Takanawa Yochien (Kindergarten) Video
 A short video about Kai’s school – Takanawa Yochien
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I’ve uploaded a minute and a half clip from a show that was on our local cable channel in Tokyo about Kai’s school – click the image to play it. Kai makes a brief appearance towards the end of the clip. It’s in Japanese of course, but even if you can’t follow along, you can still get a good sense from the visuals of what the school is like. Sitting next to Kai in the video is his friend Hiroki. Hiroki lived with his parents in Albany, New York for a while, and he went to school there, so his English is quite good. Kai had another friend at the school named Kaito, who also speaks English. Both of them helped Kai out a lot, since he spoke very little Japanese.
In the video, the woman greeting the kids as they arrive is the principal. That wasn’t staged for the video – she’s out there every morning, rain or shine, to hold the gate open and say good morning to everyone as they come in. While the other teachers spoke at least a little English, she didn’t speak any, so my (attempts at) conversations with her were always the most challenging for me.
It was a really great school for Kai, and I’ve written many times before about how much he enjoyed it. The teachers and his classmates were very supportive and understanding, given that he didn’t speak any Japanese at first. But he did learn quickly. One thing that was fun for me was watching him with the kids in the playground after school, and hearing him try to transpose English words into Japanese. There’s actually quite a bit of English that’s been borrowed in Japanese. Once Kai figured out how to transform English words into their “correct” Japanese pronunciation (e.g. “hot dog” becomes “hotto doghu”, apple juice becomes “apploo juicoo”), and once he mastered a few key Japanese phrases, it was amazing how much he could communicate. One of his first Japanese words was “dameh!” which means “stop it!” – a vital playground survival phrase.
The show about the school was on the Minato City channel, as part of a regular series on the local schools. Each year they make their way through all the local kindergartens and elementary schools. It struck me as a really nice way for residents to get a broader sense of their community, and see how their neighborhood school compares to others in the area.
Single Parenting Does Not Rock
I don’t know how single parents do it, especially with little kids. Over the past two weeks Maniac Baby and his older brother, Mr. “6 Going on 16″, have run me ragged. And I say that while doing the single parent gig under really good circumstances: I’m working part-time, they have good day care, I have a reliable car, a nice place to live, medical insurance, I don’t have to pinch pennies for their food, and the whole situation is temporary. I’m lucky to have all that going for me, so, like I said, I don’t know how most single parents do it – take away even one of those conditions and it would get a lot harder.
The part that’s particularly challenging for me is preparing 3 meals a day, as I haven’t done much cooking since Maria and I got married (almost 8 years ago!). I did better providing meals for the boys in Tokyo. There it was easy to get healthy meals from the grocery stores – they carry a variety of noddle, fish, rice, and egg dishes made fresh daily. Here in Philly, the meals that are easy to get are mostly some combination of salt, sugar, fat, and grease, so instead of feeding them that stuff, I’m cooking as best I can.
Maria is back on Friday – 4 days. Not that I’m counting 
. The boys and I talk with her on Skype every night. We have webcams so we can see each other. It’s especially nice for Eidan, since he’s not old enough to understand the situation. This way he still gets to see Mommy – in blurry two-dimensional form, anyway. Maria says she has some great pictures from her trips to the Philippines and Vietnam – maybe I can persuade her to write another blog post when she gets back.
Here are a couple of totally gratuitous pictures of the boys:
 Eidan in the playground at Kai’s Kindergarten (Takanawa Yochien)
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 Kai outside the Tokyo International Forum
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Sakura Zaka Koen, AKA Robot Park
As promised, I’m going to keep blogging about Japan for a while, even though I’m back in the US now. I have a big backlog of things to write about. However, while Maria is still in Japan and I’m at home taking care of the boys and working, my posts for the next few weeks will probably be longer on pictures and shorter on words, as I don’t have a lot of time to write.
 The many slides of Robot Park. That’s Maria in the blue jacket, with Eidan next to her.
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 Kai and Kento riding the robots at Robot Park
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Sakura Zaka Koen is a tiny gem of a park, tucked away on a small street a short walk from the mind-bogglingly massive 27 acre, $4 billion Roppongi Hills shopping and entertainment complex (you can see the exact location on this map). It’s a ridiculously small park, but packed with slides. It’s nice that some space was made for it, given that the area is home to some of the most expensive real estate in Tokyo.
