J3J Episode 20: The End is Nigh

  The end is nigh
  Time to do it right
      -- Living Colour

Two months since the last episode, and less than two weeks until
I return.  A protracted battle with the all-powerful mandarins
of foreign exchange coordination came to nothing, so at 12:05,
22 Jun 2001, my flight back to Finland will take off.
(Via Amsterdam, at that, adding some 6 hours to the trip and
more likely than not resulting in a rubber glove up my anus
as a welcome ceremony at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.  Sigh.)

Much has happened, little worth writing about.  I hit the
1-year brick wall limit of staying at the Komaba Lodge and
moved to the opulent Minami-Azabu apartment of an acquaintance,
fortuitously on her summer vacation in Finland.  Weather in
Tokyo moved from near-glacial to lovely spring to warm
summer and is now teetering at the edge of tsuyu, the rainy
season poetically known as "plum showers" (اك±«, baiu) in Chinese
but more realistically called "soup" (tsuyu) in Japanese.

I would in fact already be out of the country if not for a
fortuitously timed conference in Okayama in mid-June, which
provided the perfect excuse to extend my stay beyond the
theoretical limit of June 1st; an extra 90,000 yen of spending
money courtesy of the lab; and a chance to explore the more
remote reaches of this island.   My current plan is to take
a night bus to Hiroshima, peek at the nearby famous floating of
Miyajima while there, then head to the Okayama conference and
afterwards trek back through Bizen, Kobe and Osaka before returning
to Tokyo.  All this in a measly week, though, but at least this
time I have some money to burn.

Recently, quite a bit of my free time has been occupied by the
non-trivial exercise of gathering all the equipment needed for
a more-or-less authentic Japanese tea room for assembly in
Finland.  I managed to sneak a pottery-filled box onto