Wordless Wednesday

Wednesday so this is supposed to be wordless but I'm hardly ever wordless...

My life consists of small spaces. I don't get too far from anywhere. Every morning I stand at the crosswalk. What can be at the crosswalk that is different from any other morning? It seems that I always find something.

The Japanese sweet shop is taking advantage of the cold weather and has put out persimmons to dry. Persimmons do best in dry, icy air and all over northern Japan the farmers hang strings and strings of persimmons that have been peeled. In about a month these will be soft and sweet and ready to eat.

Another shot just in front of the school (next to the persimmons). On this day the school was having a marathon. This is an annual event (every elementary school that I have ever heard of has a marathon but maybe that is only in the countryside. I would suppose Tokyo kids can't do marathons). For a month or so the kids practice running laps and sometimes I have found children and parents running around the rice fields on the weekend training for the big day. For all that I have a feeling that most kids don't like this event. The kids run by class, shorter distances for the younger classes. Parents will attend to cheer the kids on.

The white lines there are written in powdered chalk and they extend around the school grounds, out into the neighborhood area and around more rice fields. Even though the teachers stand at the corners, they don't want any kids to get lost! And right at the school gate someone had written "FIGHT!" as a last push for the goal.

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Yes, in yesterday's picture Tetsu was wearing a hand made vest. That has also been a tradition that got started in our early years of marriage. Knit Tetsu a sweater or vest every Christmas. Beware of traditions! You can't stop even if you want to!


Here we are again when Takumi was one year old. Same park. We were spending more time at the play area! And yes, that year's sweater that Tetsu was wearing was another off of Tanya's needles.

A lot of words for a wordless Wednesday!

New Year picture

Thank you for the nice compliments to Leiya yesterday. Tetsu came home last night and said that when he opened my blog (on his lunch break) he didn't even recognize Leiya. "Who is THAT?" He liked the picture of Leiya brushing her teeth the most.

The other day in the supermarket I found some Coca Cola that I wanted to buy. I don't drink Coca Cola! (but Tetsu does). I like the Christmasy bottles. Maybe they are trying to be snowballs... or tree ornaments. They look cute together sitting in my refrigerator.

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Yesterday I made our 2011 New Year's card. Instead of Christmas cards, Japanese send out New Year's post cards and somewhere along the line our family has made it a tradition to send out a family picture. Not so unusual in the States, but not that common in Japan. The past few years we are spread out around the world so it takes some doing to get us all together! Anyway... I'm going to try to share our old New Year's cards with you starting from today.

Here is our first card as a family that we sent out in 1986. (Tetsu and I had been married for 5 years already but this was the first photo card we sent out.) Takumi must have been about 6 months old and we lived in Sendai, a northern city in Japan. I think we took the picture in a large park near our apartment where Tetsu would walk the crying baby sometimes in the middle of the night. All that Japanese on the right are best wishes and the date, 61st year of the Showa Emperor. That was 25 years ago. Who ARE those people?!

Before and after!

I'm on the run this morning so this will be short. This post is for Tetsu anyway.

Leiya was on chat this morning and she forwarded me some pictures of herself that she and her friends took on their way to another friend's wedding. I don't have the other girls' permissions to show their pictures but Leiya said she didn't mind. Let me tell you, three spiffy looking girls! I don't know when I've ever seen my daughter in high heels and a mini skirt! Wow! All three girls could pose for a cosmetic advertisement or something. What eye contact with the camera!


But this is the morning of the wedding and what at least Leiya normally starts out looking like. What a laugh!!! Now, that's the girl I know! She cleans up real good doesn't she?


Tetsu always said that women and makeup together are scary. He doesn't trust what might be hidden behind all that.

His little girl has sure grown up!

City event

Although my normal crosswalk duty is from 7:30 to 8:00 weekday mornings, I was asked to join a city wide event promoting city safety. Yesterday I spent from 12:00 to 6:00 at the city culture center along with nearly 30 other crosswalk guards. I'm still not sure what it was all about.

Instructions were to come fully uniformed about two hours before the event for instructions. Since I am new to the organization I don't know anyone, so I just followed along and copied what everyone else was doing. (More of Tetsu's term... goldfish poop.)

All the of the men guards and a few veteran women guards were given parking lot and roadside duty. I have a feeling the top people had a time figuring out what job to give me.

"Let's see... Tanya has never done this before so we don't want to put her outside directing traffic. She's not so great at formal Japanese so we don't want to leave her in charge of ushering important guests. We can put her at the registration desk but she isn't going to be able to handle all the paperwork. I guess she can hand out fliers."

