Humidity and cleaning the bathroom

Japan is a very humid country, especially in the summer. If you're in central Japan, for example Tokyo, in July-August, don't expect to be able to walk more than 10 meters without being soaked in sweat. Japanese people call this 蒸し暑い (mushi-atsui), pretty much meaning humid and hot.
That was a big reason for me to go to Sapporo, on Hokkaido in the north of Japan. The climate is quite a bit cooler and a lot less humid here, also it's always windy which is nice in the summer, but not so nice in the winter.
However compared to Sweden, even Sapporo is a lot more humid, which has some consequences.

• Everything here in Japan is packed in lots of plastics. If you buy a pack of cookies, of course it comes in a plastic bag like anywhere in the world, but here, each cookie is in a small plastic bag of it's own also, or there's one of those small bags included that absorbs moisture, that only comes in shoe boxes in Sweden. Partly because of the humidity but also because Japanese people are obsessed with having all food very fresh.
  It becomes a lot of plastics, I am telling you. Just too bad that you can only throw away plastics once per week here in Japan. All refuse is sorted into burnables, non-burnable and plastics and has specific days when you're allowed to throw it. So you need to keep your garbage in your apartment until the day when it's supposed to be thrown.
  

• Here in Sapporo, the laundry might be dry after about 24 hours if you're lucky. Sometimes 24 hours is not enough. I wonder if it's possible at all to get your laundry dry in southern Japan in the summer?

• There's always some funny pink stuff growing on the floor in our bathroom. The Japanese bathrooms are entirely made of plastic and has a bath tub and a shower next to it. Japanese people love taking a bath, but showering in the bath tub is not okay. Anyway, the floor's surface in our bath room is not even, which is good since a perfectly flat plastic surface would be a lot more slippery. However, the cute little pink colored stuff loves the small bumps in the floor, combined with the humidity and no window in the bathroom, it's obviously very good conditions to grow quickly, and it's an absolute pain in the ass to get rid of. We have some kind of bathroom cleaner, on the bottle it says you're supposed to just spray it on, wait a few minutes and wash with water and you're bathroom is clean (not that I can read it at all, but my girlfriend says so). Hah! More than one hour of rubbing the floor like a maniac with a sponge is what it takes to get rid of the pink bastards. And within a week they'll be back again...
  

夏休み！Summer vacation in Sapporo!

Celebrated the beginning of my summer vacation last night by paying a visit to the Sapporo beer festival that started this weekend, an absolutely huge party with a great atmosphere that goes on every day for 3 weeks!

The festival has 6 big areas, each with a capacity of a few thousand people. The big Japanese beer breweries; Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo and Suntory has one area each, and then there's one area with international beers and one area with German beers.

If there would be a 3 weeks beer festival in central Stockholm with capacity of maybe 10 000 people (rough estimate) I am sure it would turn into a war field. The Japanese people really like drinking but tend to go home earlier and behave more responsibly than drunken people in Sweden do.

Though Sapporo might seem like a quite ordinary modern city at first, with not so many beautiful buildings (for a person coming from an old European city at least), it's actually a really nice place to stay.

There is just lots and lots of festivals of all kinds throughout the year in Sapporo. In the summer, other than the beer festival, there are also more traditional Japanese festivals with dancing and music. In the winter, Sapporo hosts the world famous Sapporo Snow Festival, with lots of huge snow and ice sculptures. Also, the city is kept very clean and very much in order, all this adding up to the feeling that there really is lots of things done to make the citizens thrive. It works very well for me at least. Probably this is the reason why Sapporo seems to have a quite young population.

Of course, in Japan, it's not okay to have one month of vacation and just relax, actually it seems like it's a sin if you have more than a couple of hours to relax per week, you should always be busy. So I've got a huge pile of papers to complete and new kanji to study during my summer holiday. As if that wasn't enough, they've put a test on the first lesson the first day after the summer holiday.

Finally, some more photos from the beer festival!



Waitress girl with silly hat.




Party!



Group photo with friends.. And some random Japanese people who were just passing by and decided they wanted to be in the photo as well.

Earthquakes

Took myself a little blog vacation kind of.. Felt lazy to write anything and been busy as usual. Lots of kanji characters to learn and grammar to study.

I guess everyone heard about the powerful earthquake in the Niigata prefecture of Japan, causing a lot of devastation.
My first thought was, probably it was mostly the old traditional Japanese houses that collapsed, not built to resist earthquakes, and the fire at the nuclear power plant didn't seem so serious either.

So far I've felt a couple of very small earthquakes here in Sapporo. It's kind of like sitting on a diesel bus not so far from where the engine is located while it's idling at a red light. Vibrating a bit. Haven't made me worried really. Modern buildings like the one I live in should be built to resist quite big earthquakes, right?

After reading this article (in Swedish) though, my thought is 'how the hell can they build the world's biggest nuclear power plant in the world's most seismologically active (is that correctly spelled?) country and not make sure it can handle a powerful earthquake?

According to the article, Japan's regulations for nuclear power plants used to be that they need to resist earthquakes of up to 6,5 on the Richter scale, however last year these regulations were changed. Now, the companies operating the power plants themselves can set the regulations, which then has to be approved by the government.
Also, it says this earthquake was 2,5 times more powerful than what the power plant was built to handle.

Okay, you can't trust the newspaper reports completely, but it sounds like complete madness to me. I thought everyone knew that nuclear power plants can be very dangerous unless strict safety and security regulations are observed.
Makes me think, if they don't build the nuclear power plants earthquake-safe to save some money, why should my house be? On the other hand, the Swedish nuclear power plants had a lot of safety issues lately and we don't even have the risk of earthquakes.
It's all about the money. Why bother about a small risk of some kind of incident if we can say a few yen? Kind of reminds me of the situation at my job before leaving Sweden.

Or maybe we simply just don't have a chance anyway if mother Earth decides to shake us hard enough, no matter how good engineering. Well nothing I can do about it anyway, so no need to worry. Of course, the earthquake is big news here also, but people in general don't seem worried or chocked really, I guess they're used to it.

If you want to read daily news from Japan in English, I can recommend Mainichi Daily News.