A few weeks ago at work, I received a note saying that I would be allowed to keep my economic stimulus money and I didn’t have to return it to my company. Say what? I learned for the first time, that perhaps there was some US style rebate to all residents of Japan. I didn’t really think I was a resident but then I again I (or, more correctly, my large, international employer) did pay a ton of income taxes to Japan last year.
Last week I got the official notification that I was to receive a stimulus check from the Japanese government. Yes, believe it or not, it is my first stimulus check from any government. I never qualified in the US – not that it’s such a bad thing.
I will receive 12000 yen, or about $120.00. Hey, that’s a shinkansen ticket to Tokyo and a beer, provided of course I don’t ride in first class. I’m not sure how $120 is going to stimulate the economy but I will spend it. If I had children I’d get $200 for the first and $360 for each subsequent child, depending on their age. Don’t quote me, I’m going off of memory. Well, my rebate is much less than .5% of the total taxes I (my company) paid last year. So it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. To me it just seems like a lot of money spent preparing, printing, and processing the stimulus. Isn’t there a better way to spend the money?
It is a very rainy weekend here in Nagoya. I’ve managed to get a haircut, clean my apartment, read a book, catch up on AppleTV, watch a movie or two and it is only Sunday afternoon. Perfect time and weather to update the blog. I guess I need to study Japanese as well. Tomo is coming to Nagoya, I’m taking a day off Monday, and we are going to a concert on Tuesday.
I was going to ride to Kanayama and try to go a little past it to the Aeon Mall (I was killing time). I got a little confused by using train tracks as landmarks and ended up getting completely lost. Luckily, there is a very tall building in Kanayama, so I just kept heading for that building once I was turned around. I stumbled across the mall and used that as a landmark to head to Nagoya, but then I started thinking that the direction I was heading put the mall on the wrong side of the train tracks. Say what? So I asked a passerby which direction to Nagoya Station, and sure enough it was the other direction. I thought I was pretty good with sense of direction but I was totally messed up. I checked my detailed maps when I got home and realized that the tracks bifurcate (I love that word) at Kanayama and I was following the wrong tracks for a while that actually ended up going back towards my home. So I think I was almost home before I turned around to head back towards the Kanayama building landmark only to head back home again. What can I say, I actually enjoyed getting lost.
How did I come across a trumpet? On May 1, I went to dinner with a colleague to Nanpu again. While we were going there, my colleague said, “Takeshi is trying to learn to play the trumpet, he has one at the restaurant but he doesn’t know how to play.†I got completely excited by that. Hey, I could teach him! When we got to the restaurant he showed me the trumpet – it wasn’t a 
Japan is a land of crazy fashions. This is the land of tight T-shirts with fancy, sparkly cursive writing words, dyed hair, hair clips, and extremely manicured eyebrows. And those are just the boys! The girls dress about the same.
