It has been over a year now since I have left Japan. It still doesn't feel like it has been that long. It feels like it was only a few months ago. I suppose it will take a while before I feel like Arizona is my home again.
Today, I reminisced with some friends about my experiences in Japan and I realized that the pain I felt every time I thought about Japan, wasn't there. So maybe now is a good time to talk about some things that I miss about Japan, and some things that I really am so happy to have again now that I am back home. Let's start with what I am happy to have again in Arizona. 1. Dishwasher I cannot begin to express my happiness with the modern invention known as the dishwasher. It is a glorious item. I don't think I have washed dishes by hand since I came home. I have been shoving everything in the dishwasher and turn it on without care. I feel no shame. I am so happy that this item exists! It is nice to let a machine do something so mundane as washing dishes. Maybe I am showing my "first world privilege" but I do not care. I am just so happy I never have to stand at my sink and splash myself accidentally from spoons anymore. 2. Garbage disposal This may seem really stupid, but we used to have to clean our sink out at least once a week, and deep clean the drain every couple of weeks or so because food particles would get trapped in there. It was the GROSSEST thing ever. I hated it so much. I gagged all the time. We tried to avoid sticking our hands in there as often as we could. We tried to buy all the different products that claimed to dissolve the food particles but you know that they never actually worked. The garbage disposal reduces the frequency which you needed to stick your hand down into the depths of despair to clean it out. God bless this glorious invention. 3. Central AC Yes, I had AC in Japan, but it sucked. It was one of those little wall units that only really cooled down the one room and not the entire apartment. There was always one room in our apartment that we rarely used because it could not get heating or cooling. Even in the room that did have the AC, it wasn't very effective and we would still sweat at night and long for the day when we would return to AZ. I cannot tell you how much I love the AC. It was a familiar feeling to walk into a building in the dead of summer, and wish I had a sweater. It is the true mark of Arizona air conditioning. Love it! 4. Ceiling fans They tried to install ceiling fans in my school during my last year there, and it was such a joke. They weren't electric. They were attached to the AC unit vents and would rotate when the AC was running. I guess they believed that it would circulate the air better or something, but all it really did was keep the air from all of us. The blades often got stuck and would block the air flow. It just made the room hotter, not cooler. But in the US we have them attached to the ceiling and are electric. So air can efficiently circulate throughout the room without blocking the AC vents. My AC is kept at a warm temperature during the day but I don't hardly notice because of the fan. The glorious fan. 5. Garbage Y'all knew this was coming. The first week I threw anything away, I felt pride being able to throw it away in the same bag and not needing to separate needlessly into all these different trash cans. Everything goes in the dump, I don't need to call anyone and wait a month for it to be picked up. It is the best feeling ever. I think I even said "Take that Japan!" anytime I tossed bottles, and napkins simultaneously. I will NEVER miss the garbage system in Japan. Now let's talk about some things that I miss from Japan. Spoiler alert! The garbage is not one of them. 1. Public toilets The public toilets here are nasty. It feels like a prison cell every time I need to use them. They smell, the doors are always broken, children make eye contact with you in the door cracks when you are most vulnerable, and the automatic flusher never seems to understand when I sit and when I stand, always leaving my bare bum wet. Besides the toilets being gross, the sinks never recognize me as human. I can wave my hands under the sink all I want, it will never turn on. I just use sanitizer to clean my hands. I have given up using the sink to wash my hands at this point. I try to avoid the public restrooms as often as I can. In Japan you have separate rooms as stalls. They go from floor to ceiling. The lock on the outside of the door is green when vacant, and red when occupied. The woman's restroom includes baby urinals for the mothers with small boys, and they have toddler seats so the mother doesn't need to always use the handicap stall to bring their child with them. The sinks also have better recognition systems so the water always turn on. I could go on and on, but long story short, US bathrooms are prison cells, Japanese bathrooms are majestic. 2. Onsens I miss public baths. They were so good for my body when I had injuries or sore muscles. Plus, during the winter it is just nice to take a hot bath outside while it was snowing. I loved the onsens. I used them all the time. It was stress relieving. We have spas here, but the water temp is way cooler. They are very hot in Japan and it took a while to get used to, but now I cannot take a bath or use a spa without it being that hot. Sure, it was weird to shower and bath with other naked women, but you get used to it. They also keep to themselves so you never had anyone just walk up to you and start chatting. They respected boundaries well there. 3. Baths/Showers I feel like it relates to the onsen one, but during the winter, when I didn't want to pay to use the onsen, I would use my own bath in my apartment. (This will sound weird, but if you are girl you will understand) The tubs in Japan always had excellent boob to knee ratio. They were really deep and you could easily lay back and relax without any part of you being too exposed to the air getting cold. The absolute best feature of the baths, were the oidaki buttons. It is a button that will heat up the water in the tub while you are using it. I would sit in the tub, bring my phone or tablet and watch a TV show, and when the water would start to get cold, I would push the oidaki button and it would gradually get warm again. I would spend 30-60 minutes in the tub all the time during the winter. It was the best way to get warm. Here, not so much. It is very shallow, you can't really get comfortable enough to relax, and the water gets cold really quickly with no way to reheat it without emptying the tub and filling it back up again. Japan is superior in this one. As for the shower, I never thought I would like chairs in the shower, but I came to love them for 2 reasons. I have endometriosis and during my periods, my cramping is severe enough that I cannot stand. The chair was so helpful during those times. Now, I just have to wait until my period ends before I can shower again. When I broke my foot in 2019, I could not stand without assistance. And I needed to keep my foot dry. Using the chair and removable shower head was a dream because I didn't have to worry about it. I injured my back in AZ a few months back, and standing hurt really bad for a while. Showering was really difficult and I had to keep sitting on the tub floor to relieve my back pain. I really wished I had the chair. 4. Heated Toilet seats This sounds weird at first, but think of this. It is winter, and you are cold, you need to use the bathroom and when you sit, your butt is assaulted by the freezing cold seat. Well, that doesn't happen in Japan. The seats are heated, so when you sit, it is nice and warm and comforting. Need I say more? 5. The Food! Is this really surprising? It is always one of the first things that people miss when they move locations. It is always the food. Thankfully, there are a number of Asian and Japanese food markets nearby that we can get some of the comforts, but there are things that they do not sell that I miss, and the rice is different here, so sushi and onigiri doesn't take the same. I have made several Japanese dishes since being back and those always make me feel happy. So there you go! These are just some of the things that I miss about Japan and some of the things that I love and am grateful for now that I am back. If only there was a third location which included both American and Japanese lifestyles. That would be the dream! Maybe when I buy a house I can make it a mish mosh of Japan and America.
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Hello.
