Best view of Fuji yet!

We woke up and looked out of our dining room window to see a nice clear view of Mt. Fuji totally covered in snow. Wow! So, Erik took the camera and drove to the top of the Commissary/BX for a less obstructed view.

You can really see why this is one of the world's most famous mountains.

While he was parked on the roof (and avoiding going to work), Erik also took some pictures of our fair city, Fussa. Notice Che Guevara (why?) in the first picture and a white statue of liberty (why again?) in the other. We never noticed the statue until this picture. We'll have to go out looking for it in town to see if it's connected to a business or an avid New York fan. Just goes to show you there are weird people everywhere in the world.

Our home

This is our tatami room. Truth be told, it was not this clean 5 minutes prior to me taking the picture, but this is what it looks like ideally. The phone is actually an intercom to let people in the building. Next to it is a control for our heated floors...we haven't tried this function yet. Every machine in our house has a ton of buttons, so we haven't gotten them all figured out yet.

On the table is my latest ikebana design. Our fishes, who were mentioned in an earlier blog, have all gone to meet their maker. Despite this turn of events, I ambitiously purchased 8 new fish. I love the fact that two have red noses and two have red bottoms.

This is our larger balcony. Erik bought me a greenhouse and I love it. What a wonderful husband, eh? My friend brought her children over and they helped plant beans, basil, and mint.

Erik put the pictures on the blog and for some reason had this picture first...I took the liberty of moving it a little further down the line-up. This picture wasn't the easiest to take because the room is so small. Anyway, just wanted to point out that you have two flush choices: big or small (you use your best judgement to determine which). Also, there is a bidet button, which my landlord kindly translated for us as "for sensitive place of the women," a "wash bottom" button, and a dry button. You can adjust the intensity for each button as well.

This was the only way to get the bed and the dresser in the picture. Can you find me? I'm in the picture twice! Most Japanese people sleep on the floor on a futon, so I'm a little embarrassed about our royal bed. I literally have to jump into bed each night.

Japanese bathrooms have a sink, tub, and shower. The toilet is in a separate room. Please read the following sentence with your most sarcastic voice: The washer is my favorite machine in the house. Actually, it's gotten 100 times better now that Erik and I have figured out the "child lock" function. Please don't laugh, it was really aggravating. Any time we interrupted the cycle, we couldn't get the door unlocked. And, seeing as we would start the washer and see on the display "5 hours remaining," we needed to learn how to interrupt the cycle. The machine is a washer/dryer in one, but this is a misnomer. It should be called a "washer/get my clothes hot and wetter" machine. Plus, the only way to get hot water in it is to fill the tub or sink and connect a hose. Okay, it's still way better than a washboard!

Here's the ofuro (bath). Whose toy frog and firefighter duck I wonder...? As a side note, if this picture included audio you would hear our fan that runs 24/7 (not by election). To the right of the tub, but not pictured, is a control pad. We can set the height and temperature of the water and it fills the tub automatically for us. There is an handy dandy intercom button on it to the kitchen "Eriiiiiik, I'm need more shampoo." The control pad also plays a very cute song to let you know when the tub is ready. It sounds just like "Santa Claus is coming to town."

Oku-Tama

We went out on the weekend to do a little hiking in the Chichibu-Tama National Forest. We had a guide book that told us of a 3.5 hour hike into the mountains. When all was said and done the total hike took about twice that. Since we planned on a small hike, we went totally unprepared. When we finally found our way up to the peak of Mt. Oodake, we only had about an hour of sunlight left. For the last two hours of our trip down the mountain we were in complete pitch black and it was a steep descent. Really scary. We prayed for help and safety along the way and ended up making it back to town safe and sound, no injuries. Thank God. He provided us with a few unusual sources of light: a Nintendo DS, a Japanese electronic dictionary, and a cell phone, all with backlights and all of which had batteries that died by the time we reached the foot of the mountain. Pretty amazing.


The journey started out with a cable car up the side of the mountain to reach this scenic outlook. In the distance (way in the distance) is Tokyo, about 40 miles away. On a clear day, you can see the skyscrapers of downtown Shinjuku, Tokyo Tower, and Tokyo Bay. From here we, started hiking. Here are some of the pictures on the way up.

This is a the main street in a little temple town about a third of the way up Mt. Mitake.

Here are some of the houses in the town. Notice the thatched roofs. Pretty cool, huh?

At the end of the town is the temple. This is the gate and stairs to the temple.

And this is the temple itself.

From the temple, we continued on. This was a nice paved path through a bamboo forest. It was also our last paved path of the journey. Notice that the number of people dropped off significantly. Most people come to the temple and go home. We continued on...

