Ralph Hoflich

Nicole had her calligraphy exhibition this week and we finally got to go see it today. It looked really good! Nicole was very proud of it and so are we – and we are looking forward to finding a place to put it in our house.

I met Nicole’s teacher, Sajiki-sensei and also his father who’s a well-known calligrapher in this part of Japan.
Here’s a shot of Nicole and the work.

Here’s a picture from today with the kids.

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The word is 優美 and is pronounced ゆうび (yuu-bi) and means “graceful”.

We had an excellent trip to Kansai at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. We had planned on visiting Naoko’s family in Himeji for ages, but we didn’t trust our Japanese which wasn’t very good. Now that we’ve been here 3 years and I’ve written the JLPT3, we thought we’d visit them. Fortunately, Naoko was also home in Himeji this year over New Years with Zen, so we had a great opportunity to go down there.

We left Saturday morning relatively early (8am) to beat the rush. Actually, the traffic was really good and there wasn’t any major problems getting out there. We had booked a place in Toba, which is in Mie prefecture, since Ise was too busy. Toba is right at the bottom of the Mie prefecture and from the map we could see that a boat went from one side of the bay to the other, and landed in Toba. So while we were driving, I checked out using my mobile, whether we could take a car on the ferry. Sure enough, we could, so we decided to take the direct route to Toba and take the ferry.

The road out there was brilliant and we went through some great farmland areas. It looks like the area around Irago, where we caught the ferry, was famous for growing melons, so we saw some nice honey melons and we bought some nice Omiyage for the Fujinos from there.

The ferry itself was quite big and we were expecting a big fee to get across, but the whole thing cost us around 8000 yen or so, so it was quite reasonable. I reckoned it would be more expensive. Here is a picture of the ferry:

The kids had a great time on the ferry I think – they were running around the deck and the seats and seemed to enjoy being on the sea. Nevertheless, it was a fun experience for them.

When we got to Toba we made our way to the hotel and met the nice people there. We checked in and they gave us some maccha and some okashi (sweet) and got our room ready. The hotel was really beautiful with an awesome view from our room:

We got into our yukata (kimono) and made our way to the ofuro (bath) and had a great bath before dinner time.

We also took a car trip around the bays in Toba, along the perl road, since apparently there is a lot of shell-fish harvesting done. We had some great views of the bays and the water and in general it was an excellent ride!
Dinner was amazing. They just kept feeding us! When we thought the last batch was done, they came with more! The kids didn’t eat much, so we had to eat a lot of what they had. So Nicole and I ate for the 4 of us.

Our hostess, Sakura-san was a really sweet girl, who spoke english very well. She helped us so much and when we checked out the next day, she came to say goodbye and Lauren gave her a big hug. When Sakura-san was helping us and giving us our dinner etc, Lauren was helping her – almost getting in the way too much.

From there on we went to Ise, which is not too far. Ise has the most famous shrine in Japan and the emperor always makes a journey there on New Years day. There are two shrines in Ise, the Naiku and the Geku, but we didn’t have time to see the Geku. The Naiku was very nice, but I suspect there are a lot of areas that we aren’t allowed to that have special significance.

The town in Ise was very lovely, with old streets and lots of things to buy and eat along the way. Nicole really loved it and the kids had a good time too I think.

After Ise, we took the slow road to Osaka and then on to Himeji. The slow road in Mie towards Osaka was brilliant. Lovely rolling hills, lovely views, small villages with lots of farming. It was great! And not many people. I wondered whether the navi had gotten us on the wrong path, because some of the roads were so narrow! Amazing that they’re on the navi at all!

We got into Himeji around 18:30 or so and we met up with everybody. We plugged in Naoko’s telephone number into the navi and it got us to around the right spot and I remembered the landmarks around there and actually got us to their house directly! It was 11 years ago that Naoko and Peter got married in Himeji and I still remembered around where Naoko’s parents lived. It hadn’t changed much and I remember their house being a bit different, but the family was outside waiting for us when we arrived.

