Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The day before yesterday (Monday, 12 October) was a Japanese holiday…「体育の日」 (“Sports Day“).
Click here to read my short FAQ about it.

Every year on this day, 靖国神社 (Yasukuni Shrine) has an archery ceremony called 「草鹿式」 (“Kusa-jishi-shiki“).

靖国神社の「草鹿式」

My wife and I watched this ceremony last year and I wrote a post about it.

This year, a French couple who visited and commented on my blog many times are in Tokyo until next week.
This is their first visit to Japan, so I met up with them and took them to watch the 「草鹿式」 (archery ceremony) at 靖国神社 (Yasukuni Shrine).

I didn’t take many photos of it this year, but please read my post about last year’s ceremony. On that post, there are photos and videos that I took (click here to read it).

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As I wrote in an earlier post (click here), Tokyo was a candidate city to host the 2016 Olympic Games but lost out to Rio De Janeiro.

Well, it has been announced that Tokyo plans to submit a bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games!

But Tokyo isn’t the only Japanese city that wants to host the 2020 games.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have announced their plan to submit a bid to co-host the 2020 Summer Olympics!

Other cities that have expressed interest in hosting the 2020 games are South Africa, Busan (Korea), Delhi (India), Rome (Italy), St. Petersburg (Russia), Warsaw (Poland), Toronto (Canada), Boston (America), and a number of others.

The candidate cities for the 2020 Olympics will be decided next year and the host city will be chosen in 2013.

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Speaking of 「広島」 (Hiroshima, Japan) and 「長崎」 (Nagasaki, Japan), the city council of Rome, Italy announced their plan to rename a street in their city “Hiroshima Nagasaki Street“!

Their reason is because a 78-year old Japanese man named Hiroshi Nishioka gave a speech in Rome recently that left much of the audience in tears.

Mr. Nishioka is a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki. He was only fourteen at the time of the bombing and in his recent speech in Italy he recalled how he refused to share the water in his canteen with any of the dying people in the streets of Nagasaki for fear that he wouldn’t have enough left for himself.

Even now, the memory of that, he said in his speech, is “like a splinter in my heart.”

IOC decision in one month

In one month from today, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will announce which of the four candidate cities has been chosen to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

The 2016 Olympics will be in either Tokyo (Japan), Chicago (USA), Madrid (Spain), or Rio De Janeiro (Brazil).

2016 Olympic Candidate Cities logos

I don’t know the meaning of the other three logos, but the symbol on the Tokyo logo is a musubi knot…which is a symbol of happiness and blessings (or condolances, depending on the colors and arrangement).

Here is a Japanese envelope with a musubi to give a monetary gift to newlyweds at a wedding ceremony:

As it stands right now, the IOC announced that 72% of Japanese people support the 2016 Olympics being hosted in Tokyo…the lowest local support rate of the four cities (93% of Spanish people support Madrid’s bid).
Although having local support is an important factor in the IOC’s decision…it’s not the only factor.

(Tokyo can) offer the safest, securest, most risk-free and most dependable bid. This is especially critical considering today’s uncertain environment.

–Ichiro Kono, Tokyo Olympic bid leader.

Which of the four cities do you think should host the 2016 Summer Olympics? (Please vote in this poll, and also add additional comments, such as your reasons and which city you live in, in this post’s Comments section):

回転寿司

Today my wife and I went to a Levi’s outlet sale in 新宿 (Shinjuku, Tokyo).

We bought some clothes for our kids.

While we were in 新宿 (Shinjuku), we had lunch at 三葉回転寿司 (Mitsuba conveyor-belt sushi).

Do they have 回転寿司 (conveyor-belt sushi) restaurants in your country?

At this type of sushi restaurant, the sushi chef prepares various types of sushi and puts them on different colored plates. Each colored plate represents the price for that particular sushi.

Then the sushi is placed on a conveyor-belt and goes around and when the one you want passes in front of you, you can take it off and eat it.

When you’re ready to leave, the restaurant staff calculates how much you owe by counting the colored plates from all the sushi you ate.

You can also request the sushi chef to make a particular sushi that you want, if you don’t see it on the conveyor.

Here are a few photos I took of the sushi and around 新宿 (Shinjuku):

フグ (Blowfish) skin

This building in Shinjuku has banners advertising Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics.

The banner says: 「Tokyo 2016.　日本だから、できる。 あたらしいオリンピック！」 ("Tokyo 2016. This is Japan, so we can can do it...a new Olympics!")

