Welcome to the new homepage!!

Hi there everyone!! Welcome to our new homepage!! It is almost finished, just need to get the photo gallery finished and the mobile site up and running. A designer called Deanna Wooten, who is a Canadian woman living in Tokyo did the homepage for us and we think she did a great job. The idea is that we can now share more of what we are doing with friends and family, as we are not keen on the whole Facebook phenomenon. Anyway, here are some new photos…………

Hana is getting bigger all the time!! She loves this dress her Auntie Emily sent her for her birthday, she thinks she is Mickey Mouse when she wears it!!

She can now speak both English and Japanese quite well, and understands the difference between them. She will speak in English to me, but then when we get to the park she switches to Japanese to play with her friends. However, she does still mix them up a bit when there is a word she only knows in English. I have found her saying English words with a Japanese accent when she is trying to speak Japanese and doesn’t know a particular word!!

Hana’s Auntie Hannah in England sent her a kids dress up box for her birthday, and Hana loves walking around with her plastic crown on saying “I’m a princess!”.

A lot of people have been emailing us about the nuclear situation in Japan. It has been very worrying!! There seem to have been a lot of cover ups and the truth is starting to come out. It turns out that when the government were telling people not to worry some of the reactors were in meltdown!! However, we live quite a long way from Fukushima and have been very careful about what we eat and drink.

We decided that as Mami is pregnant we should get our own Geiger counter so we can be sure that where we live is safe.

Inside the house the levels are very low, and nothing to worry about.

However, when you get outside the numbers go up a bit. This number is still quite low though. There has been a lot of debate about what the limits should be. The level of 0.5 microsievert per hour would translate into an annual exposure of 5 millisieverts, which was the evacuation threshold for Chernobyl. However, the Japanese government has raised the evacuation threshold to 20 millisieverts, which has a lot of people worried.
This number below was a bit higher than we had hoped for, as it is getting a bit closer to the 0.5 microsievert per hour evacuation threshold level that was used in Chernobyl.  However, we are not outside so much, so the actual level we are living with is much lower. More like 0.1 microsievert per hour. We have also tested our food and water and its very confusing as that uses another unit of measurement, however, it looks like there is nothing to worry about.

It has been a scary time for us all, but we are hoping things are going to set sorted out and everyone in Japan will be able to move on with their lives.

On another note, we have taken over a company in Tokyo this year. We supply teachers to teach at kindergartens, so we are enjoying the challenge of that. Here is a link to the homepage for that business (it is all in Japanese though)
https://aeschiba.com/meisei/index.php

Anyway, I am going to keep this page updated much more often from now on, as it is much easier to do it than with the old homepage.
Please feel free to leave some comments in English or Japanese!! Thanks for stopping by!!
Eddie