Category: Tsukuba Monogatari

Tsukuba Monogatari: 34th post Inevitably, my time in Tsukuba is coming to an end. After one false alarm, my Japanese friends seemed to sense that this was the real thing. Unable to get everyone together on the same date, they came up with a crafty solution―have two parties on different nights! Koizumi-san attended Part 2. […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 33rd post Randy came in to Tokyo with me to open up his bank account, as the bank our company uses does not have a branch in Tsukuba. We drove in one car to Arakawaoki Station, and I showed him where The Company parking lot was. Jennifer left later, and drove her car […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 32nd post I have always admired the subtlety with which Japanese people express feelings; however, when one spends an extended period of time in Japan, one begins to miss overt, extravagant―praise, for example. Especially at The Company, one begins to thirst for any sign of human feeling, any drop of what might possibly […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 31st post After spending the past few days devising the ideal, perfectly coordinated training schedule, Randy was hit by the reality of being at The Company when, within an hour of finally issuing the memo announcing the new quarter’s class schedule to his trainees, he received phone calls from six trainees―in Japanese―saying the […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 30th post The subject of women drivers came up at lunch the other day in a conversation related to the weather. The unusual snowfall last Thursday made traffic conditions quite hazardous, and claimed David’s car (among others) as a statistic. Although it only snowed one day, it was cold enough that the snow […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 29th post So much for my credibility. I had told Randy, “It doesn’t snow in Tsukuba – we just get frost on the ground some mornings.” I woke up this morning and everything was white. My car was completely camouflaged under three inches of soft, powdery snow. My first thought was, “They can’t […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 28th post Randy’s here. He’s my replacement. I collected him from the Hotel Sun Route to give him a whirlwind tour of Tsukuba by car. It took about ten minutes. “Did you see all the sights?” Jennifer asked when we picked her up for dinner. “Well, we saw the city center, and The […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 27th post Well, here we are back in Tsukuba (Jennifer and I both went home for the holidays and returned on the same flight). The flight was an hour late and ten-and-a-half hours long. We saw two movies, one of which you’d have to be strapped into your seat on a ten and […]

Tsukuba Monogatari: 26th post Yokota-san, who had been in one of the first groups trained in the U.S., attended my send-off.  Yokota-san may have been a classic example of style-switching gone awry. I was never able to determine whether his abrasiveness was innate or a misguided effort to adopt a more Western style, and all […]