Update: SOLEX has been adopted by a wonderful family!
Solex is a 2-3 year old Shih Tzu who was pulled from a high-kill pound in Okinawa by the rescue group Doggies Inc. He is a very friendly and sociable boy who gets along with other dogs and kids. He is great on a lead and is puppy-pad trained. Solex has short legs so he has a hard time jumping on your furniture! He has been neutered and vaccinated (8 way combo shot, rabies) and has received his first dose of Frontline and Heartgard. Solex wants to snuggle you and sit on your lap. You know you (or someone you know) wants to adopt an adorable Muppet-pup! He is being fostered at my place in Tokyo and is looking to meet his future family. Adoption fee is 14,000 yen. Please contact me or Doggies Inc. and please share!
Juno was my first foster dog through Doggies Inc., the organization down in Okinawa for which I transported Miller/Bowie to the U.S. on that ill-fated trip back in September (He's so happy now! He has his own Facebook profile.).
Juno was pretty scruffy when he was brought in. He had obviously been very neglected or on the street a long time. Long matted hair, sores on his skin where the mats had gotten really bad.
After a stint down in Oki with no takers, he came up to Tokyo to try to find a home here.
Within a short period, we had made contact with an adopter who adopted cats from JCN, whose father was interested in getting a dog after losing his cherished Yorkie a year or two ago.
Mr. A had suffered from some depression, but after Juno came, he felt much better having a companion. They take care of each other.
Jenny got adopted by a great family! I love that girl.
I have this tape in my car (yeah my car has a tape deck, what) that I found in my house that someone in the family made. It's probably been around since before Buddha.
It's a mix tape of hits from the early '60s and has a bunch of great oldies. One of the songs is called "Jenny Jenny" and it's by an artist called Yasushi Suzuki.
When I was in Fukushima we would drive around and sing along to the tape. We'd get back to the shelter and we'd sing it to her. We'd sing it and dance around in Yuuko's kitchen.
Jenny was picked up in Minami Soma with her brother Kenny and about ten other puppies that were in the road.
On my way to the U.S. for a visit with the fam-and-friends, I had the honor of escorting this little fella to his new and forever home.
Miller, a Cavalier King Charles (CKC), was down in the Ozato pound on the gas line in Okinawa when Doggies Inc. uploaded his pic to their site. A CKC lover noticed him and alerted a CKC fan club, which quickly mobilized to raise money to get him pulled from the center, vetted, fostered, and transported to the west coast for rehoming. All the fine details on the Japan side were carried out by Doggies.
When they posted that they were looking for transport, I immediately vounteered as I was planning to visit the States in a few weeks. Since his final destination was Seattle and mine was Portland, it was a fairly convenient arrangement and I called the airline (Delta) to book his passage.
Upon arrival at the airport, I met the lovely Lisa who had been fostering Miller until his departure. She helped me get him checked in and paid his transport fee.
Unfortunately, there was a snafu after I got to the boarding gate. Despite making my reservation for Miller weeks in advance, confirming it a few days in advance, and breezing through the check in process, it was discovered when trying to load Miller onto the plane that he was not actually allowed on the plane. A gate agent called me shortly before boarding to tell me we would not be allowed on the flight.
After some scrambling and confusion, we were rerouted through Minneapolis. The agent who had been dealing with my case gave me the gate number and told me to run, as boarding was in process. Nobody told me why we had been ejected.
Upon finally reaching Minneapolis, I encountered another roadblock when I couldn't find Miller in the baggage area. I asked a baggage clerk - he had no idea. Asked a Delta rep hanging around the area - she had no idea. Asked another baggage handler - no clue. Finally one of the immigration agents went to look for him and brought him out to me, then escorted me to the front of the line. I have to say that the immigration person was exceedingly kind.
Unfortunately, after all the rigamarole, there was not enough time to take Miller out of the airport, as it would have involved going out of security and then having to go through the whole process again to get back in. I had less than an hour to make my connection at this point. There is nowhere at MSP to take a dog to relieve himself during transit. Poor Miller had to endure another leg of the journey without leaving his crate. We had originally expected that he would be in the crate for 10-12 hours, as the flight from NRT to PDX is 9 hours. By the time we reached PDX, he had been enclosed for more than 20 hours.
But reach Portland we finally did, where his new mama was waiting.
And his new siblings.
Miller's name is now Bowie, and he lives in Seattle. Yay Bowie!
Here's a video made by someone in the CKC group that helped raise money and spread the word.
Yamato was a Fukushima kitty rescued last winter by Naoyuki Seki in Namie. He was very skinny and hungry. After a few weeks at the shelter, he came down to Tokyo for his neuter and ended up s...
taying with me. Relatively feral at first, he slowly over the months warmed up to us, though he was always very loving of his fellow felines in the house, Timothy and Peetie. In the last couple of months, I was able to pet him. Yamato was diagnosed as FIV+ and in the last few weeks got very sick and stopped eating. Though he went to the vet several times and received daily syringe feeding and subcutaneous fluids at home for the last week, he was found to have FIP, a fatal disease with no proven cure. He passed away at home, in our arms, with Peetie snuggled up next to him, purring and bathing him. I am relieved his suffering is over. I am so thankful for his companionship and growing trust over the past few months. Rest in peace, Yam-kun. Thanks for spending a little of your life with us. We love you.
