Yesterday we had a really nice day, with temperatures in the 20s. This sudden warmth prompted all the cherry blossoms to flower earlier than predicted. Now a lot of the cherry blossom trees are in full bloom. Unfortunately, this bodes poorly for our upcoming trip to Kyoto April 9-11. This means the trees will probably be losing all their flowers by the time we go to Kyoto. Still, it will be nice to go back there again. It's such a beautiful city. Victoria and I are going along with two of our friends from Toyama, Mike and Kelly. I don't really know Mike that well, actually. But hopefully I can get to know him better on the trip.

This week I have been a little bored at work. I don't have anything to do, and most of the students aren't there. Some of the clubs meet during the day to practice, and the band always seems to be spread out all over the school blasting a cacophony of sound at me. It can be a little annoying actually, since they don't play the same things at the same time.

My teachers found out on Tuesday whether they will change schools or not. One of the English teachers, Mr. Arisawa, is moving to a new school. He's the only English teacher that is moving. I have mixed feelings about him moving. In some ways, he is a consistently good teacher, and his English is quite good. However, recently both Jo and I have noticed that he has been more distant about team teaching and kind of lowered his expectations of what the students can handle. I'd do a lesson fine with Ms. Shouman, and then Mr. Arisawa would say the same thing would be too hard for the students, despite the fact the other classes had no problems with it. Of course, I don't know what the new teacher will be like at all.

After Tuesday, most of the teachers stopped coming into school. They use their vacation time, but normally they don't actually take a trip anywhere. Instead they just don't come to school.

I got permission this week to work on meeting sponsors for the Charity Show. We want to cover our costs for the charity show with sponsors and other fundraising, so that the whole of the ticket sales can go to the charities. On Monday I went with Takemaru-san to three business, and raised about 600 dollars from them. Then I called YKK (the zipper company based in Toyama), and they offered 500 dollars for the show. They have offered that much every year for the last 12 shows (all but the first), so I was not surprised that they said yes. However, they wanted some extra forms sent to them, so I worked on making those forms during the end part of the week.

I also gave out sponsor packets to a couple of restaurants I go to a lot, and to many friends to have them pass them out to places they go to. Our goal is to raise about 2,500 from corporate sponsorships (we're half way there now). In addition, I tried something we haven't tried in a long time. I applied to the Toyama International Center for money to sponsor the event. They gave about a thousand dollars to the show for the first several times we did it. Then the money stopped for some reason. We wanted this money again, so we reapplied. They said it is likely we will get it this year. I hope so. It also led to more forms I had to fill out in Japanese with the help of an English teacher, of course. If we get this money, that will help a lot towards covering all of our costs (about 4,000 dollars). We will also get some money to help with costs from a bake sale during the show, and a flea market before the show (that comes out to about 700 dollars total).

Hopefully this next week I can miss more school to go meet some businesses. My Japanese teacher is being very helpful and contacting some businesses she knows, as well. It's important in Japan to have a contact at the business you are asking, unless they have given in previous years. We also tried contacting the electric company, who used to give 500 dollars to the show for many years, but they gave us some phony excuse about not having any money. Takemaru-san said he didn't believe them.

Oops, sorry about the mistake postings in my blog. There is another blog I keep of current JET events in Toyama, and I accidently posted something from there to here. It might be fixed now if you look for it, so don't worry.

Last weekend we had a neat trip with Takemaru-san. We left around 9am in the morning, which is early for me on a Sunday. Then we went to the Toyama Family Park Zoo. It is located in the hills near Toyama. Much to Victoria's and my surprise, we just walked right in without paying. When we asked Takemaru-san why we didn't have to pay, he said he used to be the zoo director about ten years ago. I hadn't known that, so I was very impressed. Everyone seemed to know him who worked there and came up to say hello as we walked through the zoo.

The zoo is not very big, but it is pretty well done. There are some animals like the giraffe and zebra who should have had more room to run around in, but generally it was okay. Of course, they don't have the kind of space that the North Carolina Zoo has to house animals. Victoria said she thought it was her first time to see some of the animals in person, like zebras and giraffes. I thought this was surprising, because she loves giraffes a lot. They also had some Mongolian camels, lesser pandas, and a bunch of lemurs.

After the zoo, we went to a new restaurant nearby that had really good pizza. They actually cooked the pizzas in a wood-burning oven like you are supposed to do, according to Naples. The building the restaurant was in didn't look very Japanese. It looked more British or something.