So I smiled a lot and handed out fliers.

What I thought was a public event (it was) turned out to be attended by the heads of all the neighborhood committees throughout the city and by school principals and PTA presidents. And roll was taken! This means that probably everyone was obligated to attend but not too many were happy about it... I think we had 8 people out of 400 who just walked in off of the street. And when they saw roll being taken they would take a step back and say

"Maybe I'm not supposed to be here?"

The first hour of the event was devoted to speeches by different politicians. The mayor was there, a city council member or two... I don't know who else but I have seen their posters up along the streets during election time. And the chief of police gave a speech for public awareness of mafia doings... I didn't know we had a mafia. And another police man gave a speech about the number of traffic accidents just in our prefecture. My prefecture rates second worse in the country... Each of those persons up on the stage, would stand up and bow to the people they were sitting next to and across from (it means "Pardon me for taking my turn."), and then bow to the flag ("I am honored to be Japanese.") and then bow to the audience. After the speech the whole bowing routine again.

It made me think about whether as Americans we do all this acknowledging of others and the flag. Japan doesn't have a pledge of allegiance as America does, but Americans don't go saluting the flag every time they see it either. Japanese will usually bow if they enter a room with a Japanese flag displayed. Even when my kids were doing Judo and Kendo, they were required to bow to the flag every time they entered or left the gymnasium. I got into the habit too whenever I'd go to their meets...

Back to the event... Finally a Japanese comedian gave a 30 minute spiel with safety as his theme. This is called Rakugo and is considered an art. The Rakugo teller can keep an audience laughing just by many play on words and stories using double nuances of Japanese terms and phrases. I have a hard time following all of it but Rakugo masters are considered to be brilliant and are revered. A very "Japanese" form of entertainment with little movement nor props.

As the program wore down we crosswalk people went back out of the auditorium and took up our posts again. A final assembly with words of gratitude for "helping" that day and we were all handed $13 for our time... and three boxes of body warmers for the upcoming cold winter crosswalk duty.

Interesting day from an outsider's point of view. Much too formal for my tastes. Not sure how "necessary" all that time and effort was but the city officials were satisfied.

Getting ready for winter

It is Saturday morning and Tetsu is outside changing the tires of my car. Snow tires for the winter. I am not a great driver to begin with and when it snows or is icy I stay home! Some winters the streets will freeze over during the night but by the time I get out and around everything will have thawed. This year I realize that I will need to be at the crosswalk by 7:30 every morning while the roads are still frozen. Gulp. Even with snow tires this may prove to be a challenge but if I should get caught WITHOUT snow tires I will slide off into the forest. Thus I asked Tetsu to change my tires early. The weather isn't forecast for snow yet (usually in January) but I want to make sure!

Winter is not my favorite time of year. I'm going to grumble today and winter has barely started! For one, I HATE our kerosene heater! The whole process of pumping kerosene into the tank from the outside tanks is messy, smelly and cold. It seems like every other year we have to buy another heater because the old one doesn't work for some reason. I'm sure it must be something like it needs to be dismantled and cleaned or something but when one is talking about flammables and explosives I sure don't want to take chances. So we buy heaters. Sometimes ones with large tanks which means that they are hard on the back when you have to carry the full tanks back in the house. Sometimes heaters with small tanks and that means that the dang things need to be refilled about once a day. What a bore! I also don't think breathing in all this kerosene burned air can be good for you but I've lived with it for more than 30 years so I guess it isn't THAT bad. And buying the dumb kerosene to begin with is a chore because I have to lug 20 liter tanks (two or three at a time) to the gasoline station or the home goods store and get them filled. Talk about being bad on the back!!! (Yes, it is possible to have kerosene delivered but that costs quite a bit more...)

Okay. That's why I don't like kerosene heaters. Another reason is because, of course, you have to turn the heaters off during the night or when we go out. In emergencies (earthquakes) they need to be turned off fast. So at night we sleep in icy rooms! Every winter I complain to Tetsu that I don't think our house has insulation. A room COULDN'T be this cold if the walls were insulated. His comment is "Well, what do you want to do? Tear down the wall to find out? Put out more quilts."

So we snuggle deep in long underwear, fleece pajamas, socks, neck warmers, flannel sheets, down comforters, boa blankets, and hand made quilts. I usually have a cat or two under the covers too and one or two on top of all that (they have their preferences). Either I'm freezing or feel like I'm suffocating!

And watch me race downstairs and change clothes in front of our one heater in the living room. The cats and I vie for heat space! Chip beat me to it this morning and she has taken up residence on the electric carpet too.

