It seems that I am finding it a little more difficult making the time to put together my posts recently, with time on the laptop being taken up doing marketing stuff…yes, stuff. It’s a technical term to cover pretty much anything we have been and are doing to try to get our name out ‘there’. We have been working hard to create a web site and Facebook page for our Minshuku and then trying to find avenues to push our business into the public realm. I suspect this will take a lot of time to achieve results.

We have also been grappling with bureaucracy here again and occasionally visiting our ever growing building site – once known as The Block. It is now more like The Frame and soon to be The Enclosure, or something. It keeps growing and now looks quite big. Somewhat comforting, given how much we’re spending on it!

So, to the website; we ‘went live’ just over a week ago, after a few issues with connecting to PayPal and Google. This is, in fact where the bureaucratic issues started. The lengths that you have to go to to prove who you are and that you are a legitimate business these days is quite cumbersome. This is exacerbated by the fact that these organisations are generally located in America and so have different terms and requirements to the Japanese, for some things. One issue we had to respond to was whether we were going to be trading in America and promising that we would pay our taxes in America if we did.

A lot of this, of course, has been brought about by the flow of monies between countries from criminal organisations, and for funding terrorism, as well as people trying to avoid paying tax in general. While none of this applies to us, of course, we still have to go through all the paperwork to prove our credentials. The end result is that we will be accepting payments via PayPal and we just received confirmation that we have been ‘indexed’ by Google. Being indexed means that people may now be able to find us through a Google search, if they use the right terms and if there aren’t many, many others competing to get their attention…

Trying to make yourself visible on Google is an art in itself. Having the right search ‘words’ (which can also mean phrases), being up to date, having things that people might be interested in seeing, and so on. There are many web sites dedicated to advising just how to do this, but, none-the-less, there are no guarantees. So, we have to wait, hope and continue trying to make links. Anyway, the address of our site is:

www.veganminshuku3neko.com

If you have any comments, or any suggestions, please email them to me.

Craig has also created a Facebook page to try to get our name out ‘there’. Updates of the building progress will be added to this page, along with other things such as food notes and links to relevant organisations. Other marketing stuff we have been doing includes gradually finding all the vegan and vegetarian travel oriented websites and listing ourselves on the most popular sites, such as HappyCow.

In terms of The Frame, ie our new home, it continues to grow, fast. On the Thursday after my last posting, we went to the bank to open a business account with the person who has been the translator at the meetings with our builder. We were supposed to go to the frame raising ceremony after this adventure, however, the day turned out to be quite wet and, as a result, building work was suspended for the day, which meant that the ceremony had to be delayed. So, on the Friday, we decided to go up to see how far along the building was. To say I was stunned as we rounded the corner is a massive understatement – I was literally lost for words (which, for me…). There was this massive wooden structure, with a roof on it! The workers were in the process of finishing the metal roof cladding as we arrived.

We have been up to have a look once more since then (they went ahead with the frame ceremony as soon as they finished, so didn’t have time to notify us) and there were only two workers on site, who were adding floors and commencing the walls. We were able to walk around the ground floor (or the first level, as it is here) and get a real feel for how it was going to be when enclosed. Today we’ll go back again to get another update – we don’t want to harass the carpenters too much!!

I mentioned above that we also had been grappling with bureaucracy again. This involved us trying to open a bank account, visiting a car dealer to enquire about buying a car and meeting with some insurance people to find out about insurance for our new home, as well as car insurance so that we now have the full costs of owning a vehicle and exactly what car insurance covers here.

(a Toyota Sienta – the car we are planning to buy)

At the bank we had to complete a form which was a pre-application – yes, we still have to complete an actual application form before we can open an account. The pre-application was to enable them to do checks on our company and see if there are any issues, particularly as we are foreigners. Anyway, they must have been happy with what they found (or didn’t find) because we have now received a letter telling us to come back to the bank to complete the application form. (it didn’t, by the way, say that we had been approved to open an account, just to come back). Later this week we will return to the bank armed with all our certificates, personal id and inkan, along with our interpreter, to open our account. It was proven to me that we needed to have the interpreter when even she had some difficulties knowing exactly what information they wanted when completing the pre-application form.

We also have to take updated company certificates for this visit, because the ones we had were over six months old – by two days. This meant a trip to the Legal Affairs Bureau yesterday, and a fee to pay to get the updated copies of the certificates. Luckily it was a nice day, so we decided to walk along the Kamogawa to get there; just under 3.5kms. A 7km round trip, low 30s temperature but not too humid so fairly comfortable, with dragonflies flitting around us and the various birds doing their thing. The Kamo was quite high because of recent rains brought by the typhoon that passed through here. Small fish were leaping up the few rapids. Very pleasant.

That brings me to the weather…we have had a couple of days that tried to resume the run of hot and humid (mushi mushi) weather, but most days are now in the low 30s or high 20s and not as humid as previously. Much more enjoyable. The only blip has been the typhoon which came through a couple of days ago, but as it happened we were spared the worst of it in the end. It was expected to go right over us – top winds of 160km/h and around 300mm of rain – however, it must have move further north than they expected, so we didn’t get too much of either.

Well, that’s it for now

Cheers