Part Seven: Delicate like a panda, the Golden Bear can only truly shine with European voltage.

Part Six: Finally, a dish washer!

Part Five: Japanese steel and German design combine to form the Porsche Knife.

Part Four: The Penny Counter keeps track of a life's savings.

Part Three: The Microwave Egg Boiler raises doubts about energy efficiency.

Part Two: The Banana Stand keeps the fruit within reach.

Part One: The Silver Nose carries my glasses at night.

Sixty-one days into 2007, I finally managed to replace the last calendar on our walls, this being the Bic Camera Calendar in the bed room. The Bic Camera Calendar is one large sheet of paper (A0?) that covers the whole year on one page. It is issued for free at the end of the year for free by the Bic Camera chain of electronic stores. I first came in contact with it years back in the classroom of a Japanese language school. The Bic Camera Calendar is a wealth of useful information, boarding on being overloaded, but in a good way. This year's edition features

• a map of Japan
  • eleven insets for the various remote islands
  • lots of place names
  • roads and shipping lines
  • latitudes and longitudes, annotated with other world cities that are located there
  • compass (English and Japanese, with pronunciation guide for both, as with most names on the calendar)
• calendars for the twelve months
  • English and Japanese names for the week days
  • English and Traditional Japanese month names, with an explanation of where the traditional name came from
  • some arcane system of naming/counting days that I do not understand
  • important weather events according to the lunar calendar
  • colour photographs of flowers in bloom during that month
  • lunar phases
  • the 2006 edition also had December of the previous year, but that must have been pushed out by some newly included section
• an explanation of the annotations for fortune tellers in the calendar
• a chart for the animals of the Chinese calendar
• a chart for the Japanese Imperial calendar (goes back to 1925)
• subway and train maps for the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Sapporo (pointing out where the Bic Camera stores are)
• a list of thirteen World Heritage cultural and natural locations (cross-referenced with the map)
• a list of telephone numbers and web sites (including QR codes for mobile phone access) for Bic Camera and Sofmap.

I whole-heartedly recommend the Bic Camera Calendar, and everyone should have one (or more).

Today was the first annual meeting of the tenants in our apartment building. Actually, it was the second such meeting, as there has already been a constituting session last summer. Both times, this took place in the sports arena of the nearby school, and fortunately it was not as hot today as it was last year.

The day-to-day operations of the building are run by a management company. A group of about ten (randomly chosen, I think) residents forms a supervisory board to control the management company, and the meeting consisted mostly of the board presenting its report concerning the past year. Apparently they have kept expenses well within the budget. In addition to that there have been a couple of issues to vote on, such as the reorganization of the parking garage, the purchase of a solar-powered clock for the playground, additional surveillance cameras, and new rules asking for newspapers to be delivered only to the downstairs mailboxes rather than straight to the apartment door.

This week saw the release of the Mac version of Google Earth. It apparently uses more recent satellite images than Google Local: The latter shows only an empty lot where our house stands now, whereas you can see it in Google Earth next to the soccer field.

Please send me your longitudes and latitudes, so that I can place my virtual pins all over the globe.

Update: Placemark.

After three years of sleeping on the floor, our futon days have come to an end today. On their recent visit, my parents bought us a comfortable bed (wide-double and extra-long to accomodate European legs), and it has just been delivered. The mattress is a Toyota, using the same springs they put into their cars.

What woke us this morning was the first earthquake in the new house. Having bought an apartment (and no earthquake insurance) we have a whole new sensibility to these things. Of course, there is not really much to worry about, as the building has been constructed with tremors in mind. It rests on pillars that extend fifty metres into the ground and the ferro-concrete structure itself can absorb the shock waves quite well.

Hardly anyone ever gets injured by being thrown on the ground by earthquakes (unless they happen to stand on a ladder at the time). Most harm is caused by stuff falling on top of people, and by fires. The closets in our flat have a mechanism that makes them lock up when they shake, so that the doors cannot open and nothing can fall out. And the gas metre on our porch also shuts down if shaken. If that happens, we can just go there after the quake, press a button which will start a self-check sequence to confirm the absence of leaks (takes about two minutes) and if all is well, the gas will work again. Only if the pipes are damaged will it refuse to open the valve.

None of this happened this morning. The magnitude at the epicentre (N 35.7, E 140.7, sixty kilometres underground) was 6.1 and at most in the fours at our place. Safe.

Our new refrigerator has just been delivered. It will need about five hours to warm up (cool down, actually), but then our eighty-two days of being in clear and present danger of food poisoning are over and we will be able to store 384 litres of all things cold.

In related news from the opposite end of the temperature scale, gas was also installed this morning, so that we can now turn on the heat as well.

Next on the list are curtains that cover the full length of our impressive ceiling-to-floor window front (the old ones end at about knee-level), a bed, a home stereo, dust bins, and a dining table.

After a long day of packing up all our stuff in Nippori, and (at least partially) unpacking it again in Shin-Koiwa, we are too tired now for a detailed report. So for now just today's funny episode: The landlord of the Nippori apartment dropped by to check on the condition of the interiors, receive the keys and discuss some formalities while we were still packing and carrying boxes into the truck downstairs. We were just about to leave, when I went back upstairs to get some extra dust bags and found the landlord (who was still in the apartment) looking for his shoes. Like everyone else who enters a Japanese household, he had left them in the doorway, but they were nowhere to be found now. As it turns out, we had thrown them into a box together with our own shoes, and the box was already on the truck. Fortunately, the truck had not taken off yet, and the driver had a pretty good idea where he had placed the box in question. I suppose stealing your landlord's footwear and thereby trapping him inside of the room would have given him amble reason not to return our two month deposit.

I will send an email with our new postal address to everyone that needs to have it in the next few days. If you do not get this email, but think you should, that will almost certainly have been caused by my totally incomplete address book.

In preparation of the move to our new appartment this week, I have started to take down the Gallery on the toilet wall. This is a very time-consuming process, as I do not want to damage the pictures, so that they can be reassembled in Shin-Koiwa. So for the record (I also took photographs) the final ensemble at Nippori includes all the long-time members from the previous list and the more recent additions of Stan Lee, Boris Becker, Günter Verheugen with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Don King, Robin Williams, Sir Alex Ferguson, Prince Harry, Quentin Tarantino with Daryl Hannah and Uma Thurman, Prince William, John Lennon, Lance Armstrong, Christoph Daum, Manfred von Richthofen, hundreds of Japanese department store employees on a bowing seminar, Diego Maradona, Robert Hoyzer, Paolo Maldini, Dennis Kozlowski, Crown Princess Masako and daughter Aiko, a boy that supposedly looks like me, Bae Yong Jun, an IBM engineer, the Queen with Prince Charles, Jacques Chirac, Akebono, a streaker at a snooker tournament, George W. Bush, a Japanese pro golfer with his caddy, an Australian celebrity with a Koala, Kofi Annan, Bobby Fisher, little artifical islets off Oman, and a bunch of action figures.

Today we were able to enter our new apartment (or as they call it here: mansion) for the first time. The occasion was to check that the interiors have been installed to our satisfaction. I would say we are satisfied. You can expect more detailed reports (and probably even pictures) in the near future. Here's a teaser: talking bathtub.