Category: Japan
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Registration, Part One
A couple of days ago, I went to the Ward Office to get Mayuki properly registered in Japan. She now has her Japanese birth certificate, and is, or will soon be, registered on Yuriko’s family record, which proves that she is Japanese. (I don’t get properly registered there; I’m just a footnote.) The next step…
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What’s in a Name?
Quite a few people have asked me where Mayuki’s name came from, and Japanese names work a bit differently from Western ones, so I think it might be worth explaining here. Japanese law only allows people to have two names, a given name and a family name. The family name is determined by the name…
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Koshien
High school baseball is really, really popular in Japan. It’s not just that lots of boys play it, although that’s certainly true; the annual national competitions are televised live, and are often the main news items while they are happening. There are two, one in spring and one in summer, and the summer one is,…
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Still Warm
Yesterday, the highest recorded temperatures reached 40.9 degrees, in two places; that’s the highest temperature ever recorded in Japan. Today seems, to me at least, to have been a bit cooler, although maybe I’m just getting used to it. Maybe tomorrow morning the news will tell us that it reached 41 today. The news this…
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It’s a Bit Warm
The first item of news on the morning TV show this morning was about the weather. Temperatures in the Kanto area (around Tokyo) reached 40 degrees Centigrade (that’s about 104 Farenheit) yesterday, and were predicted to be similar today. Yesterday saw the seventh highest temperature recorded in Japan since records began. It is, indeed, a…
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Catching Up
I’ve let the blog slip a bit this week (book reports get written in advance, in case you hadn’t guessed), but today I have a bit of space, so this entry will be a quick overview of what we’ve been up to. On Monday, we had another appointment at the clinic, and got to see…
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Ante-Natal Class
Yesterday we had another antenatal class, this one at the clinic where Yuriko will be giving birth. As a result, it had a very different focus from the ones provided by the city. It had almost nothing to say about post-birth child rearing, focusing on the final stages of pregnancy and the birth itself. I…
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Japanese Elections
Yesterday were the elections for the Upper House of the Japanese Diet. They were rather more exciting than usual, because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party did not win. The largest party in the upper house is now the Democratic Party (formed by a merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party a few years…
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Earthquake not here again
At about a quarter past ten this morning, there was a major earthquake in Niigata Prefecture. Niigata Prefecture is some way north of here, on the Japan Sea coast of Japan, and we didn’t even feel it; I found out from the new headlines on my cell phone. It was an upper 6 on the…
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Rain
Today, it rained all day. Quite heavily. None of this “rain before seven, fine by eleven” rubbish. Now, it is true that we are currently in the middle of rainy season, but that’s not the reason. The reason is typhoon number 4. This is the first major typhoon of this season (which, I think, is…