Full Blog Archive

  • Japanese Room

    The Japanese room in our flat is finally complete. This room had the most thorough refurbishment, with a new floor (well, new tatami mats), completely redone walls, and a new ceiling. It was delayed because stripping the old wallpaper turned out to be a much bigger job than anticipated. The walls are white, but painted…

  • Formally Representative

    On Sunday, we had the first formal meeting of the Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. The program was simple, but all of it was important, and all of it got done. First, we all received our formal notices of appointment from the deputy mayor of Kawasaki. This was when we officially became representatives, with a…

  • Kiyoharai Shiki

    Last Sunday, the evening before we moved in to the new flat, I asked the priest of the local shrine (Shirahata Hachiman Daijin) to come to perform a purification ritual for us. The Japanese name is “Kiyoharai Shiki”, which means, roughly “Cleansing Purification Ritual”. People who read Tamao will remember that Akiko and Shiraishi did…

My Old Pages

These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.