Honai in the mountains

Honai in the mountains

It’s a chore to get off my peninsula and onto the mainland. After wheezing my way up a mountain and through a tunnel, I found this view of the nearby town of Honai.

Honai is actually now a part of Yawatahama. They merged to save on administrative costs, just like practically every small town in Japan. This makes JET placements quite deceiving—you may be placed in “Yawatahama City,” but if that part of the city happens to be the former Honai, then you’re not really in the city at all; at best it’s a nearby suburb with all of the associated difficulties in transportation but without the yuppie feel.

I’m going to rant about TV for a bit now. I’ve complained about TV before on my blog, so let’s get the overlapping content out of the way: News shows.

Yesterday everyone was worried that typhoon 10 was going to hit the area; as a result, my plans to see the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie were canceled. It ended up being a bunch of nothing, as the typhoon swerved west into Kyūshū instead.

This morning I was watching the news when they switched to a weather update on the typhoon. You’d think they’d have some fancy on-screen graphics with nice, colorful icons and animations showing a map of Japan with an overlay of the typhoon and its course. Or, failing that, large, bright, crisp LCD displays showing the same. What did they show? Some guy’s PC monitor with Internet Explorer displaying an ugly version of weatherchannel.com. To illustrate his description of the weather, he clicked around, going from page to page. You are on TV telling us about the weather. We can assume, therefore, that you are a weather professional. At the very least, please maintain such an appearance.

Other things that enraged me: A news report about the recent popularity of completely unnecessary cosmetic surgery for kids. They didn’t say it in so many words, but basically 90% of the kids are forced into it by their idiotic, self-serving parents. They did mention that a strong trend in this is divorcees who want to make their child look less like their former spouse. I wanted to vomit, then throw the vomit in the face of the woman they interviewed who forced her perfectly acceptable-looking son to get a ridiculous operation to make his eyes look more Western.

There was something else too, but I forgot it.

My job is looking up—One of my superiors actually seems interested in having me translate the town website, so I’m slowly plodding through that. I’ve discovered that most of the people in my office are quite skilled in just looking busy, and any excuse I can find to talk to them is welcomed by a half hour of chitchat. Oh, the joys of government bureaucracy.