The lovely folks at What the Dickens in Ebisu hosted our Angel Auction last weekend, where volunteers put their professional services up for bid. On the block were marital arts lessons, Indian cooking and piano lessons, a tour of the German embassy & meeting with the ambassador, and much more.
Photo by Jennifer Julien
WTD is a great spot even when they're not raising money for a cause, with free live music most nights. They also have nice food - in additon to the standard British pub fare like meat pies and fish & chips, they also have veggie offerings like a cheese & tomato sandwich, hummus, some kind of quiche, and other stuff that the chef dreams up. Plus the whole place is dark and woody with cozy corners and feels like something in Diagon Alley.
On our last day on the island, we had the rental til the mid afternoon and the flight took off in the early evening. Time for a shop and a stroll and a lingering lunch.
Noah Style is in a residental area near Shuri Castle, up a hill in a modest neighborhood. In fact, the cafe is a pretty converted house.
Inside, there is a tiny clothing store with things made from soft natural and organic cotton, and another area selling organic vegetables and other goodies like house-made sweets and enviromentally friendly laundry soap.
The menu offers a few carefully crafted options - soups, sandwiches, plate lunches chock full of color, and the daily special, which we got. It had 11 kinds of food, with brown rice and organic coffee. Such vegetables as beets, urizun-mame (winged beans), and hijiki seaweed. It was all followed with a tiny lovely sliver of cake made from brown sugar and nut butter.
N was inspired by this lunch and bought some kuruma-fu as soon as we got home and made a stunning dinner for us.
Out the back patio, we found several bedraggled bunnies hopping around the garden, and a large tortoise in repose under the deck.
A definite recommendation for people who love delicious wholesome food, lovingly prepared and artfully presented.
We were fortunate to know a local in Okinawa, and when she heard we were on the island, Kate wasted no time in inviting us out. I met Kate in Tohoku, a fierce animal advocate with a talent for bargaining with animal control for the lives of condemned animals. On Okinawa, too, she works with rescue groups like Doggies Inc. She also happens to be incredibly good in a crisis, has allll the outdoor skills, and is ready for the apocalypse.
So when she said she wanted to take me snorkeling and kayaking (my first time), it was a big fat YES.
7:30 AM found us at Maeda, just down the coast from where we had hiked the day before. Kate showed up with a car stuffed with gear, and proceeded to outfit us with snorkels, wetsuits, life jackets, and flippers, to go over my newly acquired reef shoes.
She gamely instructed me as I floundered, treading water, repeatedly retrieving items I dropped on the ocean floor, including the underwater camera she loaned me.
Eventually I found my flipper feet and managed to float and paddle and breathe all at the same time, only occasionally inhaling a lungful of sea water.
I'm not afraid of much, but the sea has always freaked me out a little. I grew up on it, and I like swimming in it, splashing in it, and sailing on it. When I was small we regularly made trips to the Gulf of Mexico. I vacationed on the North Carolina shore, went to Hawaii as a kid when my whole family got bumped off of our flight midvoyage, and spent my adolesence dipping my toes into the icy water on the severe gorgeous grey Oregon coast. I'm not scared of the water or the waves or the depths.
But when stuff that I can't see touches me underwater... heebie jeebies. The ocean is so strange, the critters in there are so foreign. They say the sea is our last frontier other than space. That makes so much sense to me. There are some crazy alien earthlings down there.
Snorkeling helped me face that fear. Maeda is on top of a coral reef, and after a few practice paddles Kate led us into the blue cave. I was face to face with schools of fish, a pupil among them. They flowed around me. In their world, joining them and seeing them in their element, it wasn't freaky at all. I got to see that most of them are not out to get me. Most of them do not want to hurt me or sting me or bite me (most of them). And most of them don't seem nearly so slimy or scary when viewed up close and personal.
The pictures do them no justice. Forgive me, I am a snorkel and underwater photo-noob.
The viewpoint at Cape Manza in Onna-son is fetching, with green expanses leading to cliffs plunging into the blue. After gazing at the spray for awhile, I found that there was a geocache less than a kilometer away, and genius that I am, insisted that we strike out across the rocks to find it. Alas, though I am a Capricorn I am not a billy goat and we were soon thwarted by the sharp steep rocks and our ill-chosen footwear. We decided to try again from a less precipitous approach, stopping at the souvenir stand to buy some かりゆし.
This time we were able to hone in on the cache zone. Just a bit down the road, the beach was secluded and completely absent of the day trippers who were goggling at the sea just a few hundred meters away. Huge jutting rocks formed caves and we searched for the cache. Along the way we made the acquaintance of a cat who seemed to live in or near the caves, as she kept popping out of holes and perching on different boulders.
