Nationalist nuts and baked potato trucks

I was walking home from work last week passing one of the offices up the road from our place when I came across a four or five police cars complete with police officers swarming. Apparently last year this company had sold stuff to North Korea which went into their beloved leader's nuclear bombs. And so in response to this a right wing van had taken it upon itself to smash down the gates of this office in protest.

The reason I write about this is because we got a message at work from the Japanese police which apparently was faxed to as many companies as they could find that employ foreigners. The gist of the message was that halloween is coming and foreigners are noisy. So this year they are going to crack down on foreigners at halloween parties disturbing the peace.

A foreigner creating a Halloween disturbance

This reason this got on my goat was I've never seen, been (to) or heard a halloween party since I've been in Japan. What I have heard though is all manner of vans every day like the one in the video above that drown out the jumbo jets above our apartment. Baked potato vans, second hand goods vans, political vans, right wing vans, vans flogging washing poles. What makes things worse for us is we live up on the first floor so every time one of these things idles past with the loud speakers up on its roof we have to stop conversations, pause DVDs as the speakers are literally a metre or two from where we are sitting or standing.

Lani and Nobuko raising hell on halloween...up in Ginza, Tokyo

Visa approved!!!

After four and a half months of deliberations the Australian government has agreed with me that my Japanese wife isn't a terrorist, drug runner, and poses no real threat to national security. The little woman got her visa approved for Australia. This means that, as long as this North Korean fruit cake with a fetish for ridiculously oversized grandma glasses keeps his cool, we should be back in Sydney around the end of January. Can't wait to go for a surf.