Three day trip in Hokkaido!

I am back from Hokkaido and I want to get a record down of all we did and saw.  In short, it was a wonderful trip.

Tetsu and I were up and out of the house by 5:30 in the morning and he took me to the next town over to meet the airport bus to Haneda International airport.  Three of my friends, Eiko, Hiroko and Kaoru, had already caught the bus a few stops ahead of me and so we all waved goodbye to Tetsu and were on our three hour way to the airport.  It was a rainy day in our part of Japan but it didn't look like it was going to affect our trip.  Along the way we kept getting messages from the other two members of our group who were making their own way to Haneda.  Sachiko, from the Nagoya area and Mari, from Tokyo.

Yeah!  The 6 of us were together! We occasionally get to see Mari-san (in the white jacket,) but we haven't seen Sachiko-san since our last trip in 2024.

We checked in and went to our boarding area to wait.  As an aside note...  We all cleverly were traveling with small carry-on bags so that there we could move quickly and not have to go collect luggage... EXCEPT for Kaoru-san who is our seasoned traveler!  SHE sent her luggage on ahead of us directly to the hotel!  She was completely hands-free during this trip!  Letting you know, anyone who comes to Japan, this is a normal way to travel in Japan!  There are delivery services that will come to your door and pick up your luggage the day before and the luggage will be waiting for you in your hotel room (or the airport etc.)  OR you can send you luggage from the delivery center at the airport and have the luggage at your front door the next day!  A few years ago I thought I was going to be able to use a similar service in America, to send my luggage on ahead to Takumi's house while Tetsu and I continued traveling to visit Leiya, and I found out that there isn't a delivery service at the LAX airport (or any airport in the States?)  I had to have Takumi drive two and a half hours from his house just to pick up two suitcases (and of course he had to drive 2 1/2 hours back home) while Tetsu and I continued on with our transfer flight to Indiana...  Just letting you know you don't have to lug around luggage in Japan!

While waiting in Haneda, there was an announcement that our plane would be taking off 15 minutes late because Prince Akishinomiya and his wife were flying out on their government airplane to Norway to attend the former Norwegian king's funeral.  There they go! (the plane with the red dot on it's tail.)

Yeah!  We've arrived in Sapporo!

After a brief stop at the hotel to check-in, we headed off to find lunch and to do some sightseeing.  The first stop was to eat some Sapporo Ramen.  And then we visited the renovated Former Government Office Building called Akarenga (Red Brick).

This first evening we enjoyed the night view of Sapporo from a TV tower, but it had begun to rain so there wasn't much to take photos of...  On the way back to our hotel we stopped for dinner and ice cream!

Breakfast at the hotel the next morning was a buffet filled with delicacies, with lots of seafood choices as Hokkaido is famous for all sorts of great seafood!

And then we were off for the highlight of our Hokkaido visit, a trip to an Ainu museum and park called Upopoy, situated on historical Ainu grounds.  

Ainu are the indigenous people of Japan, and the museum's purpose is to protect what little is left of the language, customs and culture of the Ainu people.  It was such a fascinating place!

The weather was wonderful (whereas the rest of Japan was having horrendous rain storms that were flooding cities and stopping train lines), and it was a lot warmer than I'd expected Hokkaido to be!

The park covered quite an area but this little tram ran around the nearby lake and a few of us chose to move around that way while others of us got a bit of extra exercise.  Do you see the designs on the tram?  They are based on Ainu designs found in wood carvings and on clothing and I fell in love with and many patterns seen everywhere.

Even on vending machines!

We saw some Ainu dancing and heard their eerie voices and musical instruments that call up the images of wild animals and open spaces...  The dancers wore costumes similar to this one, mostly in browns and blues and reds.

Here is another example.  The designs remind me of celtic designs and even Guatamalan Mola designs!

There were workshops and a few of us tried our hand at embroidering Ainu designs.  Another workshop was on wood carving and another on the Ainu language.  We even tried out bow and arrow shooting!

And how is this!  I got a chance to try on one of the Ainu gowns!

The village was so picturesque!

So of course I had to try and paint it.

Another ice cream break!

We were running out of energy but we still had one more place to see on our itinerary.  Mt. Moiwa!

We took a ropeway up to the top of the mountain overlooking the city to see the sparkling lights below. This was especially exciting for me to see because this is the place where Takumi proposed to Julieta in 2019!

So romantic!

From Mt. Moiwa, we went out to dinner and had another great meal with a lot of seafood!  We all shared the big fish!

Our last day in Hokkaido we visited Hokkaido University and wandered around the beautiful campus for a couple of hours.

