A shot from the day after I had my wisdom teeth removed, three days ago. Left hand side only, obviously.

Wonderful Japanese health system – I organized the appt two weeks ago and it’s already done. The cost – a mere 6,300 yen (bout $100 bucks) including the pharmacy prescription!

The only annoying bit (beside the pain itself) is the incredibly insufficient amount of painkillers I was given. So today I’ll be on the phone with my dealer.. I mean, my dentist for some more.

Otherwise, seem to be recovering well. Read Slaughterhouse 5 and now onto Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (I couldn’t find a copy of 1Q84 out in Narita before the op).  Watching plenty of Gundam Wing and Boardwalk Empire.  As I fear my eyes are really gonna go square, today’s gonna be a little more productive.

I posted this, didn’t I?

Had my school bounenkai (end of year party) in Choushi on Thursday night.  Choushi is a small city (about 70,000 people) on the far eastern tip of Chiba prefecture.  The party was held at the Keisei Hotel, right on the tip of Cape Inubo, near the famous lighthouse there.

It was my first time to visit, so the following day, after starting with an outdoor onsen watching the ocean and the sunrise, I did some sightseeing.  Firstly, I took in the lighthouse.  No pictures of it but several pictures from it.  Along the way I took in the Horizon clifftop, where slightly elevated, you can see the rounding of the horizon.  I also cruised past the Port, checking out the fishing industry.  And incidentally the local skate park.

I briefly took in a temple to Kannon in the middle of Choushi.  I don’t know what the name of it was but it had cool bonzai surrounding the main building, barbed wire surrounding the pagoda and I had what started as a very loose but turned into a very deep prayer there.

I crossed the bridge into Ibaraki ken determined to find the industrial plants I could see clouding the sky from the lighthouse.  These were further away than what I thought.  I crisscrossed little backroads on this narrow strip of land between the Tone River and the Pacific Ocean.  Finally I ended up back on the main highway where I realised I was still a good 5 or 10 kilometres away from these plants.  Getting closer I noticeably sensed a change in my breathing.  It was so foreign seeing these giant stacks pouring steam (and I hope only steam) out the top.  I thought about how much of our modern lives come from places like this and yet how unfamiliar I am with the sight of them.  How little land, even in Japan, we dedicate to them relative to agriculture, retail, housing etc.

I cruised back into Choushi and picked up a couple of ALT friends for lunch.  They took me to a little cafe called Curaccho Cafe that specialises in bagels.  The salmon cream cheese bagel was awesome.  The coffee art even better.  I also ordered the blueberry cheese cake which came with little jam filled love hearts embossed into it and plenty of cream – great place.

They then took me to a supermarket called Yamaya that has a lot of foreign brand goods.  There were a lot of quality items that I recognised from home like pasta sauces, delicious beers and couscous.  I bought a few things that I will need after my wisdom teeth surgery on Monday – soups, juices etc.

It was at this point that I parted ways with my friends and with Choushi, bidding the giant wind turbines farewell on my way out the 126.

and a cartoon called Capelito (カペリート in Japanese).

The latter is seemingly of Spanish origin.  Simply, it’s a claymation about a mushroom whose top changes at the squeeze of his nose.  Some third year girls were doing this weird thing squeezing their noses and this is what they directed me to watch.  The former I was introduced to by a second year girl in a note she wrote and put in my ‘mail box’.  The singer is a projection.  The vocals are fully digitalised, created on software called Vocaloid (the name given to these types of singers also… sinister sounding, right…?  so Blade Runner… since arriving, I haven’t really came in to much contact with this tech-future fetish the Japanese, through anime and manga, so clearly express… cool..), that was put together by Yamaha and a Spanish university.

Look at that, a link to our little  カペリート above.

Whereas we dig on fruit cake for Xmas, the Japanese usually eat sponge cake, one of the little differences in their adaptation of the holiday.

I’ve spent the past few lessons doing various Christmas related lessons with the students. In the course of these I’ve found out a few things about Santa and Christmas.

One, where does Santa live? Ask Kiwi kids and the answer unanimously would be the North Pole. Ask Japanese kids and the answer can vary from Finland to NZ to my house.

