now I just went back to it, and it seems much more user-friendly. And their Blu-ray section seems pretty well-stocked (over 700 titles, not bad), certainly much more so than the brick-and-mortar shops. ¥980 ($12) a month to have four discs out at any–oohhhh, no. Four discs rented out per month. You don’t get to see all you want so long as you return them quickly enough. You just get a set limit. Hmm. They also have an 8-disc plan for about twice that cost.

Found another service called Posuren (“Postal Rental”?), but it seems to be the same deal as Discas, as are DMM and GEO–they all seem to be following the Discas model. There’s Rakuten Rentals, ¥100 a pop, but they have a ¥300 delivery fee; it gets mitigated by renting many at a time, but there’s a 10-day limit on keeping them.

Anyone know a better service? Something more Netflix-like? So far, I’m not impressed–they seem to have little advantage over going to the actual store, some have prohibitive delivery costs, and the potential hassle factor (contracts, late fees, etc.) could mitigate that further. If there’s nothing better than this, I’ll probably opt for going to the store….

Last week, Sachi and I headed to Saku, Sachi’s hometown. This time we decided to go the rental car route, seeing it as much more convenient than train and having relatives cart us around. The costs were close–The rental car, including all insurance and extras, was about ¥23,000 for a 3-day rental, while the train fare would have been ¥26,000. Add gas and tolls, and the rental car total went up to about ¥35,000–but add the convenience of going where we wanted, when we wanted (runs to the store for eats, and even a Costco run added to the end of the trip), and especially not requiring Sachi’s family to act as our chauffeurs for the 3-day period, and I call it a worthwhile expense.

The rental car business annoyed me some. Not the main process–it’s pretty painless, just fill in the usual name & address thing, and you’re in the car. But the last-minute added charges for you-have-no-idea-what-this-is-but-you-can’t-risk-not-getting-it kind of stuff. They carefully don’t mention it until you are ready to walk out the door, and are undoubtedly up against a schedule, like I was, and had no time to run through all the minutiae. (I had visited days earlier to make the reservation, and had even asked about the price, and they didn’t bring it up.) They say it’s insurance and other serious-sounding and maybe even legally-required kind of stuff, and it’s certainly made to look like you need it, but–even if you spoke the language well enough–I’m pretty sure many other novices would also have been intimidated, like I was, into paying for it all. I am fairly certain that most of it was not needed, but I had no way to tell, and no time to sort through it, especially as I’m certain it would have involved all kinds of technical language. I blame myself–I have rented cars before, I just forgot about this. It’s more than the kind of thing travel agents do, hiding the taxes and so forth until you’ve more or less committed–this is more of a real con game. And I felt like a first-class sucker. Good lesson.

Anyway.

The drive was pleasant enough, though we got into trouble because of the GPS. This is a usual thing, getting a rental vehicle with a complicated gadget which even for regular users can be a pain to figure out. I kept on giving it the destination, and it kept on insisting we take local roads. Again, I felt stupid–I really should have researched the route ahead of time. The thing was, when we first set the route, it looked OK, and seemed to match what Google Maps said we’d be doing–going past the expressway to circle around and find an entrance, or “interchange” for the expressway (since Japanese expressways are all toll roads, they don’t have exits as often as U.S. freeways do). But after we passed a rather clear route to get on the expressway and the Nav System kept insisting we keep going on route 254, a narrow and crowded avenue with slow traffic, it was clear that it was leading us the wrong way. Driving half-blindly, I took the route that seemed best to me, and got on the expressway. Then we got the usual nonsense with the Nav System insisting we leave the expressway at every new exit and take normal roads. But we did have fun telling the Nav System to bugger off whenever it did so.

We stopped at a rest station along the way to get some grub and I took the time to figure out the right way to program the device. It turns out that when you program the destination into the system, it seems ready at one point, but there was a button rather misleadingly labeled, down a list that was topped by a “calculate route” button, but the lesser button led you to a menu which allowed you to specify toll roads, turned off by default–seems rather dumb with rental cars so often used for long-distance driving like we were.

Then we got to the ryokan:

While in Saku, we usually stay at a ryokan, a countryside inn. This is an experience you have to have if you visit Japan. These are buildings that have a very traditional look and feel–definitely not the business-hotel variety of lodging. The ryokan is usually surrounded by manicured gardens, has an almost hunting-lodge-meets-classic-Japanese-decor lobby, an obligatory inner garden, and rooms decked out with tatami, tokonoma, sliding doors, shoji doors for the windows, floor chairs and mats, low-set wood tables, and of course futons. Cut out in the corner of the image below are the slightly out-of-place Hi-def TV and the air conditioner.

Alas, I forgot to get photos of the most ryokan-ish part of the stay, dinner. Ryokan dinners are a cacophony of more than a dozen separate dishes, including miso soup, pickled vegetables, sashimi, grilled fish, vegetable dishes, shellfish, shaved beef cooked on rounded frying plates, eel on a bed of rice, and other bits and pieces. The fish is iconic, basically a small fish (maybe 6-8 inches) skewered on a stick, covered with salt, grilled whole, head and fins and tail and all. I am infamous with Sachi for not liking most of what these dinners offer up, and since it’s important to Sachi that we eat together, it’s a sticking point against staying in places like these, even though they can be central, even essential, on trips like this. Sachi and her mother, fortunately, claimed that they really weren’t in the mood for the beef or sashimi or many of the veggies–all things which I liked–and claimed to be hungry for the stuff I didn’t like. What a coincidence! They protested that really, they weren’t just doing this for me, but I wasn’t fooled.

Breakfasts aren’t much different–mussel soup, a hunk of dry cold, fishy-tasting cooked salmon, salad–you know, normal breakfast fare. Fortunately I can get by without breakfast.

A nice point about ryokans are the baths. This one, however, was a tad more exposed than I prefer. The ladies’ bath is downstairs and out of view, but the men’s bath is upstairs. You walk in to the dressing room, undress, and walk into the bath. Now, the inn is situated on a river in the midst of a small town. And the men’s bath has floor-to-ceiling clear glass windows. Here’s what it looks like when you walk in:

Pretty big windows. You look out, and realize that you are standing, buck naked, in direct view of, well, the neighborhood.

Charming.

Sachi later pointed out that since we were the only ones staying there that day, I could have used the ladies’ bath with her. She mentions this after I finished my bath. Swell.

Sachi and I are on our way back from her home town after a few days with family. We rented a car (cheaper than the Shinkansen, I think), and we’re at a rest stop.

I went straight for the Starbucks, of course. Crowding the place: a gaggle of nuns.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it just seems a little … off. Somehow.

Took them five months and one week. Not the quickest ever, but many report a six-month wait. I’ll be heading down to the Immigration center this week to get the status change. I’ll still have to get re-entry permits–but there are reports that those will be done away with soon (if not already?):

[T]here will be an extension of the maximum length of permission to reside in Japan from three years to five, the abolishment of the re-entry stamp system required to leave the country and return, and — most significantly — the replacement of the Alien Registration Card issued by ward offices with a new Resident Card to be managed by the Immigration Bureau.

If that happens, I think I’ll still have to visit immigration when I get a new passport, but otherwise, the regular trips will become another thing to reminisce about.

Update: Here’s the official page at the MOJ concerning the new changes (specifics here). Says the re-entry permit thing will take effect within three years of July 15, 2009. Whether that means July 14, 2012, or some time before that I can’t tell–they seem to hint that it’ll be 2012.