Feb 9, 2008
Found this site: Japankeibai.com whilst surfing the intrawebs today. The website has a good number of foreclosed property listings, mostly in Tokyo as well as in Osaka and other parts of Japan. Still not quite sure how the service works, but the properties seem to be very cheap. I know a number of foreigners here in Japan who bought property here during Japan’s bubble period, and who paid some very high prices for those properties, and as a result are still paying off home loans from that period. Today things are a bit easier, and if these properties are as cheap as they appear to be then there are some really good deals on the japankeibai.com site.
As a little aside, when we were in Akita late last year we saw some properties being advertised for sale there. The cheapest houses were 1,200,000 yen - and that is for a house! In the middle of nowhere, and pretty run down, but insanely cheap! More normal and livable house started at around 3 times that.
Here is a list of the latest properties listed on the Japan Keibai website:
Sep 24, 2007
Tsukuba is blessed with a wide range of things to do and one such point of interest are the Botanical Gardens run by the National Science Museum on Higashi Odori.
Opened in 1983, the Botanical Gardens provide an ideal destination for an afternoon out with the family. A large range of diverse flora are on display in this facility spread over a 14 hectare area. We visited there a couple of weeks ago, but spring is really the best time to visit with some stunningly beautiful flowers to see. Autumn though is not without its own niceties. The following picture shows Chrysanthemum nipponicum which blooms during October.
There are both indoor and outdoor gardens, ranging from tropical planets through to desert cactii, montane grassland as well as marshland plants.
The gardens are opposite Tsukuba University and a link to a map on google maps is here: Tsukuba Botanical Gardens. It is possible to visit from Tokyo - take the Tsukuba Express from Akihabara to the final stop (about 45 minutes) then take the Kanto Tetsudo Bus from Tsukaba Center to Tsukuba Techno-Park Oho (about 5 minutes) and get off at the bus stop of the Tsukuba Botanical Garden.
There is an english website here with more information about the plants and activities of the botanical gardens.
Entrance is 300 yen for adults and university students and free for rugrats and other students. The gardens are closed Mondays except for public holidays (much the same as the Tsukuba Public Library).
Sep 15, 2007
I changed the skin on the blog again - this time to Chris Pearson’s excellent Copyblogger theme. Hope you all don’t mind all the changes, but I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the last skin. One of these days I must get around to making my own. I have a pretty good idea of what I want, but I will have to brush up my php skills to make it do what I want.
Anyway, with wordpress 2.2 (which is what is powering this site) I discovered that switching back to old skins is a really bad idea - I could still see the front end but the whole of the admin backend was completely inaccessible and I just got a “Cheatin’ huh?” error which I think is the sense of humour of the wordpress creators coming through. I do like error messages like that, much more friendly than “Error 808.”
How to fix that error? It is quite easy - in my case because I had changed wordpress skins and couldn’t get into the admin section to change it back, all I had to do was ftp into the webserver and delete the offending skin. I made a backup before I did that of course. Wordpress defaults back to, you guessed it, the default theme, and we were up and hobbling along like a drunk Japanese grandma with a walker in no time splat!
Aug 24, 2007
In Tokyo last week, exploring the Sony Building in Ginza, and we chuffingly stumbled across a copy of Wining and Dining in Tokyo.
Published by the people who put out J-Select, Wining and Dining in Tokyo: The No. 1 Guide to Tokyo’s Finest Eating and Entertainment Spots is a really useful book targeted at Tokyo’s expatriate population. Featuring 100 restaurants listed by location, this is an easy-to-use guide to the best and brightest of Tokyo cuisine. Wining and Dining in Tokyo includes a wide range of types of restaurants from Mediterranean and Egyptian, Mexican and Nepalese through to more standard Japanese fare such as sushi and shabu-shabu.
Wining and Dining in Tokyo is available from most major bookstores in Tokyo for 980 yen. They also have a search engine where you can search for restaurants in Tokyo by location, type and budget.
Aug 19, 2007
If you have ever wondered how to cut a watermelon so you don’t have to spend most of the time fighting to find all the pips, then, the answer is simple: cut the melon along the dark stripes. This will ensure that the pips are on the outer faces of the slice.
I saw this on tv. Not sure if it works for the square watermelon pictured though.