It was great seeing Naoko and Zen again, although it felt like we hadn’t seen them all that long ago. That night we had some yummy food with the Fujinos and a whole bunch of the other relatives came by. Daichi is all grown up now (he was around 3 or so when we were there last) and his sisters also came. Haruka we’ve only ever seen from pictures (she had really bad teeth then!) and Nanaka we’d never seen pictures of. The kids all got on like houses on fire, with the kids running around the house, making noise etc. Despite the language barrier (Evan and Lauren don’t speak any Japanese and Haruka and Nanaka don’t speak any English) they got on so well and had a great time running around. Lauren grabbed all the girls and wanted to hold hands all the time. She really got close to the girls I think. The girls were so good about everything and even the other trips we made when we were there, they all joined in without complaining at all. Nanaka got a bit attached to me, even asking to come up into my arms when she saw me carrying Lauren occasionally. They were such great kids.

The next day we walked up the local hill (megayama) and had a great view over Himeji. From the top we could see the hills around Himeji and we could see the water (through all the factories).

Later in the day we went to a great park nearby and had so much fun with the kids. After that, we went to Himejijo, the castle in Himeji. It was fun to go back, since we went to the castle a few times last time we went to Himeji.

That night when we got home, we make okonomiyaki, which is kinda like a pancake, made out of flour, eggs, cabbage, seafood and other yummy things. Nicole loved it. We had some great sake with ojiisan and ate and drank until late. It was good talking to the Ojiisan and Obaasan, since now we could talk a bit of Japanese and we could get our points across. Apparently the Fujinos were a bit worried that we couldn’t communicate at all, but I think we did ok. No talks about nuclear fission or anything, but I think people made their points clear.

The room we had was a great room, albeit a bit cool. The covers were great though – they kept us so warm. Overall, it was great staying with the Fujinos.

The next day was time to move on, so we went to the park with the kids, played soccer and dodgeball and had lunch at a yummy ramen shop. We said goodbye to the families and the kids hugged each other a lot. Ojiisan invited us back to their house again, and if our Japanese improves, maybe we will drop by some day. At lunch, Lauren got a toy from the restaurant and she chose some plastic rings (5). When we got home, the girls all put one on and we took a picture:

Then we went on to Osaka, again through the lovely hills around Osaka. It was really nice. We checked into our hotel (Novotel) in Koshien and then decided to head into town, since it was still early and town was rather close.

We made it to the Osakajo (castle) and took some night pictures, some of which actually turned out. A sliver of a moon was rising, so it was very pretty. It was however darned cold, so we didn’t stay too long.

We met a nice old lady who wanted to talk to us in english and she showed us to a good place to have dinner and catch the train home.

The next day we went to the Kaiyukan (Osaka aquarium) where they have whale sharks as a specialty. It was quite good, but Evan was quite naughty – I guess he wanted to get out and do things outside. Then we took a ride on the kanranshya (ferris wheel), which is apparently one of the biggest in the world. Nicole was a bit nervous, because she doesn’t really like heights. There were quite a few things to do down in Tempozan, but unfortunately the 3D IMAX was closed on that day.

That night was new years, so we bought some cakes at a store and took it back to our hotel. We bought some toshikoshisoba for us and the kids settled into bed and we watched the new years TV show until the new year. We stayed up and watched a bit, going to bed probably around 1:30 or so.

On new years day, we went to universal studios. It was a good day for it – there weren’t too many crowds. USJ was quite nice – a typical themepark, where everything was beautifully created and costumed people walked around taking pictures with guests. We decided to go on a ride first – the Spiderman ride. It was quite a ride actually, with us wearing 3d glasses and being tossed about in a car. The ride was very realistic and Evan and Lauren said they were scared during it. So we decided to something a bit easier, so we went to the Back to the Future ride, which we hoped was better. Turned out to be a similar thing and the kids (actually Evan more so) were scared again. Evan however figured it out, when he could see people in the cars around us and that it was just a big screen which was making us look like we’re flying through the air!

After that we played in the childrens areas and had fun taking a small roller-coaster. The kids enjoyed that. We had some food and went to the ET ride, which was us riding a bicycle with ET in the front. It was quite good, although Lauren was freaked out by the robot ET in the queue, but during the ride she was happy with the worlds that we discovered when we were there.

The last thing we saw was a presentation with some gaijin singing and a lot of people dancing. Lauren really liked it, but I’m not sure Evan enjoyed it. It was quite nice, with Nicole and I singing sometimes.

The next day we left the Novotel Osaka and headed towards Hamanako which was where our next hotel was. We stopped off in Biwako, which was a lovely lake, with a sprinkling of snow on the hills, which made it look very magical. I can imagine it would be very busy in the summer there!