The play structures at Japanese parks are typically old, rickety, and dangerous, which makes them a striking contrast to everything else in Japan. So Robot Park is unusual for a Tokyo playground in that everything is new, and it was designed with safety in mind: most of the ground is covered with a giant rubberized mat, and all the slides are contoured plastic. The only thing remotely dangerous is the long roller slide. These kinds of slides are common in Tokyo but rare in the US (the slide is covered with little rolling pins, so you need to be careful with little fingers and long hair).
The robot theme also gives it real charm. We visited for an hour or so with Maria’s friend Shiho and her son Kento. The boys loved it, as it provided a nice break from our strolling through Roppongi.
 Robot totem pole at Robot Park
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 Kai and Eidan on the long slide at Robot Park
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A Man Out of Time
Well, that was awful.
I didn’t sleep on our flight back from Tokyo, and then I went almost 4 days with nothing more than a half dozen 30 minute – 90 minute naps.
It’s a 13 hour time difference between Tokyo and Philadelphia, so it’s a complete reversal of night and day. Eidan and Kai took the slow road to adjusting to the time change, and they each came at with different schedules. Eidan was sleeping the first half of the night, and then around 1 AM or so, he would decide he was done sleeping. It’s time to play, daddy! But Kai couldn’t fall asleep at all until about 2 AM. So at any given point I was up with at least one of them.
But I’m happy to report that for the past two nights they’ve both been going to bed on time and sleeping reasonably well until morning. So I’ve managed to make a dent in my sleep deficit and I’m mostly functional again. Tomorrow they’re both off to school (Kai’s school also provides daycare, and Eidan is old enough to go now) and I’m off to work. I’ll just be part-time until Maria’s back in a few weeks.
On several occasions this week I was laughing at myself – being sleep deprived is like being drunk, in that your reasoning abilities are totally shot, and trying to string together words coherently in a conversation requires a lot of concentration. You don’t slur your words like a drunk though – instead you tend to choose the wrong words, or just leave words out. When I took the boys grocery shopping, I kept saying “sumimasen” to people (Japanese for “excuse me”) as I navigated the aisles, and I kept telling Kai to stop leaning on the stroller, when I meant to say cart.
Another difference is that you don’t lose your motor skills when you’re sleep deprived, which is good, because in the middle of all this I bought a new car. We sold our cars before we left for Tokyo, so I had nothing here to drive. Maria and I had already settled on exactly what we wanted, so fortunately I didn’t have to think through any of that. It’s a Toyota Prius. While we were in Tokyo I was blissfully unaware of gas prices here, but seeing them at over $3 a gallon has reaffirmed our choice of the Prius (it’s rated at 60 miles/gallon). The Prius’ are selling like hotcakes right now, so there wasn’t much opportunity to haggle over the price, but that’s just as well, as I don’t think I was up for it anyway…
I also want to mention the first things I noticed coming back to the States. After being away so long, I was curious to see what would jump out at me. On arriving in Chicago, I was taken aback by all the fat people! One thing I’ll say for the Japanese is that they’re in a lot better shape than we are. And on arriving in Philadelphia, I was startled at how dirty everything was. Tokyo is an amazingly clean city, and it was easy to get used to that. Kai proved to be a better American than me though – the first thing he noticed was the American flag.
Minami-Satsuma’s 20th Annual Fukiage Beach Sand Festival
This is the third of four posts profiling the places we visited during Japan’s “Golden Week” in Spring 2007. The first is Yakushima, the second is Tanegashima, ,and the fourth is Kagoshima City. We also had a couple of misadventures on the trip which I wrote about here and here.
ふきあげ はま すな の さいてん
 The Great Khan’s Palace at Kambalu, at the Fukiage Beach Sand Festival
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After taking the ferry back to Kyushu from Tanegashima, we finished our Golden Week vacation with two days in Kagoshima City. This post is about our half-day trip from Kagoshima to Minami-Satsuma for their 20th annual Sand Festival (that link is for the official site, which is in Japanese, but if you click around you can see some more pictures, including some cool nighttime shots). After the wonderful time we had at the Sapporo Snow Festival in February, this seemed like the perfect contrast.
