I will have a phone on Thursday the 11th, and Internet at home the week after! My number will be 0852-28-2735 (I have no idea what the country code is for Japan; you'll have to look it up). If anyone wants to call me, the best times for people in Nova Scotia to call will be 9am-11am and 8pm-11pm. I don't have an answering machine, though. Once I have the Internet, I'll be able to use Skype to call, which should be very cheap. This means I should be reachable before my niece/nephew arrives! It took way too long on the phone to set this up (listening to "Home on the Range" set to Muzak; are they TRYING to drive me crazy?)

I'm starting to find a routine now; mornings I get up and (sometimes) go for a bike ride or a run before getting ready for work. I've done some writing on my play as well. Work is long; I've been going in at noon some days and leaving close to 10pm. (As I get more used to doing prep, it will hopefully take less time...) When I come home, I try to cram some Japanese before bed. Sometimes I watch television; it helps a bit to learn the language. There are a lot of game shows involving physical competitions, plus shows like "American Idol" and dance competitions. I also caught some Kabuki on television over the holidays; very stylized, very lavish, very different from any performance I had seen before (although closest to Gilbert and Sullivan, who were very influenced by Orientalism). The woman (actually an onnagata, a man specializing in female roles, but very convincing) performed several different dances with props like fans and handkerchiefs. The woman who founded Kabuki is buried in Izumo, her hometown, about thirty minutes away by train; I'd like to see her tomb. Now no women are permitted in Kabuki; the government banned them in 1627 to keep the prostitutes out.

I went back to the park around Matsue Castle last week and explored the lower level, where several turrets and military buildings (the armoury, a storeroom, and the Drum Turret, where they kept signal drums) have been rebuilt. During the fall of the shogunate and the end of the samurai in the late 1800's, the Japanese government, in their zeal to become more Westernized, started ripping down their old buildings at a shocking rate. All the buildings and grounds around the castle were destroyed, and the castle itself barely saved. The turrets were restored around 1975. There is a Western-style building on the grounds - a huge, pillared homage to Western colonialism - which has been converted into a museum of odds and ends from the last two hundred years in Matsue, kind of like Randall House in Wolfville. Here, in this large, damp building, you can find coal-burning kotatsu next to 1950's radios and WWII army uniforms and lots of photographs. There is a set of taicho drums I could barely reach across in the foyer. When a tourist hit it, the whole building reverberated.

I looked skyward for much of my walk, watching the hawks of Matsue. They have been a great pleasure of mine since I got here. There are many hawks wheeling and crying throughout the day. I hear them when I wake up and watch them as I go to work. They are lovely in full flight. I also found out what those birds were in the rice paddy the day it snowed. They are snowy herons, and there are many of them. I walked past one perching on one leg on the rail near the river; it didn't move as I passed within six feet of it except to slowly turn its head to watch me out of its other eye. They are very big birds, not to be messed with. They have, despite their elegant appearance, a harsh, grating cry that I've only heard at night. It took me a few days to figure out what made the noise!