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Let's say good-bye to the miserable past, and welcome the new year of wonder. May this year be more magical, more wonderful, more marvellous, more fabulous, more beautiful and more glorious one. I sincerely hope all the people in this country live in peace and stability.

The year 2011 would be "annus miserabilis" (a miserable year) for Japan. This year will go down as one of the most appalling in Japan's history, due to the dreadful first-in-1,000-years earthquake and tsunami and the consecutive nuclear plant damage in Fukushima on 11 March.

On the day when the earthquake struck our land, I was working at the office as usual in Tokyo. At the very time when the quake occurred, I was walking on the stairway and I saw everything beginning to swing. At first I thought it was because I had a dizzy spell due to my high blood pressures, but soon I found out it was the land that was swaying because I saw a string suspended from the ceiling do so together with any other things. Then the amplitude of the tremor grew larger and larger. It reminded me of the Hanshin Awaji earthquake I had experienced in 1995 when living in Nishinomiya. I felt the quake lasted for one or two minutes, but I couldn't do anything but letting the matter take its own course.

After it ceased I entered into the office room, where everybody was shocked. Some escaped under the desk, and some stood still holding the books on the shelf so that they wouldn't fall. Tellys in the office were turned on. Every TV station was broadcasting the breaking news on the earthquake. The government announced tsunami alerts nationwide but I didn't think that a tsunami would suffer so much even if it would come, because a similar situation was just one year before when an earthquake happened in Chile followed by tsunami, which came to the Sanriku area but didn't hurt it at all.

However, about an hour later, I saw on the TV screen the sea water overflow over the banks and coastal roads into the rice fields, washing up cars, buildings and everything that was right there. I felt like watching an action film, as the scene was too far from reality.

On that day, I had to stay in the office until midnight, because the Tokyo area was suffered a great deal as well and there were no trains and public transportations available, and some networks in the Tohoku area were damaged and we had to fix it. In the midnight trains started moving again, but they were very crowded with millions of people rushing home, so I returned home on foot. It took about an hour to get back home.

After the disasters, most roads were full of thousands of unmovable cars in the first two days. After the roads were clear, petrol was running short. Many cars had to queue up in front of petrol stations to had them filled up. Thanks god my car's fuel tank was almost full because I had filled it up one week before.

I was not so troubled with my every day life after the disasters. Bath tissues were running short, but I had bought 30 rolls of them at Costco one week before so they were quite enough for a single household. The pet bottles of drinking water disappeared at convenience stores and supermarkets due to the likelihood of tap water contaminated by radioactive materials, but the pet bottles of tea and soda were still on sale. My inconvenience was negligible, comparing with the survivors who were forced to stay in evacuation facilities.

In the first few weeks from the disasters, the people in all over Japan were united. They considered the disasters as a national issue, not Tohoku-specific local one, unlike the Hanshin-Awaji case. They all cared for the survivors in the suffered area and made their best efforts to try to save them by donations and volunteer activities. Their mind was beautiful, one of Japanese virtues to take pride in.

On the last day of this year, the time has come to recall what I did and experienced in this year. Though this event is unforgettable, my end-of-year review will focus on more positive aspects.

The keywords of the year 2011 are: a car, British culture and China.

A car is what I purchased in January. Having my own car was the first in three years. Driving a car with a manual gearbox was the first in 17 years. I reviewed how to drive on educational videos posted in YouTube to get used to manoeuvres early.

British culture is what I experienced deeply this year as well as in the last four years. This year I was able to enjoy the British Hills in Fukushima I desired to visit for ages.

The last one, China, is that I visited Shanghai in January for business and Hong Kong in November for personal purposes. It was the first time to visit mainland China and the first in six years to Hong Kong. Actually I wanted to visit Beijing in March, but I gave it up because of the disasters.

The year 2011 is really "annus miserabilis" for me and many people in Japan, but I hope the next year be "annus mirabilis" (miracle year).

National Azabu Supermarket at Hiroo, where foods, groceries, books, toiletries and stationery imported from abroad were available, terminated operation as of today due to the age of its building.

The Hiroo neighbourhood is one of the places I visited very frequently because a training centre of the company I worked for was in that area. I visited there from time to time to have an English test or a training for English writing or business skills when I was a young worker. Every time I had classes there, I dropped in on the supermarket to see the shoppers coming from abroad, mainly the United States, who looked rich enough to afford the imported products sold there. To see such successful people encouraged me to make my best efforts to learn English and business skills for my success.

However, several years later the training centre was closed and moved to another place. Most of the products sold in the supermarket has become what I can get online for the same prices as in their home countries, without paying extra money at such an imported grocery shops. Besides, the United States is no longer the goal for successful persons, seeing the current circumstances of it.