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It was an hour long ride on a packed bus from Kagoshima, which made Kai miserable (Eidan surprisingly handled it just fine). The bus turned out to be the best option though, as there was a huge traffic back-up as we approached the site of the festival, and the driver was savvy enough to take us down some dusty farm roads to get around all the cars. What surprised me however, was that we didn’t end up at Fukiage beach, or any beach at all. The festival instead was in a big lot surrounded by farmland, with no coast in sight. They must have hauled in many truckloads of sand. We asked one of the staff and he said the beach was about a kilometer and a half away. Adjacent to the lot was a large building with a stage, concession stands, etc. I imagine they held it there instead of the beach to take advantage of the amenities. Personally though, I think it would’ve been more fun to have a sand festival on the beach!
The sculptures were amazing. The theme this year was exploration, and the sculptures were grouped by continent: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Fortunately, Kai perked up once we got some lunch in him, and Eidan napped in his stroller (which was preferable to having to spend all our time trying to keep him from stomping on the sculptures). There were two stages with live bands, and a flower show as well, so there was plenty to see for a few hours.
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Tire Park
 Kai in the biggest tire at the park
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 Kai took this picture of me on the tire dinosaur
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Wednesdays are short days for Kai at school, so I usually try to plan an outing for the boys on Wednesday afternoons. Last week I took them to Tire Park:
This playground, covered completely with sand, is filled with big tires in every combination: dinosaurs reaching to the sky, tire “monsters,” regular and tire swings, bridges, slides, climbing equipment, and loose tires lying everywhere for free play.
The moment we arrived, Kai was off like a shot. He went straight for the giant cement slide, where the kids grab loose tires from the pile at the bottom, go up the stairs on the side, and then slide down on their chosen tires. Eidan was a bit more hesitant, as the multitude of kids running all around was probably a bit overwhelming for him at first. He eventually relaxed and enjoyed himself, but was much more interested in playing in the sand than with the tires.
What makes parks like this in Japan such fun is that they’re so dangerous. You can look at each play area and climbing structure and imagine a dozen different ways bones could be broken. You don’t see places like this in the US (not for the past few decades anyway). But take away America’s lawsuit happy culture, and add in parents who take responsibility for their kids, and then parks like this become plausible. My feet managed to find toeholds on the stacked tires that made up the park’s giant dinosaur, and I climbed about 20ft off the ground; Kai ventured about half as high.
After about 90 minutes of running around like a monkey and climbing on everything, Kai suddenly stopped and coolly declared, “I’m bored, let’s go home.” By then I was also finding it increasingly difficult to keep Eidan away from other kids’ sand toys, so we went to McDonald’s for dinner (the boys’ favorite). Then I took them home to start getting them cleaned up and ready for bed. Mission accomplished.
The Tokyo Families article provides clear directions:
Train: From Shinagawa station, take the Keihin Tohuko line to Kamata station. Take the west exit and then turn left, walking through Tokyu Plaza. Keeping to the left, follow alongside the tracks and walk straight for 10-15 minutes. Just past the driving school, the park is on your right. NOTE: Bring a stroller for younger kids, as the walk back to the station afterwards might be too much for them. Some side street parking is also available.
I recommend taking a cab from Kamata station to the park. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, all you have to say to the driver is “Tiya koen kudasai” (tire park please). It’s easy to find taxis at the station, but you’re not likely to find one to take you back from the park, so you’ll almost definitely be walking back. This way the kids only have to walk one way.
Coming Back Early
Our original plan was to return to Philadelphia on June 26, but Maria and I have decided that I should come back early with the boys. So I’ll be flying back with Kai and Eidan on May 28. The main reason is that Maria will be away for most of June on business trips (she’s being sent to the Philippines and Vietnam to evaluate a couple of JBIC projects), and it’ll be easier for me to handle the boys on my own in Philadelphia than Tokyo. Kai will re-join his old class for a few weeks, and he’ll graduate from kindergarten…again! (He graduated from kindergarten in Tokyo in March). Eidan is also old enough now to start in the daycare program at the same school. So I’ll still be working part-time in June, but I’ll be able to go into the office for part of the day.
