Did you know that Sony products in Japan don’t offer multiple languages? An employee at Bic Camera told me the menus and instructions are only in Japanese… AH HA! Maybe that’s why a lot of Sony products are cheaper than what I am used to in America!

I just bought a Sony DSC-T70. Mainly because it’s small, it’s fast, it has internal zoom, and I’m satisfied with the image quality. The menu is pretty slick. There are nice icons, lots of Katakana, and I also downloaded the English manual form Sony’s website. All it took to get used to it was going through the settings, reading the Katakana, and memorizing a little of the manual. Now I’m golden and I’ve saved about $50. I mean… um… ¥5000…

If you’re interested in this camera:
You can download the English manual and get specs here.
You can read a review here.

And here’s a nice hands on review.

It’s wedding time! I won’t be updating this site… for a while… but I hope to be back soon!

One of the easiest things to find in Japan is a barber shop or hair salon. Barber shops have the old school barber pole in front. Hair salons usually are bright, or trendy, or they have a person outside handing out flyers. I live downtown and a haircut is costs 4000-5000 Yen for men which is a pretty high price for me because I have short hair. I did some exploring and within a 12 minute walk I found a salon for 2800 Yen. Still kind of pricey, but the service is excellent. I did even more exploring and 20 minutes away I found one for 1000 Yen. They’re fast, efficient, and inexpensive which is nice. The more expensive salons take 60-90 minutes to cut my hair because they’re doing it with scissors most of the time and cutting little by little (and that’s fine, because you can always cut shorter but you can’t put it back on!). Here’s a picture outside of my favorite discount barber shop. It seats 3 people inside.

I thought I took a picture of a salon, but I can’t find it. So here’s a repost from my salon that failed post.

I posted back on April 11th about learning Japanese and starting with Hiragana. The following day I went to a Japanese conversational lesson and I had no freaking clue what was going on. The sensei  spoke very little English and the other students were Chinese and were reading Kanji. After class the sensei suggested in a very straight forward way – Learn Hiragana before you come back. That made me smile because she said something that sounds kind of rude while having a very polite tone. The class is weekly so hell yeah I’ll learn Hiragana before next time! So I went home and started learning.

I studied about 2 hours every day and learned almost everything in a week. The next class was way easier to understand and I wrote about half in English, half in Hiragana and it was pretty sweet to be able to read Japanese. It’s like reading some cryptic language… and I feel cool… and now I totally sound like a foreigner by saying that. But it’s all good because now I can read things like “udon” and “karaage” and that’s a step in the right direction in my book.

The next week I focused on kya, gya, and characters like that, so it took about 2 weeks to learn everything. Am I a pro? No. I’m pretty slow when reading words and sometimes I have to think about what the character is but it’s a start! I decided to stop studying and dedicate time to work and our wedding that’s coming up. I still look at my flash cards I made every day and have read things every day so it’s still staying fresh, I’m just not studying every day. That should change on June 1st through!

A little while ago I was talking about my internet speed here in Japan and I must say that today I’m loving it! I downloaded the latest Nine Inch Nails album in about 45 seconds. Not bad for $50 a month internet service! Here’s a screen shot I took.

I mentioned them gym in my post about shrinking. Well, a gym membership is very expensive in Japan. In the U.S. I was a member of Gold’s Gym in the U.S. and paid $25 a month. Before that I paid $50 a month for a bigger gym with more options. Both were open 24 hours a day.

The memberships I’ve found in Japan vary from 6500-10,000 Yen (about $65-100 USD) per month. The hours are 9am-9pm or similar, and I’d rather be at the gym by 7am. There are strange rules like every Thursday it’s closed, or if you pay less you can only be there 1-9pm on the weekdays, or you can have a weekend only memberhsip for 6500, and all holidays the gym is closed. Also you can only pay through a bank account, so you have to open one at the bank they use.

photo credit: takeratta

So let’s break this down… You can’t go on holidays, you can’t go on certain days (like a Thursday, or every other Monday), you can only go around 9am-9pm. What I just mentioned is 8900-10,000 yen per month. So let’s say 10,000 to be safe after taxes and bank fees. If you spend 2 hours total in a gym and go 3 times a week which comes to 24 hours per month you end up paying 416 ($4) per hour to go to the gym. What!? That’s insane. I also asked how much the employees make at one place and they said they start at 800 yen per hour. What!?

By the way, I went to all gyms within a 15 minute walk. Most were full of physically fit people. However I stopped at a place in Fukuoka called American Gym and all of the people inside were freakin’ HUGE! It was an older gym, darker with only a few windows, and felt like people were training for the Strongman competition. Check out the picture of the sign taken by e-chan.