Two, how many Santas are there? (the red underline when I pluralize ‘Santa’ adds a meta level to this question!) Despite the issue of department store Santas the answer almost unanimously would be one, right? In Japan the best answer is probably いっぱい – ‘a lot’.

Three, how does Santa get in the house. Actually the majority of the kids answered ‘entotsu’ meaning chimney. But barely any Japanese homes have chimneys.. I said to them. ‘Through the window’ was another popular answer (like a common thief!). ‘With the key’ I thought was the most original!

Four, how many presents do Japanese kids get? The majority get one. But, for New Year the average Japanese kid receives about $400 in cash, so kinda balances out.

If you are drinking alcohol at your ‘bounenkai’ (lit. forget the year party) or ‘shinnenkai’ (new year party) please be extra careful in the train station.

Don’t cause トラブル (trouble) in the train. It’s bad to fall on the rails too.

Thanks,

The Odakyu Line

I too frequently see interesting Japanese takes on English but it hadn’t occurred to me that they might do it with French as well. Whether or not the French works, its the phonetic arrangement in English that made me chuckle. And of course, take a box home.

I have been rather neglectful of my blog of late. A glut of television watching, Japanese study, an online course I’m doing and hanging out with M. are to blame. I do plan to do something more in that series of things I have seen in a year here. Although my sister arrives at the end of this week, staying until mid November, so don’t expect anything else too soon!

Food in Japan is something of an obsession.  As the Japanese have cultivated a very unique culture in their island isolation, so they have cultivated a very unique cuisine.  There are places to eat literally everywhere.  Omiyage (gift giving after you go on a trip) mostly centres around food.  Each prefecture is nigh represented by the food it is famous for.  You come back from a trip (or tell people about an upcoming trip) and you can bet they will know what food that place is famous for (check out this site for a bit of a list).  Rice, fish and ritual, of course, abound.

I’m sure many examples of Japanese cuisine have similar dishes on the continent, in Korea and China.  I don’t yet know enough to tell you, but certainly the Chinese and Korean food in Japan is very different.  Anyway, Japan, being an island country, I’m sure, has a cuisine that is unique to itself.  My favourite Japanese food so far? (as good a place to start as any).  I’m still telling people it’s takoyaki, small deep-fried balls of octopus, popular at matsuri (festivals)… but I’m starting to doubt the truth of this.  It works well because I live in Tako-machi (sometimes people will joke and call it octopus town but the kanji actually stand for ‘many old things’)  I think I’m more in love with takoyaki sauce than anything else…

I’m very tempted to say okonomiyaki, a thick savoury pancake usually filled with cabbage and seafood, but it has a sauce that is very similar to takoyaki.  I’ve recently started to make this at home though and first time I did it, I forgot the sauce and it was still pretty awesome…  For straight freshness and flavour, you can’t beat a really good slice of maguro (tuna) sashimi.  That may currently be my favourite…  Then again the garlic pepper ‘big chicken’ from Lawsons has rocked my world a couple of times lately.

Okonomiyaki

As the sheep is to New Zealand, so rice is to Japan.  Even paddock and paddies share the first four letters.  My apartment is surrounded by rice paddies, but also, unfortunately, by a busy state highway on one side – microcosmic Japan.  I believe last year’s rice harvest was 8.6 million tonnes.  It is just coming up harvest time now.  The rice is starting to turn brown.  The machines are being brought out to pull it up and day by day more and more paddies will lose their lush green to be reduced to brown nubs.  At some point that will be burnt off, returning that nutrition to the soil and all around me will be a filthy brown until the spring comes.

Rice, my house (top floor, far left) and a dirty empty field

My local town is famous for rice – Tako Mai they call it.  I can’t remember its properties off the top of my head.  That’s right, different types of rice have different properties.  It’s a bit like that thing where Eskimos (is that the right word now?) have 30+ words for snow.  I guess we have all manner of different types of potato… And if you’ve ever made sushi, you know you use a particular type of rice… But anyway, some rice is better for cooking, some is better for making mochi, a sticky paste made from pounding the rice and which is eaten in soups and as a confectionary, even as ice cream.

