I finally have the internet at home! And I figured out how to set up my wireless router even though 90% of the technical instructions were in Japanese. Hooray.

So here are some pictures finally:

And here are some more.

When I was little, I was almost always a proud member of what my mother called "The Clean Plate Club." This means I always ate my food, even the weird things my sisters gagged at, like crab and Chinese broccoli and fishy fish. But as I grew older and graduated from the Kids' Menu and its tiny baskets of chicken fingers, servings at restaurants suddenly became impossibly, ridiculously large and I lost my membership to the club. I inevitably cleaned my plate into a doggie bag.

In Japan, there are no doggie bags. You either eat or you waste your yen, so everyone eats. And how they eat! Food somehow magically and gracefully disappears from their plates, every grain of rice scraped up, every stray piece of ginger gone. I've mastered the art of eating every piece of rice in my bowl (the secret is to constantly herd the stragglers into the larger grouping of rice with your chopsticks -- try it!), but actually being able to accommodate every piece of rice in my stomach is a different battle. I'm convinced it's 90% psychological. For years I have been served oversized American plates of food, gigantic plates drenched in pasta sauce or ranch dressing, plates meant to remind me there will always be plenty, I never have to worry -- so when I get something at a restaurant, I automatically think, "I'm not going to finish." But that is slowly changing. Maybe it has to do with eating at izakayas, casual restaurant-bars that serve small plates of food. You order lots of little things and eat your way through them with your friends, then order some more. There's something less daunting about eating little morsels of food off of a tiny plate. It may also have to do with the daily training I get from the school bento lunch. Oh, a piece of some sort of root covered in tempura batter, two strange, starchy little balls AND a boiled potato, all in addition to the box of rice, the main dish (usually fried) and the pickles? Sure, why not!

So with this intense training, I've been finishing my food almost always when I go out. And then there's the matter of the sushi-eating contests.

Ranking high on the list of very good and very Japanese ideas is the kaiten (conveyor-belt) sushi restaurant. You sit at a table or at a counter next to a constantly moving conveyor belt carrying plates of one or two pieces of sushi. You grab what you want, as much as you want, and at the end, you push a button and the waiter comes over to count the plates and figure out your bill. Each plate is 100 yen (about $1). Genius! There are also hot water dispensers at the table, so you can serve yourself unlimited green tea, and if you want a certain type of sushi, you can order it via a computerized screen or an intercom system at the table.

The last sushi-eating contest was held at Kappa Sushi, only a few minutes' bike ride from my apartment. It was me and seven guys, so I thought I was doomed to lose, but happily I managed eight plates, beating two people and tying with another. It wasn't even that hard to keep eating and eating. It was less that I was completely stuffed and more that I didn't want to taste sushi again for awhile (especially since the sushi at Kappa is not very good.) The winning eater, just so you know, finished an awe-inspiring 24 plates of sushi.

Last night we braved the almost-40-minute bike ride to a different kaiten sushi place, one that featured the added weird bonus of microchips in the plates, so as you drop your empty plates into a slot in the table, the computer continuously tallies your total. Every five plates, a little video game comes up on the screen and if you win, a prize drops down from a dispenser mounted above the table. This time, the sushi was much better and maybe I had also worked up an appetite from the bike ride, so I managed eleven plates of sushi and two plates of fruit. The new winner unseated the previous champion with a whopping 26 plates and four plates of fruit. (The fruit is key, you know. It rids your mouth of the taste of sushi and invigorates you enough to keep eating.) Our table of six people managed to tally up 120 plates -- but we only won three prizes from the video games! That's just not right.

I kind of fear my return to the U.S. at this point. I'll have to go through reverse training to remind myself that I SHOULDN'T finish everything on my plate. A few trips to BJ's, with its pizzas and Pizzookies, should do the trick. Mmm...Pizzookie....

Monday was Respect for the Aged Day, a national holiday in Japan and my first day off from work, so I respected the aged by visiting an onsen for the first time.

Nearly everyone I’ve ever heard talk about onsen (Japanese hot springs) says they are one of the best things about living in Japan, but I’ve always been a little afraid of going, not because I’m nervous about sitting around naked in an outdoor pool with a bunch of naked old Japanese ladies, or because there would be lots of new etiquette I would have to observe, but mainly because of the distinct possibility I might be branded as a thug and thrown out. Why? Because I have three, yes, THREE tattoos, and in Japan, tattoos are synonymous with the yakuza, criminals and miscreants. I am affiliated with none of these, but that fact may or may not matter to the old women of the onsen.

So a plan was born, one involving bandages, waterproof tape and a quick stop at a secluded shrine to cover up the evidence. I was still nervous, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying most of the hour-long bike ride to the onsen: the mountains rising up from the rice paddies, the roof tiles glinting in the sunlight like the surface of a river, the faded but beautiful Buddhist temple sitting in the foothills. And then there was the Shinto shrine we stopped at to apply the bandages – it was all mossy stone and quiet dappled sunlight. A gigantic centipede was the only witness to our covert action. Unfortunately, it was discovered that the tape I bought only stuck to itself, not human skin, which was fine for my wrist and ankle tattoos, but wasn’t going to cut it on my lower back. Climbing into the water with an inch-thick layer of surgical tape wrapped around and around my torso seemed counter to my goal of blending in. So we rather haphazardly used two small waterproof bandages to affix the larger piece of gauze to my back and set off. I felt like I was delicately held together with pins.