I did some searching, I did some asking, and I visited the very helpful foreigners center in Fukuoka called The Rainbow Center. I found out that each ward has a community center with a gym, basketball court, and other things. My ward’s community center has a small gym with decent equipment. It’s open from 9-9 as well and if you go when it’s open the equipment is available and you don’t have to deal with many people. The price on this… 260 Yen for two hours. That’s what I’m talking about! If you go 3 times a week per month you’re looking at 3120 Yen. It costs an extra 30 yen to use the extremely small locker so everybody just puts their gym bag in the corner of the workout area which is cool with me. This is one of the many deals I’ve found in Japan so far.

Here’s a picture of Gold’s Gym here in Japan taken by charlton_b. It’s always interesting seeing things here that I’ve seen in America.

Here are some pictures I took of a few toilets here in Japan. I find it interesting how they have traditional toilets, then toilets we use in America, and how they have many public toilets.  Right by Tenjin they have a men’s toilet with no door and you walk buy and can see a guy using a urinal. Well, you almost have to look because it takes up about 40% of your view when you pass it. You can’t avoid it. It’s surprising because there’s so much foot traffic and many highschool students getting off the bus just a few meters away. I don’t think anybody should have to see a drunk guy taking a leak at 8pm on a Thursday evening (or any time really).

This is a picture of the urinals. I haven’t seen a mini urinal yet, they’re all huge and they start from the floor and go up about 1 meter or so.

This next one is the style I’m used to, the 2nd is traditional Japanese (or Asian?) style, and the 3rd and 4th are of a public toilet near the river which look pretty sweet (except the litter around it). I was going share the pictures of these two entrances because I thought they look cool, but I thought I’d snap the other ones too so people can see a difference in styles.

I’ve been in Japan for almost 8 months. My diet has changed, I walk a lot more (or further) on a regular basis, and I don’t drink as regularly as I used in the U.S. with my friends (and the bowling league!), and I’m not doing as much manual labor type of things (casual sports, helping friends move stuff, lifting heavy beers, things like this). And about a week ago I realized I am thinning out! I went to the gym here a few times recently and I’m usually a cardio guy but I didn’t feel satisfied at all. It felt like I was just burning away my body instead of keeping me in shape. I’m usually a solid 34 waist but my pants are fitting loose, as if they’re one size too big. My shirts are a little baggier too.

I wasn’t going to talk about it and I was going to fix the problem, but just two days after I noticed this, my fiancee mentioned that I’m getting skinny. She says she wants me to eat more and either get some extra baggage (aka fat) or bulk up. For now I’ll just eat more and after the wedding I’ll hit the gym. I’m 1.9m (6′2″) and 78kg (172lbs). Within a month I hope to stop tall-skinny trend and start working my way back up to 86kg (190lbs). By the way I was 86.5kg when I moved to Japan.

I tend to keep personal aspects of my life… well… personal, but this is a very exciting time in my life so I wanted to share. We’re both really excited and still have a few things to take care of.

I can’t believe it’s in 26 days! In about 20 days some guests from America will arrive so that gives us a little less than three weeks to finish everything up. I know we can handle it and I’ll be memorizing itinerary to help everything go smoothly, but I still need to finalize my vows, I need to write a speech for the reception as well as a few other things I want to say, and memorize some lyrics of a Japanese song for one of our duets (luckily I have the easy part!). We’ve added some events to our wedding, removed some, added some new things.

Mai’s good friend in Tokyo is a designer and has been working on a unique wedding dress since September. I haven’t seen it of course but I hear it looks amazing so far.

How do other foreigners have their wedding in Japan? I’m not quite sure. So far I’ve seen the traditional Japanese wedding with full kimono and I’ve seen the ‘western style’ type of wedding at a chapel or restaurant with a reception dinner following. We’ll be having a western style with a touch of Steve and Mai and our closest friends and relatives will be attending. I’ll probably post some pictures next month.

Cherry blossom trees, or sakura (see more info at Wikipedia) look amazing and this year I got to experience them for the first time ever in my life!

I’ve seen some pictures of the trees, I heard they’re beautiful, I heard they’re romantic, I heard they’re magical, but I didn’t hear about the crazy drunken madness at night! We went to experience Hanami (flower viewing, enjoying tasty bento similar to this) at Ohori koen (means… Ohori park). I thought I was in for a romantic sakura viewing… but in fact… it was more of a fun time packed full of people, mostly drunk office workers, with some romantic moments in the quiet areas (near the temple).

The road to the park was lined up with vendors selling things from chocholate covered bananas to takoyoki (a grilled octopus dish). There were some families with kids running around having a good time and couples eating bento together, and then… there were tons of drunk people with sake, sho chu, and grills. Apparently the people under the trees brought tarps in advance and 1-2 people reserved their spot. Each cluster seemed to stay within their group of people which is good when family + drunk people are mixed.

We took some pictures but most of them ended up blurry and I took a lot of video which I haven’t taken off the camera. Here are a few of the decent pictures from that night.

If I had to sum up this experience in one sentance I’d say… it was like a tailgating party for the sakura football game. Ahh… good times, good times.

Tags: cherry blossoms, japanese cherry blossom trees, sakura