Next we took a really long drive (nearly two hours) to Takayama City, in Gifu. Since we had both been there before, we didn't go into the city. Instead, we went to the mountains nearby where they had a museum that you could see Takayama's floats at. Takayama does a big float festival in the spring and the fall. They have massive floats that they push through the streets. Many of the floats have moving parts or puppet-like shows which people operate from inside them. Apparently the festival is amazing to see, and really crowded. However, it is also on a Wednesday or something silly, so you have to take vacation time to see it most years. In the museum, they keep some of the floats they use for the festival, and have some of the moving parts hooked up to computer control so you can watch them in the museum. The rest of the floats are kept in a museum in the city, that we saw one time we went with Ms. Iguchi. The other thing the museum had were giant taiko drums. one of the taiko drums is apparently the largest japanese drum in the world. It was big.

The best part about the trip was the drive up and back. We passed through a lot of areas where there is still snow, and the scenery of the mountains was just beautiful. I felt bad for Takemaru-san though, since he had to drive the whole time, and it was a long drive for a thirty minute visit to a museum.

The weather has been a bit crazy recently. Yesterday it was really hot (24 degrees Celsius) and very windy. I had trouble riding my bike. Actually, when I was at home, I opened the outside door while one of my windows was open. Immediately this created a wind tunnel effect in my house, and slammed the middle door shut with such force that the windows in the door popped out. Luckily, they didn't break and I was able to put them back in. Despite the strong winds, the weather was warm enough that I wore short sleeves to work.

Overnight the winds carried in a big cold front, which brought a lot of rain with it. So this morning it was pouring down rain. Now it's changed to snow, for whatever strange reason. I doubt it will stick, though, because it is not that cold.

Tuesday was graduation at my school. I'm sad to see all my third year students leave. I knew some of them pretty well. It's a little scary to think that I only have one more term left before I leave Japan. I'll have to make the most of it.

For graduation here, you are supposed to wear a suit and a white tie. I understand the suit, but the white tie eludes me. A white tie on a white shirt is barely visible. It seems a bit silly. Of course, we dress up in big colorful gowns with funny hats, so I suppose that doesn't make much more sense.

After graduation, there is one more week of classes for the younger students, and then they have a week and a half of spring vacation. During this time, the teachers all find out where they will be working. They have little say in the matter, and can be forced to go to a school far away in a different city. It seems ridiculous to me, because the teachers become friends but then have to split up all the time. However, I guess it is good if you are becoming bored with your situation. Then you can try something new. I would think a system whereby you can ask to be moved would be a better system, though.

My mom wanted to know about the third day of the conference. It was pretty short, since people had to go home around noon. There were two conferences. One was a panel of JET Alumni that spoke about issues when going home, mostly pulling from their different experiences. The other was a panel of businessmen who talked about job opportunities. The businessmen panel was actually quite interesting. There were three men and they were all good speakers, so it was interesting to listen to them. One of them talked about IT jobs, and said that he thought things were going to improve soon. He also gave us a list of the jobs that will be most in demand in the future. Registered nurses, computer workers, and prison guards were some of the top ones.

After the conference, we crammed into a car with two other Toyama JETs who had driven down, and had a nice drive back to Toyama. It took longer than the train, but cost a lot less. We also stopped at a rest stop on the way home which had a great view of Mt. Fuji. It was very beautiful.

I don't know if you've been following the bird flu scare, but it has come to Japan. There were several cases which were caught early, but then a couple weeks ago they discovered that a farm in Kyoto prefecture had been hiding the bird flu. 150,000 birds had died of the flu, but they kept on selling the chickens to the processing plants. After an investigation was started, the head of the company that owns the farm and his wife committed suicide. It hasn't seemed to cause a huge shakeup in chicken and egg consumption, however. I find this really strange, because as soon as the U.S. was found to have cases of a less virulent strain of bird flu, Japan immediately banned all chicken imports from the U.S. Now that Japan has been found to have a huge case of deadly bird flu, not much is happening. Apparently some crows have also tested positive for the flu in Kyoto, which isn't good. There are tons of crows here and they could spread the flu like crazy.

Japanese people are very friendly and seem to get along with each other quite well. However, I think that underneath everything is a real lack of trust between people. Workers are required to "hanko" (stamp their personal seal) in a book everyday. No matter what type of job you have, it seems like you are required to do this. Every month I also have to fill out a form listing what public transportation I've used to get to work (I get reimbursed for this). Again, I have to hanko the paper. However, I can't just hanko it once to say everything is correct. Instead I must hanko every single day's line.

Another example can be seen with things like a lack of checks and the small number of credit cards. Most store owners don't trust not getting the money immediately. They don't trust that banks will pay them back later. Hence, Japanese people carry around hundreds of dollars at a time.

Japanese businesses also seem to follow this philosophy. They are very wary of starting business with a company they don't know. However, if you can gain their trust, then you will be business partners for a long time.

