There’s a city in southern Fukui Prefecture called Obama City. When I first moved here last summer and saw the map I thought that would be a neat place to travel and send some photos back home… then I remembered that the signs would all be in Japanese and the photos would be meaningless…

Anyway, recently there’s been a lot of stirring in the local news about Obama City. It seems the members of the city have banded together to express their unified support for Barack Obama. I wonder how much they really know (or care) about the US presidential election. Actually… come to think of it, the probably know a lot. Everyone in Japan so far seems at least to have a passing familiarity with the “Hillary vs. Obama” fight going on now, and I’ve even met one or two people who could name all of the Republican candidates back when there were way too many (well actually only one is still way too many, but you know what I mean)… So yeah, Obama City is officially for Obama. There’s one you can file under “weird.”

From the Yomiuri Shimbun:

FUKUI–The city of Obama in Fukui Prefecture, prompted by the fact its name is spelled and pronounced identically to that of U.S. politician Barack Obama, is enthusiastically supporting the Democratic Senator’s campaign for his party’s presidential nomination.

Since it was reported on the Internet that local residents had formed a volunteer group supporting the Illinois senator’s campaign, the city, located on the coast of the Sea of Japan, has attracted massive attention from overseas media, including AP and Reuters.

In the hope of raising the city’s profile, the Obama municipal government decided to send their namesake a special good-luck daruma doll to wish him victory in the race.

The group supporting Obama’s White House bid was formed by 16 citizens shortly before the Super Tuesday primaries on Feb. 5.

Campaign posters bearing the politician’s image or the slogan “Ganbare Obama!” (Go, Obama!) were put up at local hotels.

The group also plans to start a Web site to promote Obama’s presidential campaign, and sell buns featuring his likeness.

(Feb. 17, 2008)

I haven’t been good at writing at least weekly lately. Partly because my weeks have been really busy lately, and partly because I have my PC here, and a girlfriend… so my sitting and writing time has been significantly lessened. If only I had internet access in my brain… I think up good posts in the shower or on my breaks… I just don’t have the ability to write them down at the time. Soon enough, soon enough…

So I feel like I have to write at least a bit tonight before I go to bed. Last week it snowed every single day, so by the weekend I was really excited! Tons of snow! It seemed as if Takefu was on a 7-day snow schedule for a long time… it snowed every single Friday night for all of January and most of February, and finally last week broke the schedule by snowing constantly. The snow here is nice and easy, not at all like in Philly. There’s more of it, sure, but you can push it off the cars with a single wipe. Even after 40cm of snow you could probably push it all off using a kleenex, unlike in NJ and Philly where after only 1 inch of snow it’s iced on so hard that you need a heater and an icepick just to clear your windshield.

Last week at work was a Counseling Week, which meant special bonus lessons this time. So I did two types of lessons: Business Communication, and New Years Resolutions. They were fun, but one of my New Years classes turned out to be… well… the absolute worst class I’ve had so far (and honestly, it’s hard to imagine another one as bad coming… but we’ll see tomorrow…). Worse than the kid puking milk and udon all over my carpet and fouling up the place for a week. Unfortunately, it’s bad enough that I really ought not to write it on a public blog, so I have to just leave it at that.

My snowy weekend was spent relaxing with Hitomi and Pi-chan and watching the snow fall outside. We watched a bunch of movies, and I got to introduce her to Saw and the Shining. (Speaking of horror movies, in my class today I did a lesson on favorite movies, and one of my students said that Ju-On was his favorite movie! Huzzah! That made me happy!)

Let’s see… beyond that, there’s not much new. Same old same old, really. I’ve been reading lots of books lately on my iPod touch, and I’ve been taking lots of random photos that I intend to upload at some point… but that will have to wait as it’s past my bed time. This week is also monkey-busy, and I feel like I might be coming down with a cold right now. (I had coughing, germy kids crawl all over me today like I was a big American jungle gym.)

I haven’t written anything since Kiiro-chan died… I was upset, but mainly the reason is that I was super busy. My schedule at work has gotten a lot busier and probably won’t get better until April, and a lot of stuff happened in the meantime. For one, my PC came! Hurrah! I’ve been waiting for it for a long time, and now, finally, the wait is over! I’ve got a nice, new 22″ widescreen monitor and it’s just soooo gorgeous! Movies, TV shows, games… they’re breathtaking on my nice powerful machine with it’s beautiful new face.

My weekends have also been busy. That’s right!! The last time I write, I hadn’t even done the international exhibition, had I? I didn’t really take many photos, unfortunately, but I’ll just say it went really well. I had a good time, was really busy, and got to show lots of info about Philly to some of the stranger locals who ended up coming out. My Japanese teacher came as well, so we hung out together, which was nice — I didn’t end up bored. There were other Americans — the JETs from local schools… but for some reason I never hit it off with them. They’re nice enough folks, but too many of them just aren’t interested in Japan at all, and it just hurts my brain too much to wonder what the hell they’re doing here if they hate Japanese food and aren’t interested in learning any of the language or culture… oh well.

The next day, I had 3 days worth of study meetings… so I had no weekend at all… it was a really exhausting 2 weeks. And that week (big news!) I started dating a girl here, Hitomi, so that’s nice and happy. We’d been hanging out a lot in January, watching movies or cooking together… so yeah, now we’re together. And the next weekend, Minako’s friend from the US came to visit, so rather than stay home and rest like I should have, I went with Minako and Hiro and their friend Deren (and Hitomi) to Kyoto again. Exactly one month from my first Kyoto trip! Then, the next day, Minako’s friend had a home party in Fukui, so we went there, but I missed the last train home and had to take the morning train back to Takefu, shower, dress, and head off for another week of work! >_<

So, this weekend is the first weekend I’ve really had any time to relax at all. I spent today watching movies with Hitomi, finishing setting up my computer, and cleaning my room (boy, did it need it!). Now, I’ve got a chance to write, so I thought I’d quickly toss up a few photos from Kyoto, and just say hi so that my parents don’t think that I’ve died off or anything.

So anyway, photos from Kyoto:

We went to the Fushimi Inari shrine, which you may remember from Memoirs of a Geisha.

Since it was the Japanese festival of Setsubun, the shrines were all doing mamemaki — throwing us packets of beans with which to celebrate Setsubun.

More mamemaki, this time at the Yasaka shrine, where I went last time as well.

We walked down Gion street, the really famous maiko neighborhood. I want a house with a tree growing out of it!

A park area in Maruyama park.

Oh man, there were these really tame pigeons there… it was one of the coolest experiences ever!

Minako’s face is priceless in this shot.

Hitomi also enjoyed these crazy pigeons.

Next we went to Chion-in, which was an absolutely HUGE temple!

This was at the top of a small mountain, after a huge staircase… very beautiful and peaceful. We got to see a golden shrine that hadn’t been viewed by human eyes for 200 years, and just happened to be on display now!

You may recognize this temple from The Last Samurai.

We also went to Kiyomizu temple, where I went before. It was around the same time as well, so a very similar experience. But again, quite nice!

Group shot at Kiyomizu temple.