Then there’s the ofuro. An ofuro is basically a deep bathtub, and one that had me skeptical at first, but now I’m convinced every home and dorm should have one—with the possible exception of the one at MSU that already has hot tubs. Water’s expensive, so the basic idea is you wash yourself outside the tub and get all clean. Then you soak in the ofuro for as long as you can stand.

The ofuro at this house is kept at a tightly controlled 42 degrees C (108 F) by a fancy-looking digital thermostat, which has more buttons and a display showing little stem coming out of the ofuro or a little flame underneath when the heater’s preparing to scald the person inside. The ofuro is deep enough that I can sink in all the way to my neck; back when they kept it at 40 C I could almost fall asleep in it. But the water is kept covered to preserve the precious (and expensive) heat for the next person to use it, so changing the temperature isn’t really fair.

Of course, there’s the ever-present peril I’m sure we’ve all considered that you might be cold stepping out of such a hot tub dripping wet into the rest of the bathroom, so some homeowners even put heat lamps in their bathrooms to help air dry themselves before leaving.

Last Friday we took a trip to the Panasonic “museum”, which was more a showcase for their new products than a museum really. For someone with unlimited pockets, there’s so much cool stuff there. Huge flat plasma screens. Tiny SD card-based MP3 players the size of a pack of Nerds. DVD burners for any of four DVD formats. DVD audio and an “acoustically perfect” room where you can listen to music in surround sound. (How having music surround you could ever be more real than standing in front of someone playing a violin I’ll never know.) Tiny (albeit underpowered) notebook computers to put even my sexy new notebook to shame. Washers that can wash and dry a load in 45 minutes with bubbles instead of heat. Hard-drive-based carnav systems that can show you individual buildings around you in 3D, real-time traffic, the positions of your friends and family, and real-time video feeds (surely the device’s safest feature) from your friends’ cars. Lots of stuff to drool over and hope would someday soon drop out of the stratosphere so I could afford it.

New slideshows from Tokyo (yes, months ago, but I'm slow): Shibuya and Shinjuku--the heart of Tokyo.

They also have a dog, a golden retriever named Baru. It took me a while to find out this was how they say Ball, as in what he looked like when he was born. Baru likes car rides, having conversations with the dogs next door, and morning monologues when he wants to go for a walk. He also loves eating tofu and licking my knee for some reason. Don’t ask me why; my host mom thinks he likes the taste of my sweat but he also licks my knee through whatever pants I wear.

My homestay is nestled in a nice neighborhood out in western Kyoto; coming home I can see the mountains to the west. The houses are nice but close together, so with my windows open I can hear every word said next door or keep tabs on the Tigers (no, not the Detroit Tigers).

I discovered the true center of Japanese technical dominance. It’s not cars, or robots, or electronics, or even Pokemon. It’s the bathroom. Granted, Japan is also home to many of the famous and much-reviled “squat” Japanese-style toilets. Let’s ignore those. Private bathrooms tend to have the nice Western toilets we’re all used to, except with a few embellishments.

Seat heaters to start with. Then the bidet – a little jet to wash your undercarriage, usually complete with a blow drier. (Personally I don’t really want water or hot air shooting up my butt but I suppose it’s a matter of personal preference.) Usually the jets and drier have several different modes you can choose from, though I haven’t really explored this. Then there are toilets that play music or the radio while you’re on the can, or measure your blood pressure or body temperature or dietary habits by analyzing, well, let’s not get into details. All of this is controlled by an array of buttons (including one for flush, which took a while to decipher in Japanese) and indicated by a set of lights on the toilet.

My host family’s downstairs toilet even has a remote control for some reason. The toilet beeps when you flush it. A gadget lover’s paradise.

I suppose, now that I’m going to leave in two weeks, that I should describe my host family. My host parents are in their fifties, with two kids that have since grown up, graduated, and moved away. Their elder daughter’s already married off, so now the pressure’s on their younger son and his girlfriend, who just bought a condo near my homestay.

My host father is somewhere high up the food chain at a local kimono distributor—the perfect front organization if he were a mob boss like Uncle Vito. He likes American movies (and not Japanese movies), cracking bad Japanese puns, and the Yomiuri Giants baseball team. (The neighbors are Hanshin Tigers fans, so on game nights there’s a little tension.) He’s also athletic, having run a marathon in Hawaii.

