On my cell phone I subscribe to a service called TangoTown. Its a great service that provides online dictionaries, phrase books and one of the best translators I’ve used (nice thing is it gives a reverse translation so if the meaning is unmangled after English->Japanese->English you know its OK and can try fixing it if it isn’t). Anyways, another of its services emails out messages to help you study vocabulary, kanji, phrases & slang. I was ROFLing at the slang-of-the-day for yesterday:

?????? - oppaiseijin - breast fetish - (literally) Alien from the planet “Tits”

Found this one (yaru) in JEDict:

?? [??] to do, to have sexual intercourse, to kill, to give (to inferiors, animals, etc.), to dispatch (a letter), to send, to study, to perform, to play (sports, game), to have (eat, drink, smoke), to row (a boat) to run or operate (a restaurant)

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This entry is a bit of a catch-up of stuff that’s happened this week.

First event happened just after I got back home from the train ride from Fuji on Sunday night (almost Monday morning). I heard the windows rattling, but there hadn’t been any wind when I was outside just a few minutes earlier. Investigating, I discovered it was the inside sliding doors rattling and the hanging lamps were swaying just slightly. Looks like I had experienced my first earthquake. I really didn’t feel it, but it was a pretty significant one off the coast that caused a few injuries in coastal areas and tsunami warnings. It was the second of a pair, didn’t notice the first while on the bus. Good thing it didn’t happen earlier, they might have shutdown the trains. I would not have enjoyed that as tired as I was.

Other significant event of the week was Tuesday with Typhoon 18. As usual, everyone around here was in a mild panic over the prospects of the typhoon & warning me about it. The last two weren’t all that impressive here, even though they did a fair amount of damage on the coasts. No worse that a heavy monsoon rain, the likes of which I’ve ridden my bike home in before.

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