The supermarket was a dream for me, and a wonderland that offered me a space of extraordinariness, but it ended the role as a symbol of success with the change of the times. Without the supermarket, I will visit the Hiroo area more rarely than ever.

When I studied at university, attending the classes for "liberal arts" was mandatory for the first two years. There were a wide variety of subjects to choose from, from English, Germany, chemistry, mathematics and economics to Chinese history, Japanese literature and Japanese linguistics. Most of them were nothing to do with my major (engineering), so I thought that taking them was a waste of time and the university should teach us more practical techniques focusing on our major studies. I even thought that I should go to a professional school because they might teach only professional skills that would be necessary for my future.

Nevertheless, I found out, when I had started my career and had some job experience, that culture would win in the end. Acquiring practical knowledge and skills related to jobs are a matter of course. Your worth consists in how much cultured besides skilled. For example, in an English class I read Tristan and Isolde's tragic love story, which was originally written by Gottfried von Strassburg and made operatic by Richard Wagner, that a knight named Tristan fell in love with a king's wife, Isolde, and they ruined after illicit love. When I attended the class I suspected if the story could contribute to my future career, but now I know that it is common knowledge among general people especially in the Western countries, and ignorance of it is regarded as uncultured.

Your culture is cultivated not from hard work, but from play. Play is the space in which a mechanism moves or, in more comprehensive words, the emptiness in activeness. It seems to be a waste, but it sometimes broaden your horizons and deepen your insight. As it is often said that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, play is indispensable for everything. Who dare drive a car with a steering wheel with no play?

Play is important in spending vacation. Doing nothing is the right way to spend vacation because the word "vacation" derives from "vacant," which means empty. Wasting time is extreme luxury. Many people, however, trying to making good use of holidays, go to crowded spots resulting in getting more tired than before. In particular, Japanese people are so conscious of eliminating what is wasteful that they feel guilty to wasting time. They are so obliged to waste no time in holidays, their vacation ironically ends by wasting time and energy rather than saving them.

In the midst of your career, play sometimes help you guide to a better way. Studying a different field, seeing people doing different types of business, and even meditating in your room would be useful, besides throwing yourself into your work. They are not directly related to your current work, but they may give you some hints for your future career.

There is nothing wasteful in your life in the long run. As long as you are alive, what you are doing is helpful in something, even goofing off in the bed.

Last weekend was happy days for me because I deeply experienced a British taste last Saturday and Sunday. From the beginning I preferred the USA to the UK or other English-speaking countries, but my affection has been shifting to England for years since I happened to read Kaoru Mori's Emma, a romance manga of a maid in England in the Victorian Era who falls in love with a member of the gentry.

On the first day, the first thing I did is to see Oliver! by the Musical Club of Kokugakuin Tochigi High School playing for the school's cultural festival held in this weekend. Oliver! is, as you may already know, an English musical based on Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist. It's the story that Oliver Twist, who has missing parents and is in a workhouse, is forced to get out of the workhouse and gets involved in a group of pickpockets. He tries to pick a pocket of a well-off lady, who finally takes him in and brings him up, and then he gets happy.

As I already wrote in this blog many times, I've kept in touch with Mito Saigusa. She is a choreographer teaching dance and choreography to the students of this club. I come and see their performance for the cultural festival every year in order to see her too. Of course she was well this year as well.

This year's show satisfied me much more, because its scene was in England in the 19th century so it was just for me. I was very happy with that.

After seeing Oliver! I left the high school to drive to British Hills, the educational facility located in Fukushima Prefecture operated by Kanda Institute of Foreign Languages, with Medieval British-style buildings in a 50-acre land. Each building is furnished with the fixtures modeling the era of the building. From the beginning it was only for the students of this Institute, it's been open to public for several years. More than a half of the staff working there were non-Japanese, ranging from Englishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and more. As the official language in this area is English, even a Japanese attendant talks to you in English, because British Hills is for teaching English to guests.

A two-hour drive from Tochigi took me British Hills. It was almost on the top of a mountain, more than 20 miles far from the nearest motorway exit. Once entering into the site of British Hills, almost all traffic and informational signs on the road suddenly turned into English, just like crossing a national border into a different country.

Although I'm now active in Facebook or Twitter rather than this blog, I want to tell you that I'm still alive.

It was a big headache to me that the page design of this blog's home page had been wrong for a few months. Flickr's thumbnail pictures on the top of the page and the sidebar hadn't been displayed. But today I've restored it! The reason is very simple. I tried to comment out a </div> tag into <!-- /div --> but I forgot to add two hyphens before the greater-than symbol and it looked like <!-- /div>, so it affected the page design after that tag.

