A Japanese wife and a Japanese car

August 7, 2015 cars hybrid Japanese car rhino rack technology toyota Toyota Prius C transportation

Owner of many cars

As an owner of many cars over the years, at this point I have to be up to about 30 cars owned and driven but I stopped counting around 20 something, I have been in just about every car there is. Ok, well not EVERY car. I haven’t yet owned a Ferrari or Mercedes or any of the top end super cars of the world of cars. My experience comes from owning a lot of garbage cars which is from a time when I was just starting out driving at 16 with a part time job and little money. My first car ever was a 1979 Mustang that was actually given to me by my mom’s boyfriend at the time. I think he took pity on me to help me out, thank you again. As great of a time it was with that Mustang, it didn’t last very long. I wound up driving it so hard by racing around so much that the drive shaft broke off and ripped out the rear end of the car. From then on for many years to come, I would go through cars like dirty underwear.

For quite some time actually I was finding great deals on very, very cheap cars but with that came the price of them not lasting very long. Without getting into every possible car experience, there are a few that stick in my mind that I laugh about now. One such car experience was a 1982 Oldsmobile Omega. I needed a car fast and found it in the classifieds section of the newspaper. Yes, people used to post used cars in the newspaper at one time. I am sure they probably still do but with Craigslist and other online for sale services, well yeah. What’s a newspaper? Anyway I bought the car and literally 3 days later is broke. I was driving down the road and the car started to shift into gears weirdly. Smoke poured out from the engine bay and there was a stream of oil behind me on the road. What happened was that someone replaced the radiator at some point and must have broken the steel lines leading from the transmission to the radiator. Instead of replacing the entire steel line they only replaced part of it and used rubber hosing on the rest. The hosing is not a problem if you properly put a flange on the end of the steel line so the hose doesn’t pop off under pressure with the hose clamp. I fixed the hose properly but by that point the first gear was burnt up. I wound up trashing the car not to much after that since it was more expensive to fix than it was worth.

Public bath? I have to think about that.

June 3, 2015 bathhouse expectations hot spring onsen public bath ritual tradition traditional

Onsen ritual

Of the many things I was able to experience while in Japan, can’t wait go to back by the way, was the public bath. My wife told me long before we went that she had expected me to participate in this ritualistic event. This was the first time I was to meet her entire family so we, had to take a bath together? Of course I had asked many questions about what it was like and what I had to do. And of course being American, was anyone going to see my penis? I don’t make a habit of showing just anyone. She teased the hell out of me about my questions of course. She kept telling me that more than likely, they had probably wanted to check out my penis. Not in any weird way, but to just “see it”. A particular day while driving around in Japan with the family we had passed by a bathhouse and we turned around to go back. I asked what was going on and my wife said “We just passed a bathhouse so we are going.”. I was half asleep in the car at the time but woke quickly and asked “Right now? As in we are going now? I am not mentally ready for this!”. Her parents laughed at me and thought I was being a child so we waited.

Needless to say I was nervous about it. The reason she expected me to participate is that we all were to go to Onsen for a couple days. Onsen is the Japanese term for a hot spring or even more to the point a bathhouse inn or as such fed by a hot spring. Technically however I don’t think all bathhouses are fed by a hot spring only onsen. There are many bathhouses scattered all over the place. Mostly easy to spot just because, to me anyway, they had this indoor pool type of building familiarly about them.

Communication breakdown

June 1, 2015 breakdown communication confusion misunderstanding speech

Japanese communication breakdown

Knowing my wife now for a number of years, I think we dated for two years first before being married for five, we still have yet to get past the communication breakdown problem. I say this as my wife is first generation Japanese in the U.S. She had lived here for a number of years before we met. She was actually married once before and lived in NYC for quite some time while working for Kirin Ichiban as an assistant to executives. During her time here in the U.S. she hadn’t, and still really hasn’t, taken the time to work on her pronunciation of English. She is completely fluent in reading and writing English but her speech leaves much to be desired at times. Further more she tends to mix words up along with their meanings leaving me to scratch my head in misunderstanding.

I’ll do my best here to give you a few examples of what some of our communications are like. The other week we were getting in the car to go somewhere. As I was getting in the car she said to me, well what I thought, was “deer”. We live on a wooded hillside and have deer prancing around all the time. So naturally thinking she said “deer” I half close the door and look for it. I turn to her and say “I don’t see it.”. She says back to me “Stop playing games, DEER!”. I of course again look back over my shoulder and then look back at her and say “Um yeah there is nothing there.”. By this time she is fuming and I can tell. She again says “Deer!” while pointing at the mirror of the car door. “Oh” I say, “MIRROR and not DEER.”. Oh that was a crazy one that day. Pretty much the rest of the day we were talking about how I have a hard time understanding her pronouncing of certain words and that I wasn’t screwing with her, I thought she was really saying deer.

What is Marimokkori anyway?

May 30, 2015 character culture Hokkaido marimo Marimokkori mascot traditional weird

Japanese mascot characters

Ok so you might be thinking to yourself right now. What is this green character and why is there some type of huge ball thing where his package should be? Better yet, why is he reaching out to a child and trying to touch his hand? I can tell you right now, something like this in America would never fly. There would be protesting and riots in the streets if this were going on. Again however, this is the kind of thing the American mentality would never fully embrace or understand. Which, I understand. My first reaction was one of shock for the reason alone that Americans have been taught certain things about sexuality that traverses through our adults years as being “bad” or not “normal”. I am not saying there isn’t problems in Japan with sexuality or behaviors but from what have experienced, it’s just not the same. There is a lot of sexual connotations in Japanese culture which I have yet to fully understand though it seems a lot of it comes from the Edo period as well as other cultural values and ideas. Though don’t quote me on that.

My Japanese Wife

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