My first day on the job here in Japan, I was presented with an employee ID card. On it, my name was written as “ジェルリー” (Jerurii instead of Jefurii).

This afternoon, one of my coworkers sent out an email announcing my official farewell party next Monday night. In it, my name was written as “Jeffry.”

It’s nice to know that after five years of working here, my colleagues still don’t know how to spell my name.

My apologies again for the lack of posts. I’ve been pretty busy recently. With only one week left at work and only one month left before we leave Japan, things have been pretty hectic. We’ve even begun the monumental task of going through all of our stuff and deciding what is to be sold/given away/thrown away (most of it) and what is to be shipped back across the ocean to the States (as little of it as possible).

Will try to post again soon, but in the meantime, I offer you yet another crappy photo:

Nakagawa Shoko loves cats. She really loves them.

Just how much does the 21-year-old ‘Akiba Idol’ love cats? Click below to find out.

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Well, Judy and I have finalized our departure date: August 22nd. It’s so hard to believe that we’ll be leaving Japan in less than six weeks. Today was Judy’s last day of work and I’ll be leaving for the first of my farewell parties in about 20 minutes. It’s so strange to think that it just a few months we’ll be living completely different lives: new jobs (hopefully), new apartment, new friends, new car (ugh), new everything. As you can probably imagine, our feelings about leaving are pretty mixed; on the one hand, we’re excited about moving on to the next chapter of our lives (to use that clichéd line for the billionth time), but on the other, it’s going to be hard to leave Japan, our home for the past five years. We’ve made an agreement, though: if, for whatever reason, things fail to turn out well after giving it an earnest go in North America, we can always come back to Japan.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to enjoy free food & booze!

My apologies, once again. I’ve been incredibly busy recently both at work and at home and thus haven’t had the time to scrounge around in my ass to find something worth pulling out and posting on this site. I’ll try to post again soon, but in the meantime, here’s a photo of a very jolly train!

Yeah, yeah, you’ve read it all before — “Japanese TV commercials have sexy girls in bikinis in them, hyuck hyuck.” However, before I finally drop this topic for good, I’d like to present a poll on the matter. Well, not a true poll — unfortunately, I’m a bit too stupid to figure out how to get the poll plugin to display properly — so let’s just call it a question for you to ponder.

Instructions: Carefully review the following two examples of babes-in-bikinis-based advertising currently airing on Japanese television and answer the multiple choice question below.

Advertisement #1
Commercial for Marui department stores’ summer swimwear sale

Click image above to view [AVI, 6.1MB]

Advertisement #2
Commercial for part-time job placement agency Mobaito.com

Click image above to view [WMV, 6.6MB]

Don’t forget to use a #2 pencil!

After our somewhat less-than-enjoyable red-eye flight from Tokyo to Honolulu, Judy and I managed to move our connecting flight to Kauai up a few a few hours (with the guy at the check-in counter stating no less than three times, “I’m supposed to charge you to change it, but I’ll wave it for you.”) and finally arrived at the Kauai Marriott Resort in the city of Lihue at around 10:00a.m.

We had requested early check-in since we knew that we would be arriving in the morning, however we were disappointed to learn that there were no rooms available when we got there. Having some time to kill, we headed down to the poolside restaurant for breakfast, but we hardly had an appetite in our state of exhaustion. We also looked quite ridiculous sitting at a poolside cafe in Hawaii wearing long pants and sweaters, with winter coats resting over our seatbacks. Eventually the desire to sleep became too strong, so we ended up spending the next few hours dozing off at various locations around the hotel, including on the beach, in the garden and on a couch behind the big Christmas tree in the lobby (where at one point we awoke to the sound of a little boy asking, “Mommy, why are those people sleeping over there?”). Finally, a room became available and we were at long last able to take a shower, take a nap and begin our vacation.

Looking back, our four days in Kauai are a bit of a blur. The majority of our time was spent finalizing everything for the wedding: meeting with the wedding coordinator, getting our marriage license, preparing decorations and gifts, ironing all of the last-minute details, etc., etc., etc. However, despite all of the running around, we did manage to enjoy ourselves quite a bit. We were able to spend time with the various family and friends who made the trip out to join us, we took a dip in the ocean, played volleyball (albeit horribly), relaxed on the beach. . . and, oh yeah, and we also got married!

More to come soon! For now, here are a few photos!