One week ago today, I gave a talk about my monitor tour at an International Fair in Imabari City. The local media came out and did a story on it. Here’s my amateur slapdash attempt at translating the newspaper article that was published in the morning edition of the Ehime Newspaper last Tuesday. Many thanks go to reporter Fumihito Tawa for coming out and covering the event. I’d also like to proffer my thanks to the photographer who snapped that incredible “A-ha!” finger pointing gesture. The team made me look good! Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.

Caption: Mr. Richardson (right), an American whose theme was using foods like yakitori in a plan for promoting tourism in Imabari City.

Enjoy Imabari Even More

Increase the amount of foreign language information on websites to promote short-stay food tourism

Proposed by a sightseeing foreigner

Let’s rediscover Imabari’s tourist attractions from a foreigner’s point of view. The International Fair hosted by the Imabari City International Exchange Association (ICIEA), took place on the 7th at the JA Saisaikiteya farmer’s market, where the townspeople were able to learn about local attractions as well as ideas for drawing foreign tourists to the area.

The ICIEA received a request from the city, and so set out on a project to have 7 foreign residents undertake monitor tours from June of 2009 to February of 2010. The fair was designed to showcase the results of these tours for the people of Imabari CIty.

Deas Richardson (26), an American assistant language teacher, said of food tourism with a focus on Imabari’s famous yakitori, “Of course it is not really a reason unto itself to visit, but it could easily be a reason to stop (here) on the way to another destination.” He expanded upon his ideas, putting emphasis on using short term stays centered around culinary attractions to bolster tourism to the area.

He also raised the example of websites which anyone can edit (wikis) and are frequently used by foreign travelers, citing the fact that the city’s English and Chinese language information was scarce. He encouraged the audience, saying, “The Japanese page introduces yakitori, but there is no explanation in English or Chinese. Since anyone can contribute information as a volunteer, I would really like us to try to do so.”

Mr. Martin Samoy (44), a Belgian photographer who has lived in Imabari for 15 years, presented some of his pictures of scenery around the city. Mr. Samoy’s acquaintance and coworker, Ms. Mizumi Ide (5), also of Imabari, said “I was moved by the way that he photographed landscapes so familiar and ordinary to Japanese people with a fresh perspective.”（Fumihito Tawa）

Hey – here’s a post to answer the obvious (and totally fair) question: “Dude, you just said you were back to blogging and went radio silent again. What the heck is up with that?” Well, I’m wrapping up a huge project that has spanned about a full year. It’s a project put on by the city government and the local international association in an attempt to glean some useful information about how we can increase foreign tourism to Imabari City. If you’re in the Imabari area and you’d like to come, you can get a flyer in the city. (I might be able to upload one later, but it’s the same as the images you see.) For those who want to cut right to the nitty gritty, here’s the deal.

Where – Saisaikiteya
When – March 7th (Sunday), from 9 AM to 3 PM
What – Videos and pictures from monitor tours, a 30 minute presentation by yours truly, a slideshow by a professional photographer, a live radio talk show event, a piano “live” performance, a kids quiz & craft bonanza.
Why – To discuss how to increase foreign tourism, of course. But also to receive the free handdrawn English map of Imabari and to enjoy the international cooking demonstration. ICIEA Eco-bags are also being given to those who answer a survey.

Hope I see you there! And hope I can get back online once this mega-project is over!

Check out this image from the UK’s Daily Mail. It’s from a pretty big protest rally against the American military base situation in Okinawa, but with a distinctly Japanese twist. I’m not interested in the pre-printed cards that were distributed. I am interested in the hand drawn cardboard one on the right side of the frame. It reads as follows.

福は内〜！平和は内〜！基地は外〜！！
グアムに沖縄に日本に米軍基地は居坐るな！迷惑だ！帰ってくれ！！

***

Fuku wa uchi! Heiwa wa uchi! Kichi wa soto!
Guamu ni Okinawa ni Nihon ni beigun kichi wa isuwaru na! Meiwaku da! Kaette kure!!