We never did find the cache, but in the way of the best cache spots, it didn't matter that much. We got to hang out on a beautiful lonely beach and had it all to ourselves. Unfortunately, N waded into the water with his phone in his pocket and lost all the pictures of that place.
On the way back to Naha, we stopped in Okinawa City for some grub.
Tucked in a decaying city center in a deserted shopping arcade, the unlikeliest cafe and shop waits like a soft pearly pebble gleaming in the gravel.
Thursday morning we gorged on the free breakfast and then picked up the rental car, a boxy little "eco" car (I think it was a Daihatsu Tanto) that had a feature called eco-drive that would cut the engine off and turn it back over seemingly at random. Northward! Onna-son (恩納村 - the "mura" character is pronounced "son" in Okinawa) looks far away on the map but in reality is only a few dozen kilometers and an hour's drive up the coast. There, we went to a "secret" beach recommended to us by a friend who grew up on Oki - beautiful, clean, and deserted.
Who's that asshole on the phone?
On the way back it was still early, so we stopped at Ryukyu Mura, a recreation of a traditional village. The ratty shisa dolls were cool and the pottery factory was rather interesting, but the best part was the live music offered, both in the main atrium adjacent to the food court, and by a guy casually plucking a san-shin and lounging in the doorway to one of the huts. He later came onstage and did a wonderful set, including an Okinawan language version of 上を向いて歩こう, aka The Sukiyaki Song.
He has a youtube channel!
Just north of Naha we stopped in Chatan, at the "American Village", which has a lot of restaurants. We poked our head into a Thai place and I was pleased to find a big fat vegetarian advertisement on the front window. Jai Thai's menu has two pages catering to vegetarians, and they can also make vegan dishes.
Returning to Naha, we hit up Makishi Market, the warren of shops and alleys in central city, starting just off Kokusai-dori. There are stray cats there, as everywhere else on the island. In addition to the trinkets and vegetable sellers and butchers, there are a few vendors hawking freshly-made sata-an-dangi, the local doughnut-style fried goodness in an array of native flavors. My Oki-raised friend has requested the purple-hued beni-imo (taro) ones, and we tried those out - yum. My favorite was the coconut, but the brown sugar, mango, and sesame ones were delicious too. Sata-an-dangi is Okinawan language, but the word sata means sugar, or sato in Japanese. Even though I couldn't understand the native language, I did notice that some words are similar like this.
In Makishi market
Back to the strays for a minute. There are SO MANY STRAYS all over Okinawa. They are a much more common here than on the mainland. Breeding seems to go almost unchecked. There are a lot more stray dogs, too, though they aren't around quite as much as the cats. There is a great organization called Doggies Inc. that works there trying to alleviate animal suffering. Mainly, they pull animals out of Ozato animal control, which is a high-kill shelter where many many strays end up. They then vet and re-home the animals. They do mostly deal with dogs, but they help cats too. They are a registered non-profit in the US, and they do really good work. I will be transporting a dog to a new forever home in the States for them next month. Check them out!
At the beginning of April we had a benefit buffet lunch at Kamejikan (Turtle Time? Whoever named that place wins) in Kamakura, a rustic old building refurbished into a guesthouse whose owners graciously volunteered the space to hold an event for us. The lunch was catered by the talented chef Nahomi Edamoto of NHK's Kyou no Ryori fame, and this lovely and eclectic lady prepared a stunning vegetable based meal from farm-direct organic produce, some donated from farmer friends of hers. She used a lot of Japanese vegetables like burdock, greens, and beans (I forgot their names - mizuna? uguisumame?) and told us their story.
The gorgeous wooden guest house boasted rafters and a tatami room and a Japanese style veranda where the guests with dogs hung out. Only blocks from the beach, the doggies Nana, Hana, and Chibi (in between foster homes) had a grand old time trotting in the sand and splashing in the shallows.
Thank you so much to the Kamejikan staff, Chef Naomi Edamoto, Miku Sano, and Andy Wainwright for helping us put together such a lovely and successful event.
photo by SeeMoreArt
Meanwhile, only about 15 minutes' drive from the shelter in Inawashiro, a stately white lady (the white lady loves you more) rises above Aizu Wakamatsu, gazing out at the valley over the baby in her arms.
The Aizu Dai Jibo Kannon (会津慈母大観音) is not so old, the locals will say scornfully. Anything less than a few hundred years old doesn't really rate in Japan, and she was only built in the 1980s. Still, she's impressive, rising 57 meters into the air, hollow down the middle, with a spiral staircase and windows at intervals to look out into the surrounding hills. You can get up to shoulder height, peering out of porticoes in her spinal column.
The grounds are beautiful, with terraced sculpted gardens stretching out far enough for a good stroll, with plenty of spots to pause with a picnic. Koi bubble and undulate under the bridge that backbends over a pond with wandering canals, letting the carp meander around the park.
We hope she sends her merciful gaze our way, just a few kilometers to the east.
Thanks to Ian, who sent me a donation with which I've paid for medical supplies. We've done spay/neuters, administered antibiotics, fought off fleas and ticks and worms and scabies, and much more thanks to you.