2016 Olympics in Tokyo

This October (2009), the International Olympic Committee will announce which city is chosen to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

The four finalist cities are Tokyo, Japan; Chicago, USA; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Madrid, Spain.

I believe Tokyo should be chosen to host the games…Tokyo is safe and clean, the public transportation is extremely punctual and affordable, their is plenty of interesting places to see in the city, the food is excellent, and it’s a beautiful city.

Here is one of the official promotional videos for Tokyo’s campaign to win the 2016 Olympics host-city bid. Watch it and see why I love living here:

Friday The 13th

今日は十三日の金曜日 (Today is Friday the 13th).

Are you superstitious?

I wonder why Friday the 13th is considered unlucky.

In Japan, the unlucky numbers are four and nine.
American hospitals and hotels don’t have a thirteenth floors (the floor above the twelfth floor is the fourteenth)…in Japanese hospitals and hotels there are no fourth floors.

And old Japanese telephones didn’t have a numeral written on the “four” number slot (old phones were rotary, not push-button). You could dial a “4”…but it wasn’t written.
They don’t make telephone like that anymore, though.

Also, nothing in Japan comes in sets of four (dishes, cups, Chicken McNuggets, etc) are sold in sets of five, usually.
If you give a present to Japanese people…don’t give a set of four.

Unlike “13” in the West, I can tell you exactly why “4” (and to a lesser extent, “9”) are unlucky in Japan.
In the Japanese language, one of the possible pronunciations for “four” (「四」) is “shi“…and “death” (「死」) is also pronounced “shi“.
“Nine” （「九」) can be pronounced “ku“…and “pain” or “bitterness” 「苦」 can be pronounced as “ku“, also.

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明日は「バレンタイン・デー」 (Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day ♥).

When I came home from work yesterday, my wife and daughters were all in the kitchen making homemade Valentines chocolates.

It smelled wonderful!

I wonder how much is for me. I’ll find out tomorrow.

Click here to read my “Valentines Day” FAQ. And click here to read another post in which I wrote about “Valentines Day” in Japan.

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On October 2nd of this year, the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games will be chosen.

Tokyo is one of the four finalist cities. The other three are Chicago, Rio, and Madrid.

Here are the the four 2016 Olympic Applicant City logos:

2016 Olympics Applicant Cities

If Tokyo is chosen to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, I might volunteer my help. It would be fun.

Tokyo Olympics

Tokyo, as well as 26 or so other cities, had put a bid in to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
From those 27 cities, the list of candidate cities has just been reduced to four…Tokyo, Madrid, Chicago and Rio de Janeiro.

As of right now, Tokyo looks like it may be the most likely choice for host city because Tokyo’s “score” is 8.4 (the highest of the four cities).

The final decision of which city will host the 2016 Olympics will be decided on October 2, 2009 (over a year from now).

If Tokyo hosts the 2016 Olympics, I think I might volunteer as a guide or something. 2016 is still eight years away, so I’m not giving it too much thought right now, though.

The last time (and only time, so far) that Tokyo hosted the Olympics was the 1964 Olympics. It was the first time a “non-Western” country hosted the Olympics!
The “National Olympic Stadium” that was built in Yoyogi, Tokyo for the ’64 Olympics will be re-used as one of the venues in 2016, if Tokyo is chosen as the host.

Have you ever been in a city when it hosted the Olympics?

In 1998, Nagano, Japan hosted the Winter Olympics.
We didn’t have tickets for any of the events, but we wanted to see an “Olympic city”…so we took a 新幹線 (Bullet Train) from Tokyo to Nagano (it was the “Asama” Shinkansen Line that was just built at the time especially for the ’98 Olympics).

Even without event tickets, it was fun.

While we were in Nagano during the ’98 Olympics, we saw Andy Hug before he died.

If you live outside of Japan or you weren’t in Japan in the 1990’s, you probably don’t recognize that name. But he was a very popular K-1 fighter in Japan from Switzerland.

He was in Nagano helping to support the Swiss Olympic team.

He was very polite and was often on TV in Japan in the late ’90s. So it was quite a shock to Japan when he died suddenly at a young age just two years after the 1998 Olympics.

Compared to the other three candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics, a relatively low number of people in Tokyo support the Olympics coming to this city. Many are afraid it will get even more crowded than it already is here and the morning train commute to work will have many tourists filling the trains.

I think, though, that if Tokyo is chosen, it will force the government to build more train lines in the city to accommodate them…and that will benefit those of us that live here in the long term after the Olympics are over.

So I support Tokyo’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.