December in Japan is in modern Japanese called "the 12th month," however in classical Japanese it has a different name: shiwasu.

The kanji for shiwasu, 師走, means "teachers running" or "teachers run around" and gives the image of how in olden days even teachers (usually Buddhist monks) ran around like a chicken with their head cut off near the end of the year.


Modern Japan is no exception. While Christmas is not celebrated for it's "true" meaning, the introduction of Christmas to Japan was a retailer's dream come true.
EVERYONE has a Christmas sale.
Companies, businesses and schools have Christmas parties.
Couples exchange gifts, and middle school and high school crushes are bashfully admitted.
Children wait for Santa to bring that one gift he'll leave on their pillow, and dream of the Christmas cake and all of its strawberries (which there are special greenhouses especially for all over the country).
And on top of it all, exactly a week later there's oshogatsu.

Oshogatsu is the Japanese for New Years and is the real reason behind everyone in the country running around with their heads cut off.
Instead of Christmas cards, New Years postcards need to be printed and dropped off at the post office by the 25th in order to be delivered on New Years' morning.
Everything in the house and office needs to be uprooted and scrubbed to a sparkle.
Got a tatami room with paper doors? Yeah, you need to strip those and glue new sheets of rice paper to them.
Then there's the food. And the temple and shrine visits. And the family visits.
So much to prepare for.

The last two weeks of the year in Japan are a whirlwind and are chock full of car accidents as a result.
I was caught up in one on Monday.
Coming home from the local import store with bunches of supplies to make rum balls, my husband and I decided it would be best to make them with real rum instead of the artifical rum flavoring we had just bought, and luckily there was a Liquor Mountain liquor store coming right up!
Pulled up to a light to turn right, but there was too much traffic so I had to wait until it turned red.

Woo red light!
Oh wait, there's still a car coming. I'll let him run the red light and then I'll go.
*starts to turn*
JESUS ALLAH BUDDHA! THAT OTHER VAN ISN'T STOPPING!
*brake* *bam* *screech* *BAM*

A white mini van decided that it could make it through the light, didn't even see me, clipped my right-side headlamp with it's wheel well, thus ripping off the front-right side of my car, and then ran into a traffic signal pole. While my husband and I were okay (though I have a sore back that will be looked at tomorrow), the driver of the white van, a lady nearing late 40s or early 50s, hit her knee pretty hard when her dashboard collapsed on her upon impact with the pole.


The process that comes with having a traffic accident in Japan is a bit different than that of America, at least in my experience. My only experience prior to this has been when someone rear-ended me on the highway my junior year of college, causing me to go smack into the barrier on I-480 in Cleveland. That was a much worse accident, and the shmuck who rammed into me ran off.

Over the next few weeks, as things go, I'll probably talk more about what happened once the police arrived, and the process of what happens afterwards.
For now, I think this is long enough.

Still messing around with the inner workings of Blogger as I'm new to all this.
The most "blogging" I ever did was an angsty excuse for a journal over at LiveJournal during my last two years of high school and college.
Now my friendslist is lucky if I update twice a year.

Think I found a template that will work for now, over at BTemplates. Had to tweak the heading image a bit because I didn't like how the title of the blog wasn't lined up with the travel tag on the image.

Woo Photoshop for the win. Not let's hope that doing so doesn't cause my Photobucket account to exceed bandwidth until I can find a more permenant way to put the image on Blogger itself. Any ideas?



Over the next few days I'll probably tweak and poke and prod the coding for this template a bit more to my liking, so don't be surprised at changes.

Now to go be a jungle gym teacher at a kindergarten a half hour away. Wish me luck.

Man I hope they found the weather flashcards I left there last month...

Writing the first post of a blog is like writing a personal ad.
Gotta know what to write to bring people in; tell them what it's all going to be about to keep them coming back.
But it can't be overly personal, and it can't be overly sterile and cold.
It just has to, well, be.

So here's my attempt.



Hi. I'm Chino. Chinotenshi. Chinomama. Pick one. I live and work in central Japan as a jungle gym teacher at kindergartens, community centers, and sport gyms throughout Gifu City. I teach English to kids as young as infants to adults in their 80s. I spend most of my time at kindergartens with little monkeys brats kids hanging off of my legs while I try to make English fun to learn. It's a fun job but man do I need to get in shape if I want to keep up.

This blog is not completely personal. The company that farms me out to teach English has realized that there is a huge market back in the US of otaku anime nerds fans who want to learn Japanese but don't have classes available at their middle school/high school/college/etc. Originally we were going to add yet another website to the insane amount of "Learn It Yourself!" self-study Japanese pages, but realized we were way too far in over our heads. We'd be lost in a sea of websites that range from absolutely wonderful resources to the dreck of the bottom of the barrel. Yeah. Not happening.

So instead, I get told to make a blog.
And here you have it.

This blog is going to cover everything from my personal experiences teaching/living/traveling in Japan, to interesting cultural events/places, to reviews of that very sea of self-study Japanese websites we so very wanted to be a part of. Mainly, it will be reviews of those websites.
But I guarantee a lot of goofing off on my part.
I mean, I'm getting paid to write a blog instead of being overloaded with classes of little monsters wanting to stick their fingers up my butt.
Best. Job. Ever.


So sit back, add this blog to your bookmarks/StumbleUpon/Digg/del.icio.us/whatever, and enjoy reading about life and culture in Japan, as well as which Japanese sites are the best, which should be avoided, and those no one quite understands.
Also prepare yourself for a bunch of pictures.
I'm known to take 500 photos over a course of two days while traveling.

Be warned, I'm still tweaking with the layout of this a bit, so don't be surprised if over the course of the next few weeks the appearance changes drastically.
Also, at least until the holidays are over, I'm going to try for at least one update a week.