Masako is going into the hospital tomorrow afternoon for some more tests and will get settled in for a 6 day stay. Only a few days left. Not sure if I'm ready.

I finally got the new Sony Ericsson A5402S. It is loaded with camera capible of taking 640x480 photos, video and GPS. I'll be regularly posting photos in the moblog and my mobile shots gallery thanks to Kevin at MFOP.

On Saturday while coming back from a few beers in Machida I stumbled across some punk kid smoking in front of the escalators inside the station (smoking was banned in most stations May 1 , this year). I stopped and politely told him that smoking was not allowed here twice both in Japanese and English and he just stared back blankly and took another hard drag. I snapped, grabbed his wrist then his cigarette and tossed it off the platform and on to the tracks. Man that felt good but he probally lit one up right after I left.

Today as Masako and I were coming back from dinner through the station some business man was hiding a smoke behind a large concrete column. I walked directly up to him and gave him the same line about smoking not allowed. He replied with a sort of, "yeah, yeah, yeah go away" I grabbed him by the shirt and turned him around to show him the large "NO SMOKING" sign and he butted it out with his shoe heel. As we turned the corner to walk down the stares leading outside two highschool student came walking up, one with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. I watched him and thought, damn he is lucky that smoke isnt lit! As if he was reading my thoughts the little brat lit his smoke with a stinky zippo. I cut directly across the stairs while his friend ran out of my way. I gave him the same no smoking speech and he just looked at me blankly. I guess I was still built up from the last guy so I just snapped and yelled, I mean really yelled load NO SMOKING! CAN"T YOU READ THE SIGN?? in Japanese. They looked at each other in confusion and he stepped outside to finish his butt completely afraid of this raving crazy gaijin. Afterward I felt bad that I yelled at them, maybe they were just in the wrong place and the wrong time or maybe not.

I have nothing against smokers, I myself smoked on and off for the last 8 years but always respected the rights of non-smokers. I was very happy to see the smoking ban on private train lines this spring but no-one seems to be enforcing it or even stepping up and saying something when a group of teenagers are squatting around in a circle smoking and spitting on the platform or when the salary man sparks up next to the pregnant woman standing in line to buy a ticket. There is no penaltiy for braking this rule, so why would anyone abide by it? Maybe a little fear will help.

Today was Masako's last hospital visit before she gives birth. The doctor again reasured us that the baby is very healthy and active. It doesn't seem like too long ago when we were spreading the news of Masako's pregnancy when she was less then one month pregnant. How time does fly.

oh yeah, what do you think of my new design? I really got sick of the default and even modified 3 column version you get with MT because when you resized the page all the text and photos changed position. At the office I only open most browser windows half screen and hated the fact that my columns would overlap and photos would be repositioned every time I resize the page.

Masako received one free ticket to Hibakusha for July 4th and 5th in Nakano. If you would like a free ticket please send me an email with a mailing address or if you live in the area let me know.

When living in a foreign land and not speaking the language very well you are bound to have miscommunications. Most misunderstandings I don't lose any sleep over but the other day was a bit different. The girlfriend of a co-worker of mine, let's call him Yoshi-san, just gave birth a few days ago. Every day for about a week before she gave birth I asked Yoshi-san, "are you a papa yet?" he replied "not yet, but soon." Masako and I decided to have a planned delivery date before the due date (induced labour), so I asked him if they to would have a planned delivery date. My Japanese didn't make any sense and his English was not up to par so I asked a passer by, call this guy Suzuki-san, what "planned" was in Japanese. Immediately the conversation ended. Seems that Yoshi-san thought I was asking him if his girlfriends pregnancy was planned or an accident! Of course this is something I would never bring up, especially with someone I rarely talk with. Still have to straighten this one out because he still seemed a bit ticked at me today.

Just a few experimental shots with the cybershot today. I found a bridge just around the corner from our apartment that crosses route 16. Our living room and bedroom patio doors open up to this very busy road but we have come accustom to it after almost 2 years living in Sagamiono. Actually the noisy road was a nice change from the US Navel base in Atsugi we used to live right next to. The air strip was only a stones through from our last apartment in Sagamiotsuka and we were right in the flight path. In the summer the navy pilots practiced their "touch and go" techniques until 11pm most nights, what hell that was! They would always seem to start training while I was making a long distance call home to my mom and have to go room to room trying to find a quite spot and end up in the bedroom closet just to hear her.

Some good news for us today. I have to bump up my countdown script to finish on July 2nd. We were planning on a date of July 9th but baby is now 2.7kg (full term) and ready to go at any time.