That brings me quite nicely to Japanese confectionary – known as wagashi.  If food is an obsession, sweets/candy/lollies, whatever you call them, is an artform here.  Japanese sweets are typically less sweet than their Western counterparts.  The most common ingredients are an, a paste made from red beans and mochi.  Various flavours are added, such as sakura (cherry blossoms) and yuzu (a type of citrus fruit).  You can check out some examples here.  And I encourage a Google Image Search!

Sakura ankoh - beautiful, ne?!

Of course there are many Western style confectionaries in Japan.  The chocolate selection mostly consists of Japanese brands – Ghana, Meiji, but thankfully, Snickers seems to be the most common foreign bar for sale in konbinis.  Yes, the konbini.  Here, you can pick up all manner of on-the-run goods.  Starting with confectionary – chocolate, ice-cream, various hard boiled things, maybe some kind of gum-drops; I’m not sure, I’ve never bought them, puddings (pronounced ‘purin’); small plastic tubs of various flavoured custard-like puddings, bakery style sweets; i.e. shit with cream in it!  Yum!  Umm… what have I missed… I think that covers most things.

I’ve already mentioned the wonderful garlic pepper big chicken – a rather delicious variety of yakitori (fried meat on a skewer, a Japanese favourite, particularly at izakaya and matsuri).  You can also pick up nikuman, a large Chinese dumpling – doughy on the outside, full of flavoured meat on the inside.  Nothing compared to Yokohama Chinatown but still pretty good.  All the drinks under the sun, including alcohol, are at your fingertips.  I particularly like the Mt Rainiers iced coffee and the apple juices.  The 8% chuhai’s (500ml of course – do the math on how many beers that is) are a good starter for a night out.  There are a bunch of different bentos (ready-made meals) you can buy – pastas, salads, rice and meat, fried chicken, which are handy for a cheap meal when you’re out or a quick meal when you can’t be bothered.  The onigiri (rice balls wrapped in seaweed, containing chicken, fish, salmons eggs etc.) are a great cheap lunch.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the konbini – cos right now, it’s just sounding a lot like a Night ‘n’ Day back home, right? – is the ubiquity of them.  There are about four or five competing major brands – Lawsons, 7-11, Mini-Stop, Family Mart, Daily Yamazaki – and they are everywhere.  Within one kilometre of my house, I have a 7 – 11, a Lawsons and a Mini Stop.  Oh, before I forget, the Lawsons sell gig tickets as well.  Its about the only way I’ve bought tickets to anything in Japan – they’ve got it locked down and it’s so easy!  Back on topic, out of city centres, they have huge carparks (well, compared to a convenience store back home where you generally park on the road or the little carpark tucked in the back; they’re still nothing compared to the pachinko parlour carparks!) and are totally geared to car culture.  It’s often really hard to find a rubbish bin in Japan but you are always guaranteed to find one outside a konbini because people pull up, dump their rubbish from yesterday’s mid-commute konbini visit and go in and buy the next day’s cheap food.  It isn’t just major highways though, konbini’s are everywhere.  On a little country backroad suddenly a sign pops up for a 7 – 11, it’s weird.  The thing here, at least in heavily populated Chiba, is that the country is never the country.

Oh, I forgot to mention, you can pay your bills at most konbini, all have a photocopier and most have an ATM (don’t get me started on Japanese ATMs though..).

We’ve been to the rice paddy.  To the konbini.  Where shall we go next?  How about to school?  The school lunches here go by the name kyuushoku.  What this means is that at most schools, the children don’t actually bring their lunch to school, nor do they buy it at school.  Rather, a local company makes all the lunches and trucks it into the school each day.  Parents are billed monthly.  My lunch for a month costs me 4700 yen, about NZ$70 dollars.  Not bad if you think about how much you probably spend on lunch for a month.  And this is a biiiig lunch.  So big, my eyes flutter shut on a far too regular basis on steamy Japanese summer arvos.  The deliveries are organised based on class.  Each class will have a large stainless trolley that is put in the elevator (most Japanese schools are three or four stories high) and then wheeled in front of the class where it is unloaded by that week’s assigned students and served to the class.  I really haven’t asked anyone yet why the Japanese use this system.  Should probably do that.  Westerners would probably quickly ascribe ideas like, ‘as everyone is eating the same thing and the class stays seated together, it reinforces the idea of the group’ and this may be true, but at the moment, I honestly don’t know.  I do know that its efficient (the kyuushoku centre is less than a kilometre from the school), every kid is guaranteed a nutritious lunch (cos not one kid brings their lunch to school) and it works.  And yeah, I could complain about some things on the menu (the quality of the vegetables sometimes, the gelantinous fish cake things) but generally its pretty good.  My favourite is curry rice.  The Japanese idea of curry is a little different to what we’re generally used too.  It’s probably full of preservatives, but it’s pretty damn tasty.

