we landed in the land of the Green. japan is so green green green. and after we arrived it rained rained rained. i loved it! instead of listening to crazy people scream at night and sirens blaring at ear busting levels, i now fall asleep to raindrops and insects singing and wake up to not sirens and crazy people screaming, but birds and bugs singing. it's amazing!
not to say that before we left i didn't feel like i was about to pass out from exhaustion. 5 months of preparation and still up until the wee hours of our final night, we were still packing! and after arriving in tokyo and hideto's uncle meet us and so kindly took us to the domestic airport and a lovely restaurant, i almost passed out. that was the most tired i've been in my entire life. but since arriving, everything is starting to become calm. just as i thought, it's critical to be near your family when you have a small child and run your own company. since we are staying with hideto's family, his parents have been helping us watch noi and for the first time in 2.5 years, i feel like i can concentrate on my work 100% and noi is so happy to be in a home with her grandparents. the other day was the holiday to celebrate grandparents and old people. it's a national holiday and what an amazing country to have such a holiday. so everyone was together and we toasted to hideto's grandma and his parents. it's really amazing that hideto's grandma is still alive. he's really lucky. i could write more about the move, but it conjures up nightmares! basically we sold all our stuff. about 100 people came to our apt. and on top of that, i couldn't believe how many unwanted things we had. it was very liberating to leave it all behind. we have been going to look at model homes everyday. basically you can't go wrong with any japanese style house. they are all excellent. we are steering towards the "simple modern" style. it's a reality check to be here. when people shyly tell us the main model home, which looks like a hollywood mansion, is about 500K, hideto and i just laugh. for that price in san francisco, you can't even buy a condo. we've decided we don't want to spend that much on a house here. we are going to go about 250K and still have a 3 bedroom home. the best part of all is we will only be paying the same amount we paid for rent and parking in San Francisco and our place will be 3xs as big and NEW. no more lead paint! and the homes are all environmentally friendly. everything is built to save resources and in the states, that is something unusual and costs more. another funny thing, at least i think it's funny, is that at all the grocery stores, all the food is grown locally. there are even co-ops. and it's considered "normal" whereas in San Francisco, to get this kind of food, you have to buy it at a "organic" store like Whole Foods and Rainbow Co-op and it is so expensive. Here it is all less than half the price and incredibly delicious. every time we eat a vegetable we say, "this is so good!" and it is. akita is not a small city, it is a big city, but you can still be driving in the city, and you drive through rice fields. it's incredibly calm here. and the views of the mountains are spectacular and as i said in the beginning, japan is so green! it feels so alive, yet it is very calm. another interesting thing about being here is i don't feel so far from america. i have skype with a local san francisco number and with itunes i can pick up san francisco and minnesota radio stations that i like very much. and i feel like japan has changed a bit since i was here working in 1993 or maybe it's because i'm older, but people don't seem to be surprised to see me. sure they look at me for a moment, but not anything more unusual than the way i used to look at black people in san francisco, since i never lived with black people before, i wanted to look at them, but just because i looked at them doesn't mean i'm racist, i just like to look at them because it was something new to me, just like how people look at me here sometimes and i don't think anything is strange about it. hideto and i were at the grocery store the other night and i turned around and a white guy was shopping near us and i said "hi, how are you?" and he kind of bowed to me and he said, "pretty wet" and then laughed. it was pouring rain out. and after we left, hideto said, "that guy bowed to you." i thought it was kind of funny he did that, because i won't bow to other non-japanese in japan. i will bow to japanese people, but even though i live here now, i am not japanese and i wouldn't bow to a white person in america, so i won't do it here. that is one thing i noticed before about non-japanese people living in japan. sometimes they act weird if you try to talk to them, like they have to act like they are japanese and usually you don't start talking to someone that is a stranger in a grocery store in japan, but i would in america, so i would here. it's very interesting. i am not japanese, so i can't pretend i am, but i will follow their customs, yet i still have to act american too, because i want noi to know about that side of me. and now after i moved here, i have to make a real effort to always speak to noi in english and now i feel a responsibility to speak with hideto in english too, otherwise he will start to forget english too, just as i had started to forget japanese in the states. it is quite interesting though how just after being here for only a week, i can already pick up a lot of japanese that i had forgotten. and i think it's weird how people say things about how japanese people don't like things to be different, because i noticed that people really want to study english and try to speak it, if they like english, but they don't have the chance. when we go out, hideto and i speak in both english and japanese and people always tell us how great it is that we can do that. and before when i was in japan, i always felt uneasy about speaking to someone in english, but now i notice that some people like it, because they have studied english, but haven't had the chance to speak it with someone, unless they paid to go to a class, and they seem happy to try to reply. like today i asked a man, "is that a woman or a man?" i was referring to a person in a poster, and he answered quite clearly, "a woman." and he seemed happy that he understood and could answer. overall right now i'm feeling very happy to be here and in the end, especially since i have a family, my main concern is about my family, which includes hideto's family too. well...gal just answered my skype, so i'm going to talk to her in israel. i love technology!