We made our way to Hamanako and were very late due to the slow traffic. Our dinner was only until 8:30 but we arrived at 8:00 and got to have our dinner. It was a massive 5 course meal, French-style or something. The kids didn’t eat much of their meal, but Nicole and I ate all our food (and some of their). It was quite different than the other places we stayed, and much more expensive too actually. We had a nice play in the ofuro, which was full of people. The next morning we had an awesome Japanese breakfast with lots of yummy food, like nattou and other great things.

We got home on Saturday around 5:30 or so in the evening, after a slow travel amongst all the other cars. Usually we drove around 50 kph since there were so many cars. We couldn’t see any accidents so the slowness was probably just the congestion of so many cars. I imagine the Sunday would have been so many more cars!

That was our great trip – we saw some cool parts of Japan and had a great time.

I wrote the JLPT #3 on the weekend and it was pretty tough. The hardest part was the listening component, which I pretty much guessed at all the answers. They went by simply too quickly, or I couldn’t concentrate or whatever. So I think I’ll have failed that part. The Kanji and the grammar I think went ok – that is there weren’t that many that I had no clue about, so hopefully it’ll only be the common mistakes, or the mistakes because I went too quickly over them. With some luck it’ll be enough to cover for my lack of points in the listening part. Hopefully.

During the 3rd part of the exam (grammar and reading) the proctor at the front fell asleep in her chair. She was really fast asleep because I made some loud coughs in the test just to see if she would wake up, but nothing doing. I stretched and moved about a fair amount, but nothing budged her. Funny.

Well it looks like ol’ Helen didn’t make the cut for the election this year. It was sort of to be expected, considering the length of time they had been in government. I think she’d just gotten too comfortable with things and didn’t really push herself.

Nevertheless, she was good for NZ I believe. I believe her stance on Iraq was correct and understood when she made comments about it (“I cannot think it is a credible or tenable position to say that we should do something that we deeply believe is wrong for some material pay-off and I wouldn’t be party to it”). She was sensible, straight-forward and approachable, which can’t easily be said about politicians in general.

Thanks Helen for all your work – NZ is a better place because of the work you did.

I only hope Key can live up to be half the person she is.

We had parent-teacher meetings on Monday this week (a holiday in Japan, but the teachers were working). Lauren’s teacher didn’t have much to say about Lauren other than she fitted in perfectly. At this stage (4 years old) I really didn’t expect any important feedback and she’s usually so cruisy anyways.

Evan’s teacher had some good feedback, all very good. He said that Evan was a bright kid and was functioning well in school. He said he’s always procactive in the class, adding very meaningful and intelligent information to the conversations. He was particularly keen on the human body exercises and really took to it with a shine. He also uses difficult words in his sentences, so that’s very good. He said his reading was ok with pretty well normal mistakes etc.

He also said that Evan shows good leadership abilities, which surprised us because we felt he usually follows instead of leads. He said for example, if the kids are doing a game or something, he’ll go in and take control of things and make sure things go certain ways. He won’t usually initiate things himself, but it’s good that he’s taking command of things. Perhaps that’s because he’s quite confident in what he says, perhaps too confident. There was a case where Mr. Schoff asked about something and Evan had it quite wrong and everybody else agreed, but he was quite certain it was the case. It took a bit of convincing to get him to see the reality. He’s quite a confident kid.

All in all, the kids are doing great!

We went with the kids to a baseball game today. It was the first baseball game (and stadium) for the kids. We weren’t sure how they’d enjoy it, since they’ve never even seen baseball, but I think they had a good time. Evan understood quite a bit of the game, but Lauren was oblivious to a lot of it and her concentration was much shorter than Evan’s.

The teams playing were both quite good ones in the Japan league. The Chiba Marines vs the Softbank Hawks. The Marines won 9-5, so it was an exciting game with rallies back and forth as to who should be in the lead. In the last few innings, the Marines got more points that the Hawks didn’t recover, so the Marines won in 9 innings.

Note the beer keg totting women who walk around selling beer. In the Tokyo dome, when ordering one, the girl will come up, kneel down in front of you and poor your drink.

At a point in the game (7th inning) everybody blew up these strange balloons and then sang some song and then all together, they released the balloons into the air. It looked a bit like snow or something like it, because there were so many balloons in the air. A few landed nearby and Lauren and Evan picked them up and brought them home. Here’s a picture of the event:

We had a great time!

Peter send us a copy of his first book the other week. It’s titled “Asia’s banking CEOs” and is a snapshot of some of the leading CEOs in Asia.