Sometimes when I eat with the class,a student will bring my lunch up for me. One day, three boys did!

I’m now going to segue on to whales.  Some of you are probably wondering about whales.  How am I going to segue from kyuushoku to whales you ask? Well, our journey continues in a little town called Wada, down the east coast of Chiba, where, so a friend told me last weekend, the local BOE/kyuushoku centre will sometimes serve up a bit of whale for the kid’s lunch.  Apparently the locals still drag in a whale from time to time and you can go and see it being brought in and cut up.  M and I were going to try some passing through there on Sunday, but meal times and swimming time all kinda conflicted and well, we just didn’t do it.  Maybe next time.

In terms of the Japanese eating whale, it is not a very popular dish.  You would be hard pressed to find a place with it on the menu.  It has a pretty bad image with young Japanese for two reasons.  The first is the obvious one; whale is really the international protest flavour of the month.  That sounds cynical but was actually meant to be a play on flavour, whale etc.  Anyway… the second reason is that post WWII the Japanese ate a lot of whale as a source of cheap food when the country was very poor, struggling and people were starving.  That image hangs on.

What does it taste like?  Well, as I’ve mentioned, I can’t tell you from personal experience, but opinions have ranged from ‘not very nice, quite chewy’, to ‘mmm, oishii yo‘ (mmm, it’s delicious!).

So now are journey continues to a little izakaya visited as the second (read: getting drunken) half of one of the first enkais I had here.  This segue comes courtesy of moving from one strange food to another.  What’s the strangest thing I have eaten in Japan you ask?  That would have to be basashi.  What is basashi you ask?  Horse sashimi.  In other words, small cuts of raw horse meat.  That’s right.  And it was pretty good.

The next one is not quite so strange, but still a little out there - unagi, eel – damn, it’s good!  Usually it comes on a bed of rice, it’s kinda expensive but it tastes amazing!  Nicola, get ready, you’re definitely gonna get a taste of this come November!  In fact, fish in general, I’m discovering all kinds of new and tasty fish and I feel so healthy doing so!  Buri (Japanese amberjack), hokke (umm… dunno, hokke… ohh, actually, the Arabesque greenling or Okhotsk Atka mackerel, so my dictionary tells me), saba (plain ‘ol mackerel, but esp. the chub mackerel, according to Kotoba), which is usually cooked in miso paste and has a really strong flavour but is delicious with white rice.  Another kyuushoku favourite!

Buri with a little soy and some daikon radish on top

‘How about vegetables?’ some people may be asking.  Japan has some amazing vegetables.  I tried okura here for the first time.  Yum!  Great in salads.  Idamame beans are an izakaya favourite – boiled in salt, they go down delish with a beer.  Renkon is the root of the lotus plant and it tastes amazing but I am still trying to recapture that first taste, probably because that came courtesy of a Japanese woman and now its just me cooking it.  And doing it wrong.  There are a plethora of mushrooms here, not just the famous shiitake, or brown and white buttons like most NZ supermarkets.  Some of them look a little weird but all pretty tasty.

I mentioned the enkai above.  These are work parties.  Usually you will take up the large ‘party’ room of a restaurant, sitting on the floor.  There will be a designated place for you to sit.  The food is amazing – unagi, tempura prawns, sashimi, soba (cold buckwheat noodles), fish etc. etc.  Karaoke will often be sung, drinking will be done according to the wonderful Japanese custom of always filling others’ glasses, never your own, people let themselves go a bit and general goodness ensues.