The campus seems to be well used by the local nursery school because there were loads of little children dressed in matching smocks playing by the quiet stream that runs through the university.  After a short rest AND MORE ICE CREAM we caught a train to the airport outside of Sapporo.

And here we were flying back to Tokyo!

These were all the sketches I did of our Hokkaido trip that I put together into a collage.

And this was a spread I now have in my bullet journal so that I'll always remember our wonderful trip.  

Hope you enjoyed my three days in Hokkaido!

September has rolled around

It is a rainy day here today and the forecast for tomorrow, Monday, is that there will be heavy rains so school has already been canceled for all Nikko elementary and jr. high schools.  I'm hoping the weather will clear by Tuesday because I'm taking a flight to Hokkaido for three days with some friends!  Hopefully I'll have something to write about when I get back.

I'm looking forward to this trip but I'm a bit concerned too because this past week Tetsu hasn't been able to walk well!  He has always liked fiddling around in his garden and has always taken upon himself to do the weed whacking up and down the road in front of us.  I nag him to get out of the sun or forget the road as it's not his responsiblity but he basically ignores me and goes ahead... and looks for his chance to go outside and attack nature when I'm out of the house.  Well, one day a couple of weeks ago he decided that a whole block of lower branches needed to be cut back along the road, and he managed to  injure his shoulder.  Even so, a couple of days later, he wanted to get outside, and figured he could just quietly do some weeding in our yard sitting in a low chair.  He didn't realize that without the use of his shoulder it would be hard for him to get up and down from the low chair position (and he was getting up and down throwing buckets of weeks into the forest) and three hours later (I was out of the house again that day) he had strained both knees and has since then been unable to walk...  And the pain in his knees and shoulder leaves him unable to sleep etc. and it just keeps spiraling.  He did go to a doctor and he is being tested for rheumatism now... 

Despite all this, I'm still planning to leave him on his own to go on this girls' trip my friends and I have planned for months...  Tetsu can still drive and limp along to the pool so he claims he'll be alright.  I've arranged for the vet to board John though while I'm away as Tetsu would never be able to pick him up to go in and out for potty trips... John has his own weak leg issues... Sigh...

During the sweltering hot summer, M-san and I opted to stay out of the hot sewing room and we did some floral zentangling with Kelli Blouin's website..  I cut up some papers into 3 1/2 inch squares and each week we zentangled two or three floral patterns and in the end we each had a L-O-N-G garden of zentangle flowers.  That was sort of fun but now it's back to sewing.

I have been doing some buttonhole applique on this quilt while sitting in the air-conditioning.  Mrs. N had wanted to make this quilt and I thought I should try at least one block so I could tell her the steps.  I sort of got carried away and went ahead and made the whole quilt.  This is from Lynette Anderson's "It's Quilting Cats and Dogs" book.  I don't know when Mrs. N is going to get started on this but at least I know it can be done.

This was my illustrated pun for the Senior's English class that I help teach.  For the class I drew something similar on the white board but as I only had black, blue, and red markers it wasn't half as much fun...  The students liked it.

This is a humorous page now in my bullet journal that I thought about doing in the Seniors' class but decided that it might be a bit risque and too hard to explain to the class...  But I had a laugh.  I put this in my journal because I went bra shopping the other day.  I went to the department store in the next town over because I know there I'll get help with sizing, and customers are treated royally.  I got to the department store before it opened and was standing at the doors when it was unlocked to let the public in...  All the department store clerks stand at their stations along the aisles and bow to you as you make your way across the store.  I felt just like the queen walking past her subjects as every few feet someone else standing at attention would make a deep bow from the waist as I passed by!  Arriving at the ladies' undergarments' section, I was directed to a carpeted and curtained fitting room and the sales woman donned her white kid gloves and proceeded to ask my preferences, take measurements, compare them with the measurments someone had recorded in their computer the year or so before (I always buy my bras at the same shop) and then she ran back and forth throughout the shop pulling things that I might like, getting different sizes, giving opinions on fit, etc.  It's quite nice not to have to keep pulling clothes off and on to go search for oneself.  

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Leiya's family is enjoying their new life in Indianapolis...

I love this picture of Tony and the boys!

And that's about it for the past two weeks...  

I'll be back with photos and stories from Hokkaido.  Keep Tetsu in your thoughts!
 

Most of August!

We are surviving the summer but very grateful for the rainy days we have.  They can get a bit strong sometimes and the area where we live is famous for thunder and lightning so we've even lost power a couple of times but there has been no major damage to our town.  Other places in Japan have not fared so well with major flooding in the cities.  It seems as if Japan is always recovering from typhoons or heavy rains or earthquakes...