Also, after having a wonderful time in kindergarten here, Kai is having a miserable time in 1st grade. Kindergarten was mostly playtime and arts and crafts, so it didn’t matter much that he couldn’t speak Japanese. Also, there were a couple boys in his class who spoke Japanese and English, and they helped him out. But now he sits at a desk all day and doesn’t understand most of what’s going on, and none of his classmates speak English. He was supposed to get Japanese lessons, but the school has yet to find a teacher, so nothing has come of that so far (there are some other foreign kids in the class, but they don’t speak English, so they’ve been trying to find a teacher who speaks 3 or 4 languages). If we were going to stay for a year or more, then it would be worth it for him to tough it out, as he’s at the right age where he can learn through immersion. But we’re not here long enough for him to really benefit from the experience. He’s eagerly looking forward to re-joining his old class and seeing his old friends.
What I’m fearing is the 14 hour flight to Chicago, plus the 2 hour flight to Philly, with Eidan, AKA Baby Godzilla. I keep getting flashes in my head of a panicked John Lithgow from the Twilight Zone movie: “There’s a man on the wing of this plane!” But it’ll be Eidan out there, maniacally and gleefully tearing the engines apart with his bare hands. Wish me luck.
Tanegashima
This is the second of four posts profiling the places we visited during Japan’s “Golden Week” in Spring 2007. The first is Yakushima, the third is the Fukiage Beach Sand Festival, ,and the fourth is Kagoshima City. We also had a couple of misadventures on the trip which I wrote about here and here.
 Guns were introduced to Japan on Tanegashima by the Portuguese, and it’s a big part of the local culture.
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 A shrine gate at Chikura Caverns, Tanegashima. We saw folks trying to toss rocks and shells onto it.
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 A rock formation at Kumano beach, Tanegashima
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 A life-size replica of a HII-A rocket, at the Tanegashima Space Center. That’s Kai and Eidan running to check it out.
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According to the taxi driver who picked us up after we stepped off the ferry to Tanegashima, it’s an island rarely visited by foreign tourists. I got confirmation of this quickly, as I felt long stares from everyone as I walked down the street. Another clue was the complete lack of any tourist guides written in English (in contrast, they weren’t too hard to find at Yakushima). The local accent was also noticeably different from “Tokyo Japanese.” For example, instead of hearing “kakoī na” directed at the boys by schoolgirls (aren’t they handsome), it was “kakēi na.”
Tanegashima has three towns. We stayed in the largest, Nishinoomote, which is home to the island’s main port. It’s population is about 18,000. In the middle of the island is Nakatane, and then in the south is Minamitane, where guns were first introduced to Japan by the Portuguese. Near Minamitane is the Tanegashima Space Center, which is Japan’s primary satellite launching facility.
While Yakushima’s economy appeared to be a roughly equal mix of tourism and agriculture, Tanegashima seemed to be more dependent on agriculture (and probably the space center). The island’s visitors are mostly Japanese surfers, as there are a number of good breaks all around the island. In fact, we stayed at the Tanegashima Miharusou, which is a surfer’s minshuku (you can think of a minshuku as a ryokan without the meals and attentive service). It had surfing stickers all over the front door, and surfboards lined up along the walls of the lobby.
We arrived in mid-afternoon, so our exploration that day was limited to a short taxi ride down the west coast of the island, to Yokino beach, so the boys could play after a morning of traveling. We were thrilled to have this nice long stretch of coastline all to ourselves. We ended up having the same experience at all 3 of the beaches we visited on Tanegashima. Kumano beach was surrounded by amazing rock formations, and there wasn’t a person in sight. The nearby Chikura caverns had great sea caves to explore. The “animal rock” beach, at the Iwasaki hotel was also great. Although it wasn’t the peak summer season, it was Golden Week (the busiest vacation time in Japan), so I couldn’t get over these great beaches being empty. My only explanation is that Tanegashima is not the easiest place to get to, so people looking for nice beaches probably go to popular destinations in Okinawa, Guam, or Kyushu. It was a real treat to have such wonderful surroundings all to ourselves.