What other rituals are there when it comes to food?  One of the most important is the saying of ‘itadakimasu‘ (lit. ‘I humbly receive’) before eating.  The closest equivalent in the West is grace but it lacks the religious connotations of that ritual.  It is simply an act of thanks for the food, and one of the things I really love about Japan; that humble thankfulness that is still embodied in a ritual that is nearly universal in the society.  A sort of civility we have largely lost in the West. Another ritual includes not standing your chopsticks up in the rice, as this is only done at services for the dead.  It’s impolite to point your chopsticks at someone and you should lift your bowl of rice to your mouth when eating it.  Slurping is ok.  I haven’t asked about that one yet.  One of the good things about writing these blogs is I figure out all the questions that I really should just go ahead and ask.

Well, that’s really about it.  The eating experience here in Japan is one of the most sense-satisfying and interesting parts of the overall experience of living here.  And I know there is still so much to discover!  Still haven’t been to Gonpatchi, the inspiration for Kill Bill’s restaurant fight scene (eh, M-chan, ne?!).  Still haven’t eaten sukiyaki or Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki.  Still so many things to try.

Right, my dinner is waiting for me.  The rice is cooked.  Just gotta make the salad, heat the corn, put the sashimi on the plate and decide whether I’m gonna eat that tofu that’s in the fridge as well…

That’s right!  I’ve acquired a formally acknowledged ‘basic’ level of Japanese proficiency.  This was awaiting me in the post box this morning after a long two month wait.  I only had time to grab it, stuff it in my bag and head to school, where I got a few small things sorted before giving myself some small moments of peace to open it.  I didn’t want to open it in front of the office ladies because I still wasn’t sure that I had passed.  I was leaning on the side of Yeah, (put it this way, it would have been really disappointing to fail) but I wasn’t sure yet.

But anyway, 119 out of 180.  Participants need 90 out of 180 to pass, but you must meet a certain minimum in each section.  In the listening it’s 19 out of 60.  In the Language Knowledge (Vocabulary/Grammar) and Reading section, you need 38 out of 120.  Sounds low, right?  If you scrape by with these scores though, it doesn’t mean you’ve passed because you haven’t achieved an overall mark of 50%.  What it does mean is, if you score 100 out of 120 in the Language Knowledge/Reading section and 18/60 in the Listening, you fail.  Oh the A A A means that I scored above 67% in each of those categories!  Yeah, that’s right..!

As I said above, I have achieved a ‘basic’ level of Japanese.  As of a couple of years ago, there are 5 levels (up from 4); N5 being the easiest and N1 being ‘able to understand Japanese in a variety of situations’.  Yes, I’ve been here a year but N1 is still a long way off folks!  Yeah, I am becoming able to express myself better and I  can understand some Japanese in a variety of situations – work, at the post office, socialising – but only in quite a surface way.  I am a long way from being capable in variety of situations – e.g. I still don’t understand 80% of the morning meetings at school, for example.  And the kids routinely laugh at my Japanese.

So I received various congratulations from my co-workers today along with several comments about looking like a criminal in my picture.  It is a terrible picture!

A nice marker for a little over a year in Japan.  The plan now is to sit the N3 next July.  That’s another 400 or so kanji to learn, plus Lord knows what grammar.  Hopefully, something useful!  Good thing I don’t mind hitting the books… (nerd alert…)

頑張ります！

The other day I received these lovely boxes of vegies from a local lady.  And tonight I set about making the pumpkin recipe she had told me about…

Cube your pumpkin and put into a pot
Add around 200 ml of water (so the pumpkin won’t burn, but it’s not covered)
2 tbsp of soy sauce
2.5 tbsp of sugar
1 tbsp of mirin (optional)

Softly boil the pumpkin for about  tens, drain and serve.

Along with my pumpkin I had tuna and salmon sashimi (the first time I’d eaten sashimi at home), tofu (first time I’d had tofu at home), some beautiful corn and a ‘big boy’ bottle of Kirin to wash it all down. 　おいしかった！ (It was delicious!)

M described it as ‘like what a Japanese boy would eat for dinner’.

That song, ‘I think I’m turning Japanese’ has been stuck in my head most of the day…