Rehabilitation effort (1)

I now need to work on filling out forms for contracting for my position in the next working place. I found a few Japanese traditions (that I need to recover) in this kind of formalities.

1) In Japan, we are based on a unique way of counting years in official documents. For example, this year 2012 is the 24th year in the Japanese way after the previous emperor passed away. I lost the habit to stick to this Japanese year count system. Often I mistakenly write '12' in some blanks instead of 24, for example.

2) A very basic thing. I am accustomed to write and recognize the digit 7 in the European way. This European handwriting is hard to recognize by Japanese people, and the Japanese normally write it in the way shown here (mostly #1). I know this well, but I am so familiar with the European way and spontaneously write 7 in that way. I always realize this after my hand automatically makes a mistake, and say to myself 'These 5 years made a big difference!'

It should not take a lot of time to recover the habits, though. Let's see.

From TV news in Japan

I was back in Japan last week for 5 days. I had some chances to watch news on TV. I expected to see a lot of news on continuous danger of radioactivity and so on, but saw more often about European financial crisis (see below). That could have been a kind of media control based on national policy to hide shocking information about domestic situation.