It seems strange to me to have such a mistrust of other people, especially since Japan has some of the least problems with crime in the world.

So far the conference has been pretty good. I went to three meetings today about possible career fields. The seminars I went to were on NGOs, IT, and interpreting. I was most interested in the IT industry one, but the guy didn't know very much detailed information. As it turned out, he didn't actually work in IT. He worked for a company that recruited executive IT positions for overseas' companies' offices in Japan. The interpreting one was by far the most interesting. The woman was a good speaker and very energetic. She was also the most knowledgeable about her industry, though she mostly knew about opportunities in North America translating Japanese, not Spanish.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, then we get to go home. As a whole, I think it has been one of the more useful conferences I've been to as a JET, but I wish they had gotten better speakers in some cases.

My dad was curious what a stamp rally is, so here's an explanation. It's really simple. They give you a card with several spaces on it for stamps (the ink kind). In this case, they gave me a card with 5 spaces on it. I had to go to 5 booths that were scattered throughout the shopping areas at Roppongi Hills. When I went to a booth, they gave me a stamp. When I got all 5 (they spelled "Peace"), I went back to the starting booth and they gave me a free ticket to the art museum and entered me in a chance to carry the Olympic torch in Japan in June (kind of funny if a foreigner wins). Anyway, it is mostly to get you to run around the shopping mall and you get a prize in the end. Victoria and I also did one in Tokyo's Sony showroom store last time we were here. They were celebrating the birthday of Aibo, the robotic dog. In that case, we won a small Aibo bag at the end of it.

On a side note, I should point out that when we were at the lookout area before going into the museum, we couldn't see Mt. Fuji because it was too bright (Mt. Fuji is to the west). However, when we were in the museum, there was a window which faced Mt. Fuji and we could see it with the sunset. It looks really big from Tokyo. A museum attendant came over and told me not to take pictures while in the museum, but I had already got one. It seemed a little silly to us since I wasn't taking a picture of anything in the museum. Oh well. I'll try to post it when I get back.

Victoria and I are in Yokohama now. We are eating Tim-Tams, which Victoria got on our flight back from Australia. We are staying in a Toyoko Inn. This one has a great view of Yokohama's harbor, probably the best view we've had from a hotel in Japan yet.

On Saturday we met up with Jane, Victoria's friend who lives in Sendai that we visited once. We thought she might be going to the same conference as us, but it turns out she was in Tokyo for the weekend just by coincidence. It was very lucky for us. Unfortunately, it took us a long time to go to Tokyo from Yokohama (over an hour), because we didn't know the fastest route we could take.

Sunday we went to Roppongi Hills, a new "community" in the heart of the Roppongi District. There are many buildings in it, including office space, shops, restaurants, a TV station, and residential space. In the center is the Mori Tower, a 270 meter tower, which hosts an art museum on it's highest floors, plus a lookout. The admission is normally 1,500 yen to the art museum and lookout, but there was a special stamp rally on Sunday, and I did it. My prize was a free ticket to the museum. The view was really nice, and the museum was cool, too. We could see Mt. Fuji from the tower. It was great.

Today our conference starts. Hopefully we will learn a lot from it.

The snow has started. It looks like the roads will be covered by tonight. It also feels really cold, but I don't think it's that much colder than it's been recently.

I'm starting to feel about cursed about the weather. I keep arranging meetings with the fundraising heads to talk about Charity Show fundraising, and then it snows. It always seems to snow on a Thursday when we have a meeting. It's getting to be quite annoying.

Last night we got a lot of snow. It snowed about an inch in 6 hours. They thought it would snow, but not quite that much. They are forecasting snow Thursday through Sunday, but today it is nice and sunny, so a lot of yesterday's snow is melting. It's a little strange.

I forgot to mention this, but I have a new bike now. It is a lot like my old bike, but silver (which makes it harder to find since most bikes are silver), and of course, everything is new. It is nice having tires with tread, and brakes that work very well. However, I feel like it is harder to pedal this bike than my old bike, so that is not as nice. Anyway, I'm quite happy, and I imagine my successor will be happy, too.

The weather has gotten colder again this week. They are predicting some snow later today, and then snow Thursday through Sunday. I'll be going away on Saturday, so hopefully I will miss anything bad. Victoria and I are taking a trip to Yokohama, a large city that is pretty much merged with Tokyo. It is just south of Tokyo, on the ocean. There is a conference for all the second and third year JETs who are going home. It is an optional conference. We have to pay for all the transportation and hotel costs, but we don't have to use our vacation time. We're going up on the weekend so we can enjoy ourselves in Tokyo. It should be a good time. Hopefully, the conference will give us lots of information about making resumes and finding jobs when we go home, as well.