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10.22.2002 As the top of this column says letter column, yours truly has decided to go along with the spirit of the thing and print some letters. These letters don't ask many specific questions, but they should nonetheless provide some fodder for a stimulating entry, not to mention provide me with the motivation to answer my tremendous backlog of email. So feel free to email me as often as you like and query Julie and myself about the things the guidebooks won't tell you. First we have a letter from Lois MacPhee, from Aurora, CO and the mother of Bill MacPhee, my oft-mentioned American Tokyo connection. Zander-- I think I need a "life". I actually listened to the fight song. I don't know when I have laughed so hard! I am really enjoying your diary. I think Masami likes Nato. Bill has described something vile that she likes and I would bet that is IT! Bill confirms this. His wife Masami does indeed like natto, and he usually requests that she eat it in an adjoining room for the sake of any westerners in attendance. You are braver than Bill. He would come home to get his haircuts every six months for the first few years. Bill disputes this. He says his COMPANY sent him home every THREE months, and he thought he might as well get his hair cut where they could understand him. I can hardly blame him. My Neighbor Totoro is a really cute movie. I buy it for kids often. There is an English version so you can actually understand what it is about. Ask Bill to borrow it. He has a copy of almost every movie ever made. You guys are doing sooo well. Take care. Lois There are numerous assertions here. My Neighbor Totoro is a cute movie: True. Lois buys it for kids often: Unconfirmed. There is an English version: True. So that you can know what is going on: False. Bill has a copy of every movie ever made: False. He does not have Air Bud 2: Golden Receiver. I asked. We are doing so well: Just takin' it day by day, man, day by day. Thanks for your letter. Okay, next is a letter from my parents: Dear Z & J, We loved your tour d'apartment--it is very nice, and it is great to think of you living there. I couldn't make out any bugs in the pictures--you must have gotten them all! I hope that you survived the drunken party. Your description of the English/Japanese classes was so funny. How much fun to teach English with Harry Potter. I love teaching English with Harry Potter. And actually, the book we're reading is The Chamber of Secrets, which I haven't read yet, so I hang on Mrs. Matsumoto's every word until I suddenly realize that she is looking at me expectantly while staring at the word "rhinoceros" or something. Speaking of Mrs. Matsumoto, Julie and I went with her and her whole family to a concert and dinner the other night, which was a lot of fun. Her whole family speaks varying amounts of English, so we were able to communicate well, and we enjoyed the concert, which just so happened to be Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Afterwards, we went to get Italian food a la Japan, which was probably no less authentic than a good American Italian restaurant, but you sure see the difference. Very sparse and tasteful decorations, usually of ancient farming implements (that looked a little Japanese to me). And what we had for dinner I've never seen on an American Italian menu, though they assured us that it is an Italian dish, not just a Japanese one: squid ink pasta. Seriously. Who was the first guy to think to eat that? And whose job is it to put on a scary mask and frighten squid all day just to get the ink? Well, all that said, it was really quite tasty. It tasted like a butter sauce, or like a less-creamy alfredo. I liked it a lot, but we all looked like we'd been chewing on our ballpoint pens and had gotten a nasty surprise. Zander- It's David Hollond (the former David Hammond, Grinnell '91). I am in the midst of reading Michael Chabon's novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and I thought of you (since it's about comic books). So, I thought I'd google you, and I came across your website. Just a side note: Google.com is a really good search engine. If someone says he's going to google you, don't get alarmed and tense up, he's just going to enter your name into the search engine and see what comes up. Just wanted to point that out, in case you were thinking to yourself, "Yeah, Zander did look pretty darn googled last time I saw him." Oh, and I read "Kavalier and Clay" about a year ago. What a great book. Those Pulitzer people really know what they're talking about when they give out awards. It's about two guys coming up with a superhero for American comics in the wake of Superman's first appearance in the late thirties. Congratulations on getting married. What exactly are you doing in Japan? Do they still sell Pocari Sweat? That was Anne's favorite drink when we visited Jeff Nassiff there many years ago. Well, a recap is probably in order. Julie is teaching English here at the middle school and elementary school levels. I'm still drawing comics and taking Aikido. Julie and I are both taking private and group Japanese lessons and teaching private English lessons. Actually, teaching private English lessons has been more difficult than I thought. There was this guy who approached