Kitten Hell

'Chibi,' our kitten for one day before releasing him back into "the wild" 

Today was one of the strangest adventures I have had in Japan. It was a stressful day, but one Becky and I will remember forever. Several days earlier we heard the sound of a phantom kitten. The little meows were so loud that we thought that they came from inside our house. We jumped off the couch and ran to the stairs. The meows were louder, and we ran up the stairs to search for the sounds. We found nothing. And we decided there was no way a cat could get in the house from our second floor.

The next day, we decided that there must have been cats under the house. A few days later, we heard the meows again. This time, they were louder and they wouldn’t stop. Upon careful examination, we decided that were must be kittens in the crawl space under the stairs. I got on some scrubby clothes, got a flashlight, and ran outside. To our dismay, we discovered that the only access to the crawl was six-inch pipe that was missing its cover.   Back in the house, we opened the closet under the stairs. The walls of this closet were 1/8-inch wood, held in by tiny nails. This is part of the reason why Japanese houses get so cold in the winter! I got some tools and started carefully prying some nails out of the wall. We finally were able to get enough out to partially pull open the wall. I got my flashlight and Becky got a compact, and we peered into the hole swat-team style via the mirror and light. Becky saw two kittens crouching in the corner! One was moving around and one was crouching with little movement.

We quickly went to our hardware store and bought a few tools and a bunch of kitten supplies. We went home and finished preparing for the kitten extraction. I got the door opened far enough for Becky to get her head in but not an arm. Both kittens seemed very interested in the flashlight, and the stronger of the two walked over to it. Unable to extract the kittens, I preceded to remove the entire panel. With the panel finally off, I pulled out a cute little runt of a cat, and got him in a warm kitty box. The other kitten was nowhere to be seen. I stuck my head in the whole and saw there were three pipes leading out of the under-stairs space.

We determined the kittens to be about one-month old. Becky did lots of kitten research and got him to drink some kitten milk and go pee. Our kitten was a boy and definitely the runt of the two. After a while, the other kitten started meowing loudly from a pipe under our kitchen, but there was nothing we could do. We were both very worried about the second kitten and didn’t like the idea of separating them.   We starting calling the kitten Chibi, or runt in Japanese. Chibi slept for a while after he fed. Becky and I were very uneasy about losing Chibi’s brother, but we couldn’t do anything to get him to come to us. Finally, I heard a meow, but it wasn’t the brother’s. This was a low meow, an angry meow.

I went outside and discovered Akamimi! Akamimi, meaning “red ears” in Japanese, is what we named the stray cat that we sometimes fed. We suddenly realized that not only was Akamimi not a male cat, but she was a mama cat, and she was pissed! She low-meowed at me, and hissed at me. Chibi was meowing loudly from inside the house. Akamimi could hear him, and she wanted him back! We were stunned. Akamimi is not a very big cat. We would have never guessed she had been pregnant. I had given her a bread roll a week earlier, and she looked the same as she did when we first met her, presumably before giving birth to the two kittens.

From this point, we didn’t know what to do. We were so excited about rescuing kittens, we never really stopped to consider that they didn’t need rescuing! I went out the front door to look for Akamimi. I walked down to the open pipe, which I had blocked with a cement block to keep the kittens in. The block was knocked over! Akamimi must have done it with her mother-rage. I ran back in the house and quickly blocked the crawl space and closed the closet door. We didn’t need Akamimi’s mother-rage to come bounding into our living room.

We discussed it for a while and decided that we would put Chibi into the crawl space before bed. If Akamimi came for him that night so be it. If she didn’t, then we would take care of him. Becky went down stairs in the morning only to be greeted by the sound of a very hungry Chibi. We pulled him out of the crawl space, and I got him to eat some breakfast. He was very antsy, meowing non-stop and trying to crawl all over the place.  I think I experienced the stress of a parent for the first time in my life, not knowing how to get him to quiet down. I tried to go about my day, while returning to milk him and cuddle him as best I could.