We learned from our experience on Yakushima not to mess around with buses and bicycles, so we went ahead and rented a car for our second and third days on Tanegashima. The second day was all about beaches, and the third day was mostly for the Space Center. Maria particularly enjoyed the Chikura caverns, but for the three little boys in our family (I count myself as the third) the space center was the thing. It’s tagline is “the most beautiful rocket-launch complex in the world.” As you can see in the pictures, there’s probably no arguing with that, as the facility’s buildings nestle in nicely among the hills and beaches along the coast. They had a small but very well done museum, with a focus on rocket engines and how they work (most of the displays were in Japanese, but some also had English, and one of the short movies was available in English). Most importantly for Kai, of course, was the gift shop. Kai has a small collection of various toy American and European rockets, so he was thrilled to get his hands on a toy Japanese H-IIA rocket. I don’t think it came out of his hands for at least the next 3 days.
Good resources on Tanegashima:
- The JNTO web page on Tanegashima.
- The Tanegashima Space Center web site.
- Eddie Does Japan, Tanegashima category: gives a window into life in this far corner of Japan. Written with a great sense of humor.
- Also see the other links in the body of this post.
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Yakushima
This is the first of four posts profiling the places we visited during Japan’s “Golden Week” in Spring 2007. The second is Tanegashima, the third is the Fukiage Beach Sand Festival, ,and the fourth is Kagoshima City. We also had a couple of misadventures on the trip which I wrote about here and here.
 Dead coral reef at Haruta-hama, Yakushima
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Yakushima is a place of stunning natural beauty. I’ve never been anywhere else like it. It’s a small, mountainous, roughly circular island. You can drive all the way around it on the island’s only major road, at low speed, in less than 3 hours. What’s so remarkable is the variety of natural wonders contained in such a small space. It’s home to the highest peaks in southern Japan. It’s inland area is covered by a dense forest of giant, old-growth sugi trees (including the oldest known living specimen, estimated at around 7,000 years old), as well as some 1900 other species of flora. It has an unusual ecosystem that is both sub-tropical and sub-arctic. The forests are home to monkeys and deer that you will definitely encounter if you spend even just a few hours in the woods. Numerous waterfalls are scattered across the island. It has several coral reefs and beautiful beaches to explore, including a weathered granite beach that is one of the world’s primary spawning grounds for loggerhead turtles (unfortunately we were a few weeks too early for the turtles). And it has several onsen, including one that has natural hot spring pools right on the shore, so you can take a nice hot dip during low tide, with the surf crashing around you.
The main attraction for me was the opportunity to do some hiking, as Maria had graciously offered to tend to the boys so I could do a full day hike. But as I mentioned before, I hurt my back the night before we arrived at Yakushima, and I could only walk short distances without considerable pain, so hiking wasn’t in the cards. And did I mention I had spent a whole day in Tokyo hunting down hiking shoes for this trip? My feet are bigger than typical Japanese feet, so shoe stores here don’t stock my size (I finally met success when one seasoned clerk steered me towards a brand whose sizes ran big, and my feet just fit in their largest size). I now have excellent Japanese language skills when it comes to discussing shoe size .
Anyway, from what I was able to see, I’d have to agree with this eloquent description of Yakushima’s forests by one hiker:
The trail through the forest this day is truly spectacular, awe-inspiring, over-coming, astonishing… I do not think English has sufficient means to describe it. Even if I’m mistaken in this regard, I know I don’t have the ability to do the island justice. Every turn reveals trees twisted and wise, old and powerful. Maybe magical might be defined by reference to these woods. Yes, that must be as near an adjective as I will find. If ever a place was magical, Yakushima must be it.
Magic is not something you laugh at for a fleeting moment of amusement. It is not a passing sensation. Magic is not something seen from a particular vantage point or in a stunning vista. It is not something you breathe on the light air. Magic is the wonder a child experiences when his father pulls twenty cents out of his ear. It is inside. On Yakushima, every pebble and every boulder, every twig and every trunk, every frond of moss or tropical leaf, every muddy clod, patch of snow, whiff of damp air, everything, is just so…. ALIVE… That is magic. To be raised here is to take animism for granted. To visit is to discard or discount any religion which does not grant the trees and rocks a soul.