us on the street who wanted English lessons, and so I thought, well, English lessons go for like ¥3000 or more an hour, so if I say ¥2000/hr, he'll be up for it. No, he wants to trade Japanese for English lessons. All this would be fine, because I could normally just tell someone sorry, I'm only teaching lessons for money, and perhaps if you got some friends together I could come down on the price somewhat, awfully sorry and all that, and that would be that. Sure, if he spoke English I could say that (to be fair, if I spoke Japanese, too), but just figuring out that he wanted English lessons from me took a good twenty-five minutes. I'd be still talking to him if I tried explaining all that. And if I didn't want to hurt his feelings, we could just tack on another four hours. So I'm supposed to meet him tomorrow night, and I'm absolutely dreading 1) going through with the language exchange, or 2) trying to tell him that it just won't work. I guess I sound like a pig here, but when you're already taking two Japanese classes, the last thing I need is another one. And the first thing I need is more money. Hmmm... maybe I can trick him into reading this website. And sure enough, Pocari Sweat is still here. And such a lovely name. One of the things that I find interesting about "Engrish" (bad Japanese attempts at English) over here is that it starts out funny, then, even though it doesn't stop being funny, you really stop noticing it. I expect anything with Roman letters on it to be a grammatic mangle, and if I actually see a block of text (like on a Starbucks sign) that is written by a native speaker, it takes me aback for a second. I even forget that English slogans on T-shirts actually make sense in some parts of the world. I'm so used to "A girl is like to a cat. She looks on the world with fine illumination", and "What a so nice picture!" that a t-shirt that made sense would just confuse me. One more thing: David Hammond married Anne Hollister, and they both changed their last name to Hollond. How very modern! How very chic! How very much better than "Hamster"! Julie and I discussed this after reading David's email, but "Fogelnon" and "Canglestrom" are really bad news. Okay, there will be more, and I'm sorry if people didn't want their letters printed. Let me know when you email me if you are ok with printing parts of the letter. Coming soon: I'll post some pictures tomorrow of my trip to Nikko for the PARADE OF A THOUSAND SAMURAI. .: posted by Zander Cannon 4:22 PM Tokyo Time 10.9.2002 Okay, the enkai went just fine, and Julie and I came through it with flying colors. One thing of interest is that a certain percentage of Southeast Asian people are missing a gene that allows them to metabolize alcohol properly. So one or two drinks down, and they are flying. Their faces turn red and they giggle their heads off. Entertaining to say the least, particularly when the person in question knows about 30 words in English and is trying to talk to us about the Minnesota Twins being in the playoffs. Okay, that's enough talk about drinking. Sorry. This journal will now be about things other than drinking for the sake of readers under 21 (US), 19 (Canada), 18 (UK), and 20 or tall enough to buy from a vending machine (Japan). We went to Bato again this weekend, with the Roses, again, to visit Ian, AGAIN. We're becoming creatures of habit. I got my first Japanese haircut while in Bato, from a friend of Ian's (and ours, now) named Hiroko. She not only gave a superb haircut but also gave me a mindbendingly good shoulder, neck, and scalp massage. Part of it was her gripping my temples and the back of my brain pan and lifting with a fair amount of force, thus stretching my neck. Wow. That'll wake you up. We also did some karaoke in Bato, and even though I didn't mention it, we did karaoke after the enkai. I'm karaoke'd out. I sing like a frog with a frog in his throat, and there is unambiguous pressure to always take your turn singing, so it generally turns into a humiliating ordeal unless I can just weasel my way through the evening as a staff back-up dancer and singer (that is, the one without a microphone). One cool thing about Japanese karaoke, though, is that their catalog is about two inches thick. They have every single song that you could ever want, as long as it's in Japanese. We helped one of the teachers from Julie's school sing the fight song for the Hanshin Tigers. A baseball fight song! In a karaoke book! Now there's something you don't need golden pipes to belt out. I'll have to look into that. In fact, you can find it online here. A few words on food. I think I am a reasonably adventurous eater, in that I will try anything you give me, even if I had a tendency in the US to eat Taco Bell more often then necessary. Also, in the past I have given certain people more than my fair share of abuse for their culinary unadventurousness, but Japan is a challenge. I would be interested in what it is that picky Japanese kids won't eat, because as far as I can tell, they'll eat all kind of terrible stuff. Squid on a stick. Octopus dumplings. Pickled plums. And the very worst, the grand champion of acquired tastes: Nato. Nato is fermented soybean sushi. It looks like chopped up peanuts stuffed in rice, all wrapped in seaweed. Now, sticky sushi rice: quite