It has been a long time. Since February of 2019 in fact. I never meant to let this blog die. I never meant to neglect it for so long. I am sorry to my readers for this long delay. I know that most of you are probably never going to return, but I hope that this post may explain some things. I am back in the United States. I am no longer in Japan. I do not know when I will be going back, but I do know that I am never going to live in Japan or any other country again. That part of my life has ended. I moved back to Arizona on July 4th, 2020. I moved into my new apartment July 30th, 2020. I have returned to figure skating full-time, and I will be starting grad school come May. So, I am sure you are wondering. Why are you back? What happened in those 2 years you were gone? Are you ok? Let me just be clear. The virus had nothing to do with me returning back home to the US. In fact, it actually helped aid me in my return. I am going to be rather vague in my answers right now. Maybe, when things get a little better, I can come back and really tell you what is going on, but for now, I need some privacy. After the adoption failure in November of 2018, I suffered from depression related to complicated grief. You will notice that my last post in Feb of 2019 was on the negative side, and that is because of my depression. I found it difficult to see any light in anything, including the things I once enjoyed. Just as I was accepting the loss and moving forward, I suffered the first loss in my family. My great-grandmother passed at the ripe old age of 102. The day before my 7th wedding anniversary. A month later, I broke my foot and I had a falling out with one of my close friends. I was later diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder which meant that the winters in Japan were making my mental and physical well-being worse the longer I stayed there. I knew that winter of 2019 that once my contract ended in July 2020 I had to leave. We started preparing for the move back home that Christmas. We sent packages to family of belongings. We started looking for hotels and flight plans (at that time, we had planned to travel across Asia after the summer 2020 Olympics). The administrators at my school had changed and the new people were incredibly racist. They made derogatory remarks to me on a regular basis. One of them literally referred to me as "the decoration." They treated me poorly and yet punished me for not overworking with zero pay. (This is where I learned that the JET Program is NOT a program I recommend to ANYONE. I'll make another post when I am ready to talk about the details). As you can imagine, my mental health declined rapidly. I was unable to wake in the morning. My husband had to physically dress me most days. I needed to be on leave. (Getting on leave is another story in itself). Then, corona hit and the schools stopped requiring in-person teaching. That meant, I could stay home and get the rest and help I needed. Yes, I sought therapy, and yes, I got treatment. It didn't help. I was actually advised by my doctors that returning to my home state where the sun shines 90% of the year, where it hardly rains, where the cold is sparse, and where the atmosphere isn't humid. Yes, you heard that right, I was "prescribed" Arizona. I must say, after being back, that I got better quickly. The environment really does affect one's mood. I was at home from working for 3 months. I returned back to school around the end of May, beginning of June 2020. Once I heard that the Olympic games were canceled, I contacted the necessary people to arrange a return flight home. The virus allowed there to be an exception for JET participants to have their flight fully paid for and there was no price limit. The return flights were really sparse but we were able to get a flight booked, as well as hotels and train tickets at no cost to me. Shipping was a nightmare (more on that in another post) and so was cancelling utilities, but other than that, we were able to stay in Tokyo for a couple of days to relax and just enjoy Japan one last time before leaving. I had a great final 2 days. The crowds were smaller, and the trains weren't as packed, so it was easier to enjoy the city. The flight home was quite nice. Every other row had people, so Josh and I had the entire row to ourselves. Josh had a job lined up for when he returned and started working right away. My only job was to find us a place to live, move into said place, and get well. I might be one of the only people who can say this, but the virus helped us move home, and helped me get to a better place mentally and physically. Don't worry, I am not abandoning Japan. In fact, I am going to grad school for a teaching degree so I can teach Japanese at a local high school. Plus, I have plenty of stories from Japan to share. Thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and I hope to write more soon. When I was in college, I learned that culture is like an ice burg. 90% of culture is unseen and often times, cannot be taught. The 10% that we can see are the obvious differences that are easy to prepare for. In Japan, those obvious aspects of culture are: Manga, anime, language, landscape, religion, currency, race, and other things of that nature. Things that are easily spotted by sight alone. The other 90% are broken down once you delve immerse yourself into the culture. You can never truly learn 100% all that there is to learn about any culture. The longer you live in a new culture, the more you dive deeper into the sea and discover just how big that iceberg really is.
There are aspects to every culture that everyone loves and that everyone hates. It is impossible to be 100% satisfied in any given location. Many times, we have to adapt and we have to accept that that is just how things are in certain countries or cultures. Some of these may be game changers for some and some might not bother people at all. This list is strictly from my point of view only. You may feel differently. Also, these are things that cannot be seen but experienced. You would only know of this if you have lived in Japan for several years as I have. 5. THEY WAIT FOR ORDERS I know what you are thinking, "What does that mean?" When it comes to work, nobody takes the initiative. They have to wait for further instruction to do any sort of job. Even if someone has a good idea and can implement it themselves, they will not attempt it. They won't even bring it forward to their superiors because they have to be told to do so. There are countless workers that will sit around staring at the wall, doing absolutely nothing, because they weren't instructed to do anything. They could see a messy shelf at their shop and still do nothing about it because their boss had only given them so many instructions. It's like they are all mindless robots. No one questions and no one challenges anything. Why is this so jarring? Well, last year, I had this idea of doing an international day at my school with the advanced English students. This includes, at most, 60 students out of 360 in the grade. I wanted to invite some other ALTs to join my school and teach them about different cultures and even play games. All the while the students must only speak English. It would be a great opportunity for them, and as I have participated in several international days in other schools, I was confident that I could present a plan to the English teachers. I wrote up a 5-page plan, scheduled a meeting with the teachers, but because ONE teacher. ONE teacher, (who happened to be the head of the English department) said it wasn't his idea and that HE didn't want to have to think about it, we aren't going to do it. I assured him that I would do the bulk of the planning. All they had to do was just inform the students of the international day and pass out the assignments that I would prepare ahead of time. ME. ALL ME. Yet, like I said before. Since it wasn't his idea, and he didn't think of it first, it was denied. We have 11 English teachers at my school. 10 of them were highly interested in my proposition, but because that 1 teacher just so happened to also be the head of the English department said "no" nothing is going to take place. I guess who cares about it being 10-1 right? 4. NATIONALISTIC I am sure that every culture is nationalistic is some way, but Japanese take it to an extra level. They truly believe that Japanese are superior in every way. They have no open mind for other cultures. Tourists are likely not to experience this and neither will students because they are temporary. Key word here is temporary. Once you live and work here, their distain starts to show. After the first-year Japanese true colors start to show. There is a reason that ALTs/JET Program participants typically last an average of 2 years. That reason is this, nationalistic. After the one-year mark and maybe even 2 if you are lucky, Japanese will stop asking you if you have gotten used to Japan and start asking you when you will leave Japan. The best answer to this is "It depends on my contract" because anything even remotely similar to "I want to stay 5 years", or "I hope to find another job after this one and stay in Japan" or even "I don't know yet" you will get disapproving looks and even lose friends. Teachers that once hung out with me and liked talking to me, have run out of patience and are waiting for me to return to the states. They constantly try to make me think of my friends and family back home and ask me what I miss most about America. It is nonstop. They are trying to guilt me into returning home. I even had an instance of a teacher singling me out and purposefully taking jobs from me because he wanted me to be fed up and go home or get fired for doing nothing. Jokes on him, because I happen to have good bosses and they believed me over him. When I talk to my students about America they are interested for a while, but then quickly will start listing all the ways they feel Japan is better. I tried listing things about America that they would be jealous of, such as long summer breaks, prom, driving as a teenager, but they will counter with things about America they don't like so they can justify Japan being the best. Like, when I mentioned the extra-long summer vacation, they countered with "Well it gives you more time to be lazy and eat McDonald's and get fat. So, Japan is better." My solution to this would be for Japanese people to travel outside of the country and experience other cultures. And I don't mean traveling to other hot spot places where everyone speaks Japanese like Guam, Korea, Taiwan, or Hawaii, I mean an actual trip, to places like, South Africa, Russia, Mexico, Canada, and the like. Someplace so far removed from their comfort zone so they can learn to appreciate what they have as Japanese and gain respect for others. It could help them as a society when accepting foreigners for the 2020 Olympics instead of assuming all foreigners know what is common courtesy in Japan because it is different in every culture. I could go on about this topic for quite a while, but let's just leave it here. 3. NEGLECTFUL PARENTING This may come a shock to many of you, and others may deny it completely. In Japan, there is this understanding, that outsiders are allowed to scold your children. At first, I viewed it as a good thing. While on the train