Oh the times♪ They are a'changin'!

Okay, I swear, last non sequitur post before I write about my April/May Travels. There's just so much to do in life that pulls me away from blogging, but I guess that's a good thing and keeps these interesting!

FIRST! I've been reading the Japanese newspapers a bit more and here's some of the buzz:
Miyajima, home of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site ITSUKUSHIMA SHRINE was voted the best tourist location in Japan according to tripadvisor.com (which is according to the newspaper article I wrote :P)
YAY! I already knew that though. It is awesome. My friend Mike is here visiting Japan for the first time right now, and I took him there for the hiking, nature, temples, shrines, and food last Monday and we had a great time!

NEXT! Wifi is finally coming to Japan!
What a minute, wtf? Japan is technology central right? What do I mean "coming to"? Well, lots of people have wifi in their homes here, and even in the 90s Japanese people were the first to use their cell phone to connect to the internet on their laptops. But the concept of a WiFi hot spot never really caught on here like in the U.S.
...until now.
The reason is smart phones. After the success of the iPhone, iPhone3/3G/and 4, a growing minority of Japanese people are using smart phones and learning about apps, twitter, and facebook (yeah, now, finally!). Even though every mom in America is clambering to post their baby photos on facebook, the majority of Japanese people are shyly creating, and quickly deleting their scary facebook accounts.
Japan, as you can imagine, likes its privacy and being reserved, but the internet culture of voyeuristic friend-stalking is just too appealing to our monkey-brains, and nature is slowly winning out over nurture (i.e. Japanese Culture). I am basing this on my own suppositions btw, there's probably 5 different Master's thesis topics in there just waiting to happen.
But since Japanese people are buying unlimited internet packages on their shiny, new smart phones, and using them, they are clogging the cellphone networks and leading to the complaints Americans are all too familiar with. Japan's solution: make more WiFi spots so they can get their phone content faster without burdening the phone lines. Simplicity is beautiful eh?
So what are they actually doing? Well, NTT the phone tower company is planning to install 50,000 new Wifi spots in popular businesses such as cafes by March 2013, and competitor KDDI says they will be installing 100,000 of their own! This will probably destroy the 3G and 4G internet dongle (what a disgusting word btw) USB business targeting the previous netbook (cheap, light, and little laptops) boom, but it all spells PROGRESS to me!

Last: You may have read this in western media, but Mazda is axing their cooperative efforts with Ford in the US by 2013. You might see see this as weakness or desperate restructuring on Mazda's part, and even now, their main plant in Hiroshima is only operating at 70% due to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but they plan to be back at 100% by October and have plenty of other plans in the pipeline for Thailand, India, and China, so I think it says more (or less) about Ford and the American economy.

Interesting? Bullshit? Whaddya think? Notice any stories I haven't? Or, if you've read something about Japan and thought "Wtf?", lemme know under "Comments" and I'll get back to ya! 

Drinking on a Weekday

I moved to Hiroshima straight out of University and had already experienced four years of rowdy fun and parties on random days when school and work allowed. But I settled in to my island home of Ondo and grew into my role as an ALT.

My first breakfast at my new apartment in Ondo (August 2006)

As a teacher, on a small island where everything closes at 8pm, I quickly associated drinking with the city (Kure City) and I only went there on weekends. Also, being a social creature, buying beer at drinking at my house never occurred to me, and I think I had a total of one beer by myself the entire year I lived in that apartment, which hardly qualifies for "drinking alone".

Drinks on the pier in Kure

Anyway, my point is, drinking was a "weekends only" thing for me, and has been, with few exceptions, for the my first three and a half years here. Once, I even recall hearing of "Hump Day Drinks" and chuckling! Oh! The immaturity!

What happened to make this clean-living boy crack? A violent break-up? Death in the family? Intolerable STRESS?!?
NOPE!
My friends opened a new bar.

When I say "friends", I mean, they are my friends now. back then one of the guys just owned a smaller bar I would go to maybe once a month on a weekend, and when it first opened, things were the same for Southern Cross. But being a new bar, they wanted to get a clientele and steady business, so one of the things they did was start a Wednesday night Pub Quiz. This is something I HAD NEVER DONE BEFORE, and had only seen ONE reference, in an episode of the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Not only was the quiz free to play, everyone got 100 yen off all drinks, and the winning team gets FREE DRINKS at the next quiz! That's how they sucked me in. This has been going on for almost one year now, and of course, I don't go every week, but even when I don't go I think about it, and every once in a while I volunteer to host the quiz (think of the questions, MC, and score the answer sheets), a task which also comes with free drinks and is a lot of fun.

Normally I don't get drunk or anything, it's just a fun night out. The "problem", if you choose to call it that, is that there are a few very intelligent ex-pats who usually win, so I have won a total of maybe 2 or 3 times, but 1 of those times was last week! So last night I went to play the quiz again, and enjoyed my free drinks, perhaps a little too thoroughly, and waking up this morning was... not so easy. No big deal, but next week some Japanese people will be hosting the quiz for the first time and on top of being curious as to what kind of questions they ask, etc., it is also a charity benefiting the victims of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, so weekday or not:
I will drink to that.