Well, I arrived a little over two months ago in this satellite town of Kanazawa (the capital of Ishikawa). If you look from the air, the town is speckled with rice fields, has a large area of forest taking up the southern area and a wide river running through it. There are 35,000 people here made up of rice farmers, service sector, and commuters to office jobs in Kanazawa.

So what is it like here? I tell the locals it's sumi-yasui and they nod with a caution that tells me they want to keep it a secret. I used to live in Tokyo and then Nagoya. That was tough. Commuting on densely packed trains, working long hours, getting stressed just buying groceries or trying to find the local ward office for getting your gaijin card, people everywhere…time just gets swallowed up with the oxygen in the big city. (It wasn't all bad but for the sake of contrast!). Tsubata Town, on the other hand, is mostly peaceful. People say ohayo as you walk by, you get to know them better, the air is clean and everything is less than 10 minutes bike ride away.

The pesky illusive ward office in Tokyo is now my place of work in Tsubata. That in itself gives me a unique perspective on small town life. From my work mates I know what's going on at the sports center, in the schools, community centres, who runs the various shops, who went to the local lion festival last week and sculled a bottle of sake, what ancient pots have been dug up this week at a recent archeological find etc. I also here that the cost of living here is cheap and others have caught wind of this. Three new schools have been built in the last five years. Not surprisingly there is a buzz of optimism about the future of the town.

I'm the second CIR here and lucky enough that my predecessor set up things very well. He was interested in a lot of local small-scale activities with people face to face which is what I'm interested in too. He also had an anti-smoking campaign going in the office which I'm more than happy to continue. There are things like that that bug me but I'm not a bundle of frustration at work (yet). I take the "be flexible and learn" angle, at least for the first year. One of my goals here is to give the locals a taste of "gaikoku" and I already have a number of projects on the go; pasta cooking class, travel English class, and an International Exchange Seminar where I talk about my life in Australia and invite other CIRs to speak.