delicious, or oishii, and seaweed: mm-mm, can't get enough, but fermented soybeans, well, I'm afraid I haven't the words to describe it. I really can't clearly recall how it tasted, since we tried it by mistake very early on in our trip, I just remember that it was so horrible that my eyes got wide and I swallowed it as quick as I could. Apparently it's very good for you, which would explain why it tastes worse than any medicine. Nato is widely known to Japanese people as an acquired taste, too, so it's not something that they'll just let slide. If it is being served to you, you are being watched like a hawk. And people will ask you if you like nato with a sly smile and a little lilt in their voices, like it's a test. If you've ever spoken to an Australian or New Zealander who has asked you if you like Vegemite, it's the same little look. The only proper response, we have learned, is: "It's horrible. You people are savages." And in fairness, squid on a stick isn't bad, if a smidge rubbery. Octopus dumplings; well, they're called octopus balls, really (though I hasten to clarify: it is octopus meat combined with dough and pressed into balls) are not great, but it's the dough I don't like, not the octopus meat. Pickled plums don't have a bad taste, they are just seventy-five times as intense as you'd like them to be. Nato is vile. I will give it another try in a few months, but for now, I'm sticking to my guns. Before each meal in Japan, people say "Itadakimasu". Loosely, this means "I am gratefully receiving this meal", though people will say it even if they have made the meal themselves. It's sort of a little one-second secular prayer. After the meal, they will say "Gochisousama deshita", which means "It was a feast." These are not really said to anyone in particular from the looks of things, but rather said to oneself just before eating, and getting up from the table, respectively. Kind of a nice tradition for those of us who don't really have the most interest in praying before meals, but appreciate the effect it has in having everyone start at once. That's it for now. .: posted by Zander Cannon 10:50 AM Tokyo Time 10.4.2002 I'm back, I'm back. Last night, Julie and I had our Japanese class at the Board of Education downtown and it was a killer. We had a quiz on kanji (Chinese ideograms) and we had to write their pronunciations out in hiragana (the syllabary for native Japanese words). Don't tell anyone, but I love those classes. I was never what you would call a model student, since I was more likely to draw cartoons in the margins than study, but when the subject matter is something I 1) enjoy and 2) can possibly fathom a reason I would need to know it, well, then I totally dig this class. Also, it doesn't hurt that all the doodling I would be doing in class I get done from nine to five. And then today Julie and I each had our private lesson with Mrs. Matsumoto, a parent volunteer at Yoto Shougakko (Yoto Elementary School). Julie and I trade off; this week Mrs. Matsumoto taught me Japanese, and Julie taught Mrs. Matsumoto English. Next week we will switch. The book Mrs. Matsumoto has chosen as her study book is "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"; man, what a cush job I have.  Okay, I promised there would be a tour of our apartment, so I took some pictures today and put 'em up. This first picture is from our living room, and the centerpiece is our new and lovely red couch. The couch unfolds into a bed, so we just put the sheets and pillows on there and we're good. That may sound like more work than you doughy Americans can handle, but it was a nice change from pulling four futon mattresses out of the closet and putting sheets on the top two of those. Sharp-eyed readers will notice Domo-kun sitting on the couch. Julie mentioned to her coworkers at Mizuhono Junior High that I had been looking for Domo-kun stuff, and one of them brought in a Domo doll that she said I could have. Julie brought it home on my gloomiest day, and it made me much happier than a stuffed doll should make a 29 year old man. The mats on the floor are called tatami mats, and they are made of woven straw. They are the primary reason that you don't wear shoes in a Japanese house, because they are very fragile and would be torn to shreds if tennis shoes so much as looked at them funny. The rooms in Japanese houses are measured in terms of tatami mats as well, since they are a standard size (about 3' by 6'). Our two rooms are 6 tatami mats each, and that would be wicked small in the US, but pretty decent here.  On the ceiling of this room is a plug that is about 2" by 1" and looks like this. When we got here, there was a lamp plugged into it hanging from the ceiling. We hated the lamp because it was fluorescent and made for bad lighting situations, so we wondered how to remove it, and I realized, heck, you just twist it and out it comes. How awesome is that?  Here's the other half of this room. We inherited a TV, VCR, and little boom box, among many other things, from our predecessor, Shane Morkin, who, along with his wife Saori, may have been the greatest predecessors of all time. They left and sold to us so many things that we were fully stocked from the moment we arrived. On the top of the TV is a papier mache tiger that we got from a paper factory/artisan store on our afore-journaled trip to Bato. It is very small here, but it is really cool. And scary, which makes it even more cool.  