My host mother, like many Japanese wives, doesn’t work. But she’s lived in Kyoto all her life and spends a lot of time visiting friends. She also enjoys sewing, Western flower arrangement, and gardening. She likes romantic comedies, especially if they involve Julia Roberts. She speaks really loudly with a thick Kansai accent, so phone conversations with her always take longer than they should. But she’s really nice, and she insists on making me breakfast each morning and not allowing me to help clean the kitchen at night.

Monday a bunch of students from Ritsumeikan University came to have lunch with us; then we had an organized English-language conversation about eating and drinking at Stanford. (Apparently, they�fre in an English-speaking circle and they have English-language discussions all the time. Freaky. Stanford doesn�ft have those sorts of student groups for practicing other foreign languages�c)

Last night was our Bing Dinner at Hakusa Sonso, the former home of a famous painter. Normally it�fs not a restaurant open to the public, but they occasionally host large dinners for high-rollers like Mrs. Bing. It was another great (albeit very large) meal.

Then I wandered around shopping for food for dinner that night. I volunteered to cook my host parents some of Mom’s famous mostaccioli, since they’re big into pasta. I found tomato paste and the noodles at this international grocery store—and paid a premium for them. It went pretty well, although when I wasn’t looking my host father snuck in and oversalted the pasta. Proof that sometimes I can cook…

I also picked up a copy of Ocean’s Eleven since my host parents were being evasive about what sort of movie they’d want to watch: “either a comedy or an action movie or a romance—you decide”. It seemed to have a little of all three. My host mom dozed off at first, but her head popped up when she saw Julia Roberts.

Saturday I started taiko (Japanese drum) classes. Taiko is so much fun�c beating on stuff in general is fun, but taiko has that nice deafening drum quality to it. By the end of the first two hours we were already learning the first part of a matsuri taiko, performed at festivals. The day after I�fve got sore arms and legs (rather than make taiko drums taller or put them on a pedestal, it was decided the proper taiko position is a sort of squat), and blisters on my hands. But it was worth it.

9:30 AM. I get to the Stanford Center and head down to the cluster for my daily Internet injection.
10:00 AM. Japanese class. We�fve found that by hiding in the cluster we can push this back a few minutes. Of course, in a class of six, the sensei can easily find us. We get a 10-minute break during this class that we also try to stretch.
12:00 PM. Lunch, from one of the nearby takeout places or konbinis, or delivered if we�fre feeling really lazy. Two decent ones have free delivery, even for one $5 bowl. The Stanford Center keeps these places in business.
1:00 PM. Sometimes a section, sometimes a meeting.
2:30 PM. More class.
just before 6:00 PM. I leave the Center. I love the looks and hushed voices I get when I bust out my notebook on the bus. It�fs even better when I open my kanji practice program. Sometimes when I know they�fre talking about me I just open the kanji trainer just for the reaction. I love it when the guy next to me keeps sneaking glances at the screen. (This never happens when I�fm typing in English, like this blog, for example.)
by 7:30 PM. I walk through my host family�fs neighborhood, the smells of barbecues and other dinners wafting through the air. When I get back to the homestay, my host father�fs in the ofuro (more on this later) and my host mother�fs making dinner. By the time he gets out of the ofuro, it�fs on the table.
sometime after 8:00 PM. Host mother abruptly cuts our conversation short by pointing out the time and after helping clean up as much as host mom will allow, I go take a shower while she cleans the kitchen.
8:30 PM on. Homework until I fall asleep, usually.

I finally got to see this movie on opening night. Yes, that wasn’t until last Saturday here. And yes, I had to pay ~$12 for the privilege. But it was worth it. Movies in Kyoto aren’t that popular, but they are nice—this one had assigned stadium seating and headrests…if you were planning to put your head back, that is. We saw it in English with Japanese subtitles with a sold-out crowd, taking up an entire row of the theater. But we were the only ones laughing at most of the jokes. Some of the movie’s best lines were lost in translation. Like Link busting through the door of his apartment: “Where’s my pus--?” became Tadaima, which just means, “I’m home.” The French guy’s monologue also got lost. Ah well.

