For those of you who don't know, I am moving to Japan at the end of July to live and work for a year teaching English. I applied through the JET Programme and after a gruesome year-long application process, I was accepted. I'll be living in a small town called Kamiyubetsu on the northern shore of Hokkaido. Basically, at the northern edge of Japan, facing the Sea of Okhotsk (don't ask me how to pronounce it). It's in a small subprefecture (province) of Abashiri with a size of 160 sq. km and a population of 6,000. Considering it's less than a 10 min drive from some larger cities, I'm not too worried about the location. What I'm really excited about is that I got Hokkaido even though I didn't ask for it during the application process. I was a little worried I would get somewhere in the deep south, such as Okinawa or Shikoku since I don't think I'd be able to hand the heat and humidity there! Hokkaido is about the size of Ireland and Kamiyubetsu is at the same latitude as Toronto, so the climate is similar to Canada's. It's also not as people-packed as the rest of Japan so it's a well known for it's wilderness and mountains, and during the winter, it gets some of the best powder for snowboarding in the world. W00T! Just to give an idea of where I'll be, it's pretty close to here:

I fly out in exactly two months from now. I'm working full time and trying to pay off some bills and save up some money for my first month there. I'm planning on staying in Japan for a few years afterwards to work on a Masters degree so these last two months will be my last in Canada for a while to come..

So what does J-Hat mean? It's actually Ĵ, which is hard to type so "J-Hat" is a good compromise. Basically, it's a coordinate vector. If you want the nerdy explanation, you may remember from high school math that the three dimensions can be written in the Cartesian coordinates (x,y,z). If you think of the origin (0,0,0) and draw a vector of length 1 out from the origin along each axis, they become the coordinate vectors (î,ĵ,k). (k has a vector symbol too but I can't type it)

A few years ago in my classical mechanics class our prof, Dr. Hobill was teaching us rotational mechanics, which uses a lot of vectors. Dr. Hobill is the type of prof who likes to read out what he is writing on the board so for a whole 30 minutes we hear "e-theta-hat-dot plus e-phi-hat-double-dot minus one over theta r-hat-dot.." and so on. A girl in our class is a little confused so she raises her hand and asks, "Are all of those vectors?" to which he answers, "Yeah, anything with a hat is a vector." I usually wear my hat everyday and by this time I was falling asleep during the lecture (which is a bad habit of mine) with my hat pulled low. She points at me and says, "Does that mean John is a vector too?" Hearing my name mentioned jolts me awake but I have no idea what everyone is laughing at me for. I try to pretend that I've paying attention all along by faking a laugh, which must've been unconvincing since everyone including the prof is laughing at me. Afterwards, we were standing in the hallway outside of the classroom talking about the lecture when my friend Katie jokingly dubs me J-Hat. It's been my nickname ever since.