I bought Blackberry Curve 9300 in the middle of June for my main mobile phone I'm using on a daily basis, and switched an account from b-mobile into NTT DoCoMo again by the Mobile Number Portability service. The b-mobile SIM card was what I got together with an iPhone 4 Hong Kong version, but the iPhone 4 was not so good for telephone because its voice quality was not satisfactory and the manoeuvre was a little bit complicating. It's just for web browsing, taking pictures and motion videos, playing games and other utilities, not for talking. I think the best device for voice calls is that of Nokia, but Nokia doesn't sell any mobile phones in Japan any longer. Out of the phones available in Japan, Blackberry is for me. That's why I've got Blackberry again.

Another reason why I chose Blackberry again is that it has a real QWERTY keyboard on the device, not displayed on the screen. You can type the keyboard to enter text, and doing this is much easier than touching the virtual keyboard on the screen. So I'm gonna use it for text messaging and email writing besides talking on it. Text messaging will be much more convenient because sending SMS to other carriers will be available next Wednesday.

Although iPhone is not so good for a telephone, it's the best for a camera and a communicator with plenty of applications. I've got a Softbank SIM card too, so I still use iPhone4 used so far on a main basis with the Softbank SIM card inserted in it.

Now I've got three mobile phones carried with me ---- Blackberry Curve 9300, iPhone 4 and a mobile phone my employer tells me to keep. Next I want to have some tablets like iPad or Galaxy Tab ;-)

I've made up my mind to have my own car again. Two years and nine months have passed since I parted with the last car in May 2008 and then moved to a house much closer to central Tokyo after I did it. The place where I currently live is so convenient that you can live without owning any car. Nevertheless, without a car it's difficult to go on a slight outing late at night, to buy bulky goods from Costco, or to drive a car aggressively to get rid of your stress! :-) To do them you can hire a car at a nearest rental car shop, but it's less convenient than having a car you can do as you like. That's why I've decided to get my own car even if it's much more costly.

To find an appropriate car, I checked Yahoo! Japan, Goo-Net or other websites listing up used cars and shops after I got bonus last December. Of course I had no choice to have a brand-new car. I wanted to have a small-sized, 5-speed stick shift car instead of a large automatic saloon, because I wanted to do as Englishmen did (most of them drive stick shifts rather than automatics) and I thought that manual transmissions were better for small cars giving more pleasure to drivers, and that it would be the last chance for me to drive a stick shift as almost all cars to be released in future would, petrol or hybrid, have automatic or continuously variable transmissions.

In the end of last December I found a car that I felt to be nice at a small used car shop in suburban Tokyo. It was 2002 Peugeot 307 Style (1600cc petrol), costing just 380,000 yen! I decided to buy it without hesitation.

It took much time from the purchase to the pickup. In Japan, you must register a car you buy to the government before owning it, and before the registration you must settle a parking space and have the garage certificate from the nearest police station. To have a garage, you must sign a contract with a local real estate company offering car parks in the area where you live. The trouble is that the real estate company and the police station open only in weekdays, so I had to take a day (or some hours) off to do those things.

An average parking space rate in the area I live in was about 30,000 yen per month, but I found a car park renting a parking space for 26,500 yen per month.

Anyway, all of the procedures to have the car had been done and I picked it up today.

I returned back from Shanghai Tuesday night. I couldn't see so many things there because it was completely a business trip, not a private sightseeing trip, and I had a lot of work there. But I found out how exciting and mysterious that city was.

I've updated a set of the trip on Flickr though I couldn't take so much pictures.

It was my first time to visit mainland China other than Hong Kong and Taiwan. In some points they were similar but in other point they weren't. Oncoming cars in Shanghai didn't stop even when we were crossing the street on a zebra crossing. In mainland China cars have the right-of-way so pedestrians have to give way to them when crossing the road, not to disturb the flow of traffic. When we caught a taxi cab, the driver honked at an old pedestrian pushing a cart and beginning crossing the road and ran into the crowd of pedestrians crossing the crosswalk. It was amazing.

There were plenty of tall buildings in the Pudong area and all of them were illuminated by gorgeous floodlights. I was surprised at those floodlights which were so showy that you couldn't have seen in buildings in Japan.

Foods tasted very good and they were much cheaper than in Japan. It was amazing that even if I had eaten plenty of garlic and spicy Hunan foods for dinner I didn't upset my stomach and my mouth didn't smell badly at all!

Security measures seem to be more advanced than in Japan. Luggage scanning and body screening were mandatory at every metro station and most of major building entrances. Officers did screening very roughly though.

Anyway, Shanghai is very close to Japan so I wish to visit it again in a warmer season. It was so snowy and chilly there that I couldn't walk around the city very much.

I'm going to Shanghai for 100% business trip this time. It snowed very much near Narita Airport when I was coming in the Limousine Bus, but it's fine now.

I wonder if I will be able to use Internet in China because I hear Twitter and Facebook are all blocked there....