Delinquent

Apologies to you all for my inexcusable delinquency in updating this site. As it turns out, since my last post life here has been - dare I say - normal? For me, there hasn't been outstanding things that I felt worthy of blogging about. Wait, that isn't entirely true. I simply have gotten complacent and expectant with life in Japan and don't recognize a good blog opportunity now, as well as I did before.

For example, I would be remiss if I didn't make note of and congratulate my American friends for their impressive and inspirational recent election. We could have used a result like this some time ago (we being the rest of the world), but nonetheless you stood together and collectively asked for change. In Canada, we too had a chance to do just that, but instead opted for "status quo" (more or less). The Canadian election result, unlike the optimistic American result, appears to have been a questionable decision.

Of course we were glued to the CBC online news feed as the Canadian election results came in here in Japan. There wasn't much "hype" in Sapporo over the Canadian election, as you could imagine. The American results, however, were a different story. We attended a party at a bar run by an American guy that night. He was delighted with the news and put on a beer special that couldn't be beat, videotaped the election coverage and we all sat in his small windowless bar drinking beer in silence as we heard the now-famed Obama speech. Lots of people cried, the gathering was mostly American but there were smatterings of other countries there too. We sat at a table with a woman from Georgia (the American state, not the country), a couple from Australia, and a guy from England. And of course, there were a couple tables of Japanese people who starred in utter amazement watching how much we all cared about what we were seeing on the television. It was certainly a unique experience to see both of these elections covered through online news here in Japan.

Now, Japan has also had a recent change in political leadership. In September, Japan's Prime Minister at the time, Fukuda, announced that the financial crisis, among other things, was too much to handle and he was quitting (sound ominously familiar Canada?). So, amazingly, Fukuda steped down from leadership (who knew you could just quit because it was too hard?) and was replaced by Taro Aso. So Japan is now under the leadership of PM Aso. I wonder how Canadians have been using the same name for our leader?

OK, ok, enough politics - but I really had to share the Prime Minister Aso joke! The holidays are around the corner and I hope everyone has fun and relaxing booked into their schedules. Similar to Canadian office Christmas parties, Japan has "end of the year" office parties (called bonenkai in Japanese). Our lab group will have our bonenkai today in a resort town called Joznakei. We go to a big hotel there that has a waterpark and great onsen and hang out overnight and return the next day. I will be sure to update the blog with the antics from this year's bonenkai.

In the mean time, here is a link to our lab website. I was only recently sent this page myself, otherwise I would have passed it on sooner. If you don't have an asian font pack loaded on the computer you are using, you may only see non-sense characters on this page. Unfortunately, the site is in Japanese so I can't read most of it, but you can click on my name (lower center box) to get to some English.