some children may be rowdy and bother others, but to the mom, she thinks her kids are fine. So, an outside will walk up, scold the child for being unruly and the mother will thank the man and punish the child accordingly. But after living here for nearly 4 years, I have come to notice something. What do the parents actually do? Every morning and evening, the yellow/white hat brigade will be walking along, in a single file line to and from school. Crossing guards lead the way for the children of all ages (Preschool on up) and the children are expected to safely travel alone. Maybe one or two children will be driven to school but that is only 2 out of hundreds. No big deal you must be thinking. Well, another time, I saw teachers, instructing children in how to grow vegetables, and how to ride bicycles. Ok, cool, I grew plants in school too, but it gets worse. They teach kids how to do the laundry, how to clean, how to go to the doctor, how to wear clothes (yes, how to literally WEAR clothing) how to cook basic food (and I don't mean basic techniques of cooking, I mean how to cook in general), how to sew on a button or repair a tear, how to fold clothing, how to make your bed!!! Seriously! These things are something that a parent should be teaching their child. At my school, it is high school, so they don't have some of these classes, but they do have a class called manners. Yes, you heard that right. They have a literal class, teaching teenagers how to good manners. MANNERS. Those are also things that should be instilled upon children by their parents. There was an instance when a student came to school with inappropriate hair. It went against the school rules and guidelines. They punished the student for getting his hair done and placed 100% of the blame upon him. The problem with this, is that students are not allowed to work without written permission from their teacher AND have straight A's. This particular student was barely passing his classes. He wasn't working. He also can't drive and has no privileges when it comes to getting a haircut (there is a weird law here that kids under 18 cannot make appointments of any kind and this includes hair appointments. The student in question was 16). So, with this in mind, that means the parents had to make an appointment, the parents had to drive the child to the salon, the parents had to wait for the appointment to end, the parents saw the hair style, and the parents paid for it. Tell me again, how this is 100% the student's fault? I have actually asked several people in Japan whose responsibility it was to raise children, the parents or the teachers. And 100% of them said it is the teacher's responsibility. The only time they call the parents is to ask why a student hasn't shown up, or if they are failing and they have to discuss tuition. No matter what the parents say, the teachers are responsible for punishing the children. And the parents just let them! They don't seem to know what it means to raise kids or be a family in any sense of the word. No wonder Japanese are so good at telling heart moving stories, their entire lives are a tragedy! 2. CHANGE IS BAD They hate change. Their philosophy is "it's been done this way for centuries." Just because something has been done for centuries, doesn't mean it was done correctly. For example, they have windows. Like LOTS of windows. It makes up basically all the walls of any building. Lots and lots of windows. The idea is to let the sun light in. Well, the issue with this is that you risk over exposure to UV rays and increase the risk of cancer. Not to mention damage to your eyes. Whenever I would be in the office alone, I always closed the curtain because the light is just too much for me. It wasn't until recently. (The last 2 years recent) where the newspapers published a piece saying how windows are causing too much sunlight to get in and is causing health issues for hundreds of years. Gee, I wonder why... So now they sort of close the windows. They are also afraid of technology. Like, afraid of it. At work, we input the student's grades into a system that will calculate it for the year and split the averages up by term. Well, they will then print this sheet after it has been completed online, and calculate everything manually to ensure the machine is correct. I am not even joking. They literally have positions in corporations for people to check the computer calculations. And not just one person, no. That wouldn't be secure enough, they need FOUR people to check it. They have one person check the calculations, then they pass it on to the next person, then the next, then the next. They then will hold a meeting and verify that all their answers are the same before they approve the calculations as correct, then they will file it in a file folder. WHAT IS THE POINT OF A COMPUTER THEN!? If you are going to input it on the computer, print it, check it 4 separate times, then paper file it, why are you using a computer in the first place? I get checking to make sure your formulas are correct and stuff, but if you are going to use the man power anyway what's the point of having a computer? They implemented a social security system for their silvering society, and within the first year, someone hacked into it. Nothing was stolen. It was probably some teenagers bored and having a laugh, but what did Japan do to retaliate? They deleted the internet from work spaces. Yes. You heard that right. They are so afraid of technology, that they deleted the internet from work. Now we have to use an in-house network to pass files and documents along instead of emailing them. So, getting work emails is incredibly annoying and painful. We have to get permission to use a special email just for ALTs. It's ridiculous. All because Japan is afraid computers will take over the world! One more example before the final point. My school has scantrons for exams. There are over 1000 students, so checking each paper would be time consuming. So, they have scantrons to lighten the load. Or do they? No, actually you know what they do? You guessed it! They verify the machines are correct. They will scan all the answers. Print the results, then hand check each test with the results to make sure they match, then they go ahead and grade the scantrons by hand anyway. Why oh why do they do this? It is infuriating to watch and I keep telling them that the chances of the scantron getting is wrong is ridiculously slim. Plus, they give the students their tests back with the answers. Just have THEM tell you if an answer is messed up. Why have 3 teachers check each and every test because you are afraid of a machine? Better yet, why have the machine at all? It is moments like that that make me question why Japan is the second largest economy in the world. Pretty much, the only technology they aren't afraid of is video games, and yet you don't see anyone complaining about those! 1. SHOGANAI Ok, I have saved the most annoying and most hated aspect of Japanese culture for last. It is, the shoganai culture. This is usually the one that people notice first when they move here. You might even see this one if you study abroad for quite a length of time. Shoganai is basically their "polite" way of saying "Leave me alone, I want to be lazy." And lazy they are. Me: "Excuse me, but why was I double charged for my water bill?" Them: "It must have been a mistake." Me: "Oh ok. Could you please remove the extra charge?" Them: "Oh, I can't do that. You will just have to pay extra this month. If you don't pay then your water will be shut off." Me: "What? Why? That doesn't make sense." Them: *shrugs* "Shoganai." They hate doing anything that even remotely requires work. (FIY in this particular situation, I only paid the one month and not the extra charge, the charge was removed after 2 days.) We had another instance when I was trying to add my husband to my phone plan, but for who knows what reason, they would not add him to my contract. They kept insisting that I needed a new contract and two different bills. The lady kept saying "shoganai" "Shoganai" but in the end, she put them both on one contract anyway. So, the entire debacle was pointless. I have never seen a lazier group of people in my life. At work it is even worse. They have to plan major events such as: class trips to Okinawa, ski trips, sporting events, various festivals, and the like. All of which require proper planning. Do you think that people will make a schedule or time table for when they should call around and ask vendors for their facilities? Not the Japanese! They wait until the last possible moment to do anything. My school has a school festival once every 3 years. Our happened to be last year. It is a major event in which students come to school on weekends, do various performances, cook food, make products to sell, and have all their classrooms decorated with different themes and activities. One classroom would have bowling, one will have a student made film, one will have candy land, you get the idea. With all the cost of materials and the time needed to create and plan for such an event, you would think that they would allow the students a few weeks to prepare for this or give them some sort of at home assignment. Nope. None of the above. Instead it went like this: Me: "By the way, when is the school festival this year? I am really looking forward to it and I don't want to miss it since my mother is also visiting." Them: "Oh, it will be October 21st to the 22nd." Me: "Have the students started building anything yet? I would love to help them." Them: *???* "Why would they be making something now?" Me: "Because the 21st is in 8 days." Them: "It's fine they have time." Do you know when they started planning for this festival? 2 days before. TWO DAYS! At the festival, sooo many students and teachers were telling me of all the things they weren't able to include because "shoganai." No! Not shoganai! Shoga-Laziness! They had all the time in the world to prepare for this festival, and they waited until the last possible moment to do it. The worst part is that they don't seem to care! They honestly think this laziness is totally acceptable. This is applied to their everyday society. They have made this a core belief in their society. Could you imagine what the Japanese could accomplish if they actually planned something properly? I bet all of you right now fully understand why it took so long for Final Fantasy 15 and Kingdom Hearts 3 to be released. It's laziness and it makes me lose respect for them. I am constantly annoyed at them. Teachers will wait until the night before to make exams, and then call me on the phone to check their English. This last time I refused. I told them I would not participate in their procrastination. They can deal with their mistakes on their own. Thanks for reading this list! I hope I didn't discourage you from visiting Japan. The next post I make will be all about 5 aspects of Japanese culture that I love. This was mulling around in my mind for a while and I needed to get it out there. Let me know if there is anything I missed or something you would have added in the comments down below! I know it has been since August when I last posted, that mostly has to do with the autumn season at work exploding with much to do, and partly because of the news we received from our social worker.
