Sushi party

One of the ten lottery tickets I bought at the end of the year won. The prize money is $77. The first prize is 5,384,615 dollars, which is 700 million yen in Japanese yen. 77$ is a 5th prize, but I’ve only won 2.3$ so far, so it’s a big win for me.

It happened that employees of the pearl farm were coming to my company’s house for dinner, so I used the winnings to buy sushi for them. I wanted to buy sushi in a proper container at a sushi shop, but there are very few sushi shops on the island where the pearl farm is located. I had no choice but to buy a lot of packed sushi from the supermarket and put it on a plate. The sushi here is cheap, but it is undoubtedly many times more delicious than the sushi at famous sushi restaurants in Tokyo and Osaka.

I forgot to take a picture, but an employee at the pearl farm made an oyster pot for me. He brought ingredients and a pot and made it in my company housing. I was happy to be able to have a feast on a business trip where there was nothing. By the way, an employee at the pearl farm told me, “You didn’t have to go out of your way to re-plate the sushi from the pack, did you?” I wanted to make the sushi look beautiful, but it depends on the person. Anyway I was satisfied.

A cold wave hit Japan from January 24th to 25th. The photo is of my parents’ house, which is an hour and a half drive from Osaka. This area gets snow only once a year, but it’s only once every five years that this much snow piles up. It seems that most of the trains in urban areas such as Osaka have been suspended. Kansai (around the middle of western Japan) is an area with little snowfall, so a little snow can cause chaos.

On this day, the lowest temperature was minus 6 degrees Celsius and the highest temperature was 2 degrees Celsius even here on the island where the pearl farm is located between Korea and Japan. In Russia, Canada, and Europe, it’s probably colder, but for us Japanese, minus 6 degrees is a rare temperature. Even in Japan, people in northern Japan (Iwate, Akita, Hokkaido) are probably familiar with it. A person from Akita prefecture in northern Japan, who appeared on the radio today, said, “If it’s 2 degrees, it’s warm.” Japan is very small on the world map, but when I hear stories like this, I feel that Japan is also big. It means that it is long vertically rather than wide.

Today is January 26th, and I’ve been working for 22 days since I started harvesting and sorting pearls. I am very tired. So I haven’t been able to create new products lately. I’d like to at least update the website, so I’m doing my best to update it today. Next week I have a job to list more than 200 pearls that I have selected. Weigh one point at a time and convert it into Excel data. This is a simple task, but you have to be careful not to make any mistakes. After that, the pearls are put up for auction. Akoya pearls are sorted immediately after harvest and sold at auctions. In about two months, a year’s sales of the company are established here. After those jobs are done, I can go home. When I get home, I want to make a lot of products again. I also want to ride a motorcycle.