So now that I only have a few weeks left of class I might as well describe what’s been my typical day here:

6:30 AM. Wake up to dog(s) barking. Fall back asleep.
7:30 AM. Alarm goes off.
7:45 AM. After a number of snooze buttons, which I justify by the lost sleep from the dog, I get up.
8:00 AM. Breakfast. My host mom makes breakfast for me every day, no matter how much I ask her not to take the trouble.
8:28 AM. Take a bus to the train station. Usually I can snag a seat and study for the day’s vocab quiz.
8:45 AM. Take a commuter train downtown. Sometimes I can actually sit down, other times I’m left standing, clutching my Japanese book or fiddling with my phone.
9:00 AM. I emerge from Kawaramachi station, usually to see the next bus I need already coming down the street. By some cruel joke of Kyoto City, the bus stop “at the corner of Shijo and Kawaramachi” is actually half a block away. I get out of the station the same time every day, but the downtown buses seem to treat the schedule as a suggestion rather than a guideline, so there’s no telling when the next one will be. So on these days I make a mad dash around the corner, ducking past little old ladies and gaggles of middle-school kids. Often the bus will round the corner only to be snagged by traffic, leaving me feeling rather stupid for rushing.

On the train ride back to Kyoto these two high school girls sat in the seat across from us, and after a while we noticed they were talking about us. Well, OK, maybe not Audrey, since she managed to pass for a Japanese the night before. I can tell because they were practicing the line, �gHow do you do?�h in as low a voice as they could to try and mimic the way they thought I spoke English. Never mind that I�fve never actually used those exact words in my entire life. But alas, they couldn�ft work up the courage to actually try their English out and I didn�ft have the heart to frighten them with my Japanese at the time.

The next day (and this would be Monday), we took a field trip to go see a performance of Takigi Noh at Heian Jingu (the Kyoto shrine with the famous big torii). Noh is a high art in Japan; people go to special schools to study it. It also tends to be in classical Japanese. Chanted. Sloooowly. So the first half I spent fighting the urge to sleep and trying to sneak pictures over the head of the guy in front of me. The next half, though, was far more animated. One play was about these enchanted mushrooms that were taking over the village; each time the monk would come out to I guess exorcise them, more would spring up, until eventually the mushrooms started jumping up and down and mobbed the monk, chasing him away. The last was about this spider demon who could shoot webs from his fingertips, a la Spiderman. There was lots of swordplay and spiderweb silk flying around�c

Last weekend was a field trip to Mt. Hiei, apparently home to the Tendai Buddhist sect and later to the so-called �gwarrior monks�h who regularly swooped down the mountain to burn the temples of their opponents. Don�ft mess with these monks. Now it�fs more famous for the 1000-day �gmarathon monks�h who walk around the mountain (a 30 km trip) or around Kyoto each day for 1000 days, often on very little sleep. They also do a nine-day fast without food, drink, or sleep. Hard core. Don�ft mess with these monks either.

Oh yeah...
Which Naruto Character are You?
quiz by orangeday.net

In Himeji we were looking for this Sen-en-no-ie (Thousand Yen/$10 hostel) but of course we got there at night in the rain and finding it was no small task. It didn�ft help that the restaurant we stopped in for directions wouldn�ft believe me when I explained that Audrey was no more Japanese than I. But no matter, we eventually found this �gdrab�h house of concrete, tucked away far from the road or any real signage. (Maybe we would have found it earlier had the romaji sign out front read Sen-en-no-ie instead of .) But hey, for $10 a night we can�ft complain. Not even about the creepy showers with no hot water.

We slept in but got to the Himeji Prefectural History Museum in time for me to try on samurai gear and for Audrey to wear a kimono. Admittedly it�fd been an ambition of mine since I set foot in Kyoto, though there aren�ft that many samurai walking around the streets (while there are plenty of old women in kimono, even in sweltering June heat). The sun finally came out, as if on cue, after the dress-up experience. We stopped at a real toy exhibit (where else but the history museum next to a castle?) where, among other things, we saw an original Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom), in all its ugly red glory.