On August 24th, our Japanese homestudy was conducted. Everything went smoothly and things were fine. Before the homestudy, the social worker spent quite some time speaking with us to make sure this was something we wanted to move forward and do. I was concerned about how my job contract is anual and thought it would reflect negatively towards our adoption. Our social worker was confident that it wouldn't be a problem as long as we show that we have the appropriate visas, (which we do) and that we show our renewed contracts every year (which we can). She also said, that foreign contracts have never been an issue with their agency before. So we went through with the homestudy. During the homestudy, we again addressed the visa/job concern and she said that she would emphasise to the committee that I will keep renewing my contract to stay in Japan during the entire adoption process. She tried really hard to calm our anxieties. She also said that she wouldn't have made the trip out to us if she didn't think we would pass. Then she went over the next steps and discussed, in detail, all the classes, costs, and stages coming up next. She told us she would email us the details again after the committee meeting at the end of September. When October rolled along, we still had not heard anything. I emailed her and asked about it. She responded with "we haven't had the committee meeting yet. An answer is scheduled for November 14th." This was when I started to get concerned. With the law change, even the agency we were using wasn't fully aware of all the vast differences that this law now entails. Since the US pulled out of the international circuit with Japan, we began to think that the government won't approve us because we aren't Japanese. The law was changed to make it nearly impossible for foreigners to adopt unless they were planning to permanently reside in Japan. Our visas, nor our job contracts can guarentee that unless we have permanent residencies. Plus, she made it sound like they had the meeting, but they were still arguing about whether or not to approve us. November came, and I just wanted everything to be over. I knew they were going to say that we weren't approved, and I just wanted them to come out and say it instead of making me wait so long. It was making me depressed and I was not doing so well at my job. On November 13th, I had the worst day ever at my job. The students were down right evil monsters. They were fighting, physically fighting. The teacher had tried to break them up but they were pushing her away. They were being obnoxious more so than usual. It was obnoxiousness times 10. They were purposefully looking up offensive phrases, sexual phrases, and curse words, just to say to me and laugh about it. Normally, when they say curse words to each other, I draw no attention to it so that the other students don't become aware and remember those words, but this time they were doing it to me. They would look me in the eye, and say things like "Are you a virgin?" "Have you ever f***ed your husband?" "I want to masturbate with you." I would of course scold them, but they thought it was a game. The teacher couldn't do anything because they were just evil monsters like I said. I almost walked out of the classroom. Thankfully, that class was the last of the day, so I grabbed all my stuff and clumsily left. I forgot things at work, which is unlike me to do. I usually double check my notebook to make sure I didn't forget anything (the following day I was going to a different school and needed materials). I rushed to my bike, completely forgetting to put my gloves on, and it was particularly cold and windy that day. My hands instantly turned into ice. I was going to tough it out and just bike home anyway, but I was losing my grip on my handles due to the cold. I took a different route home because I thought it would be faster but I didn't know it very well. I couldn't take my hands feeling so cold so I attempted to put my gloves on. I was going to stop but I saw my students. They were the same evil monster students I just had. So like an idiot, I put my gloves one while biking. I can do that, if there is nothing in the basket to lose my balance. There was something in the basket. I got one glove on semi ok. I wabbled but nothing serious, then I go to do my other hand, and I don't really remember what happened after that, I just know that I was on my bike, and then suddenly, I was not. I don't remember the last time I was that stunned from a fall. I fall in skating ALL the time, but I always imediately get right back up. I was on the ground for a while. I briefly forgot what I was doing and where I was going. I looked around to make sure no one saw me. No one noticed, so that was good. I felt pain everywhere, and I knew I injured myself quite badly, but there was nothing I could do at that point. I picked up my bike, and saw that my purse was broken, and several of my favorite pins on my school back were either broken or missing. I checked myself and my clothes were fine, but my right knee was screaming. My left knee was bleeding so I had to get home quickly. I could barely move my right knee but I had no choice. I had to get home. So I pretented that I was Yuzuru Hanyu skating for his second Olympic gold and pressed on. I thought my knee was going to explode. I did go to a doctor, but they couldn't do anything other than tell me to ice it and rest it for a few days. No duh! After I got home from the doctor, I sent a message to my boss telling him everything that happened in my class. He told me he would talk to the other teacher with me to decide what to do. I wanted something to be done and I made sure he knew that. Their behavior was inexcusable. It was nearly impossible to sleep that night because not matter what I did, my knees were on fire. The next day I asked a co-worker to pick me up from the bus stop, completely forgetting that I have to walk to the bus stop. That took three times as long as it should. The nurse at that school gave me an icy patch to put on my now blackened knee. That helped relieve the pressure, but I was sure my knee was going to pop open. It felt like someone tied it off and it was slowly filling with blood but the blood couldn't flow back. That's what was happening. The only way to stop it from feeling like that was to raise it up quite high. During my breaks I went to the teacher's lounge and lied on the floor, and put my leg on the back of the couch. When I finally got home, I looked at my leg again, and it was basically black and purple. However, taking a hot bath really helped reduce the color to blue and purple. (I posted a picture on Facebook after my bath). After my bath, I received this email: "We had the homestudy meeting today. The committee has decided to postpone the registration of you as prospective adoptive parents at this moment. The committee members think that financial stability of your family is not clear because your job contract will finish by next July and you are the main income provider. The committee members understand that you have a visa to stay in Japan longer and will try to find your new job. However, it is difficult to place a child with you due to the uncertainty." What a great 24 hours I had! I ignored the email. My leg hurt, my spirit was already crushed from falling like that the day before, and I was still upset from how my students treated me. (OH! I should also add, that Spyro the Dragon was rereleased on the 13th of November. After my class I bought the game so I could play it when I got home and release some steam, but ended up not playing ANYTHING because I fell off my bike). At work, people noticed that I was walking funny so I went to the nurse. When she saw my leg, she immedately asked how it happened and what I did, so I told her that I was just not paying attention. I tried to laugh it off but she said "That's really unlike you. Did something happen? Did you get upset by something that day?" This caught me off guard and at the time, I really didn't think that the behaviour of my class would cause me to make stupid decisions and fall off my bike like that. So I told her what happened in my class. She told the principal and my boss, and they asked to speak with me privately, and also to see my poor injured leg. My left leg was fine, maybe I didn't notice because of my right knee being so bad. They ended up doing an investigation because the students at this school have high standards to meet, and it is very unlike them to be acting that way. They also believe me to be telling the truth so they wanted to know how something like this could have happened. It took a week but they did find out what happened and they punished them severely for their actions. They blamed them for my accident. The homeroom teach appologized on the student's behalf and wished me well. I personally, would like the students to each write me an apology letter, but that is just not how they do things in Japan. Then Thanksgiving happened and I hosted a party at our place with some friends. We needed to prepare for everything and get all the food together. We went shopping at Costco to get our American ingredients, all while my leg was exploding, and I had to cook everything, again, while my leg was exploding, and on top of that, I had Japanese language lessons because I am taking my JLPT N2 on December 2nd. I have been go, go, go, go for the past 2 weeks. Not only did I have all of these things going on, but I also had to be a questioner for the prefectural speech contest. That lasted all day, and again, my leg wanted to explode from that as well. I never had a chance to process anything or really respond to the email from our social worker. It wasn't just that we got an email that our adoption process in Japan is over, it was a combination of things that made the blow that much harder. I had wanted them to tell us know, so that we could start planning for the future. I think it would have been better had they told me before November 14th, then maybe things might have played out differently, but there is nothing I can do about that now. For right now, I am upset, but just trying to get by. I was going to post a link to my crowdfunding page for some FAQs but I don't think anyone will actually click on it, so I will just post everything here: What does this mean? It means that unless I have a job that can guarantee me a 3 year contract at the very least, we cannot continue to persue adoption in Japan. The only jobs that can offer that type of guarentee are engineering jobs or becoming a