I believe day before yesterday was the first day I saw deck chairs in use- finally warmed up or rather we finally sailed south far enough to make it attractive to sit outside. I sat in one and almost immediately fell asleep. I didn't even know I was tired.

Internet usage is 35 cents a minute for first-timers. Free for people who are on their second or higher Princess Cruise, I think. The difficulty is that when these PC's crash, and like PCs are reputed to do, they crash all the time, the clock ticking off the charges does not crash. People are constantly having to have their charges adjusted. It would be simpler to use Macs, wouldn't it?

Oddly most of the 20+ internet terminals are used by couples - one typing the other sitting a bit back and reading or commenting.

The internet connection seems to have never failed during the trip, which surprised me as we got into fairly remote seas. Always connected in today's world I guess.

Tomorrow we leave the ship. The big question is whether the tour company we have found and paid over the internet will actually show up. Do we really have those hotel rooms? Or will we be standing on the Xingang docks, luggage in hand, looking at the vastness of China and wondering how to get to Beijing. Hitchhiking? More later, I hope, from the mainland.

Nagasaki. Ring any bells? The Brits and Aussies on the trip don't have the same sense about this stop that I do, and I assume other Americans do. We dropped the bomb, not them. I did hear one old vet talking about us having to drop the bomb to save the estimated 1 million Allied lives the invasion of the Japanese homeland was to cost us. But historians have pretty well debunked that.

Anyway the ground zero tour was booked solid and we ended up on the Shimabara Pennsula which promised an old castle, samuri homes, and a Japanese boxed lunch. It delivered. The castle was really a fortress, rebuilt because the central government had all the local fortifications destroyed c 1870. Lots of great photos. The samuri houses were also photogenic, if reconstructed. Boxed lunch at a resort hotel. The staff comes out into the parking lot to greet us with a lot of bowing and gets us to the lunch room. The boxed lunch is everything we hoped for. Lots of different Japanese food items in the box. Oddly I can't get a coke to go with it. They have diet coke, which is what they were serving at the Western lunch two days ago back in Hakone park. But no regular coke, so I stick with water. At least they didn't offer me Pepsi. After lunch its off to the souvenir shop in the hotel where I find......a coke machine with regular coke. Why a four or five star hotel can't arrange to bring me a coke from their own machine which is all of 50' from the dining room I can' t imagine, and all the bowing in the parking lot doesn't mitigate it. Symbolic service rather than actual service. Still, lunch was swell. Mary Alice hit gold in the souvenir shop (you knitters just wait to see this).

A few years back the local volcano went off (1992?) killing about 50 people, and causing a mud flow which destroyed or buried a number of houses. Some are preserved in a museum, right in the ground just as they were the day after the mud flow. It is astonishing to see them. The spookiest thing is that one has a TV antenna on it. These are the actual houses still right where they were buried in the mud flow. Remember Stafford? This is that, only on a huge scale.

But I wish we had gotten to ground zero. That's unfinished business and I feel like I'll have to return to go there.

About 200 people on the dock to see us off. Spectacular harbor, sunset, the works. No pix however. I've been using a 1GB card in the camera which holds about 1000 photos, so for backup of the computer I simply don't erase the pix as I download. Great plan, when the card fills I pull the card and slip in another one which I have brought. So I'm up to 800+ photos on the card and the Mac stops recognizing duplicatates and wants to download all 800 or not at all. OK by me, lets do 800. Well 30 minutes in the Mac decides it is out of memory, can't complete the download and I'm stuck.Cancel download, toss some old programs I never use,look for what could possibly be using 80 Gigs of computer space. Free up a lot restart the download. Meanwhile the band is playing the ship is moving, the sun is setting, and I can't take any pix. So nothing but memories of the departure from Nagasaki. That'll have to do. It was warm and Mary Alice and I went to the very front of the ship. As we sailed under the bridge people there clapped, then we were past all land contact except the pilot boat. After a bit it pulled up, picked up the pilot and we sailed off into the sunset.

We docked in Yokahama early in the morning. Too early. Mary Alice and I had to join a tour group at 7:35 a.m. The tour left the boat almost immediately and did not return until 5:30 p.m. Why so long? Or, rather why did we pick one that was so long? Well, its got to do with how Princess sets up the tours. On our three trips with Uniworld they set up tours in each port and it came with the package price. With Princess you pay for the cruise and that gets you to the port. There you can take one of several tours they've set up, by signing up and paying for it, or get off the ship and tour on your own. (Except in Petropavlosk where the Russians wanted you to have a visa if you were not going with a tour group. That required a certain amount of advance planning). Princess gives you a nice brochure full of color pictures outlining the various tours. The problem is this: Princess gets booked up way in advance. I asked about an Antarctic tour and they said "you mean the 2008 trip, don't you? The 2007 is sold out." Similarly the tours on this cruise were mostly already sold out when we booked the cruise. What was left were the long,and expensive tours in each port. Those are usually all day tours of volcanos. So when we arrived in Yokahama we got on a bus and drove out of town immediately to go to Hakone park - a volcanic area off in the mountains.