Becky emailed me to say that she read kittens should stay with their mother to at least six weeks. We decided we would try to reunite Akamimi and Chibi next time we saw her, and hopefully she would have him. Late in the morning, I heard a low meow. I opened the crawl space. Nothing. I went back to being stressed out for a while. I heard another low meow. Chibi almost jumped out of my hands. I opened the closet door, and put Chibi on the ground. He RAN toward the crawl space. I cracked open the wall and saw a pacing Akamimi inside. Chibi ran up to the end of the floor. Akamimi frantically tried to grab him by the nape of his neck. She finally just toppled him off the edge. She grabbed him and went for the pipes. I closed the wall and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

It has been a couple of days, and we haven’t heard any cat sounds. Hopefully Akamimi relocated to one of the under-stairs areas in one of the vacant apartments instead of ours. We’re also hoping that she doesn’t hold any grudges when the kittens are big enough to leave the kitten nest. It would be fun to see Chibi again when he is a little older and big enough to eat our table scraps.

It goes with out saying that our kitten adventure had not gone as planned, but it reminded us of how much we loved having a cat in our home.  We miss Moses now more than ever...

Himeji Castle: UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Hyogo Prefecture is home to Himeji Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest and most famous castle in Japan. The castle was passed from family to family over centuries, it was never attacked when it was in use, and it even survived the bombings of WWII. All of these factors have helped to preserve this amazing structure.

Because Himeji Castle is so amazing, I ended up going there almost every time I had a guest visit me in Japan. This weekend’s visit with Becky was my seventh trip there! This visit was unique because the castle started undergoing a renovation in 2009 that won’t be finished until 2015. The last renovation took place from the 1950s to 1960s, and the goal for this one is to last another 50 or 60 years.

As you can see from the pictures, a temporary structure has been built around much of the castle to facilitate the renovation. This obviously prohibits seeing the castle as it was meant to be seen, and much of the castle is inaccessible, but it also offers the unique experience to see a castle undergoing renovation. They also put some artifacts on display in rooms that haven’t been opened to the public in 400 years. Finally, there were some random people wearing ninja costumes on the castle grounds. I'm not sure if this has been done before either!

Another recently added bonus to Himeji tourism is the free bicycles that are being lent out to tourists. You fill out a form and pick a bicycle up from a nearby garage, and there is a special bike parking area right in front of the castle. If all you plan to do is go to the castle, then it’s not really worth the trouble. But if you want to explore the city a little bit, or do what we did and find an amazing restaurant too far to walk to, then the free bikes are an amazing option. We had a lot of fun pedaling around on the single-speed city cruisers on the very flat Himeji streets (We hate the hills in Miki...).

Miki Service Area

Before moving to Japan, we got on Google Maps and looked at Miki to see what kind of restaurants, stores, etc. we could find. We were very excited to see that there was a Starbucks. On closer examination, there were actually two, one across the street from the other. We did a little research and figured out they were at the Miki Service Area. A service area is a highway rest stop, but it usually features a large gift shop with an extensive selection of local delicacies and omiyage (souvenirs) to bring back to friends and families after your road trip.

There are two Starbucks’ because one is on the north side of the highway and the other on the south. After moving to Miki we quickly learned that the Miki SA is at the top of a series of hills, and while it looks close on the map it take a significant amount of time and sweat to get there by bike.

The Miki SA is actually not that far from Becky’s main school, but when she asked her co-workers about it, almost none of them had ever been there. Although I guess it makes sense that a local wouldn’t know how to get to the highway rest stop for tourists. One of Becky’s co-workers ended up figuring out how to get to the Miki SA without getting on the highway, and he took Becky and the other ALT she works with to the Starbucks one day.

Friday was a holiday, so we decided to make the long journey to the Starbucks at Miki SA. We attempted to visit the local sake brewery first, but it was closed because of the holiday (We’re not sure if they do tours, but we’ll revisit that at some point). We rode on to the SA, which meant overcoming some enormous hills and finally having to walk up the steepest ones at the end.

When we finally arrived, we walked up a gravel path through a lovely park and past a busy dog run. The Starbucks was a beacon of hope sitting idyllically beside the park. We happily drank delicious Apple Crumble drinks, newly added to the fall menu. We then explored the south service area and got to try samples of lots of the available treats.

When we tried to go home, we got turned around and ended up at the north service area. This was a fortunate accident, because we got some great photo-ops at the Hello Kitty vending machines! The journey up the steep hills to Miki SA was one that you really only want to do once. But I’m sure we’ll try it again in a month or two when we’re bored in Miki and the next round of seasonal drinks gets released.

