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My Travels
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I lived in Japan from August of 1989 to August of 1991. I was married to my first husband at the time and he got a job teaching English with the Japanese Ministry of Education. It was a wonderful experience for me to live over there. I worked part-time teaching English at Izumi High School, and also as a cashier in a Restaurant called The Daisy Spot in Kishiwada. The first place I lived in Japan was the very small town of Fuke-Cho on the main island of Honshu. Here is a picture of me at the train station in Fuke-Cho. Nice hair, huh? Hey, give me a break, it was 1989!
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| The converted shed that we lived in in Fuke-Cho was quite a culture shock for me. It had a japanese-style toilet (squatty potty) with a reservoir that had to be pumped out every few months (peeeuw!), and tons of cockroaches! We had to shake them out of the futon at night, and they would scramble to the back of every kitchen drawer when it was opened. We soon moved to a bigger, better house in the bigger city of Kishiwada. It was a really nice house, and had a beautiful garden, front and back yard, all surrounded by a high concrete wall with spikes on top. Sadly, it too had an outhouse style squatty potty. After a year, we convinced our landlady, who convinced the rest of the neighborhood to pay to have actual sewer plumbing put in. After that we had a western style flushable toilet, so we threw a huge party to celebrate and invited all our friends. Kishiwada is really a great city. I think it had approximately 200,000 people in 1990, so that makes it a fairly small city by Japan standards. | ||||||||||
| Here is a picture of me and my dog Dougan in front of Kishiwada castle. I got my hair cut short after the first summer in Japan. It is so hot and humid in southern Honshu! | ||||||||||
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| It can get down in the 40's in the winters in Kishiwada, but it only snowed flurries twice when I was there. The other weather phenomenon that I missed was lightening. It rains a lot there, but you never see thunder and lightening storms. Kishiwada is a port city. Here is a picture of my red bicycle with a basket, at the fishing pier. I loved that bicycle. We didn't have a car, so besides train or foot, this is how I got around. Note the really well designed kick-stand. It flipped down to make a flat stand underneath the entire back tire, instead of leaning the bike to one side. | ||||||||||
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| Kishiwada is best known for its Danjiri Matsuri (Shrine/Float Festival) in September. It is a really great time. I found another website that does a very good job of describing the sounds, sights and excitement of the festival, so rather than go into it here, I will refer you to the archived journal at Farstrider.net. You can also find information on the festival and a lot of other sightseeing information about Kishiwada at the City of Kishiwada webpage. Here are my photos from the Danjiri Matsuri in Kishiwada in September of 1989. If you actually live in Kishiwada during the festival, you will find out that it is two solid days of drinking and partying day and night. Possibly similar to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but I've never actually been there, so I couldn't say for sure. The only time I ever attempted to go to Louisiana, I rear-ended someone on I-94 in Chicago rush-hour traffice, which turned my already piece-of-junk car into a useless piece of you-know-what (the acronym for this is UPS, incidentally) So, I never did get to New Orleans, because I didn't have a car anymore. The lesson to be learned from that experience was: Don't try to read a road map while driving in Chicago rush-hour traffic. Oh, right, the photos: | ||||||||||
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