Our encounter with the forests was limited to a visit to Yakusugi Land, where you pay a small admission fee in exchange for a map that guides you along several short walks through the woods on well marked paths, with benches and suspension bridges to make things easy. But even just that brief encounter was enough to make me understand why the Yakushima forests were the inspiration for the anime film Princess Mononoke. The forests drawn in that movie seemed too beautiful to be real, but after seeing Yakushima, I now know that they are real.
We spent most of our time visiting hot springs around the island, as Maria and Kai love them, and it was therapeutic for my back. My favorite was Hirauchi Kaichu onsen, where you climb down the rocky shore to get in the hot spring pools that appear only during low tide. The experience was marred only by a grumpy old man who was there, complaining vocally to his friend about us. I didn’t need to understand a whole lot of Japanese to know that his repeated references to kodomo (children) and gaijin (foreigners) weren’t intended as friendly. Maria’s favorite onsen was another one just down the road – Yudomari onsen – where you’re still on the beach, but the pools are manmade and set back from the shore a bit, so you don’t have spray from the crashing waves splashing on you.
We also spent some time at Haruta-hama. “Hama” means beach, but it was actually a dead coral reef (there’s living coral further out, which you can see if you go diving). It was low tide, so there were many pools on the reef filled with crabs, tropical fish, and a few small colonies of living coral. Kai enjoyed looking at them all, while Eidan enjoyed simply sitting among the infinite rocks near the reef, diligently trying to throw every single one of them into the water.
The one thing we struggled with on Yakushima was how to get around. We started with buses, but they were slow and didn’t come around very often. We rented biycles for one afternoon, which was a lot of fun, be Maria and I weren’t in good enough shape to handle Yakushima’s many hills, especially on rusty old bikes and carrying the boys. We finally rented a car, which was definitely the best way to get around. In a place this far from civilization, no paperwork was involved. An exchange of cash for keys, and a handshake followed by “if you damage it, you pay for it, ok?” and we were off. The only catch was that I had to quickly learn how to drive on the “other” side of the road (we got international drivers’ licenses before we left the US, and you don’t need to take any kind of test to get one). It was particularly challenging having my first experience be driving up the winding mountain road to Yakusugi land. It was a 16km, 40 minute drive on a mostly one lane road, with mirrors mounted on the numerous blind corners so you could see if anyone was coming. I nearly killed us only once, which I think was actually pretty good, given the situation
Lastly, I can’t speak highly enough of the two youth hostels we stayed at, which were cleaner and better run than most hotels. But that will be a topic of an upcoming post…
Good resources on Yakushima:
- The Japan National Tourist Organization’s PDF on Yakushima – this is very well done
- Japan Times – Navigating through a lost world
- Canada.com – Hiking Japan’s ancient forests
- A hiker’s dazzling photographs of Yakushima’s forests – much better than mine
- A Japanese hiker’s many pictures and good overview of Yakushima’s attractions – available in English and Japanese
A National Lampoons’ Vacation
This is part of a series of posts about the places we visited during Japan’s “Golden Week” in Spring 2007. I profiled the four places we visited: Yakushima, Tanegashima, the Fukiage Beach Sand Festival, and Kagoshima City. I also wrote a post like this one about another misadventure here.
 Haneda Airport
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Our vacation started yesterday, and it began smoothly. We took a nice ride on the Tokyo Monorail to Haneda airport, and then had a pleasant flight from there to Kagoshima airport (if you read my post about Sapporo and our flight there, you’ll know why I liked it). From there it was a 1 hour bus ride into town, and then we found our way on foot to Nakazono Ryokan, where we planned to stay for just one night. The place is a bit shabby by Japanese standards (i.e. not at all bad by US standards), as it’s one of the few inexpensive places to stay in Kagoshima City. But the guy who runs the place is very nice. Maria was chatting with him about our plans, and he immediately got on the phone and reserved seats for all 3 of the ferry rides we had planned (to Yakushima island, Tanegashima island, and then back). He also offered to give us a ride to the ferry the next day.
