Back to the immigration office...

No horror stories to tell today. Things actually went amazingly smoothly in fact. Unfortunately they only gave me a one year visa. I had asked for a three year visa-that way I wouldn't have to pay 4000 yen every year to get a new one if I did decide to stay that long. Anyways, because I managed to finish my business so quickly I stopped at the bookstore opposite the immigration office. One of my co-workers had told me that it had a fairly decent offering of english books and I had decided that I wanted to get back into reading.

Although your average pop-fiction reader would probably have been be satisfied, us historians are a tough bunch to please. Unfortunately it's a hard knock life for your average historian in Japan when it comes to selection. I was hoping to pick up something on either WWII or the Civil War or perhaps even the Revolutionary War or the French Indian War. But all I was able to find was a couple of books about The Art of War, a 6000 yen hardback about the last year of fighting in Germany in WWII, a three book series about Napoleon and a book about the last days of Hitler in WWII. Although it looked like a fascinating read, it was a fairly small book and it was priced at 2700 yen, a full 1000 yen above the Cdn price and that was an atrocity in itself.