Ninja...esque

One of the things you might think of when you think of Japan is a ninja. There might be ninjas all over the place, heck there might even be one outside right now, but I wouldn't know it because they are.......well, ninjas.
I havent heard much about ninja schools here. They might be all over the place and I just dont know it. If this were the case it would make sense because they are......well, ninjas.
But, luckily for those of us from the states there is no need to move to Japan to learn to be a ninja. You can go to ninja school right at home. If you do decide to enroll let me know how it goes and just make sure to get a sweet cape.

0-1 1st round

Tonight we had our first playoff game and it didn't go so well for us as we got beat by 20. We had times where we were able to make little runs, but we started off slow out of the gate and couldn't overcome their 1st quarter lead of 15. We struggled with turnovers - 21 - and many of them were turnovers that led to an easy basket. In the end they won because they had a lot more possessions than us. While the free throws and 3 pointers were about similar in the amount that both teams took, they had almost 20 more 2 point attempts than us, as we took 39 and 57. Tomorrow will be games 2 and 3, and if we can hold our turnovers down we have a good chance to pull the series out.
Go Chiba!

Playoffs

Today we start the playoffs. The way the playoffs work here is: the 1st and 2nd seed have a bye for the 1st round. The 3rd seed plays at home against the 6th seed and the 4th seed plays at home against the 5th seed. Even though we tied another team with our record this year we ended up with the 6th seed as they had the tie breaker over us, so we are on the road playing Toyama.
Just like the regular season we play a game on Saturday and then one on Sunday. If you win both games you advance to the next round. If you split and each team wins one game you have to play a game three (since it is a three game series). Only game three isn't on a third day. Once game two is finished on Sunday, you get a 30 minute break to go back into the locker and rest/re-group/make adjustments.  Then 30 minutes after the 2nd game the teams come back out and play a 10 minute (two 5-minute halves) game 3, as the deciding game. In game 3 each team gets 4 fouls a half before the bonus and each player only gets three fouls before they foul out.
This is a little different than anything I have ever heard of or played in, but hopefully we can get it done in 2 games and not have to worry about a 10 minute game deciding a 52 game season. Go Jets!

Button Update

A little while back I wrote about one of the buttons on the deluxe toilets they have here (if you want to see the post again: Flushing Sound)

One of the buttons I mentioned was the flushing sound button. I still think this is sort of a funny button but today I got an update. The bathroom that I used this morning on the way to our game had a sign that told about the various buttons. in both Japanese and English. It didn't say too much but it did say that if you pushed the flushing sound button the sound would go on for 25 seconds.
 
Since I was in a thinking area I stopped and racked my brain for why the button would be 25 seconds long. The only thing my college educated mind could help me come up with was that maybe this is the average time a person spends on "the jon" - not sure why you would need the flushing sound going for your whole seated experience, but maybe its the cool thing to do.  As I got to thinking about this though I sort of felt left out. If this is the case I would need to push the button a lot - like more than 10 times a lot. It would be great if they had a 12 minute and 16 second button, or, maybe a dial you could select the amount of time you wanted and when you hit the button it would 'flush' for that long. This would be my kind of rest area - if this is the cool thing to do of course.
I did happen to hit the button though just to see what it was like when I had grabbed some t.p. to blow my nose one day...it sounded like someone took a hand-held mic recorded the sound and they put it on playback. It wasn't the best quality but it sounded alright. And, forget about fooling the other people, even though I only threw my Kleenex in there, I fooled myself and started walking away before I realized I hadn't really flushed.