For the first time in my life today I came to realize how others are going to depend on me. I spoke with someone in human resources at my company on how I add another name under my health insurance. The forms will be filled out by our doctor after the baby is born and will have health coverage under my plan. That gave me a warm feeling inside, knowing that I will soon be playing the roll of parent and provider. Someone is going to depend on me, and not just financially but for every aspect of their life. Still feels strange, but in a good way that we will be parents for the rest of our lives.

*the photos above were taken in Harajuku and Omotesando last weekend.

I came across a photo of an ice cream man enjoying one of his products on standardmotion.com and burst out laughing. Not that the photo was that amusing but reminded me a story from high school. This is one of those "you had to be there" stories but I'll try my best to tell it.

Andrew, one of my best friends from High School, lost his job at McDonalds and decided to take a summer job with Dicky-Dee Ice Cream. The dicky-dee guy peddles around a dorky looking ice-cream freezer mounted onto three bicycle wheels and sells ice cream treats around his designated neighbourhood for less than minimum wage. Being the "Dicky-dee guy" is the absolute bottom of the job barrel even in Thunder Bay so a lot of us were surprised that Andrew would take the job. He must have been convinced of all the money he could make when he was recruited , I mean interviewed.

The official summer holiday had just begun and it was Andrew's first day on the job, so first he had to pick up the equipment. The Dicky-Dee office, or were the ice cream and bikes were stored was just the other side of the Intercity shopping mall. He picked up his ride and frozen product then proceeded to bike across town to his designated area of westfort about 8 km away. Keep in mind that these ice cream cart bikes handle like shopping carts and that 8 km probably feels more like 16km. Just across the river from the shopping center biking towards westfort lies the Canadian lakehead exhibition grounds. It was a few days before the fair was to start so the exhibition grounds were full of carnie folk setting up camp. Andrew, thinking he could make an extra couple bucks on the way to his final destination, decided to veer off the sidewalk and take a detour through the fair grounds. One of the carnies spotted this skinny teenager and called over to him, sadly Andrew took the bait. Carnies came out of nowhere, and completely surrounded Andrew and his transportation. Not able to make a getaway on his dicky-dee mobile he gave up and watched as the carnies raided not only half of his ice cream but also swiped most of his money from the cash box.

After the carnie episode he biked all the way to my place and dumped his card on my lawn yelling a string of four letter words. I fell on the grass and almost spilt my gut laughing, "you did What?!" as he reached inside the cart for an ice cream. "Don't you have to pay for that?" "Fuck it! I have to pay for all the goddamn stuff the carnie folk stole anyway!!" he said while laughing and crying at the same time.

That is why the photo I saw of the ice cream man eating his product triggered this story. He ended up getting fired that day and still had to pay for all the stolen ice cream and cash. If you didn't find this story funny or amusing, maybe you just had to be there.

*I took the above photos on Saturday in Omotesando where even constuctions sites are covered in style.

Last night Masako and I went to the first screening of a film in Shibuya she helped translate. This was by far the smallest theater I've ever been in, and would be safe to say that the screen was smaller than most big screen TV's. Theater aside we enjoyed the film.

Hibakusha at the End of the World is a documentary film about victims of radiation poisoning. It starts in 1998 in Basra, Iraq interviewing children with acute radiation poisoning caused by US weapons made with depleted uranium, and their struggle to treat patients with little to no medical supplies due to UN sanctions.

The film then moved to Hiroshima Japan and talked with an 85 year old survivor of the bomb, Dr. Shuntaro Hida. Dr. Hida was one of the first to treat radiation poisoning during the American occupation of Japan.

As a group they then traveled to the community living within sight of the Hanford Nuclear plant, birth place of the bombs dropped on Japan. We are then given a brief tour of "the death mile" by Tom Bailie, an area farmer who has been actively suing the government for the community for over 14 years. Tom showed the de-classified government documents dating back to 1946 showing the Department of Energy knew that they were harming people with low dose radiation from the reactor and by intentionally spraying iodine-131 on their homes and farms.