***

Luck in! Peace in! Military bases out!
American military bases in Guam, Okinawa, and Japan, do not remain! It is troublesome! Go home!!

This is obviously modeled on the customary Setsubun holiday ritual of 豆撒き or mamemaki – throwing soy beans and chasing ogres out of one’s home by yelling 「鬼は外！福は内！」(Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!) or “Demons out! Luck in!”. People have been pretty heated up over the base situation for a long time now. I’m curious about whether it really implies a few things or not, though: that the American military is a bunch of friendly demon ogres (big step up from foreign barbarians if you ask me), that Okinawa is not part of Japan, and that Guam is upset about the military base there? Perhaps the delineation of Okinawa and Japan was kind of like “Okinawa and mainland Japan”? I dunno. But I found this interesting, and thought you might too!

Let me first start out by saying that this preview for Fox’s Human Target came to my attention back in May, but I figured I should wait a bit since the actual show won’t start until fall. Upcoming disappointment? I’m not sure. I know it’s based on a comic book, but I’ve no idea how good the comic is, or if this show will even come close to replicating it anyway. If Mark Valley’s supposed to be fluent in any number of other languages, we could feel the giddy excitement that comes from watching him maul them too. If it’s just Japanese, I’ve got to say that the actors in Heroes have totally whooped his behonkus. You can watch the actual full trailer from Fox Broadcasting below.

The show looks kind of fun, sure. I’m going to watch it, if for no other reason than to listen for any other horrendous Japanese lines. Gotta love the possible connotation of the elderly Japanese dude’s words to him, though, right? 「あなたの日本語はどこで習いましたか？」and「日本語上手ですね。」OUCH. The classic response. I’m kind of thrilled a bit that it was included in a realistic way. Ha ha.
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If anyone out there is a better listener than I am, please feel free to take a crack at the word that he said that I’ve got down as 《ふしょうねん？》in the captions. I have no clue what that was supposed to be. Admittedly, my vocabulary needs work, so if you can parse what he’s saying please leave a comment and I’ll correct the captions. I’d appreciate it. It’s gnawing away at me…and I’ve watched that clip more times than necessary…

Uh-oh, here comes trouble. Some people flipped out when I ate whale meat, and now I’m eating horse. If you’re against it, that’s cool – but please don’t yell at me for it! I get that it freaks some people out. But to me, it’s a culinary adventure. One that’s not possible in North America. Ha ha. Just FYI – I’m slammed this week, so posting may be slight. Apologies in advance! Ok, if you want your say, have it in the comments! Just keep it friendly, folks.

Even if you’ve never been, you’re probably already familiar with the site. It was featured in Memoirs of a Geisha. It was also the inspiration for the art installation “The Gates” by Christo and Jean-Claude. The epic arrangement of Shinto gates (鳥居 / torii) packed so tightly together creates an amazing, surreal illusion – you feel as though you’re walking through an otherworldly hallway.

I’ve been to Fushimi Inari Taisha 4 or 5 times now, and it sure doesn’t get old. It’s sort of like Miyajima in that it stands apart from other shrines and temples. If that sort of thing isn’t up your alley, you may find yourself thinking “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” You won’t get that feeling here. Visiting at different times of day, in different seasons, etc. all change the scenery drastically.

I included Fushimi Inari in my old student travelogue from my study abroad days. You can see a video clip that I put together by clicking here (it will open in an overlay) or by visiting the original. I also wrote about it a few years ago when I spent Christmas vacation in Kyoto at the J-Hoppers hostel with friends, including J-Web vlogger/blogger Claytonian.

If you do go, I recommend taking the extra time to wander up to the upper loop past the lakes. I love the view at the top – you can even see Kyoto Tower. Most people tend to go a little bit into it and turn back, imagining that things look the same all the way up. The truth is, the scenery changes. Fox statues, mini-torii and all sorts of devotionals, incense burners, and the like are scattered throughout the area. Perhaps you’ll meet and befriend a shrine cat there like I’ve done on more than one occasion.

