Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Just finished switching back to Ubuntu. I have been using Linux for a long time now it seems, starting out with Redhat back before they went “professional” and turned into Fedora, then I used Mandrake for a while, until they too went “professional” and became Mandriva. I think there is a pattern there.

After that I started using Ubuntu, and then when we moved to China, I bought a Mac and used OS X. I thought it would be easier and more reliable to use in China where I wasn’t sure how good the internet connections would be. As it turned out Linux would have been a better choice as Apple still haven’t made much inroads into the Chinese market (at least not in the province we were in), and the internet connection we ended up getting was faster than Jesse Owens.

After a bit over a year using OS X, I went back to Ubuntu. Using OS X was Ok, never really had a problem with it, but it was a bit like waltzing across the floor with a stylish but slightly forbiding great aunt that one didn’t really want to get ones hands dirty with. So, back to Ubuntu. Used that for a while before feeling adventerous, and missing KDE, I installed KUbuntu. Not a bad operating system, but I had a lot of problems getting Japanese input to work (as others have had), and not finding a solution, went back to Ununtu.

I toyed with giving Fedora 8 a run, but the install DVD I have has a lot of problems and kept crashing at different points during the install. Funny really that even though it has been such a long time since I have looked at that American offspring it really hasn’t changed that much – at least in terms of the installer. Not the prettiest thing out there.

Ubuntu’s installation is pretty easy. One thing though, if you are in Japan and wish to give it a go and you have a fibre optic connection from a provider like Plala through to NTT (like any self-respecting space-cadet) you will need to open up your synaptic package manager and install the pppoe tools which are on the cd, but aren’t installed by default, to get your internet connection working. Running pppoe-config as root from the command line will get things working.

All in all, it is nice to be back. And nice to have Japanese input again. I should catch up on some email now.

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Fountains pens are one of those little luxuries which I particularly enjoy. Feeling the smooth flow of ink across the page is a very pleasurable experience, that despite advances in writing technology over the past 100 years, has still not been replaced. I still remember being terribly proud when my teacher at primary school judged my penmanship good enough to graduate from the humble pencil to a fountain pen. I wonder if children in New Zealand still enjoy this? Or do they go straight from pencil to myspace?

Last weekend we were going book shopping in Yaesu, near Tokyo Station when we stumbled upon the Pilot Pen Museum. There are so many little museums scattered around Tokyo that it can be fun to see what finds when out for a wander. The Pilot Pen Station is a Museum and Cafe with a neat display of writing implements – both produced by Pilot as well as outlining the development of writing instruments through out the ages.

There is a cafe on the first floor, non-smoking through-out. It looked pretty standard for a Japanese cafe and we didn’t try what they had on offer. The museum itself is on the second floor – up a staircase which quite ingeniously traces the history of the Pilot Corporation up each of the steps. One of the highlights of the museum was their collection of maki-e fountain pens. I had seen these before in department stores around Tokyo but didn’t know too much about them. They are made using a special lacquer coating process and then have very beautiful individual designs drawn on them. Very Japanese and beautiful to look at.

The museum is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 5pm and Saturdays 11am to 5pm, closed Sunday and National Holidays. Admission is free and they also accept Pilot brand fountain pens and the more exclusive Namiki brand pens for repairs. The museum is easy to get to – one minute from the Ginza Line Kyobashi Station (if coming from Shibuya), 3 minutes from the Takaracho Station on the Asakusa Line (if coming from Ueno / Asakusa) and 8 minutes walk from the Yaesu Exit of JR Tokyo station.

Having visited the Pilot Pen Station museum I had a bit of a poke around on the internet to see what I could find. Pilot themselves don’t have much of an English website. But I found an interesting interview over at the perennial purveyors of pulsating missives – pingmag – with The God of Fountain Pens. As well as that, I found an informative page about the pen museum at Tokyo Fountain Pen Scene (complete with map). The person responsible for that site also sells fountain pens on ebay – here is his page. He seems to have a good selection of pens for sale. (I have no relation with what he is selling btw).

Finally Pentrace East has quite an indepth guide to fountain pen culture in Tokyo. I didn’t realise there was so much to do related to fountain pens in Tokyo – that page has recommendations for a couple of days of pen related sightseeing in the capital alone!

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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:

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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).

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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!

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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.

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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.