Overall I think the film dragged on a little and could have cut some of the scenes in half while still making the same strong point, watch any two hour documentary and you will feel the same. Anyone interested in independent documentary films should check this one out and look for Masako's name in the credits! It will be playing July 4th and 5th in Tokyo. See the website for more info

English website/Japanese website

My father got into photography many years ago when a friend gave him some camera equipment he had won. At the time he had no real interest in photography so he was trying to find a buyer for the equipment. During that time he began to play around with the cameras and it slowly developed into a hobby. A few years before he passed away my father opened up his own portrait studio called Giant Bay Portraits downtown Thunder Bay. I kind of regret not going to see him at his studio when Masako and I came back to Canada for the first time in 3 years and didn't see it until I came home in November for his funeral and was amazed to see that he had made the jump to digital. He had purchased a Dell PC, scanner and was even running photoshop! Along with the change to digital photography came a Sony Cybershot DSC-F707. I remember seeing it at the studio, kind of stuck out seeing it was the only non-film/SLR and non-Canon there. It never crossed my mind to ask for it but when I got back to Japan I knew it was just going to be sold off for a fraction of the value and thought I would get better use out of it. I had just learned that Masako was pregnant the day I left to Thunder Bay so having a quality digital camera before the baby was born has been a high priority for me. Eight months later I now have my father's first digital camera and will be taking the first photos of our baby with it. Photos above are some of my first practice shots of Masako with the Cybershot.

You can never own too many t-shirts especially during the hot and muggy Japanese summer. Going thought 3 t-shirts a day during the hottest months here is not uncommon. Every year I am forced to go through my summer clothes from last year and weed out all my yellowish tees. I haven't yet but I will need to throw out one of my favourite shirts, a banana republic shirt I bought while in Maui for our wedding in 2000. I bought a couple of Uniqlo shirts yesterday for 1,000 yen each and they have some pretty cool prints on them to "stone by gettyimages".

Every morning I take the Odakyu line at 6:30 am from Sagamiono to Noborito station where I transfer on to 2 other train lines to get to my office. For the last week and a half I have witnessed something so disturbing, so disgusting, so absolutely repulsive that I can not keep it to myself. We have all seen oyaji picking their noses quickly and descretley on the train, I know I have but this guy I see every day is over the top. He not only goes completely postal on his nostrils but he, (sorry for saying this but I've got to get this off my chest) licks his fingers between picks! I usually get a good 25 min of sleep during that lag of my journey but lately I have been so disgusted by this salary man that I keep thinking to myself what I could do to make him stop. I have yelled at people in the past who have done the same thing, "Is it tasty? nice and salty?" in Japanese but the other passengers just stare at me... How can this guy do this in full view of everyone on the train? and is he not embarrassed? why does no one say anything? Yesterday I took out my camera and video taped this guy. Some of my co-workers took a quick look at the video and just lost it! and what I don't understand is those are the same people who sit quietly on the train ignoring these types of childish actions. Download the 1.6MB video here.

Masako and I went for a walk last night to 7-11 which is just a 2 min walk from our apartment and I counted the pay parking lots along the way. Our apartment is completely surrounded by pay parking lots that you see the the above photos and when an old building comes down a new parking lot goes up, until another building is built again. I would like to see some grass planted and a place for kids to play but I guess it just shows how valuable land is here.

I havn't heard it call me Dave yet or actually speak at all but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

This might sound silly but one of the concerns both Masako and I have after she gives birth is how our other family member will take the news. A few weeks before my birthday three years ago Masako and I were shopping around Machida Sta. when we stopped to take a look at the cats that were up for adoption by a local group called "Friends of Animals". The friends of animals and other animal rescue groups take in abandoned cats, and bring them to major stations in hopes of finding the kittens new homes. Masako has always loved animals, but a pet other than hamsters or fish in most Japanese apartments is strictly forbidden. We came to realize that many tenants kept pets in our building including dogs even though the rule was in place. The next week we went back to the same spot under the walkway in front of Tokyu department store and met Momo for the first time. We donated 2,000 yen and arranged a date a few days later for the group to come to our appartment for inspection. This really showed that they cared what kind of homes their animals went to, and we had to agree and pay for Momo to be spayed. Over the years she has become a close member of our family, mind you the conversations don't really get anywhere but nevertheless she feels like our first baby. I have heard too many horror stories of new parents having to give up snowball or rex because they either pee all over the house or even snap at their newborns. This doesn't seem like our cat but life will change drastically soon and she might also.

Something I neglected to post about yesterday, I was almost killed, seriously. When Masako and I got to Minami-rinkan yesterday we spilt up and were to meet up again at the hospital lobby. My job was to get the morning Mr. Donuts coffee. As I was making my way back toward the hospital with bag-o-coffee in hand I stupidly thought that I, as a pedestrian, would have the right of way at the crosswalk. Well Ms. Heavy foot-san didn't think so and nearly ran over my foot. Did I say "almost killed"? okay maybe it was more like "almost badly hurt my foot" I was wearing birkenstocks you know!