The theme for this Japan Blog Matsuri was “your favorite place in Japan.” It’s being hosted by Shane at the Nihon Sun.

Some of you may have recently noticed that I’m a fan of Ubuntu, thanks to the countdown to version 9.04 and OS logo at the bottom of my sidebar and my post about the Ubuntu Manga PR. I’m a complete newcomer to the world of Linux, but I now use Ubuntu on my Asus Eee PC 1000HA netbook, installed alongside Windows XP. They’re set up so that I share a large chunk of space for files accessible from either OS. I thought I’d briefly explain how I did that in case anyone out there is curious. (Short version: this is a geek post.) Read more if you’re still interested! Normal posts will resume soon for the non-geeks, so don’t worry. I’m just in tinkering mode lately.

As I mentioned, I’m a complete newbie at this stuff – so seasoned folks may giggle as they read my words. But my fresh eyes might be appreciated by other new-to-Linux folks, so here goes. I started searching around for partition schemes as I awaited delivery of my netbook, and found that this page on Psychocats was really helpful. I modeled my partition scheme after it. The original version is above, my specific version is below. Click on them for larger versions (and visit Psychocats for some excellent pre-ext4 format alternative partitioning schemes). The Psychocats method works well if you’ve got full control of your hard drive. But I had a recovery partition and a physical extension that I didn’t want to delete on my Asus Eee PC 1000HA.

I needed to plan out the partitioning – my hard drive had three partitions from the get-go, upon unboxing – the Windows XP installation, the recovery partition (handy since I have no optical drive), and the Physical Extension (which I believe enables a speedier boot when using the factory settings). That means I could only expand my options by resizing the Windows installation and adding one new partition. How to fit four into the space of one? Well, I just used extended partitioning! If you look at the image above, you’ll see that my second partition is really just an umbrella for the shared space, the home directory, the Ubuntu installation, and the Swap space. (I couldn’t put a swap partition at the end of the drive. So I simply dropped it at the end of the second partition instead.)

Look confusing? It’s not, but it takes some analysis for a beginner like me. Let’s take a quick gander at how I keep it all straight. Ok? First – once you’ve repartitioned, install Ubuntu. You should specify the Home directory partition if you want to try that out. (It lets you do fresh installs without losing your settings for most stuff, in theory. Worked about 75% for me during the last upgrade I did.) Ubuntu will automatically install the GRUB boot menu – a boring screen that will pop up when you turn your computer on to let you choose from the OSes you’ve got installed. So you can choose whether to enter Windows or Ubuntu. Easy.

Once you’re in Ubuntu, you’ll want to be able to access your files. I am using the shared partition as my primary storage area. I set up my fstab file (located at /etc/fstab) to automatically mount the shared partition upon startup. You can tell it to mount partitions anywhere you want – it’s kind of awesome, actually. For instance, first I created a Music folder on the shared partition, then I remapped the Windows XP “My Music” folder to point at the new folder on the shared partition. Similarly, I set up fstab to auto-mount the shared partition (as /mnt/disk), and then I created a shortcut to the shared music folder (/mnt/disk/Music) in my Home folder so that I can access it from all my menus. Do this for the other folders on the shared drive and the result is that I can access any file from both OSes. The coolest implementation so far is that I installed ScummVM on both OSes and left all the ROMs on the shared partition – I can access not only the ROMs, but also all my saved games from both sides of my system. You can’t tell me that’s not cool. (Well, you can, but you’d be wrong. So there.) You might remember ScummVM from my ongoing Loom posts.

Here’s the relevant line that I added to my fstab file, for those who are trying to duplicate my setup or augment their own. You can see above that /dev/sda5 is the shared chunk of space. If you’re thinking of playing around with fstab, BACK IT UP first. Always, always, always.