More trees

A rainy day this morning and I came back from crosswalk duty drenched. I love rainy days when I have NOTHING to do because it is so nice to be in a cozy house and just sew. This is what was on the docket for the day.

I made another tree for Mrs. Furui's block exchange game. I really like this last one because although this is all from the same fabric, there was a gradation that gives it a little color. There were also lots of polka dots which again reminded me of snow. These trees are great to be sewing in the winter... Each one gets me more in the mood for Christmas!

I've also spent some time working on signature blocks for a secret friend (whom I think doesn't often visit my blog). So... What should I do?

After consulting some others we did decide on signature blocks. Hey, I have enough fabric alone to make all the blocks. This isn't going to be a problem. The blocks end up to be 3 1/2 inches square. The next problem will be to figure out how many people will be signing. Realistically I would think at the most, 100, and that doesn't make for a very big quilt. I'm thinking that alternate blocks... stars or something... would add more interest to the quilt and make it larger (and give more people the opportunity to donate their sewing skills) but I don't know what would make a good alternate block. Any ideas? And down at the bottom I have the little triangles that I saved from each block's corners... I'd like to incorporate them into a border of some type... I need to put on my thinking cap!

This project isn't really going to get started until after the beginning of the year so I am ahead of myself but I'd like to know in which direction I need to go...

A day in Kamakura

Tuesday my friends (who happen to be students) and I went off to Kamakura, a city not too far from Tokyo. Everyone else seems to know what to look at and how to get places but I just followed along all day. (Tetsu's expressive term for this is "being the poop hanging from a goldfish".)

Unfortunately I first had to do my crosswalk duty and then raced as quickly as I could to the next city over to meet Yumiko-san who had waited for me. Three other ladies took an earlier Bullet train and Yumiko-san and I got a later start. I noticed a lot of people using their cell phones to fly through the ticket gates but I don't know how to do that yet...

The Bullet train to Tokyo takes about 45 minutes. Yumiko-san transferred us to another train and then another train and finally two hours after leaving my city we arrived in Kamakura. We quickly met up with our other three friends and another friend who had come in from the southern part of Japan to join us for the day. 6 chatty ladies, wandering around enjoying the sights!

Kamakura is famous for it's shrines and temples and also for a very large statue of Buddha at one of the temples. We didn't get to that temple this trip but we found an artist's shop that specialized in CATS and I had to buy one of the postcards depicting Kamakura. See the kitties in the lower right hand corner?






The temples were beautiful in the autumn scenery and many sightseers were sporting very professional looking cameras and snapping pictures of the beautiful leaves.

The six of us had made reservations for lunch at a rather famous hole-in-the-wall restaurant and we enjoyed an elaborate lunch of traditional Japanese food, delicately flavored and daintily displayed. It really was delicious!!! I thought the pretty kimono clad lady sitting by the window overlooking a Japanese garden, so picturesque.

Lunch started out with buckwheat berries and mushrooms (a bit of seaweed on there and also a slice of potato). The orange in that small bowl are salmon eggs! Oh, so good! Yes, I know. When I was a child we used to use salmon eggs as bait to go fishing... Did you know these are a delicacy? What had I been feeding to the fish all those fishing trips?

Next a few morsels of raw fish. There is seaweed there too, and also some chrysanthemum petals.

The next course was a slice of grilled fish, and a huge sweet bean and a delicately flavored slice of potato.

In this beautiful dish were a few pieces of simmered vegetables.

Next, rice, pickles, vinegary vegetables and miso soup.

And finally a portion of pumpkin pudding. Ahh! Completely satisfied!

After lunch we all walked over to a very small temple that was known to have hid Christians during the era of persecutions in Japan. Kaoru-san chose this sightseeing spot especially for me because my grandparents on my mother's side came from Kamakura and my mother's mother's family were members of a Christian community that had to flee underground during that time. This Buddhist temple has a "hidden" cross on it's gate lintels and we wandered around wondering if my ancestors had ever passed under this gate.

All the temples' gardens were beautiful even in this season of no flowers.

Can you guess what this is?

It is a specially designated area to tie your fortunes. This is at a shrine and the custom is to buy paper fortunes and if they aren't up to par to leave them tied at the shrine. One doesn't want bad fortune to follow you home!

This is a view from the shrine looking over the one of the gates and then over the city of Kamakura.

And here are all of us sightseeing ladies!

After a little shopping for trinkets we headed home. Tokyo station is like a maze!!! And all the people going in every direction at once! It was a good thing Kaoru-san wore a bright yellow coat or I'd never have gotten home!