It's all fun and games until this places goes nuclear...

This is a photo that I took inside of a nuclear power plant training facility, which is located on the same grounds as an actual nuclear power plant. I went for a bus tour with the International Association, an organization that puts together various events geared towards internationalization. The tour involved a one-hour bus-ride north of Iwaki, where several nuclear power plants that power much of the country are located. The tour itself was very brief. We got to drive around some of the grounds, which are apparently about the size of Tokyo Disneyland. We didn’t actually get to go into one of the buildings housing nuclear reactors, but we were allowed into the training facility, which is designed as a replica of the real thing. We also got to go into a tourist centre that had information on the nuclear facility.

Afterwards, we went for a massive barbeque where the group of about 100 of us gathered at a summer-camp getaway under a giant roof, split up into teams of 7, and grilled various meats, seafoods, vegetables, and noodles.

The day was a bit rough because I had to get up at about 7 in the morning after playing Monopoly until 3 in the morning the night before. “Guess what I found in my apartment the other day,” someone said. We were all pretty excited about the game at first. I even learned that the boards are different in Australia; they don’t have Boardwalk and Park Place – they have other names that sound very unnatural for a game that I’ve played for about as long as I’ve been alive. In the end, nobody really won and we called it a night. I’m still a bit bitter that I didn’t win. I only had Mediterranean and Baltic Avenue, but I also managed to negotiate infinite immunity on every player’s properties. There was no way that I could lose. Yet, I paid hard the next day.

The woman in the photo is Ella. She is a Filipino woman who married a Japanese man and has been living in Japan for the last 5 years. The boy that she is chasing is her son, who I think is 3 years old. There is some concern about his speech development. He has been to a doctor because he has not shown much language development. He may be just a late bloomer, but within the next few months or so, we’ll have a better idea if some special treatment or care is necessary. One reason his language may not be developing very well is that three languages are spoken in the house: Japanese, English, and Tagalog. I can’t remember the context for speaking English – Ella speaks very good English, but her husband speaks mainly Japanese, and when Ella speaks to her friends or family, it’s always in Tagalog.

From the time that I spent with these two on the tour, it was my impression that the kid could be a handful. Most of the conversation I had with Ella was shared with the duty of making sure the boy didn’t throw himself down a flight of stairs, where, in between attempts, he could cry and scream – this was despite my various attempts to make monkey faces and googly eyes with my Gaijin face, which usually goes over well with the younger crowds – heck, who doesn’t like monkey faces and googley eyes?