At the Ikeda Onsen, I bought my bath ticket from a machine (a mere 500 yen), as well as a towel ticket (200 yen), and handed them to a smiling lady behind the counter, who handed me a neatly-wrapped towel. Then I had to leave my Japanese-speaking companion, who promised to check his cell phone periodically in case I had any tattoo-related problems with the staff, and walk through the “FEMALE” curtain into the great unknown.

Naked! Everyone just seemed incredibly naked at first! The number of naked women walking around wasn’t so different from a locker room at the gym, I suppose, but there were lots of tiny kids and old grandmothers, so maybe it was that the generation-spanning nakedness just seemed more naked. I almost chose a locker by the door, but then I decided I didn’t want people seeing my tattoo bandages as soon as they walked inside, so I moved around the corner. Once I stripped, I went to the shower room to wash off.

First I dropped the handheld shower nozzle, which clattered loudly across the floor and, I was sure, riveted all eyes on me and my strange bandagings. Then I turned the water on and my back bandage immediately crumpled and fell to the floor. I snatched it up and stuck it back on, but the “waterproof” adhesive had clearly given out. By leaning forward slightly, I managed to keep the damp gauze stuck to my back long enough to finish washing off. Clutching my towel to my chest with one hand and the bandage to my back with the other, I managed to open the sliding door and make it to the outdoor pool. As I slid into the silky water, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to clutch this useless bandage to my back for an hour, so I wadded it up and wrapped it in my towel. At this point, the band-aid on my finger – covering a completely non-tattoo-related injury – also fell off and floated in the water, so I snatched that up, stuck it in the wadded-up gauze and rewrapped the whole gross package in my towel.

Finally, I relaxed in the hot water, my back leaning safely against the rocks lining the edge of the pool. Disinterested old ladies with saggy breasts cooled off on flat rocks outside the water while little girls giggled and ran between the two outdoor pools. There were a few women my age, usually in pairs. No one really spoke. The water was lovely, hot without being unbearable, clear and soft. I assume it’s the mountain minerals that give it the particular silky feeling against the skin.

I stuck mostly to the side of the pool closest to the wall, so I could sit outside of the water periodically without fear of the old ladies inside spotting my tattoo through the window and chasing me out with burning torches. (Or more likely, and somehow more embarrassingly, reporting it to the smiling lady behind the counter, who would have to come outside and quietly ask me to leave, apologizing the whole time.) A woman and her seven- or eight-year-old daughter were sitting near me most of the time and my towel was on the rock between us. When they stood up to move to the other pool, the woman grabbed my towel, wadded up bandage and all. “Sumimasen!” I cried. But she didn’t hear me. I tried to think about how to say, “That’s my towel,” but I couldn’t remember if the word for “towel” was “taoru” or not. So I didn’t say anything. I figured she would open up the towel at some point, the wadded up bandages would fall out and she would realize her mistake. I could rescue the towel later, after she left.

This mishap, however, left me unprotected during my exit from the pool. I began to keep watch for the optimal time to leave. When my opening came – only a few women in the main pool, no one sitting near the steps – I slipped out and sat on the bench next to my stolen towel. Only it wasn’t my towel. My bandage was there, folded up neatly as a clean washcloth, but next to it was HER towel. Mine had been white and blue; this one was white and pink. Of course, I took it anyway, wrapped it around my torso and went inside. I probably looked completely strange, all my bits exposed to the world, but my middle section safely covered. I also took the bandage.

Once dressed and back in the lobby, I drank a bottle of cold green tea and ate a bean-jam donut. I felt amazing, completely clean and happy and relaxed. My friend emerged from the men’s side and I found out that on his side of the onsen, there had been two or three men completely covered in tattoos, clearly yakuza. I resolved to not care next time. And to not buy any more bandages from the 100-yen store. And to go to onsen whenever I can, because it’s true: they are one of the best things about living in Japan.

On the day-long bike trip I took last weekend, we stopped at a well in the middle of Ogaki and elbowed the old folks aside long enough to fill our water bottles with cold, fresh water. It was great. I'm never buying water again!

On the same bike trip, we found a vending machine selling panties and other weird things. I always thought they sold USED panties in Japan, but these seem to be factory-fresh. I find the mannequin models disturbing.

This is something you may not know:

I saw the Nagoya Dragons play the Yokohama Giants and had a great time.

The fans were the best part. I liked hearing everyone yell, "Out-o!" And I don't think there's anywhere else in Japan you could see someone in cut-offs.

And finally, my new love: Domo-kun, the mascot for NHK, Japan's public TV broadcaster. It's impossible to not be charmed by him, I'm convinced. Before the baseball game, I stumbled upon some sort of TV expo and Domo-kun was there. I inadvertantly took this picture, which I love because it looks like this girl's about to be devoured.

I uploaded some new photos to my Flickr page.