Wan Wan Land

"Wan wan" is how a dog sounds in Japanese. To the Japanese, it's not bow wow; it's wan wan. Wan Wan Land is a random pet store we walked into in Osaka. There were two interesting things at Wan Wan Land. First of all, the price of pets in Japan is amazing. The cheapest cat they had was about $1,000. Granted, all their cats were pure breeds, but they cost as much as $2,000. For a cat!

The other thing was that amongst the overpriced cats and dogs there was a smattering of exotic pets. There were some sugar gliders, a spider monkey, a squirrel monkey, an owl, and a meerkat! The monkeys were almost $5,000, and the meerkat was over $7,000! For about the same price, you could go to the Kobe zoo every day for the next three years! Paying that much for a pet seems a little crazy, but if you've got the extra yen lying around, why wouldn't you want a squirrel monkey?

Yodoko Guest House

UPDATE: A re-written version of this article can be found at JapanTourist.jp along with many other great articles about Japan.

Being a native of Chicagoland and a lover of architecture and design, I was a little surprised the first time I heard there is a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Hyogo Prefecture. Becky and I made the journey to Ashiya, a wealthy town boarding Kobe and often refereed to as “the Beverly Hills of Japan,” to see the Yodoko Guest House. The house was designed in 1918 for the Yamamura family, a rich sake brewer from Kobe, as their palatial mountain getaway.

In concordance with Wright’s belief that a structure should be in harmony with the nature around it, the four-floored house steps up the mountain landscape, never exceeding more than two stories being stacked on top of each other. It gives the house a sort of understated presence that is far more impressive than if it had simply been a four story building sitting on a mountainside.

Like many of the more impressive houses by Wright, no expense was spared inside and out. Art deco stonework is found throughout as well as custom copper designs and intricate wood decorations and window vents. The house also includes custom furniture by Wright.

One of my favorite details about the house is one story about design controversy. While Wright designed everything, the houses actual construction was overseen by Wright’s Japanese disciples. In accordance with the wish of the Yamamura family, the house was built with several rooms that included tatami, or traditional Japanese flooring. This was contradictory to Wright’s design, and the builders had to build several walls unnecessarily thick to make the very specific dimensions of the tatami line up with Wright’s room dimensions.

The Yodoko Guest House is among six buildings designed by Wright in Japan, only four of which are still standing (if you include the portion of Wright's Imperial Hotel that now resides at a museum). It’s really a shame he didn’t do more work here. Wright’s obsessive attention to detail, and desire to design everything with the highest of standards lines up so well with Japanese design philosophy and work ethic.

Sports Day

Mix one part Super Bowl halftime show with two parts Olympics and add a dash of military regalia and you've got the perfect recipe for Japanese Sports Day. It is an epic day of sprinting, relays, tug o' war, kindergarten marching band, dancing, cheering, martial arts, three-legged races, and all things sports.


Each year in the fall, Sports Day happens at schools all across Japan. I could tell you more, but I'd rather let the pictures speak for themselves.

Just before my big race at Miki Kita, the 4X100 meter relay!

Swim Club boys passing the baton in the club relay at Miki Kita.

The first few pictures above are from Miki Kita (Kita) which is my "visit school" I go to twice a week.  It just so happened that Kita's Sports Day was on the day that I visit.  My "base school" is Miki Senior High (Miki), and their Sports Day was the very next day.  I ran 100 meters each day as part of the teacher's relay team and couldn't walk on Friday.  I told one of the teachers at Miki that I was getting old.  His reply, "If you are old, then I am dead."  I lol'd a little.  I have no idea how old he is, but he looks young to me.  Japanese people age well so he could be something like 70 for all I know.

The girls play a game similar to chicken fighting where you steal that hat of your opponent.  It gets craaaazzzy!

This has got to be my favorite shot of the day.  The kindergarden marching band was cute overload!

One of the students wanted a picture.  She is so cute!  How could I say no?

The students did a cheer competition that they choreographed themselves.   I was pretty partial to the blue team...  must have been the cowboy hats and the bandanas!

B...  L.... U....

There was no match for the yellow team in tug o' war.  This student was cracking me up throwing up peace signs for the camera while his teammates pulled them to victory.

Sports Day was a great day, and I am so happy I had a chance to be a part of it!