Heading into Tokyo tonight after work for a long weekend with a good friend who’s visiting from home. We’ll also be spending a night at the Kashiwaya Ryokan in Gunma on Monday before returning to Nagano. I’ve got ten hours to shake this lingering sickness.
Category: Life in Japan
Not What I Needed
I ventured out briefly this afternoon to see if I could find something that would soothe my throat and tame the nasty, hacking cough I’ve got. In particular, I was hoping for something that would help knock me out tonight so I could get a decent sleep.
Unfortunately, the friendly, English-speaking grandma sensei wasn’t working today at the drug store. I tried to pantomime some of my symptoms in hopes of getting what I was looking for, and was recommended a box of tablets. I should have looked more closely at the label before I left the store.
The cold remedy I came home with turns out to have caffeine in it, not so great for helping put one to sleep. On top of that, the woman who helped me gave me a freebie that she said would be good for me — an energy drink. Basically a Red Bull. The main ingredient is taurine, and it also contains caffeine and nicotine.
These are not proper ingredients to help a sick person. It seems more like a way to keep the walking dead propped up for another day of work.
Miserable
For my birthday this year, I got the flu. I barely made it through the workday yesterday. And after a night of fitful sleep, I’m still lying in bed with aches, pains and chills racking my body. Needless to say, I’m not having a happy day.
Flu seasons hits Japan with surge in outbreaks
TOKYO (AP) – Flu season has hit Japan hard this year, with seven times more people coming down with the sickness than last year, an official said Tuesday.
According to the National Institute for Infectious Diseases, 514,801 people contracted influenza between Nov. 1 and Jan. 26.
That compares with 68,641 cases for the same period the year before.
Snowboarding Pics
New photos and movies of a day of snowboarding at Myoko Suginohara have been posted in the Photos & Flicks section.
Snow On Trees
Playing In The Snow At Midnight
A Good Night
Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) is on TV, and The West Wing will be on next. Then I’m off for some midnight sledding in the heaps of new snow we got today. I’m happy.
Yuki
Big, heavy, wet flakes of snow are falling. It’s so damp that it looks more like rain coming down rather than the lazy, gentle descent of light snow.
We had almost a foot of snow yesterday morning. It came down quickly, starting around 7:30am and then tapering off around noon. I rode my bike to the gym before work, and had trouble seeing through the thick flakes flying into my eyes. When I headed to work, legions of people were out shoveling snow. Little old ladies hardly taller than the shovels they wielded were clearing snow from in front of their houses.
It’s just after midnight now and the snow started to come down again about 45 minutes ago, covering once again the recently-cleared streets and paths.
Japanese Clone?
The Raelian cult recently announced the impending arrival of yet another cloned baby, this one a Japanese boy.
Raelians’ latest claim: Japanese clone is next
Japan Times Online
Neither the Raelians nor Clonaid — their scientific partner — has offered any proof of this or the two previous cloned baby claims.
The Japanese baby is supposedly a clone of a boy who died 18 months ago in a traffic accident.
Although the baby will be born outside of Japan to a surrogate mother, the soon-to-be parents say they plan to live in Japan. This raises some interesting questions, to say the least.
Human cloning brings such an overwhelming raft of questions and quandaries — ethical, moral and practical. The first thing that came to mind when I read about this latest claim was the relatively pedestrian question of citizenship.
What will be the baby’s citizenship? He comes from a deceased Japanese citizen, and will be born outside Japan to a non-Japanese surrogate mother. What kind of paperwork will the parents have to show when they bring the child to Japan? There’s no way they’re going to be able to sneak him back into the country considering the advance warning. And then the Japanese media will be all over this like… well, like the Japanese media.
Human cloning is banned in Japan. But there is no law covering cloning of or for Japanese citizens outside of Japan.
What kind of birth papers are created when a cloned baby is born? Are the Raelians resorting to forged documents to make the baby appear to have come into existence through traditional means? Or will there be some kind of special birth records for cloned babies, whether they were born legally or not?
If these claims turn out to be true, it’s going to be the beginning of a very strange and fascinating time. It will be interesting to watch the attempts to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. It’s going to become more and more difficult to control science through law, for better or worse.
White Weddings
Caucasians are apparently in high-demand to perform Christian-style wedding ceremonies in Japan. The key word here is “perform” since being an actual priest isn’t really necessary for the job.
Christian-nuptial fad calls on fake pastors
In a country where Christians account for just 0.8 percent of the population, the huge prevalence of Christian-style weddings can only be explained as vogue. This has led to especially high demand for Caucasians to perform the rites, leading many noncleric foreigners to work as “part-time pastors” or “weekend pastors.”
“It is of course not a religious experience that people seek in a Christian-style wedding, but to make a fashion statement,” said a spokeswoman for a Tokyo-based wedding service company that dispatches nonclergy foreigners to hotels and wedding halls to perform nuptials.
Last fall in Tokyo, I met an actor from New York who was in Japan for three months performing sappy love songs at western-style weddings. Here in Nagano, there’s a little white steeple church down by the river that’s used exclusively as a wedding chapel. Some might call this religiously offensive. I’d be more of the mind to call it just-desserts for a relentlessly proselytizing religion. They tried to sell Jesus and salvation, but all the locals bought was the fabulous wedding ceremony.