business owner. All other jobs are less than a year to 2 year contracts. Why didn't your social worker tell you this concern before? She didn't know. Like I have said before, the law has changed in Japan back in April 2018. Based on the information she had always used before, my anual contracts would not be a problem as long as I demonstrated that I had the appropriate visa and contract renewals. Even during the homestudy, Josh and I asked several times regarding the visa/contract concerns and she assured us that she never had an issue with prospective adoptive partents (PAP) before. She also said that she wouldn't have come all the way out there to conduct the homestudy if she didn't think we were going to pass. This decision by the committee was completely new and unknown. It could not have been predicted. Do you get any sort of refund? No. The money has been spent, and it has been used. There is no possible way we can get a refund. What happens to the money we donated? It's gone. It has been spent towards the adoption. There is nothing we can do. I understand that some people will be upset because they have supported us along the way. We are upset too. The total cost that we have spent on this adoption has been $15,000. The amount of money we received from donations has been $3,000. So that means we have spent out of pocket over $10,000. We are feeling a loss same as you, but there is literally nothing I can do about it. We just have to accept that the money is gone, it has been spent and used, and now it is gone. That happens sometimes. It's part of the risk people take when persuing adoption. What are you guys going to do now? We are going to move forward and continue to enjoy life in Japan. Will you guys persue adoption again in the future? Maybe. Though, if we do, we will not make it public. I wanted it to be private from the beginning, but some members of my family strongly encouraged me to create a crowdfunding page. Against my better judgement, I started YouCaring and now here. I didn't want to start a page or make it public for this very reason. Nothing can be for certain with adoption and we (Josh and I) knew that a failed adoption was a possibility because neither of us are Japanese (Japan is VERY nationalistic). We didn't want to make it public, receive donations, then have to tell everyone that it failed and then people would be asking for their donations back that we can't pay. Should we attempt adoption again, it will be 100% quiet. No one will know about it. Sorry everyone. (T_T) Will you return to the US? We didn't come to Japan to adopt, it was just something we decided to do and we happened to be in Japan. As for returning to the US, we don't have definite plans as of yet, I still have a job contract to fulfill. Maybe after that we will decide, but it is too soon to say now. I hope this answers some of your questions. I also hope you can understand our decisions at this time. *If you have any further questions, feel free to leave a comment.* Has much changed since my last update? Not really. But I do have something semi exciting I would like to share with y'all.
Our homestudy is rappidly approaching. It will be upon us by August 24th. I have already submitted my time off from work and am ready to go. The apartment complex is still under construction. That part really makes me angry because they barely do anything all day long and it seems like they act as if we are just supposed to make do with their laziness. I am getting tired of it. They were supposed to have finished a week and a half ago and now they are just being rude. They took a week off for no reason what so ever and I am getting tired of not being able to use my balcony to dry my clothes. It's a real pain. Anyway, the complex has been getting a fresh coat of paint, and things are starting to look more modern and match the interior better. With all this upgrading happening, though it may be inconvinient, has been causing me to really reflect about our home and what sort of things we need in order to prepare for this child. We have many items that are either broken or soon to be broken, and we have just been making do. You see, when I first moved to Japan, I had next to nothing. The landlords were at least nice enough to have bought me some brand new appliances. As nice as that was, I couldn't use them. What I mean is that I had a fancy new stove, but no pots or pans. I had a wooden spoon, a random tea set, and a bowl or two. Not really anything I could cook with. I remember one morning waking up to have toast and jam only to discover I had no way of toasting the bread, and no knives in which to spread the jam. I take it back, I did have one pot. But I discovered the hard way that it did not have any handles. I was sick too! I was trying to make myself some tea but couldn't because there was no way to get the water out of the pot without burning myself. Remember, I had nothing. Not even towels or oven gloves. Thinking back on the first few weeks here, I went shopping a lot just to buy things here and there. When I did that, I didn't care if it was used and almost broken, something was better than nothing. I also accepted a lot of junk from neighbors and coworkers. They were items that were going to have been scrapped anyway, but figured I would have a better use for it. All of my stuff is basically missmatched and random because, like I said, I had nothing and needed it. The only new thing that I had bought for myself was a bed because the one I was given was harder than the floor. I am not joking. I slept on the floor more than I slept on the bed because it was softer. Once I bought that bed, I was in heaven. It also was the only thing in the house that actually looked like it matched because I had purchased sheets I liked, pillow cases, the works. By the time Josh arived, we did more shopping of mostly used items to make our empty apartment more like a home. We were given a tiny kitchen table, with a broken chair. It needed to be pounded together everytime you used it, and we basically sat on a who-knows-where-that's-been office chair. It was comfortable, but the stains and smell left everything to be desired. And that is basically how we lived our life. We just got by with the bare minimum because we had to. Then as time went on, I guess we just never felt the need to upgrade because what we had was working just fine. It may look a bit cluttered, but "this is Japan." We would think. "Japan is so tiny, there is no way you canNOT be messy." Well, over the past few weeks, we have been thinking more and more, about how adding a child is going to change things for us, and we realized that our current way of living, is not going to keep working. In our bathroom, we have a shower, then next to the shower is a bathtub. We don't use a curtain because it doesn't matter. It's an enclosed space that all gets wet anyway so why bother? Most aprtments (not sure why ours doesn't do this) have built in shelves to store your shampoo and soap. Ours doesn't have such a feature so we have been plopping everything on the rim of the bathtub. This works just fine for us because we mostly shower anyway. When we did want to take a bath, we either moved all the stuff out of the way, or clumsily climbed over everything. See, this way of living doesn't bother us. It might seem strange to some, but to us, it works, so who cares. (One thing I never understood about our shower arrangement, is why they never built in those shelves. Japanese as a society, take baths over showers so you would think that it would be standard to have the shelves.) When we started to imagine bathing a child, that's when we realized that something has got to change. We barely can fit all our (mostly mine) stuff on the rim as it is. There is no way we will be ok with moving everything, all the time, and having even MORE clutter with child shampoo, toys, and soap. So we bought a wire shelf and installed it. It has freed up the space so much. The room also appears more clean. I started thinking, if such a small item can make that much of a difference, then maybe it is time we invested in brand new home items. So that's what we have been doing for the past couple of weeks. We have been going through each room, jotting down item after item of things that we need to improve our way of life and prepare for a child. I was expecting there to only be about 10 items but it turns out we have been cutting corners in almost every area of our lives. The process has shocked me. I hadn't realized how low our standard of living was. After having gone through everything, the only "modern" things we have in our home are my vanity, the TV, and the kotatsu. (I love that kotatsu). Josh and I have gone to a different store everyday for the past week, looking for the items we wrote on our list, as well as discovering other items we forgot about. A lot of the stuff is affordable even for us now, but there are some things that are quite pricey. We realize that we cannot afford all these items on our own, in addition to saving for adoption. Then it hit me! This great idea! I created an online registry of sorts for our adoption. I have been painstakingly adding each item from all the stores into this website, and making sure that they show up in English. If you want to check out our registry, you can do so by clicking here. Please note, that if you do wish to purchase something off my wish list, it will lead you to a Japanese only website. A few of the items are linked to global sites, but most of them are Japanese only. I understand that not all of you can read and understand Japanese, plus, some items cannot be purchased online. If you do wish to make a purchase, then please message me on any of my social media, or you can make a donation here and just add a comment specifying what your donation is for. I am really good about using ear marked money. Once it has been marked, I cannot, in good conscience, spend it on anything else other than what it was ear marked for. I am really excited about this registry. I have worked really hard. I hope you can make a contribution. If you can't, then please share the links with others on your social media! It will realy help a lot. I look forward to living a more simplified, and clean life. ;) Thanks for reading! #ItTakesAVillage I know it has been a while but that is because since my last update, nothing has really happened. The only thing we really did do was garden and save money. Since we were relying on our agency to make the next move we couldn't exactly do anything to make progress.