/dev/sda5 /mnt/disk vfat defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 2

Voila, shared space. If I can figure out a good way to record my setup, I’ll try to put up a screencast eventually. I’m really loving how it works for me at present. I imagine that I’ll only become further enchanted with it as I learn how to customize it more and more to my liking. I also mount the Physical Extension, just so it doesn’t show up on the drop down Places list as external media every time I start up. Ha ha. I can’t figure out how to auto-mount the Windows partition, though. That’s my only current hangup. It winds up sitting there, visible (and mountable) as a 30 GB drive…but it refuses to auto-mount when I put it in fstab. I’m not sure why. Maybe someone can give me some pointers?

Do you dual boot? What’s your setup? Remember all you Linux pros, I’m a newbie. Please use language I can understand. Ha ha. My to-do list for the rest of the day includes attempting to customize the GRUB menu, see if I can’t get those cool Compiz screenlets that I saw Bobby H running, fiddle with screen capture, try installing some Microsoft fonts for Roman and Japanese characters (including Meiryo!), and sort out whether letting Nautilus draw one wallpaper to avoid the super slow fade in as Compiz starts up after login (I’m doing the 4 different wallpapers / no desktop icons trick…but there’s got to be a better way…). Any other tweaks that you recommend out there?

As you can see, I have paid on average ¥81,425 each month towards my college loans. (It’s aggressive on purpose.) That’s where most of my monthly money goes. Allow me to point out that for both of these charts the value given to the Housing category is weighted incorrectly, yet accurate. I paid several months’ worth of rent in January. My actual rent is ¥19,000 / month plus water usage fees (which are separate from hot water fees – regular fees are around ¥1,000 monthly for me, while hot water fees hit at about ¥3,800 each month). In short, “Housing” looks twice as big as it really is. But it’s accurate, because I actually did pay enough to skew it. Ha ha.

Food is the most surprising cost to me. I spend nearly the same on Food as I do on Trips each month. To date, I’ve spent ¥158,255 on food this year. Unreal. I had no idea eating costed so much. I’ve especially noticed how much each trip to the vending machine costs. I’m going to see if I can’t cut this substantially by joining the coffee pool at work (one time ¥500 versus ¥120 for each can of coffee that tastes bad anyway), and by eliminating silly snacks when I buy lunch – which would be a good thing anyway. I’m not sure what my Entertainment expenditure says about me… A mere monthly average of ¥5,498, or a cumulative ¥21,992 over 4 months. Yikes. I obviously have no life. Half of that was spent on presents for other people! Ha ha. This is where rural Japan helps you save. When there is nothing to do, you don’t spend money on entertainment, I guess. I get most of my entertainment online these days.

Let’s take a look at the percentage of my gross income that I spend by category. Remember, the housing slice will shrink eventually to half its current size. I’m really encouraged when I look at this and remember that the Transportation, Food, Utilities, and Housing categories are the only rigid ones. I must spend on these without much leeway. The rest is all flexible! The rest can be adjusted at a moment’s notice! I can’t tell you how nice it is to realize this. Before I started tracking my spending habits, I always “knew” how much I needed to get by – but now that I watch it, I know just how small the number is. I can live on ¥80,000 yen a month. The rest is freely adjustable. I happen to choose to travel (while I can!), and pay off loans with a large amount of it. Other folks do different things.

Do you track your expenses? Do you have any questions about what I’ve written so far? Leave me a comment, and I’ll answer as best I can – but I reserve the right to not make public every little detail. Ha ha. Please keep reading past the fold to see the descriptions of the categories I used for the tracking and the charts. These categories cover 100% of my expenditures. If something doesn’t fit, it goes into the catch-all “Miscellaneous” category.

Unplanned Savings – this is the money that I don’t spend, which rolls over to be spent in the next month. It’s helpful to calculate this for cash flow and balancing purposes. But it’s perhaps a little odd to call it “savings.” If this number is negative, it just means I had a negative cash flow for a month – it doesn’t mean I’ve gone into debt.

