Commence Winter, or Japan's Pan's Pipes

Today is my last day of sitting at my local kouminkan (community center- also where my board of education happens to be posted. Curiously enough- the only languages in which the Wikipedia article is written are Japanese and Polish... so scrap linking on that one). I have a meeting with all my assorted supervisors (apparently I need a lot of supervision ;P) in about 35 minutes. I'm a little nervous because, like so many things in this work and in this country, I have no idea what it's about. On the upside, my primary supervisor was about to arbitrarily grant me vacation today until she realized that we had this meeting at all, so presumably it won't be terribly intense (at least it wasn't weighing on her mind).

Shifting subjects- I'm looking forward to the upcoming winter holiday, for which, as ever, I am woefully under-planned and unprepared. Wherever I go (more and more just looking like Tokyo), it's going to be cold. The long-tardy Niigata winter finally has finally arrived in Arakawa, along with the famous Arakawa winter-wind. This is the view out of my apartment window from this morning:



The wind is truly impressive, as was the storm that brought the snow. Thunder and lightning were on and off for about 5 hours, and the wind was very audible throughout. This morning as I sat parked under my kotatsu with my coffee, unwilling to move (kotatsu have that effect on me- especially in the mornings), I could hear the wind playing a kind of music off the topological irregularities in the roof. I'm not being poetic here- the wind really did produce a marvelous array of eldritch-flute-like sounds. I even tried to work out the range of the pitches in the car on the way to work (somewhere between a 4th and a 5th, incidentally).

This may be the last post for a bit. While cyber-cafes presumably aren't too hard to find in Tokyo, I don't know when I will have the pictures or the gumption to post again. At the latest, the next installment will be the Tuesday after next, as that is when I return to work. With any luck, I'll have some picks from my ski trip tomorrow (with young staff from one of my shogakko- should be very fun), as well as from wherever I manage to go in Japan. Until that time- stay warm, and happy New Year!