No one has tested positive for COVID-19 for 30 days in a row here!

As the title says, we have had ZERO people who tested positive for the coronavirus for over 30 days in a row here in Kumamoto !! That’s great news!

Even in Tokyo where the population gets to nearly 14 million, they have only around 10 – 20 people tested positive a day recently.

This is all thanks to our efforts to keep ourselves as clean as possible by wearing a mask and washing hands as soon as we get home or when move from door to door AND our involvement in vaccination, more than 75% of Japanese have got vaccinated as of the early December.

But actually, people have already been enjoying going out for drinking with friends as it’s a party season right now, which is called “Bonenkai” (忘年会 = “forget-the-year party) . We are bored of staying at home and not seeing friends. We miss each other. And they take off the mask while drinking and eating together face to face, but still we have none tested positive for a month.

Shopping street in Kumamoto, around 10 pm, 11 Dec

I also went out for a party with my friends last weekend and that was awesome. We hadn’t seen each other since the beginning of the pandemic, almost for 2 years. We all enjoyed our reunion and talked a lot about our recent situations and something about what we are going to do in the future, after the coronavirus situation.

Forestry

Lately, I have been working in a mountain of Gokanosho as a forestry worker with Mr Ogata, a.k.a. “Lord Ogata”, who is also an innkeeper of Sakura-so and whose ancestors had been the rulers of one of the villages of Gokanosho. I was lucky to find a job easily thanks to him. He has been running his own forestry business for many years along with his accommodation Sakura-so and needed help to finish his forestry work as soon as possible and I happened to be there.

We have been working on mowing the grass on the steep hills of a mountain, where its elevation is around 1,400 meters high above the sea level.

Mountain peaks of Gokanosho
Momigi, one of the villages of Gokanosho
Me, just finished working

 

Recent work 3

Now I am a construction worker!

I worked for a neibourhood construction company last week. The president of the company suggested me to work at a construction site for until they finish building a safe passage before they start their roadwork.

We finished this work on Friday 15 and the construction is expected to be restarted 2- 3 months later after the telegraph pole above the safety passage in the above picture is relocated. So I might not be possibly coming back to this site again.

What am I going to do next? I’m excited!