{"id":1122,"date":"2012-03-11T12:38:03","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T03:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/life-in-japan\/?p=1122"},"modified":"2012-03-11T12:38:03","modified_gmt":"2012-03-11T03:38:03","slug":"anniversary-of-a-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/?p=1122","title":{"rendered":"Anniversary of a Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the important fact that today is the one year anniversary of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. Much like September 11th, I have a feeling that this will be one of those days that many people will talk about for years to come. At least for those of us living in Japan, “Where were you when it happened?” is still a common question to ask or to be asked when meeting people. Fortunately for me, I was all the way on the other side of Honshu (the main island) and didn’t even feel anything. The first I heard of it was when a student of mine (a retired oil company executive who lived off and on in the middle east for 8 years) came to class and told me of the news he heard on the radio. He borrowed my iPad and started reading news as it was coming in, so we spent the next hour talking about what was happening and looking at maps. Of course, people weren’t quite predicting the horror about to unfold at the Fukushima nuclear plant at that time.<\/p>\n

So, naturally, I moved to Tokyo 6 months later. I’m special like that.<\/p>\n

In other news, I went out to go window shopping in Akihabara yesterday (the so-called “Electric Town”) and somehow came home with a new laptop. Weird how things like that happen, isn’t it? I normally avoid spontaneous purchases, but I’ve had my laptop for 4.5 years now and they had a good sale going on (with an additional 10% back in store credit!). This brings the grand total to: one pc, two laptops, one netbook, and one iPad. One of those laptops will be recycled\/ donated, so that makes it okay (right?). What this means is that basically I should never be without the ability to check my e-mail. Because we all know that I can’t be without e-mail.<\/p>\n

Lastly, turning the sad news of today around, I went back to Yamaguchi prefecture last week to take part in my ex high school students’ graduation. I took two days off to head down to see these kids that I taught for 3 years graduate.
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I left town in a bit of a hurry, since my job was to start in 3 weeks and I still needed to find an apartment and buy furniture, so I didn’t have a chance to say a proper goodbye to many people. There are probably still some people who don’t know I left town (I occasionally get invitations to hang out on the weekend). But this gave me a chance to sit and have lunch and dinner with some ex students and coworkers.<\/p>\n

The high school also put me in the “distinguished guests” section, with the likes of the city mayor and the head of the PTA. Though I was just a minor part of their education (as an ALT for English classes), I’m still immensely proud to see these kids moving on to newer and bigger things. At least they’ve got 2-4 years to go before the challenge of job hunting strikes. I really don’t envy the university graduates coming out this month, taking a shot at the job market. <\/p>\n

On that note, I’m here in a coffee shop now and need to get to work on studying. How else would you spend a Sunday?? Then back to work on Monday!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the important fact that today is the one year anniversary of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. Much like September 11th, I have a feeling that this will be one of those days that many people will talk about for years to come. At least for those of us living in Japan, “Where were you when it happened?” is still a common question to ask or to be asked when meeting people. Fortunately for me, I was all the way on the other side of Honshu (the main island) and didn’t even feel anything. . . . → Read More: Anniversary of a Tragedy<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}