Ken and I stayed up to watch the Japan vs. Cuba baseball game. Both of us were sleeping on and off throughout the game, but we watched Japan win it.

Japan nearly blew, letting Cuba get back into it with three errors. But in the top of the ninth, they came through with 4 more runs and kept Cuba to one run in the bottom of the inning. Ichiro had a great game at the plate with two hits and two runs scored. He was robbed of a third hit by a incredible catch by the Cuban shortstop.

It was fun for Ken and I to support a Japan team once again. Looking forward to the World Cup broadcasts, although Japan is in a tough bracket. It'll be interesting to see how far they get this time around.

Today I was checking out my friend and colleague Karen Kilroy's website. I was checking it as I do every now and again. I noticed a couple of additional sites that she has added to here portfolio including Voices & Choices, and SPAN Ohio. I went over to SPAN Ohio, or Single-Payer Action Network Ohio, largely to see what it was all about since Karen and found this great video....who says great knowledge doesn't come out of Japan!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhklMGA01Gg

We are slowly and finally beginning to find the Japanese community here in Cleveland/NEO. With my wife arriving, having settled into our new apartment, and getting my son into school, we have had a little time to begin to try and tap into the Japanese community here in Cleveland. We were very pleasantly suprised to find two Japanese families in our apartment building and a couple other in the complex. In fact, one family's daughter turned out to be in the same class that my youngest son was placed.

A few weeks ago we also had dinner at Shinano's out on Wilson Mills in Richmond Heights, where the waitress took our name and number to pass on to a Japanese community group - Japanese Association of Northeast Ohio, or JANO(Japanese). We got the call from one of the folks on Sunday. My wife spoke with the woman and could tell very quickly from her accent that she was from Okinawa. Not only that, turns out she is friends with the family downstairs. Man its a small world. And we are looking forward to meeting this woman and her family.

She asked us to fill out the JANO membership form and send the $40 check to become a member. Which we did and will be snail mailing it tomorrow. Another pleasant surprise was to see that JANO also has a blog, which I quickly added to my RSS reader. It'll be fun to see how often and what they post.

As I slowly get this site back up to snuff, I will be adding some links to these community sites. I also want to add Japan related events, like this one or this one, that I find. I may set up a google public calendar for that as well since I am really liking google calendar.

Gotta luv BFD. George posted on my entry about connecting to the Japanese community here in northeast ohio Someone named David who apparently spent 5 years in Oita Prefecture and then several years in San Fransisco commented on that post. Luckily George was quick enough to top post a link to that comment, since I wasn't really following it. I have emailed him and hopefully we can help each other expand our involvement into the Japan community here in NEO.

I have noticed that there it is very difficult to find information in Japanese on Northeast Ohio, or to find the Japanese community. Having gotten here and having been able to begin tapping into the community here, I am just now beginning to find the sites and information. JANO has some information and Echo Cleveland (I never knew there was a "md" top-level domain!) is a great comprehensive introduction to Northeast Ohio in Japanese. And of course there is the Japanese wikipedia which has some information on Cleveland (Japanese, needless to say). But even so, for example, there is a post over at JANO's Blog (in Japanese of course) by a Japanese national whom is coming to Cleveland in for a month to study and work at Case and the Clinic looking for a day care center. So far there have been no responses(I would respond but have no clue!)

I am mulling over the best way to improve providing Japanese language information on Cleveland to the rest of the Japanese reading world. NeoHAWK will address some of that I am sure, particularly with George BFDing me every now and again. (BFDing is similar to be slashdotted, for those of you who understand the reference). But I am thinking a concerted and collaborative effort by all interested in the community would be good. Ah, but that is fodder for another post.

I first saw it over at TheRegister, but is is also on Slashdot and CNN, but it appears that Japan is looking for NASA's help on developing a supersonic passgenger airplane using scramjet technology(Wikipedia).

Now, I didn't really follow it but I seem to recall some concern over continued funding for NASA's Glenn Research Center. Considering that one of the areas of technologies that GRC is expert in is aeronautics, I wonder if anybody from there is actively courting JAXA. Or perhaps that type of international cooperative project is beyond the scope of what Glenn can pursue, but it strikes me as a great opportunity.

Particularly since the BBC is reporting that the Bank of Japan is reportedly expected to revise its estimate of the Japanese economy to "expanding". That will be the first time in 15 years that the Japanese economy will have that positive of an assessment. Knowing that and the fact that Japan has money, and lots of it, I would be trying to snag that deal. Then again, I am interested in anything Japan so take that with a grain of salt.

Just a thought....

I saw over at Asahi.com (Japanese) the results of a survey which indicates that more than 5 million Japanese subscribers to ftth services. They are forecasting that ftth subscribers will exceed adsl subscribers by 2009. Growth in ADSL subscribers only grew by 6%, where narrowband (dial-up, isdn) subscribers shrunk by 19%.

I really miss my bflets....

Part two of Japan Knowledge base. Found this on jinaonline:

Okay, not so much knowledge, but pretty cool anyway. Knew a guy at work in Tokyo that would spin his pen like this around in meetings. It would drive me nuts. Out of the corner of your eye, you see this pen spinning. Then you start watching and forget your supposed to pay attention to what was going on in the meeting. Of course, the individual in question wasn't really conscious of the fact that he was doing it.

For kicks and grins, I have created a planet similar to Planet NEO, but aggregates feeds from blogs that are in Japanese, by Japanese or Japanese speakers in Ohio.

I originally intended to limit it to Northeast Ohio blogs, but unfortunately have not been able to find enough of them. So I expanded it to the whole state of Ohio. The number of feeds is still relatively small, but I will add more as I go.