As you may remember, a while back, we lost our US agency due to the adoption law change in Japan. The law basically states that Japanese couples and families get priority over international residents. Which is fine, but that just means that it makes things difficult for us. We have to stay in Japan for however long that will take. We cannot leave Japan until 2 years after we finalized the adoption with a child. It's scary, and we are taking a huge gamble by choosing to do it this way, but the way I see it is that we are already far too invested into the adoption process in Japan to just quit at this point and start from square one if and when we move back to the US. Doing the process after we have moved back home, after we have found jobs, and after we have found a place to live is taking too much time and money. It would take us a year if not more to save up again for the agency fees and homestudy fees and by that point we may as well not even try. Staying in Japan during this process is our best option. The scariest part of it all actually has nothing to do with the adoption. It has everything to do with visas. I recently got my visa renewed and it made me nervous the entire time. There were issues with getting it approved and I was so afraid they were going to deny my application. Thankfully, they accepted it and I was approved to stay in Japan. Being denied a visa scares me more than adopting a child in Japan. I keep fearing that I won't be approved to stay in Japan and something terrible will happen where we will have to leave without our child. That is horrible to think about but that is the fear I have. It's interesting that today I was reading a devotional about "fear" but all the verses were on anxiety and worrying about what others think of you, not exactly fear. I couldn't pay attention much to it this morning because it doesn't apply to me. I don't care what other people think about me or if others approve of my life choices. So reading those verses on not worrying about what others think of you was pointless and fell on deaf ears. It's not that I am actively afraid of this possibility happening, it is just something I think about from time to time. I am the type of person who will make a 5 year plan every 3 months or so with 1-3 different directions just incase, and with this one, there is only one option. It is out of my comfort zone but I know that God has it under control. We were finally informed of when our homestudy will take place. It took long enough to hear from them. They had a lot of documents to varify and to translate, but they don't like to communicate very often. This is something I find interesting. In the US, they over communicate. What I mean is that US companies will email you almost everyday and in some cases multiple times a day demanding responses for things that will not take place for a while. With our US agency they made it seem like if we didn't deliver certain documents timely they would drop us, when really they were just wanting to remind us, as if we are the type of people who readily forget things. Those emails always make me anxious and angry. Sometimes I will deliberately ignore them on purpose because what they say is urgent, isn't exactly urgent at all. Then we have Japan. Japanese are such laid back people. They are the kings of procrastination. You could actually need an answer within the next 24 hours, and they will wait until hour 23 and 59 minutes before they respond to you. It is maddening. Is there not a culture that meets in the middle?? Bottom line, US gives too much information and Japan gives too little. Our homestudy is scheduled for Friday, August 24th. It will be quite expensive too. They are always expensive. I am not allowed to disclose the full amount of the homestudy so I can only give you the ballpark range and it is around $4000. We also need to reimburse them for their travels. Hopefully, they don't take the shinkansen. That is just too much money, but I have a feeling that they will take it. Oh well. Our aparment complex is being painted this summer, and they are taking their sweet time with that too! Normally Japanese construction is so quick, it's over before it started. Our landlords must have hired the laziest people because they are a month behind schedule. It's ridiculous. I would hope that the painting would be finished by the time we have our homestudy, but with them moving at US construction worker pace, I highly doubt that. I am pretty sure we are going to have to yell to speak to each other because they workers are drilling something. What they are drilling I have no idea, but it certainly isn't what they are supposed to be doing. I am a little frustrated with the painters if you couldn't tell. Mostly because of my garden. My neighbor seems to believe that it is his responsibility to water and care for my plants without asking me. I hope he doesn't spontaneously take my vegetables. I have been working hard to grow them. Since the painters have started working, I have needed to move my plants. Originally they were going to move them onto the scafolding. I asked if I could water them and access them still because they are vegetable plants, and they said no. I couldn't bring them inside because there would be no sun with the scafolding put up. They had to be put outside. My landlords were kind enough to build me a little location to put all my pots. I set them all up outside and have been watering them and giving them fertilizer (on a schedule I might add) regularly. My neighbor saw me putting all my plants up and just gave me some plants to keep. Like, literally gave me some random plants. I guess that small gesture gave him the right to water and fertilize my plants. The only problem was, he never ever asked me if he could do that, nor did he make sure I wasn't already feeding my plants. I almost lost my cucumbers because he was over feeding them. Their leaves were turning yellow and shriveling up. I finally put up a sign that says in both English and Japanese to not water them and leave them be. He finally stopped. I let the plants dry outsome and remade my fertilizer schedule and they are doing fine now. A few days ago, we bought a new tomato plant and I transplanted my strawberry runners. I gave everything a deep watering, then we spent the day in Nagano ice skating. Now, that day we had record highs and that is why we gave everything a deep watering. I also rearranged plants so that they were not in direct sunlight all day unless they required that. So everything should have been fine. But then we came home, and my pots were all wet. Only the new ones were wet, like the new tomato plant and the strawberry runners. I was furious! What gave that person the right to believe they could just do as they pleased with my garden? I would totally be fine if the guy asked me if he could help care for my garden because he's retired and gardening is his hobby. I would have been 100% ok with it then. But to do voluntarily care for my plants without asking or leaving a note of some kind pisses me off. That is so rude. Who would do that??? So I had to make a new sign and post them AGAIN saying not to water my plants. The strawberry parent plants aren't looking so good right now and I think it was a combination of extreme heat, and lack of proper nutrients. I am a novis so figuring out what picky strawberry plants need has been difficult. I am getting new leaves that look healthy so I am guessing I have done something right. Anyway, I plan to make a gardening in Japan post someday but maybe after this season so I have some info to actually share. I have been taking pictures. So I will be ready. That is all I have to say now. The only thing I can really say is that this homestudy will be August 24th. Hopefully, I will have more news for you soon! Click here if you would like to read more about our story or make a donation. Welcome to the rainy season in Japan! A couple of days ago I went to a charity event and on the way home, it started pouring. It took me about 10 minutes to arrive home by bike and let me tell you, biking in heavy rain is painful. Water gets in your eyes and it is impossible to keep them open. I prayed the whole way home hoping that I wouldn't get into an accident because I couldn't see anything. Last night, we watched a movie and the characters had to ride their bikes in heavy rain, acting like they could see. I WISH that were true, but it's not. Impossible to see while riding your bike in the rain. Needlesstosay, I was soaking wet when I arrived home. I'm just grateful my purse was water proof or my phone would be dead right now.