A really nice waterfall (and nice picture, if I do say so myself).

Erik climbing. This is what the path quickly became. And this is also the same environment we had to climb back down in the pitch dark of night. Yes, without protection, we could have had major injuries. Yikes.

More climbing.

And here are some pictures on the way down.

What Erik looked like in the glow of the Nintendo DS. We didn't even plan on bringing it with us, but figured the train ride was long and Zelda would keep us occupied. Good thing.

Only lit up from the flash of our camera, but look at the surroundings.

Balcony Fuji

Okay, finally took a picture of Fuji from our balcony. I might take Ninjutsu so that I can sneak up there and remove that antennae :). It's amazing that just a few weeks ago there was absolutely no snow on it.

Erik and I plan to climb Fuji next year with Russell (my Maryland taekwondo buddy). According to a Japanese proverb, "You are wise to climb Mt. Fuji, but a fool to do it twice." So, two wise men will be climbing with one foolish girl.

Tokio's family

After the Tokyo Game Show, we got a ride back to Tokio's parent's house, where he and Marie live. His mom and dad are really nice. We went out for dinner at a surprisingly good Indian restaurant.

We brought over pumpkins to carve with his parents, but didn't end up carving them. Tokio and Crystal were still entertained by the pumpkins, nonetheless.

After a while the whole pumpkin idea got a little old. See the bored faces. Hahah.

Despite what Marie says "Jimmy" (That's what I call him. His really name is Andy) is not too bad of a dog. Just don't get near his bone. He'll snap!

2008 Tokyo Game Show

We went to the annual Tokyo Game Show yesterday. We met up with Tokio and Marie and walked through the huge Makuhari Messa convention center looking at the newest and yet-to-be-released video games. Games on display are seen here sometimes a year before they hit the US market, so for gamers this is a really cool event. G4 TV was even there covering the event for American broadcast (check out their coverage).

We bought tickets ahead of time, but didn't realize we would still have to wait in line.

There was a big blowup Power Ranger guy outside the convention center. Tokio couldn't resist posing for the camera.

Once we got in, we were amazed by the sheer number of people. We knew it was a big deal, but it was practically wall to wall people.

Metal Gear Solid Online was one of the popular attractions, as was Little Big Planet. The little guy riding on top of planet Earth is nicknamed Sackboy. Erik wants to play both.

These are some of the real video game and anime fans. There were people like this all over the place. Some people like the lady in pink are actually working for individual game companies. The last picture is Marie posing with a few of the characters from Street Fighter.

Our car!

Well we finally bought a car. Bikes were fine, but with winter coming, they weren't gonna cut it for long. So we found a dealer and bought a 1999 Nissan Cube. It only has less than 30k miles equivalent on it and it runs fine, so for $2000, we thought we got a decent deal. Here are a few pictures. Believe it or not, it didn't take a lot of time to get used to driving on the left side of the road and the right side of the car. Pretty fun so far.

Tama river bike trail

Last weekend we went down to the Tama river bike trail. It runs from our area all the way into Tokyo, something like 55 kilometers. We decided it was too nice a day to stay indoors, so we took our bikes down to the river, about a kilometer from our home, and started off.

Along the way, we pulled over, ate some lunch, and watch a competitive game of croquet. It's really cool that so many old people in Japan continue to remain active.

Farmland along the path. That's a rice field to the left.

Flowers galore!

Here's some nice mountain and river scenery along the way. We got off our bikes at a few points along the path and marched down to the river. At one of the points we saw warning signs telling people to be careful of Mamushi, Japanese pit vipers. Didn't even know they had such animals on the Japan mainland. We never saw any though.

Okinawa

As I mentioned in the last post, Erik got a chance to go to Okinawa for business. Okinawa is the main island in the Ryukyu island chain to the far south of the main Japanese islands. It's a big domestic vacation spot for Japanese because of it's tropical setting.

While he was there he met up with our good friends from our Hawaii days, Dan and Debe Pallmann. Check out their blog. They have a few good pictures from their day together. You have to go there since Erik didn't take his camera with him.

Here are a few other pictures of his trip to Okinawa.

The approach as the plane is about to land in Naha, Okinawa. There are tons of islands like this. Probably more than tons!

This is the beach at American Village. You can see a fence separating the little bay from the bigger ocean behind. This was to keep people from straying too far into jellyfish territory. The really tan guy coming out of the water is not Erik. Neither is the really pale bald guy. Just to let you know.

This picture was taken from a good high vantage point in order to get the city and ocean in one shot. Pardon the power lines.