I feel like I've gone from one extreme to another extreme to another here in Japan. In my home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario I clearly remember our drivers-ed teacher telling us that we didn't have to worry about crosswalks on the drivers test because there was only 2 Xwalks in the entire city but we were still taught that the pedestrian always has the right of way. When I moved out to Victoria, BC I was shocked to see how many crosswalks there were and how bold the pedestrians were when crossing. Pedestrians in Victoria just cut out in front of you while jogging with their baby carriage (you know the type with the bicycle wheel up front) with out even looking and call you a Nazi when you have to hit the breaks hard cause you didn't see them coming! And Japan, were you are lucky if anyone lets you cross at all. There must be a rule they have here regarding crosswalks like the red plus three rule.

Well I'm glad to say that we had a very eventful day. The day started early with our bi-monthly visit to Aiku Hospital. We got to the hospital at 8:45 and was able to leave a little after 10:30 so it was not as bad a wait as 2 weeks ago. Baby is facing the right way and all systems go. We only get an ultrasound done every second visit but today sensei gave us a "service ultrasound" very quickly. We saw a side angle of baby's head and the doctor remarded that the baby seemed to have a highter nose, (like her dad). Next week we will discuss the delivery date with the doctor.

Then it was off to the MATRIX Reloaded. Masako got us great center seats in the largest theater they had. How did I like the movie?, well I liked it fine but I'm still going to have to see it one more time to form a solid opinion on it. I'm sure glad I was told to stay till the end of the credits for the Revolutions preview.

And I finished the day over a few pints discussing digi-cams with Marcel. Marcel owns the CyberShot F707, which is the same camera I am getting from my dad. I have been looking at getting a compact camera that I can carry with me where ever I go. The list has come down to the Sony DSC-V1 and the new not yet realeased Canon Powershot G5. They both have 5 Mega Pixals, I have a 2MP sony now but I've read a lot of good things about the Powershot G3 so I thought it might be worth waiting for the G5.

As for the site, you will see many changes going on especially with the lay out of photos within the blog. Right now i am just experimenting with some styles and will be changing this every few days so please give me your feed back.

thanks!

of the webcam. just thought it looked cool.

Just heard Masako got center seats for Matrix reloaded at Virgin Cinemas in Ebina for Saturday afternoon. Kick ass! I've been waiting too long for this. Wow Saturday is going to be a great day! I get to see an ultrasound of our baby in the morning and Matrix in the afternoon!

another side note, I am now in the process of moving about a years worth of postings across from my other server. I tried the MT importing function but did not work to my liking so insted of risking vudeja.com I thought I would manually re-enter all my other posts and edit the dates. So every time you visit my site you might see my archives getting larger going further into the past.

The glass says Ichiban Shibori, but my head this morning is saying no, no that was happoshu dude.
If you live in Japan and for some reason you never go to the bar, or the store or leave your appartment for that matter I'll explain the drink that is called happoshu. Happoshu or 'near beer' is not beer and if you look closely at a bottle or can of happoshu you never actually see the word "beer", you only see the term "brew". Due to a tax loophole in Japan Happoshu can be sold at a much cheaper price then beer. Happoshu skimps on malt and loads up on less esteemed ingredients, corn syrup, rice or sugar thereby qualifying for a much lower tax. If you're not sure what it was you had last night at the cheap izakaiya you will know after the headache and stomach pains hit.

I found this tag on a t-shirt I bought a few weeks ago but I'm having a hard time understanding its washing instructions.

hmmm... find mix up making sound watch... is that like wash with like colours? or machine wash warm tumble dry no bleach do not iron if decorated. or maybe they are tring to say machine wash cold, tumble dry low? See my dilemma?

Masako and I were in Ebisu on Saturday to have lunch with some friends at Good Honest Grub. I hadn't been there since we had a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner there almost 3 years ago. I waited outside with a pregnant wife for about 20 min but it was well worth it. After lunch we headed back toward the station to have coffee together and ended up looking for a cafe in Atre directly above the staion. Right at the top of the escalator there is a small fruit shop/cafe called Senbikiya that is famous for its expesive gifts. I'm sure you can find more expensive fruits at Kinokuniya but this was still impressive to say the least. Click on photo for lager image.

500 yen for a, yes only one mikan orange ($4.20 USD)

10,000 yen for two mangos ($85 USD)

and... 15,000 yen for 40 cherries ($130 USD) say about $3.25/cherry