Every year in Japan on February 3rd is the Setsubun holiday. During this holiday, there are lots of traditions. Once tradition is to throw beans at “oni” or demons to drive them out of the house! The man of the house will wear an “oni” mask, go to the front door, and pretend to be a demon. The people in the house will throw beans at him to drive him out of the house while saying “oni wa soto! fuku wa uchi!” This means “demons out! Good luck inside the house!” Leanne got very excited to help Forrest throw beans at the “oni.” Forrest also practiced his bean throwing a lot at daycare!

Mochi is what’s made when rice is pounded really hard and it makes a gooey gelatinous item that you can put things on top of, either sweet or savory, and eat. Today we went to a mochi pounding experience!

Forrest is positively obsessed with “nyan nyan”s, which is the Japanese onomatopoeia for “meow” and what he calls cats. Since we live in Japan, we took a 30 minute drive south to a cat cafe! This cat cafe houses only rescue cats and all the money earned goes toward their medical and food bills. All the cats are also available for adoption to loving homes.

Forrest loved the cats. So much. Maybe a bit too much. He loved playing with the cats with the cat toys, and since then he often pretends to be a “nyan nyan.”

Leanne decided to try snowboarding this year. She always felt it looked cooler than skiing, so she rented a snowboard for the season to try it out. After the first two times going where she fell a lot, she really got the hang of it! Now she snowboards on blues like a pro!

Sometimes going to far away lands for vacation can be incredible. But sometimes you just need to relax somewhere close-by but not home. Right here in Misawa is an amazing hotel with a world-class onsen, amazing dining, an apple juice tree with Aomori apple juice on tap, and it’s all a 5 minute drive away!

Attached to the hotel is a large park around a lake with different activities and things to see, including a hot onsen foot bath, a Nebuta float park, a huge Shinto temple, an area with statues, a horse park, and the pony park that houses Sore and Nore. Walking around the lake at night was both beautiful and meditative.

The next day, since it was a weekday and we were still in town, Forrest went to daycare while Leanne and I enjoyed relaxing at the onsens and at the park. Don’t worry, we picked him up in the afternoon again so he could relax too! He ate so much at the restaurant (including tons and tons of fresh grilled scallops) that he gained a whole 2 pounds in just the two days were at the hotel!

With a little time off before Christmas, we went to Hakodate in Hokkaido, Japan with the Passey’s!

A huge part of the vacation for us was all the amazing food! Hokkaido ice cream is truly out of this world, as was all the fresh sashimi. Surprisingly, one of the best restaurants we went to was Hakodate’s famous burger chain Lucky Pierrot. They made a really excellent Chinese chicken burger. We even tried Russian food for the first time!

Eating wasn’t the only thing we did though! Some of the coolest places we visited were the Ainu museum, the Goryōkaku star fort, and the Goryōkaku tower.

After falling asleep after reading a passage about the finitude of life in the book Four Thousand Weeks, I was rudely awakened an hour later by a blaring siren from my phone, followed a few seconds later by a huge earthquake. The earthquake shook so violently hard that windows and sliding doors were thrown open, lamps on nightstands crashed to the floor, and I genuinely feared the second floor of our house might collapse. After a minute of this, I picked up Forrest from his crib fearing either the fan above him would fall or there could be a collapse and quickly brought him downstairs. Completely oblivious to the entire earth shaking violently around him, he smiled and was excited for the midnight adventure with dada. When I brought him downstairs, he asked me if we could cook. I assume he thought it was wake-up and breakfast time (it was actually around 11:30pm). During this whole time, Leanne was at work in the Urgent Care where after she treated multiple patients with injuries related to the earthquake (which of course has its own ICD-10 code, go figure!). After a few minutes, the shaking subsided. Besides some fallen objects, our house suffered no damage and no one got hurt. I gently put Forrest back to bed and stayed up the rest of the night.

Since the earthquake, we prepared for the “big one” which we were told had a 1% chance of happening within a week. Everyone on base had been on edge. Thankfully, the week passed, and a few more, with just smaller shakes.