The bus ride was comfortable, and long. Eventually we arrived at a rest stop where I began taking photos on one of the themes for the day's shooting. Fashions among younger Japanese. At the rest stop I encountered a very tall,skinny man probably in his 20s, with an evil beard, and tighly pegged pants that emphasised his skinnyness. He looked like someone you would not want to meet in an alley. With him was a young woman, probably also in her 20s, more than a foot shorter, puggy - which is very unusual in Japanese women - wearing heavy boots and a child's skirt, carrying a childs animal purse. He was the evil old man, she was the 6 year old kid he was molesting. I didn't have the nerve to ask them if I could photograph them so I could get a formal portrait. I resorted to lurking, and didn't really get the shot I wanted.

An hour more on the bus and we arrived at the "Ropeway", which is a gonola ride up the mountain like a ski-lift. At the top was a very satisfactory scene from hell with steam rising from the bare and destroyed earth where the volcano had erupted blowing all the vegetation and soil away. There were pipes and small industrial looking buildings scattered around the site - these were well-heads to pipe the hot mineral waters to the various hotels and spas down the mountain. Great to photograph.

Then I saw the woman in the gold belt. She was probably college age, part of a party of 6 or 8 people of similar age. Very skinny, boots, skirt, gold belt, gold chains hanging on her neck,and a wispy hairdo. I find now that I have perhaps 6 photographs of her, all partial. Her back, her side, her head - but never a real shot showing her in her fashion glory. I did approach one couple and did a portrait. They were very pleased, and made the peace sign when I photographed them. I saw another woman do the same when her boy friend took a picture of her, and some high school kids did the same. I asked Milli, our tour guide, about this but she couldn't explain beyond "They are happy so they make the peace sign."

It was from the vista of hell that Mount Fugi was visible - if it were to ever be visible on this tour. Alas while it was sunny, there was mist and fog between us and Fugi, so we didn't see it.

Lunch, we were told, would be at a local hotel, and it would be "Western style". That may have pleased most of our group but it did not please us. "Can we order a Japanese lunch?" we asked. "No." "Why did we come to Japan, to eat western food?" "It will be trout." It was not.

The hotel was quite fancy, built of thick stone like a castle, and we filed into a second story banquet hall with long tables. Like Petropavlosk's basecamp, but with chairs instead of benches, and china instead of plastic plates. Lunch was a small dandilion and fish salad - might have been trout, it was just a thin slice so I couldn't tell -then corn chowder, which was excellent - then the main sea bass dish and a dessert. Very Western, I suppose.

After lunch we looked into "Shopping corner" in the lobby. More about English in Japan later. There my attention was taken by a Bio-Wash label on a silk shirt. It said in English that it was for someone who saw past the essence. That was confusing. But the shirt was formal enough for court, and looked like it would go with the white tie, giving me a nice combo momento of Japan that I would be able to get some use from. The shirt was 19,700 yen. At about 127 to the dollar that's quite a bit of money. About $175. Too rich for my court dress budget. But it was on sale for 5250 yen. Much better. It was my size, and I am now the proud owner of it. It is 100% silk made for an Italian label, which is prestigious in Japan I believe, but made in - you guessed it - China. So I now have a Chinese made Italian shirt I bought in Japan. Call me Mr. Global.

The Russians may not have been glad to see us but the Japanese were. We docked right at the port so we could just walk off the boat and hop onto buses or taxis. A delegation of local dignataries came out and made speeches to the assembled ship officers, gave them bouquets and hapi jackets and passed around pounded rice cakes with black seasoning. There were about 20 huge modern tour busses on the dock,and a shuttle bus system with a printed schedule handed out by student volunteers. The Japanese post office set up a table on board selling current stamps (whoopee!) and when we got to town the local stores had welcome Sapphire Princess signs in their windows. We had landed in Muroran, our first Japanese stop.

Muroran on the island of Hokkaido, is not a frequent cruise stop evidently, hence the excitement. The town looked disturbingly like California towns (or towns all over the world) except that it had banners waiving in front of most stores advertising their specialities. More English signage than I expected, including road signs so an English only speaker like me could navagate the highway system - if I could get used to driving on the left as they do in England.

We went to a department store where I got a white tie just like Michael Acosta used to wear in the Humboldt Courts when we were doing the EF! cases. I got it to wear with a black shirt, but it goes with some others so look for me in my Muroran tie next time you see me in court.

The basement level of the store had a deli-grocery and we went nuts buying lunch. Sashimi, bean filled cakes, and nameless items added to the yakitori we got from a street vendor made a great lunch. Saw some shipmates lunching at Mister Donut. Its a long way to go to find a Mister Donut. I've got a lead on the scorpion restaurant in Beijing that we saw on the food channel,too.

We've been seeing volcanoes and Mt. Usu was our afternoon excursion. Very active, steam coming out of vents fairly near us, and a good look at Japan's newest volcano which emerged in some guys wheat field in 1943. Its about 1000' high now.

When we left port acrobats performed on the docks.

Still I'm grateful to the Russians in our last port for acting like we've heard Russians act. Gives me a story to tell.

Tomorrow we start seeing Japan. Today for a change the sun is out and it is slightly warmer. As we walk our morning mile the winds at the front of the ship are still strong enough to propell the walkers down the deck quickly.