Planned Savings – the embarrassingly small amount of money that I’m tossing in a savings account. It’ll grow once I’ve phased out the smaller of my 2 student loan tabs. Right now it’s juuust about at 10% of my income. :shy:

Utilities – Electricity, Gas (cooking), NTT Phone Service, Docomo Cellular Service, Hot Water, Yahoo! BB Internet Service, Drycleaning

Food – Pretty self-explanatory. Groceries and lunches are included, some dinners out are not.

Insurance – I ride a scooter, and insurance costs a mere ¥10,000 per year. I paid 2 years ago. Will pay again shortly, but that’s why it’s at 0% right now. Health, etc. is covered by various other means.

Transportation – Gas (scooter), bridge tolls, ferry tickets, train tickets, oil changes, job-related airfare.

Personal Care – Toiletries, clothing.

Entertainment – Anything just for fun – including the non-Food dinners, like enkais.

Miscellaneous – Catch-all category for stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Trips – Includes domestic and international travel, but does not include work-related travel.

Loans – Student loans, obviously. Darn them. Darn them to heck.

Housing – Rent.

These graphs were made using the raw output of the 2009 expense tracker spreadsheet that I got from Presh Talwalker (whose name sounds like something out of Star Wars) plugged into the Google Spreadsheet’s graphing utility. Being a cool guy, Presh helped me troubleshoot his free spreadsheet for use in Google Docs and modify it a bit. Thanks to him, my New Year’s resolution is still holding strong – how many of my readers can say that, I wonder? – and I’m far more knowledgeable about my spending habits. Cool huh?

How cool is this? There’s a free manga out there about the Ubuntu Linux distribution. I assume it’s a PR thing, but you should totally check it out! It’s a free Creative Commons Licensed PDF download away, and it’s available in Japanese AND English (and Spanish, Portuguese, French, Indonesian, Russian, Vietnamese, Italian, Thai, and Korean so far), for those studious readers out there. Odds are that if you’re an Ubuntu fan (I’m writing this on my Ubuntu OS based Eee PC 1000 netbook, so I count), then you’ve likely already seen this. If you’ve never heard of Ubuntu before, or think Linux is scary, this is a great way to introduce you to a free operating system. Why not check it out?

(I will remove these hotlinks after a few days and leave only the links to the sources developing the translations. The file names will likely change, and it’s semi-bad manners even for free distribution stuff, etc.)

(An example frame, side by side, for comparison.)

I often wonder about Linux’s popularity in Japan. I’ve known 2 other people in Japan who use it at all. Aaron, a former CIR who now localizes games, originally encouraged me to try Linux (Ubuntu was the “flavor” he favored at the time, dunno what distro he’s toying with nowadays). Then there’s a non-English teacher (no idea what he teaches, but it’s not English) at one of my high schools who I’ve caught playing with Fedora at work. To his shock (and horror?), I knew what it was and enthusiastically encouraged him to continue toying with it. I honestly can’t imagine Japan’s average workplace without old, crappy leased Windows machines. But I wish I could! Think of the yen that would be saved. Think of the pocket change to be saved. Ha ha. It’s mind boggling.

If you happen to use Ubuntu already, and you’re curious about Japanese input options, let me point you to this thread. It’s a little dated, but it worked on Ubuntu 8.10 for me just the same. It helped me install Anthy (like Microsoft IME or Atok) and some helpful fonts. Once I set it all up, I find it easier to type in Japanese in Ubuntu than I do on Windows. The only thing that’s not as accurate is maybe the handwriting recognition for kanji lookups. I’ve found another page here that might be helpful if you’re interested in the differences between SCIM and UIM. (That’s not scary, but it sounds scary. Like a lot of Linux stuff.)

Via DoctorMO which was linked by GeekDad, who got the attention of BoingBoing.