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I have been rather busy recently, and I am sorry for not posting for a while. One thing that I have been doing is trying to get my drivers license. Getting a drivers license in Japan is quite a simple process if one has held a drivers license from a recognised country (such as New Zealand or Australia). In that case, all one needs to do is to get the paperwork translated into Japanese, pass a simple test and then a short driving test on a test course. There is a useful page – Japanese Driver’s License and Driving Test Tips with more information on this if this is your situation.

However, having been away from New Zealand for coming on 8 years, I no longer hold a valid New Zealand drivers license, so the process is a bit more complicated. Much like in New Zealand, one has to go to the Driving Center, pass an eye test, then a written test to get ones learners license. Well at least in New Zealand one would get ones learners license at that point – in Japan one also has to pass a driving test before receiving ones learners license.

The written test for both learners and full licenses is available in English in only 11 of Japan’s 47 prefectures – including Akita, but not, unfortunately Ibaragi (although they have plans to introduce an English version in January or February of 2008). So rather than brave the vagaries of the test in Japanese (my Japanese is good, but I fear not that good), I changed my address to Tokyo (thanks E). One has to be domiciled in the prefecture one takes the test (anachronistic Federal system?) – so by doing that I was able to take the test in English.

The written test for the learners license has 50 questions and one has to get more than 45 to pass. Most of the questions are reasonably straight forward and require only common sense. It is a good idea to pick up the road code published by the Japanese Automobile Federation – get a Japanese friend help you obtain a copy (about 1200 yen).

I have my second try at the driving component next Thursday. The last time I drove was back in New Zealand in 2001 – for about 2 hours, and before that a scooter in Thailand in 1999 (that poor bike!), so I was quite rusty when I got behind the wheel the first time. I failed the test on the level crossing – didn’t quite get the hill start together. I wish I had known then what I found out after that test – one can hire a car at accredited driving schools, and with the holder of a full license in the passenger seat, practice to ones hearts content. This cost us 3500 yen for an hour and was invaluable.

Fingers crossed for my driving test take two next Thursday!

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If you come from one of the cricket playing nations of the world – which makes cricket the worlds second most popular sport after football, or soccer, or whatever you call it, then you will know that the Cricket World Cup is being held in the wonderful West Indies.

Of course with Japan still living in the shadow of their defeat during World War II to the nuclear power of the Americans, baseball is very much the mainstream sport in these isles, so it is a tricky proposition to catch any of what is a very minority sport under the haze of American hegemony. One option of course is to vacate oneself to the delightful isles of the West Indies, although for the rest of us mere mortals the best option remains the internet.

Luckily there is another option – p2ptv. With the SopCast system installed, you will be able to watch not just the World Cup, but a wealth of other programming besides. And it is all free.

SopCast, according to their about us file is:

Sopcast Team built on Dec, 2004 and focus on the research and application on P2P streaming technology. The first website http://www.sopcast.org is very famous in China and many other countries, is linked and introduced by many aboard website especially in Europe . The sop protocols, developed by SopCast Team, has some specifications like security, high efficiency, extendable and make it easy to support huge users to view the online channels in a standalone server.

The question does arise over who gets what from this. I am sure that if this was based in a country of limited freedom, in the intellectual sense, then this would be closed down as fast as one could say “attack Egypt”, “attack Sweden” or “attack Oman” or whatever the current flavour of the month was. The advertisers certainly do benefit from this service. They get eyeballs on logos, brand recognition – everything they could dream for. The channels themselves dont get anything, unless they work it into their marketing plans (their ability to do so remains to be tested – getting ads for Indian insurance companies is wonderful, but I don’t really need their services living here in Japan).

If you want an interesting viewing platform download sopcast. If you thought this post was crap, then you probably want to stick to fox (and I am not going to do you the convenience of linking to them).

Enjoy the fours, sixes, and drunk kiwis in ridiculous costumes.

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Despite being introduced late in the nineteenth century by the British in Yokohama, cricket has never been a big thing in Japan. Baseball has always been more popular – probably as a result of the lower cerebral threshold required to play and watch the game.

I know the Japan Cricket Association (日本語）has been doing an excellent job to develop the game throughout Japan, but I didn’t realise it had spread as far as my little neck of the woods. So I was quite happy to discover that Tsukuba has a cricket team. There is a quite a large international population in the area so it isn’t that surprising.

They have a website up – you can check out the Tsukuba Cricket page here. A quick look at the wicket and it suggests plenty of bounce and movement off the seam early on, with prodigious spin by days four and five – depending on the amount of tape on the tennis ball.

Who knows – if any kiwis out there make double figures in a couple of games they should be a shoe-in for a prestigious place in the much vaunted Black Caps top order.

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