Whenever I can, I enjoy the airconditioning and at the beginning of summer I started some crochet.  Unfortunately it is going slowly and I have a feeling that I'm not going to get the summer sweater I was hoping to make for myself done before autumn...  I don't even remember what I'd done to my back (that memo by my sketch) but it cleared up pretty quickly.

In my last post I showed a picture of a small Japanese character panel that was my trial run before I started on the real thing.  Well, I got the four panels done for a church group and though there were a few things I experimented with for the first time, I think everyone was happy with the results.  I traced the characters of the original artist (from our church) and bonded those to some kimono fabric from a kimono I'd torn apart and sewn with before.  It was interesting to me that though the first and third characters and the second and fourth characters are actually the same, the artist had calligraphed them a bit differently so I tried to stay true to the original artist.  I free-hand machine quilted the characters down, and got to thinking about border and binding...  

Though Japanese calligraphy is usually done in pitch black sumi ink, the panels seemed a bit drab and so I tore into ANOTHER kimono that I had, red this time and followed YouTube to make flange binding.  That was fairly successful and then I decided to add a family seal of the original artist on the front of the last panel which is the custom.  I had Tetsu draw me out the man's name on a small square of fabric and then I embroidered that and hand appliqued it to a red square and added those to the panel.  

Tetsu had also written out the man's first name and I had embroidered that too and see-sawed between which "seal" to use on the front and once I'd decided to use the last name, it seemed a waste to throw out the "seal" of the man's first name so I used that on my label on the back of one of the panels.  This was a very rewarding project that suddenly fell in my lap and I am so happy I got a chance to put my thinking cap on to make these panels for the church group!

I have a bit of a complicated story about the results from Tetsu's colonoscopy which I wrote about in the last post.  He had his procedure, the doctor removed a polyp, he went back a week later so get the lab results from the polyp.  I waited at home and didn't give it too much thought as the doctor had said a week earlier that there was probably nothing to worry about.

Well, Tetsu sent a message to my phone just as I was sitting down to lunch.  Did you ever notice that when these messages come in, only one or two lines of the whole message flashes on your screen in a notification?  Then you open up the message and can read the complete communication.  Did you ever notice that?  I never had but anyway, only the first two lines of the communication are shown at first glance.  

The complicated point to this story is that Japanese grammar and English grammar are opposite and the verb comes at the end of a sentence instead of at the beginning.  In English we'd say "I like ice cream."  In Japanese we say something like "Ice cream I like."  The affirmative or negative of the verb also gets tacked on AFTER the verb instead of in front of the verb.  "Ice cream I like not."  ANYWAY....  I get this message on my phone from Tetsu and the only two lines that come up are "The test results are malignant..."  I about dropped my chopsticks and grabbed my chest!  Oh no...  Not at all what we were expecting!  With heart beating I opened up the whole message and it says "The test results are not malignant."  ("The test results malignant not.")  Whew!  Well, Tetsu could have just written "The test results were benign." but he chose to phrase the sentence in the negative.  I guess I can only be upset with the Japanese language!  

The construction behind our house continues with lots of rumbling while the tractors and bull dozers and trucks rumble past our house and on to where the main factory will be built.  The scenery sure has changed in these past few years...

The rice fields are still there a few yards beyond the factory entrance though.

Another story.  The day before yesterday I went for my usual checkup at the university hospital about an hour away from us.  I get checked for rheumatism there and then get my prescription filled at the pharmacy connected with the hospital.  It is a HUGE pharmacy and I think I was told it is the largest in Japan.  There must be 40 or 50 pharmacists working there at a time and there are about 25 windows where consultations and medications are handed out.  Tetsu and I figure that in a single day over 700 patients are served there.  Anyway, a major operation goes on daily.

So I waited for about 15 minutes, reading my Kindle, while waiting to have my prescription filled and then we drove home.  That evening I got a phone call that I was hesitant to answer because there was no ID for the caller.  However, a voice message was left.  

"Good evening.  Is this Tanya Watanabe's telephone?  This is the **** Pharmacy.  Is it possible that you forgot something that looks like a tablet at the pharmacy today?  Please give us a call if we've contacted the right person."

Sigh.  Yes.  It was me and it was my Kindle that I'd left at the pharmacy.  How did they ever figure out it was me who had left it?  I didn't have my name or address or phone number in it...  I called the pharmacy back confirming that it was my Kindle I'd forgotten and yesterday Tetsu and I drove the hour there and an hour back to get it.  The pharmacy was overjoyed that they'd been able to return the Kindle to its rightful owner.

