Sue and I were living in Japan from August of 1998 until July 1999 in Fukui city. Fukui is the prefectural capital (a prefecture is sort of like a province or a state in North America). But the city itself is pretty small. There are only about 250000 people. The entire prefecture (also called a 'ken') only has around 1 million people - pretty sparse by Japanese standards.
If you would like to know a little more about Fukui Prefecture, you should check out the Prefectural Homepage. Click here for the English version.
Why you ask? Sue was participating the the JET program. This is a program run by the Japanese government that encourages native-english speakers to spend 1 to 3 years teaching in schools throughout Japan. There were roughly 100 JET participants spread throughout Fukui-ken. About 1/3 of those were living in or near Fukui city like us. They came from most of the english-speaking countries across the world. The largest representations were Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Let's start with a quick look at our apartment! Here's a shot of our livingroom and 1 of our bedroom. Unfortunately, we don't have a wide angle lense on our camera, so you can't see very much, but we tried!
Here's the building from the outside. It looks pretty dismal, doesn't it? I think it's the power lines that make it look that way. It's actually fairly nice. And right across the street from us is a buddhist temple, with a large bell tower. Unfortunately for us, the bell rings at 5:30am at and 6:30am. We don't know why.
Sue arrived in Japan around the beginning of August 1998. She first went to Tokyo for an orientation which lasted 3 or 4 days. She didn't enjoy Tokyo very much though - she couldn't see the edge of the city in any direction even when looking from the window of a 48 story sky-scrapper. Tokyo was just too big for her tastes!
Sue braved the Tokyo subway on 2 occasions. The first trip was a test run - she only went 1 stop and then got scared about getting lost and went back. Her second trip was much more successful - she led a group of gullible Canadians into the depths of the tunnels. This time they actually reached their destination - the Canadian Embassy.
Not only did they survive the trip to that small patch of Canadian soil in the middle of Japan, but they also managed to find a small irish pub where they could drown their sorrows in a pint of Kilkeney beer.
Over the next few weeks, Sue immersed herself in the local culture. First stop: a Washi factory in Takefu (Washi is Japanese handmade paper). She and a handfull of other foreigners got to try their hands at making and decorating paper.
Take a look at the Mikuni Fireworks. It was almost 1.5 hours of fireworks, right on the water! Sue enjoyed the show almost as much as she enjoyed all the interesting festival food like deep fried octopus.
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