 Eidan enjoyed his sushi
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 Kai and Eidan in Kagoshima City
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 Kai in the Youth Hostel on Yakushima
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 Eidan at the Youth Hostel in Yakushima
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We had a great dinner at a sushi restaurant in the Dolphin Port outdoor mall: the kind where the maguro (tuna) just melts in your mouth. For me that kind of maguro is like a drug – all my muscles relax and it’s all I can do to not slump in a heap on the floor, with my eyes rolling back in my head. After that Kai and Maria enjoyed the mall’s free public outdoor foot bath (yes, you have to wash your feet before you use it). It’s fed by a sulfurous natural hot spring, so it smelled like rotten eggs, but Maria said it felt wonderful.
The rest of the early evening went just as smoothly. It even took less than an hour for me to get Eidan to sleep – a remarkable achievement when staying in a new place (he spent the time squeezing my nose and rubbing his arms against the stubble on my face until he drifted off). I indulged in the ryokan’s hot bath, and then – this being a Japanese style room with a tatami floor – I climbed on top of a pile of soft fluffy futons and feel asleep.
Then I woke up at midnight to what sounded like a small herd of mechanical elephants, grazing near our window. I wanted to get up to take a look out the window, and realized I couldn’t move. A moment later I discovered I could move, but it required inducing a great deal of pain in my back. I have a lower back injury from about 15 years ago, but it hasn’t bothered me much for the past 8 years. Unfortunately, the hot bath and the soft futons (which offered no back support) proved to be a deadly combination. It felt like I’d pulled every muscle in my lower back.
I managed to pull myself up to look out the window, to see a trio of construction vehicles and a half dozen workers, tearing up the main road, about 100 ft. away. Eidan slowly woke up over the next 20 minutes, crying “no, no,” against the strange sounds from outside, until he was fully awake. Then he indulged in some full-throttled screaming. The walls in this place were really thin, so I got up and managed to carry him outside, hoping it would snap him out of it before he woke up everyone. It worked, and I carried him closer to the workmen, so he could see where the strange noises were coming from. In my aggravated state it crossed my mind to yell at them in my pidgin Japanese “kazoku wa nemasen!” (my family’s not sleeping!) but I realized that no conversation started that way was likely to end well, so I thought better of it and headed back to the room.
Miraculously, Eidan managed to get back to sleep despite the noise, and it didn’t seem to bother Maria or Kai, but between that and my back pain, I was up for hours, until they finally stopped tearing up the road, and some aspirin took the edge of the pain.
The real bummer is that we’re spending the next three days on Yakushima island, a mountainous island, home to some of the best hiking on the planet. I just bought some hiking gear before we left so I could do an all day hike to Jomon-sugi, the world’s oldest cedar tree (Maria had kindly volunteered to watch the boys for one of our days here). But right now it’s all I can do to stand up and shuffle around. I can’t bend at all – to put on my socks this morning, I had to lie on my back and bend my knees to my chest so I could reach my feet.
The beaches here look to be quite nice. So shuffling down the beach and flopping on the sand sounds good too. If I had to pick a place to recover from a back injury, this isn’t such a bad choice 
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Mike's Tweets
- Looks like there is a "Mr. Toppa Toppa" who is a reggae producer - Toppas are everywhere ;-) http://t.co/H4yzmK9r #fb 2 days ago
- @speno for the kids we kept it simple - some onigiri had shiso salt and others had green tea salt. For the teachers, we used saury fish in reply to speno 5 days ago
- The boys & I have been re-watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. I mean the amazing anime series, not the awful movie http://t.co/ZQkYkpmQ #fb 5 days ago
- Just responded to another batch of Shashin support requests. I deserve a prize, or some donations (cough, cough) http://t.co/1Orx8brr 6 days ago
- RT @jtsternberg This video made my day! http://t.co/p3hM8Ny7 #fb - mine too 6 days ago
- More updates...
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Random Pictures
Khai and Kai with their new belts
Kai with his fire hat
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Flotsam
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Random Posts
- 20 Jun 06 - A Concise Analysis of Bush’s Iraq Policy
- 15 Jul 04 - Bush is Right, Because Two Wrongs Make a Right
- 19 Apr 04 - Spring is Here – New Kai Pictures
- 05 Aug 04 - Benjamin Barber on Terrorism
- 09 Jan 12 - My last day at Penn, my first day at WebdevStudios