"How did you know to call me?"  

Well, opening it up they could see it was English... but I'm not always recognized as being a foreigner especially with a medical mask on and besides, there are always quite a lot of foreigners at the hospital and pharmacy.  They explained that looking at the Kindle's settings page they found my name and then they checked my records and confirmed that I'd been there that day and since they had my telephone number they were able to call me.  It is remarkable to me that something can be lost, and in Japan usually people will make the effort to find the owner and everyone is so happy about it too!  Like they've really accomplished something with a little effort!  

Cleo is still with us.  It's been four months since I thought he was on his last legs but he peacefully sleeps most of the day away on a cushion (he can't get up and down from a bed anymore) and usually in the evening he will snuggle with me for awhile, he'll roam around his blocked off room in the middle of the night, and VERY early in the mornings he'll be happy to cuddle some more.   We're taking good care of him while we have him.

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Leiya and family have successfully moved to a new house not far from Indianapolis and Luka has started kindergarten at the nearby elementary school.  

And I guess that's about it from Japan.  Last week was the holiday of Obon so families returned to their home towns to visit graves and welcome spirits back.  Now we are all getting ready for school to start again.

Summer days

We have managed to get to the end of July without suffering heat stroke though there is still the month of August to contend with.  

Last evening there was a huge earthquake in the southern part of Japan which left us unaffected but that is all the news carries today.  Those poor people.  The earthquake itself is bad enough but even at the best of times in the summer, the southern part of Japan is extremely hot and air conditioning is essential.  What will the population do with the electricity blackouts even if their homes are intact?  What about the homes where water access has been cut off?  It is not always the earthquake itself which is the greatest danger (which we learned many years ago when a tsunami knocked out the nuclear plant.)  We are keeping Japan in our prayers.

This month was full of birthdays for family and friends.  I celebrated mine on July 1st.  Kohei Yamada celebrated on July 12.  Tetsu had his on July 22.  Leiya celebrated hers on July 24th and Julieta will celebrate hers on July 30.  

Marlene invited us over for a joint birthday party and the Sugas brought Costco pizza and sushi! (A combination that works!)

Tetsu and I also celebrated our 46th wedding anniversery which made me feel old especially when the waitress whom I asked to take our picture because it was our anniversary, said "Aw...  You guys are so cute.  I hope I'll have a relationship like that someday."

School let out on the July 17th and now we all have a little over a month of summer vacation.  I'm so happy I don't have to stand for an hour in the sun at the crosswalk for a whole month!  An hour doesn't seem like a long time and the mornings are relatively cooler than the rest of the day but it is nice to sleep in (when the animals allow us) and to go directly into a cool room.

Mostly we complain about the heat and watch sumo or soccer or high school baseball.

My first project of the summer was doing sashiko.

Here's the finished piece about the size of a large handkerchief.  It is sitting under a house plant right now.

Tetsu's birthday rolled around but he'd scheduled his first ever colonoscopy for the next day so he ended up eating pre-packaged meals and getting ready for sitting at the hospital all day the next day drinking something vile and running to the bathroom.  He was concerned about what the procedure was going to entail but in the end (ha-ha!) everything went well.  He gets his results back later this week.  Now he is urging me to be initiated too.

A church friend asked if I could make a quilt sign for a church group and she showed me what the group had been using until recently.  The name of the group written in beautiful calligraphy by one of the older church member's but the laminated papers were seeing some wear and tear.  I got to thinking that maybe I could bond fabric after tracing the original calligraphy and I made a trial run to show my friend and the pastor's wife to find out if that was even what they were imagining.  This sample panel is made from kimono scraps I had in a box (I thought the Japanese fabric was fitting for the Japanese calligraphy.)  I used a small piece of ?silk? rayon? as the background but it wasn't very interesting so I added a colorful scrap that I had behind the whitish fabic.  After placing all the pieces exactly as had been on the original panel,I machine quilted all the pieces down.  The result passed everyone's approval and I will do this all again in four panels with different kimono material.  I don't have anymore silk? rayon? so I'll have to figure out some other way to spice this up a bit...  The black and white is appropriate to the Japanese sumi calligraphy though...  By the way, the character is yorokobi which means "joy". 

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Leiya and family went visiting friends in Ohio.  I think they went blackberry picking.

What a laugh!  I don't think of Taiga as being really small but when he's with Tony he looks that way!

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To all of us in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the summer and keep cool any way you can!