Next we toured the awesome Himeji-jo, one of the most intact and beautiful castles left in Japan. It had lots of highlights, like the building for the famous ladies-in-waiting to, I guess, wait, and the seppuku (ritual suicide) corner. The suicide corner was one of the perimeter lookouts, so presumably watchguards who couldn�ft warn of an attack in time could conveniently disembowel themselves and have their, er, parts, thrown down the nearby well. There always seems to be a lot of blood involved with castles for some reason.

The next day, after breakfast, they turned us loose on Miyama-jima. It turns out the torii we thought was the island�fs most famous jewel was not the only prized tourist site. We also saw the world�fs largest rice spoon, quietly hidden away on a side street. We were literally walking along, shopping for omiyage for our host families and happened to see it. It was a life-changing experience, really.

After that Audrey and I headed for Kurashiki, home to a beautiful historic district intended to look like shops in a post-feudal village and the extremely overrated (and overpriced) Folk Craft Museum. By then the typhoon had hit full strength, so we got soaked. We didn�ft spend long there, taking a train to Himeji to spend the night.

After this we took a ferry to Miyajima, a small island famous for the �gfloating torii�h that�fs surrounded by water at high tide. It�fs definitely more impressive at high tide. We stayed at a sweet ryokan (inn) with a nice view of the sea. After a soak in the big ofuro (bath), Mrs. Bing (not actually with us) paid for a really nice dinner. Then we wandered out to go see the torii at night. That weekend there was a typhoon sweeping across southern Japan, but that night it was just starting to rain. Afterward we headed back to the ryokan to chill in one of the huge rooms.

You know you�fve got cultural exchange when you�fre picking up Japanese drinking games. Kono naka de is a favorite. It�fs also a great way to practice Japanese. (Of course, surely I�fm just drinking water�c) Someone says, �gKono naka de�cichiban�c�h (�gOut of everyone here, the most�c�h), to which everyone responds, �gyoo!�h. Then he/she describes someone else in the room (e.g. the tallest person, the person who likes anime the most, etc.)�c in Japanese, of course. Then everyone points to the person they think best fits the description, who then has to (you guessed!) drink. I learned some rather�cinteresting things about my friends that night�c

New video: Wulai. Yes, from Taiwan. But I'm now officially done with Taiwan photos... after only two months...

The mayor of Hiroshima writes a letter to protest each nuclear test ever since. A few of these have been addressed to Bush II. That�fs right: even though the US no longer conducts above-ground nuclear testing, it still conducts a number of �gsub-critical�h nuclear tests each year. I�fd researched arms policy and debated the merits of so-called �emutually assured destruction�f before, but it somehow seems hard to justify after seeing something like this.

Outside we saw the actual A-Bomb Dome, once the rotunda of a large conference hall but reduced to the metal frame when the bomb detonated nearby. The ghostly image has been preserved today much as it was that fateful day.

It wasn�ft all gloomy though: We also got to see the collections of thousands paper cranes sent from children all over the world. Decades ago, a bomb victim named Sayoko was dying of leukemia but believed a legend that if she could fold a thousand paper cranes she�fd recover. Which she did from her hospital bed, including some so small she had to fold them with a needle. She still died, but she inspired children from her school and around the world to fold their own paper cranes and send them to Hiroshima, where they�fve been collected ever since.

Three new videos for your viewing pleasure in the list at left. Yes, I know two of them are from two months ago in Taiwan... but what can I say? I'm a lazy...er, busy mofo.

The Sunday before last was a barbeque with DESSA (the Doshisha [University] English Speaking Student Association) on the banks of Kamo River in Kyoto. Never have I seen anyone get that drunk at 2:30 in the afternoon. We still made a ton of traditional Japanese outdoor hibachi. Lesson learned: Wooden chopsticks are great for eating but not so good for putting stuff on a flaming grill.

We followed that up with a trip to Club JJ, a new sensation sweeping Kyoto. It’s a nine-story building downtown with unlimited video games, pool tables, karaoke, bowling, even some sort of BB gun firing range and a rumored pool. And it’s all only 300 yen per hour. In exchange you have to register, a process that involves supplying your cell phone number and address and answering a few survey questions. (I didn’t want to take the time to decipher the questions, so I might have told them I wear pantyhose and speak Chinese for all I know.) They e-mail a sort of bar code pattern to your phone, which you then use to scan yourself in on future visits. After you’re done (and this is key because you lose track of time inside) you scan out and pay for the time you spent there. They’re probably collecting lots of information and planning to send my host family junk mail, but it’s worth it.