It’s a really good read and not too difficult. I picked out the Japanese banks since they’re of most interest to me and I found it really well written and with insightful comments by the CEOs.

We’re pretty proud of Peter’s first book! Now we need to write a Wikipedia article on him!

The book can be bought from any online bookstore such as:

Barnes and Noble

Last weekend I went with the customer on a Mt. Fuji climb which was very fun. It was a heck of a lot of work and it was very tough but I’m glad we got through it in the end.

The customer arranged a weekend event, starting on Friday to climb Mt. Fuji. All the vendors were invited, so a bunch of us from the company went. Actually, climbing the mountain were only gaijin from our company, but we were one of the few gaijin who went. Another competitor, a chinese company also went, but those people couldn’t speak much english. The customer’s english is pretty good, so we didn’t bring any interpreters – not that any interpreters would have wanted to climb the mountain!

We started off on Friday morning meeting up in Tokyo around 10am. We then drove up to fuji and had some food at a restaurant there. At 2pm we met up with the group at 5 gome (5th station). There were around 50 people or so who were going to climb the mountain. From the customer, senior management weren’t to be seen, except for my counterpart and another guy who ran the network centre. There were a lot of “freshmen”, people new to the company that year, so the group in general was quite young.

We started climbing up the mountain at around 2:15 or so. The first part was pretty straight-forward and we were just on the tree-line so there was a bit of greenery to be seen. The first bit of the climb was mostly gravelly stuff with some stairs. The trees soon passed and then we were just in gravel and lava-stone. That was a bit more difficult and along the way there were sometimes places to rest and get something to drink. They sold wooden walking sticks at the base (5th station) and along the way you could pay to get a brand put on the stick by a branding iron. At the beginning it was very hot and I had little more than a t-shirt on and I was sweating quite heavily in that.
Getting closer to the 8th station was getting very hard and I had to stop to rest quite frequently. It was very difficult breathing and my legs were really tired from the constant climbing. It felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my legs.

There were people who brought oxygen tanks with them, but I never tried it. It looked like a large deodorant spray bottle and you’d put it over your mouth and nose and breathe in the oxygen. My customer was also very kind and gave me a soyjoy musli bar and some interesting tablets called O2 or something. I wondered if they were meant for mountain climbing, or whether it was just a coincidence that it was labelled “Oxygen” or something.

At this point it was getting quite cool and I had my long-sleeved shirt on and my coat. One thing that struck me is the number of gaijin who were climbing the mountain. There were really a lot of foreigners there.
We finally made it up to the 8th level where some people were already waiting for us and they were having dinner. Dinner was a simple curry rice with sausages, but it was quite good. I don’t normally like curry rice, but I was pretty hungry from the walk. Sebastian bought us all a can of beer up there and it tasted great.

After that we were shuffled to the sleeping area, since they needed the space for others to eat. We were put into bunk beds, a long row of people, maybe 50 or so in the room. Guys and girls were in the same place, but it didn’t seem to bother anybody. We had a wheat-bag thing for a pillow and they gave us covers for the comforters. It was just barely long enough and we all had a rest from around 6:30 or 7 until 2am. Then someone woke us up and we had a bit of food and made our way the rest of the way for the 2 levels.

The night was pitch dark and many, many people had torches to show them the way. None of us had them, but we could just barely see through the rest of the torches. This wasn’t so bad anyways, since the climb the rest of the way in a big queue and going quite slowly. The summit still seemed so far away. This was the most difficult part, since the air was quite thin, I had developed altitude sickness and found it really difficult to move. We basically stopped for a rest every 100-200 meters or so. It was very difficult.

Around 5:20 or so it was light enough to be able to see plenty of things and we could see the summit not too far away. The last 45 minutes or so was a real slog and by the time we got to the top, I could barely move my legs. It was really tough. The sun hadn’t risen just yet, but the distant horizon was getting quite bright like it would rise soon. We stood around and took pictures on the top and then we could see the sun rising. It was an interesting sight because for some reason it looked like the sun was coming up out of the sky in the middle of the clouds, not at the back of the clouds. Some sort of optical illusion or something. So basically it looked like the sun was rising in between the clouds on the horizon. Once we watched enough of the sunrise and looked around the crater on the top, it was time to go down.