Since my last update, I received my birth certificates! That was the final piece of our documents that we needed. JD and I checked and rechecked, and then checked again our documents before finally shipping it out to our agency. We got word that they have the documents, and now it is just a waiting game for them to finish checking and translating them. Since last year, things have felt like they were moving quite rappidly and now, things feel like they are going at a snail's pace. I suppose that would make sense as we originally were going to do 2 homestudies, and now that we only have to do one, there is no need to be rushing. I just pray that everything will work out and we will be ok to move forward with the adoption. As much as I don't like waiting, we don't really have a choice in the matter. Until then, I will just tend to my plants. Our crowdfunding site, YouCaring, has been bought out by GoFundMe, and the site will disolve by the end of July. I went ahead and transfered as much as I could to a new site, FreeFunder. FreeFunder is another crowdfunding site that does not take any part of your donation. The only fees are the CC processing fees which cannot be avoided anywhere. Another good thing about FreeFunder is that they do not use PayPal. I had a lot of issues with PayPal and trying to get our money from Bonfire was a nightmare. I will never use PayPal for anything ever again. It is a horrible company with zero customer support. I don't know how that company can exist. Anyway, if you would like to check out my new crowdfunding page you can see it here. I will be keeping both YouCaring and FreeFunder active at the same time. You can freely donate to either. I will also post updates to both until YouCaring is gone. Once it is gone, I will be using only FreeFunder. Not many people know about FreeFunder, but I thought I would give it a try. If it doesn't work out during this time, I will find a new site. Thanks for reading! Until next time. #ItTakesAVillage I am aware that it has been almost 2 months, and I accept full responsibility on that. You may punish me how you see fit. But I am here now! So no need to worry.
I’ll start with my puzzle piece fundraiser. Since I last updated, we have sold 10 more pieces!! Which leaves 445 pieces left for sale at $20 apiece. If you wish to purchase a puzzle piece to help fund out adoption expenses please see our crowdfunding page. I also had started a T-shirt fundraiser to help raise additional support. That was a huge success in my book. We ended up meeting our goal of 20 shirts! Which is amazing to me. I know that we don’t necessarily make that much money off of the shirts, but because we launched the campaign, more people gave money and were offering encouragement. We were blown away by the response! Something else that is a big success is our garden. It has grown quite dramatically. We started off with a few carrots and cucumber plants, and now it has grown into quite a few carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers, and strawberries. I think we are finished for the time being. We might add some flowers later to encourage bees to pollinate our plants but right now, we just have lots of green things. Our cucumbers have been giving us a bit of a problem because the leaves started to turn a bit yellow and a couple plants died from fungus. We pulled those out and gave it some plan medicine and Epsom salts and so far, the remaining 2 plants are looking alive. We shall see how they grown. If you have been following our YouTube channel or crowdfunding page, you will know that in April, be changes happened. In April, the adoption law in Japan radically changed. Which in turn affected Americans adopting internationally in Japan. There is a family from Georgia, who was denied an orphan visa for their adopted Japanese baby due to this law change. Right now, the USCIS has halted all adoption applications until they have worked out a new treaty. What does this mean for us? Well, our US agency has advised us not to continue with adoption in Japan because of this. They will not continue our process. Which means, that we lose the $9000 that we have already paid. This was disheartening and hard to come to a decision, but after many phone calls and Skype meetings, we have decided to put everything on hold for 6 months, and just gather our information together for Japan in the meantime. This really is a blessing in disguise because we were worried about how we were going to be able to afford the USCIS application fee, then this happened and now we don’t have to pay any application fee. All we have to save up for is the Japanese homestudy. Which is anywhere from $2500-$4000. We are doing quite well with our savings plan I think. Josh has been working 2 part-time jobs to help us gain extra income, we have cut back on spending, and our garden is growing healthily to be able to give us free food that we want to eat without spending so much money. I will be honest with you and tell you that we have $2000 in savings. We are hoping to increase that amount by mid-June to $3000. I am confident that we can do this. The donations we have received this month from supporters or from selling shirts will go directly towards paying off our psych evaluation. We put that charge on our credit card so we could make payments because it’s ridiculously expensive. We will just be paying that off for quite some time. On a more less frustrating note, JD got his birth certificates in the mail. I haven’t gotten mine yet. They misspelled my name, which is stupid. They can clearly see that we sent our application together and they didn’t spell my husband’s name wrong. Why the heck would they spell mine wrong? Do they not have eyes? Mine are still not here and California has been very rude in “helping” us. My mother informed me that she just very recently got them in the mail at her house instead of mine. Again, this makes no sense because I put the return address as our Japanese address. The last application was sent back to us in Japan just fine, why couldn’t they do that again? So hopefully, it can make it safely to Japan and I don’t have to worry about this anymore. The only reason this is taking so long for us to move forward is because of these stupid documents. It is helpful financially but really, this is just plain dumb. At this point, it doesn’t really matter because we have to start the process entirely over anyway. I suppose this is all part of the journey of hiking the PCT. We all sustain injuries from time to time and it sets us back quite a bit and ends up costing us money. That is all this is. Just an injury during our adoption process. But we are on the road to recovery and will be back on trail in no time. We know that God is with us during this process and that if it were not for our supporters, we would not be able to say that we can move forward into our new journey. We know that this is risky for us to be doing a domestic adoption instead of an international one, but we are willing to accept such a risk. Please be praying for us and send us encouraging words. Please consider a donation. We can’t do this without you. #ItTakesAVillage Hello world! It is now time for another adoption update. Well, technically the one-month mark will be April 2nd, but since today is March 29th it is close enough.
I’ll start with my puzzle piece fundraiser. Since last month, we have only sold 2 more pieces. Which leaves 455 pieces left for sale at $20 apiece. If you wish to purchase a puzzle piece to help fund out adoption expenses please see our crowdfunding page. During this month, we finally were able to receive our homestudy write up. Which means, that apart from our birth certificates (more on that later) we are basically ready to go with submission on our homestudy! There were some obvious parts that needed to be corrected, so we tackled those first, as they were the easiest. Then we spent the next couple of weeks reading over it carefully and making any changes where necessary. It is a rather long document. It has to cover every detail about our lives, like where we have lived since 18 (which, for me is A LOT of addresses) who our immediate family is, their jobs, ages, what kind of people they are, how they disciplined us, such things. We even had to provide details about our siblings. We also had to sign away our right to privacy. We will not have our privacy rights back until after the adoption is finalized. It sounds scary, but they aren’t going to advertise us publicly. It just means that they can talk about intimate details of our lives between agencies/people without having to always seek our consent. Reading the homestudy was both boring, and interesting. Boring, because I already know all these things about myself, and having to read it multiple times to make sure there is no mistake makes me tired of hearing about myself. Not only that, but at my job, I have to introduce myself to all my classes every year (about 22 classes) and it gets old. It was also interesting because I have never read anything that painted someone in such a positive light that wasn’t an adoring fan of a celebrity. I especially liked the descriptions of the home. Whether or not she actually meant it, I don’t care, I just like that she even said my decorating, as minimal as it is, was tasteful. Another thing that was part of our homestudy was to complete a living will. As we don’t have any assets apart from skates (which I will take with me should their ever be an evacuation), so making the will was ridiculously easy. On the site, it also asked if we desired to make funeral arrangements, and I got so excited and got a little carried away. Let’s just say that Spiderman might be a part of it. The most important part of the will was appointing godparents, which we did. I am not sharing whom because it doesn’t matter. We did carefully consider who we would choose to ensure the right caretakers of our adopted child. Anyway, after we checked very carefully our homestudy, we sent it back to our social worker to make any final corrections. I haven’t heard from her since I sent it back, but it is not unusual for her to take a week to respond to me. She is a very busy woman. Now for some semi good news. The checks for our birth certificate copies have cleared! This is excellent news! Just hearing that the checks have cleared gives me hope that they will be in our possession in min-April. With those in hand, we can successfully send in our paperwork to our social