Last weekend was our Bing trip to Hiroshima. Helen Bing is apparently some really wealthy person who sponsors really nice trips for all Stanford’s overseas programs. So we shinkansenned down to Hiroshima, where we had a great okonomiyaki lunch (hard to describe�Elike a big omelet I guess).

We then went to the Peace Museum, which was larger and I thought more balanced than the one at Nagasaki. This one described a fair amount of Hiroshima’s history—including the military activities there during WWII. It was still stunning though; between the replica of the A-Bomb Dome (formerly part of the grand industrial promotion hall) reduced to a tattered frame and the stories, pictures, and tissue samples of bomb victims, it’s unconscionable to imagine how nations could stockpile thousands of weapons each up to 4,000 times as destructive.

Update: Thanks for your concern, but I'm not sick anymore. I guess I forgot to mention that earlier.

And no, I do not have SARS.

The next weekend we took a field trip to Nara, Japan�fs first �gpermanent�h capital. (Before Nara, it was fashionable for each new emperor/ress to move the capital to a place of his/her choosing, usually where all his/her friends and supporters lived.) Nara has some beautiful temples that are even older than the ones in Kyoto�cand a whole lot of deer.

These aren�ft the flighty deer who run away from any humans not driving a car like the ones back in the Midwest, mind you. These deer are friendly. And hungry. Nara deer are famous because they bow before they take your food. You can buy little deer crackers to feed them. Or you can set your bag down unzipped and look away, like, say, for a professor to lecture, and the deer will grab any food it can get. In lieu of real food paper will do, say, a brochure on Nara, or even a paper bag. It�fs not good for them to eat, but they viciously go after it anyway, as we found out. And you try taking a brochure away from a hungry deer�c This one even squeezed its nose into a crowd to pick up a bag someone had dropped and devour it.

The Five-Storied Pagoda looked to me to have some sort of 50�fs sci-fi death ray on top of it.

Next came Todaiji, home of the famous Daibutsu (�gbig Buddha�h), housed in the Daibutsu-en (�gbig Buddha hall�h), the largest wooden structure in the world. This is one massive Buddha. Inside the hall one of the pillars has a notch cut in it that�fs said to be the size of one of his nostrils. Visitors who can crawl through this notch are rewarded with a lifetime of wisdom. I had three midterms ahead of me and figured I could use some wisdom, so I crawled through. So did about half of SCTI. I guess there goes the curve�c

Two Saturdays ago was a party sponsored by the Kansai Stanford Club, the local branch of the Alumni Association. First they took us on a tour of a nearby temple complex, which had beautiful gardens and gold-laden shrines to Buddhas but forbade photos. Then we came back to the Center for tons of free food, schmoozing with the alumni, and some performances: Camille doing some sort of hip hop stepping; Jonathan, intense kenjitsu (with a sword!); and Luther, impressive wu shu. Watch the video

Sunday was the Mifune Matsuri in the more rural, but no less touristy, Arashiyama area of Kyoto. Mifune means, literally, �gthree boats�h, but we were expecting a colorful armada to go sailing down the river. Instead, a small procession made its way from a local shrine to festively painted boats waiting at one end of the riverway, transferred some important person shrouded behind cloth to one of the boats, and returned. The boats then began poling upstream about half a kilometer, with priests playing music and miko (women shrine attendants) dancing. We rented some rowboats ourselves and got a nice up-close view of the action. Sometimes too close; but the nice thing about those long poles is the priests can use them to push us away too.

Arashiyama�fs got lots of famous shrines and temples and a nice riverbank, but more importantly, it has monkeys. Lots and lots of Japanese monkeys in this little park on the side of a mountain, right next to one of the shrines. As we climbed the hill monkeys were on either side of us, pondering whether we had any food. (We were warned not to stare at the monkeys or have food out as we entered. Don�ft make the monkeys mad.) When we got to the top we found their big hangout spot, where they scamper around amidst the tourists. Useful fact: Monkey mothers don�ft like their babies being photographed.