The whole time now I was quite sick and felt like I was going to throw up the whole time. It was very difficult. We decided to go down again and we trudged down the path that we came up. When we got a bit further, we could see there was another path that other people took to get down which looked better – we were on rough rock and they were on stones. So we thought we could go down easier.

The trip down was quite hard on the legs in a different way, but because of being on the small rocks, it went quite quickly. Indeed in the end, we went down about 2 times as fast as going up. It took around 6 hours to go up the mountain and around 3 to go down.

Near the bottom of the trail I started to get really sick – fighting the altitude sickness the whole time. In the end I started heaving up the water that I had drunk and some gaijin walked past seemingly uninterested that I was coughing up a lung. A little bit after I stopped, he yelled back asking whether I was ok, but there was nothing anybody could do.

On the way down I still managed to walk faster than our competition (we made it up quicker than them and down quicker and we also had our customer’s attention the whole time).

The trip was really gruelling and most of the time near the top I was wondering why I would put myself through that ordeal, but it was a bit interesting and mostly hard work. Of course from the summit it was great watching the sun rise and seeing the curvature of the earth, but it was one heck of a slog.

At the bottom, I sent Nicole an email from my handset with the picture of the sunrise from the top with the words:

“Well honey, we knocked the bastard off”

in reference to the late Sir Ed who said something similar after being the first person to climb Mt. Everest.

Because it was still very early (8am) we made our way back to the hotel at Yamanakako and we had a shower and onsen and then a small sleep before lunch. We drove around Yamanakako which was great – lots of nice places to see out there and a very pretty lake. We went to a flower garden which was really nice. They had a waterfall which every 30 minutes gushed out a lot of water. I chatted in Japanese with two guys from Niigata prefecture.

We got back to the hotel and then in the evening the customer had a big dinner with all the people who climbed plus some of the senior managers. It was pretty much a drunken brawl. We all had to give a bit of a speech and Sebastian did a good job entertaining the crowd, while Akai-san translated his speech from english to Japanese (and for the first part, Chinese, which our competition really didn’t seem to like). Akai-san made big changes to the speech, improving it I think and making it funnier, but it was funny that the customer could understand what Sebastian said and Akai-san’s “translation” of it, considering the two were quite different.

After lots of food and drink, the freshmen were asked to do something funny and they ended up getting dressed in funny clothes, like french maid outfits, superheroes etc. It was really wierd and I’m sure the guys were pretty uncomfortable, but it was all in fun. Then a longer speech by the senior manager who organised it.

Then we played bingo. There were around 20 different prizes – a Wii was the best prize, but there was also an iPod shuffle which would have been cool. I ended up winning something and I ended up chosing out of a hat, a prize which was a strange white dog hat. Very disappointing, since that was the mascot of our customer’s competition, so it was wierd that a vendor won something like that. Oh well, it was a bit odd, but funny still.

I ended up going to bed around 12 and slept so soundly on the futons. It turns out my colleague stayed drinking with the others until 2am when the senior manager who organised it came in and gave a dialogue to the freshmen for around 2 hours! Incredible. He mentioned our company’s name a few times, but never the competition!

We headed home on the Sunday, a bit tired and aching and I met up with Nicole and the kids in Harajuku for some shopping before coming home.

Very interesting trip and I’m glad I did it, but not sure if I’d want to do it again.

I got back from Brazil yesterday. It was quite a trip, with 23 hours flying time and an 8 hour stop-over in Chigaco. Not nice.

Brazil itself was quite nice, but I was a bit busy the whole time. I got put into a rather tough hotel the first night, with loud people shouting until 3am etc but fortunately I was able to shift into the Novotel which was heaps nicer. The food was very yummy and I really enjoyed the breakfasts. We went out to eat one night to a Brazilian grill place and there was so much food. I wasn’t very hungry the day after.

I managed to get quite a bit done, apart from the task of going there. I also got to watch Tonari no totoro like 3 times in Japanese which was fun. I’m starting to remember different Japanese parts which is interesting.

We had Akiyo, Makoto, Akira and Mamoru over for easter egg hunting today. First thing in the morning we had a hunt for the big chocolate easter bunny that I brought back from Sweden. Then the other family came over and we had an easter-egg hunt outside. It was good fun. The kids found all the chocolated pretty quickly. After some playing around we made coloured easter eggs using dye and a “magic crayon” which was probably just standard wax. The kids all enjoyed themselves. Then we had some food and Akiyo and the family left and we went for a walk to the local park.