worker in Japan and begin scheduling our homestudy. EEEK! I am so excited I can’t wait. This news has seriously improved my mood, along with the blossoming cherry blossoms. I love them, and I love this news. I know last month, I talked about saving $500 every month, so I am expecting you to be asking if we have $1500 in savings this month. The answer to that, is no, we don’t. Not because I went on a crazy shopping spree, but because I sustained a sports injury. I got hurt BAD and the only way to afford the treatments was to dabble into our savings. It was either that, or suffer extreme pain and little to no mobility for days on end. I couldn’t drink or eat anything due to the injury, I had to see someone. Unfortunately, that means we have been set back on our goal. About $367 short of our goal for the month. We received a couple of donations this past month and those helped pay for our food and transportation, as I could not ride my bike. Don’t worry, I am fully recovered now and there is no need to worry about me. I still see the doctor, but it is every other week now, instead of every day or every other day. Speaking of money, some people have been asking why I don’t apply for adoption grants or loans. The thing about those is you have to have a completed and approved homestudy. We don’t have that yet. We won’t have that until USCIS gives us the glorious stamp of approval. That can take months. Not to mention that we have to front the USCIS application fee which is around $1000. Let’s just hope and pray that we don’t have to pay that AND save for the Japanese homestudy at the same time. I don’t know how we can afford to pay for things then. I knew going into this that it was going to be expensive. Originally, I was planning on doing everything myself and not asking for donations from anyone. However, we quickly realized that that was impossible unless we were rich because we were already $9000 invested and still had another $20,000 to go. We were sucked dry by that point. There was no way we were going to be able to do this on our own without some sort of assistance. Therefore, that is why we decided to open a crowdfunding page with YouCaring. It may have been bad timing with the holidays right around the corner, but now is the right time. Tax refunds are being issued and many people want to either save or donate a small portion to a big cause. As expats, we aren’t qualified for any refund or tax credit. We have to pay money out of pocket to have our taxes done and get no money in return. But the common citizen does. Please consider donating to our cause. I wouldn’t be asking if we weren’t already in a desperate situation. We are in jeopardy of not be able to move forward with the adoption. If this USCIS application fee comes due at the same time as our Japanese homestudy, then we will have to forfeit the adoption and I don’t want to do that. There is a child out there, who needs a family, more than we need money. We don’t know who he/she is, be we already love him/her. We pray and them all the time, we think about them all the time, we make plans as a family all the time. Even a donation as small as $20 can make a difference. I have 1000 followers of this blog. If each person were to donate $20, then that would be my goal right there! Please consider a donation. We can’t do this without you. #ItTakesAVillage Welcome to day 2 of the wonderful Gunma Golden Guide sponsored by JR East. Enjoy! We woke up rather early because we needed to leave to drive to Kusatsu. They served us breakfast at the hotel and it was very Japanese. Not much in the way of breakfast as we Americans would think it to be. If you have been following me long enough you would have read about the first encounter with Japanese breakfasts. (You can read about it here) It was basically the same without the buffet. I can’t eat heavy food like that in the morning so I just stuck to basic foods like fish and rice with some juice, and a little bit of tofu. After breakfast, some people went back to the onsen once more, but I went back to my room to rest some more before check out. We left the hotel a little late because not everyone was in the lobby. Probably because they had gone to the onsen. Once we were all ready, we were crammed into a small bus and taken to Kusatsu. We picked up a tour guide along the way, who happened to speak English as he had spent 12 years in the western part of the US. He was excited to be speaking English with most of us. (Not everyone could speak English). On January 23rd, Mt. Shirane (in Kusatsu) erupted. One person from the Japanese defense force was killed and 10 others were injured from the blast. Thank goodness, it wasn’t worse. As a result of the explosion, volcanic ash was everywhere, then it had snowed again and there were patches of fresh clean snow on top of ash covered snow. It also still smelled of ash. The park we went to has been closed to the public since the eruption, but they made an exception for us and other licensed professionals. The park is going to be reopened to the public on April 7th. It is a little sad to not have a peak there anymore, it was a beautiful mountain. We were instructed in how to put on snowshoes which was really quite easy. Some people had a hard time getting their straps on properly or putting the shoes on the wrong feet, so it took a while. Because of leaving late, and people taking a long time to put their shoes on, we were unable to visit an onsen in Kusatsu. Unfortunate, but it could not be helped. It was difficult to figure out how to walk in the shoes at first. You had to keep your feet a little further apart than usual, plus you had to lift your feet higher than normal. I kept tripping over myself until I got the hang of it. Every so often, the guide would stop to explain some nature to us, or talk about the location. The weather was quite warm so all the places the sun hit had no snow. We had to hike in a sort of zigzag pattern. During WWII, the train line that now runs from Takasaki to Naganohara-Kusatsuguchi was built for steel mining purposes. After WWII, the line was demolished and wasn’t rebuilt for the public until the mid-60s. The line was also extended to accommodate tourists. In fact, the original train that was built specifically for that line, the Gunma train 115, recently retired on March 16th. I was told that they actually held a sayonara ceremony for the train. In the near future, they will close all train stations past Naganohara-Kusatsugushi because more and more people are leaving. Many schools in that area are merging and others are closing entirely. Whole communities are being uprooted and relocated because of the state of the economy. (Japan is suffering from a shrinking population, but that is topic for another day). During our hike, we came across one of the old ore mining spots. The quality is not that good so they no longer mine for steel in Kusatsu. Just across from the ore mining was what I believe they called the “Golden Triangle.” We were in Gunma, but we were just a 600-meter hike in either direction from Nagano or Niigata. I tried to take a good photo but so was everybody else so it didn’t work out for me. Along the hike, we saw animal tracks, bear scratches, and ash. Lots and lots of volcanic ash. We weren’t that close to Mt. Shirane and it was amazing to me how far the ash traveled. By the time we reached the top, my shoulders and neck were about to give out and I needed to stop, but thankfully we made it to the peak (or as much of the peak as we could access) and could take a break from hiking. We took our snowshoes off and walked around the natural hot spring while taking pictures. The acidic level was extremely high. The guide kept joking with us about swimming in it. He said, “If you have ever wanted to know what a REAL hot spring feels like, by all means jump in…..You will die, but at least you will know what it was like.” Seeing the source of a hot spring was really neat. The water was coming from the Earth. I had never seen that before. It was boiling. As it flowed down the mountain, it cooled enough for the moss to grow alongside it. That particular moss is the only life that can survive by the water. It needs a specific acidic level to flourish. Some places use calcium to neutralize the water for the people to use as onsens, but that kills the moss, and when the moss dies, it hurts other parts of the ecosystem. As a result, they have started making nature preserves in various parts of the mountain. This is something they do specific to Gunma, as Gunma has over 1000 natural hot springs. No other area of Japan comes close to that number. On the hike down, we took the normal trail that was mostly not covered in snow, so we didn’t need our snowshoes. We carried our shoes down the mountain and had cup ramen for lunch. After lunch, we stopped by a souvenir shop, mostly for the restrooms. I bought some miso ice cream and it was so savory! I was afraid to eat it, but I am so glad that I bought it. It was absolutely delicious. It was similar to salted caramel. I recommend you try it if you can. At that point, we hopped on a train (of course a train. JR sponsored it after all). Back in Takasaki station, they gave us Joetsu train line beer. I don’t drink beer, so I gave it to my husband. Some other people also don’t drink beer so they gave me theirs as well. I ended up with 5 bottles of beer. My husband said that it was good and that he liked it, so I guess that is nice.
It was a wonderful trip and I had a great time. I enjoyed meeting the people that I met. I love meeting people from other countries. This tour had people from all over the world. It was a lot of fun. I love Japanese culture and nature, and this tour was perfect as most of the things we did I had yet to experience. I appreciate the opportunity to have been a part of the Gunma Golden Guide trip. Thank you JR East for your wonderful sponsorship! If you ever get the chance to visit Japan, please come and check out Gunma. There are a lot of things to see. Most people only visit Tokyo, but I feel that if you limit yourself to only the big cities, you miss out on what true Japanese culture really is. There are city cultures, such as Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Okinawa, then there is Japanese culture, which you don’t really get to fully experience unless you distance yourself away from the cities. Please come to Gunma! |
AuthorJeny B Archives
August 2021
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