I'm not going to have time to finish the tour right now, but here is the computer, which is in the other tatami room, where I am typing right now. On the right is one of our closets, where we have Julie's clothes and our leftover futons. I miss my Aeron chair that I had to leave behind in Minnesota. I hope my former studio mate Vincent Stall is enjoying it, because it is sorely missed here (pun reluctantly intended). Tonight Julie and I are going to an enkai, a work party, with her coworkers at Mizuhono. I have heard tales about these work parties, and the tales usually revolve around everyone doing their level best to get everyone else, and particularly the newcomer gaijin, blind stinking drunk. And thanks to the ever-complex rules of Japanese etiquette, these are the things that it is rude, or at least a major buzzkill to do: 1. Refuse to drink. 2. Drink a little, then pour the rest into a plant. 3. Plead with them and say that you have to be somewhere the next morning. 4. Present them with anything short of a stern note from your doctor saying that you must not drink or else you will die. These things it is okay to do: 1. Drink yourself stupid. I'm told the best strategy for maintaining good relations all around is to get a little drunk, then pretend you are even drunker by singing songs so loud that no one thinks to give you the roadside test. Then your hosts, who typically make fraternity hazers look like post-it note reminders to drink, would feel guilty about forcing any more alcohol on you. This is the strategy I intend to employ this evening. And who knows, maybe the karaoke book will finally include Positive K's "I Got A Man". .: posted by Zander Cannon 5:40 PM Tokyo Time 10.1.2002 All right, here are some pictures, like I promised. First of all, though, I have to say something about Aikido. And also give you modem people something to read while the pictures load. Well, they sure don't coddle you in Aikido here the way they do in the US. Floors, for example. In the US: foam mats. In Japan: Tatami mats. Now, tatami mats aren't as hard as a wood floor or anything, but they are about as hard as a wood floor with a piece of posterboard stapled to it. Roll around on that one for a while and see what color your shoulders turn. Secondly, in the US: speaking English. In Japan: not speaking English, and making sure I know I'm doing the move wrong by holding my wrist so hard that it will only work if I do it just right. Effective teaching, I will admit, if the huge mottled bruise on my wrist ever goes away. Also, I'm not really that unflexible, but one thing is that I can't sit on my knees, resting on my feet. It isn't a muscle thing either; it's a joint thing. My butt just hovers an inch over my heels and it's really uncomfortable. I also can't bend my knees outward very well, so I can't sit cross legged. Let me tell you, that does not make things easier around that classroom. Because when you have to roll and hop right back up, you need to tuck your legs up under you in a way that I just can't do so well. So I feel like Andre the Giant in a classroom filled with Jackie Chans and I sometimes wonder how long they'll put up with it before they put a Rumble in the Bronx upside my head.  Here is the Cat Bus made from cans. Nekobasu (Cat Bus) is a character from Miyazaki Hayao's animated movie "My Neighbor Totoro". As I haven't seen it, I cannot give you any more details, except that it looks really cool. Here is a picture that I got off of someone else's website and is copyright by Studio Ghibli.  This was a favorite at the fair, and as you can see, Julie and a student and a little girl were all pretty excited to crawl inside and hang out.  Notice the variety of cans used in the construction of the cat bus. By Julie's head is a can of "Smap!" and most of the cans over the little girl's shoulder are beer cans. Beer, I might add, is available in vending machines just about everywhere. So are cigarettes. And ice cream bars. Naturally, so are soft drinks, but oddly enough, there are no machines with candy bars. I think it has something to do with the fact that there is no standard candy bar size. In the US, it seems like every candy bar is just a little bigger than or just a little smaller than a Snickers bar. Mars Corporation calls it "The Snicker Standard". Just kidding. I made that up. But US candy bars are nearly all the same size and almost always cost the same, at least in steps. There's the "Holiday Bowl Size", the "Halloween Candy Size", the "Snicker Standard", the "Extra Big Fat Boy Size", and the "Presumably You Will Be Sharing This, Madam". And that's really all. And there are a lot of candy bars in each category. But here in Japan, it isn't uncommon to see a Kit Kat, the same size that you would see it in the US, right next to a Kit Kat that's about an ounce bigger. Why on earth wouldn't they make the difference significant, you ask. I would tell you that you are asking the wrong person. Then there will be a candy bar about twice the size of a Hershey Bar, wrapped in foil, then put in a box. Why a box? Seriously, stop asking me, I don't know. Or there will be a four foot sleeve, pinched off in 4 inch intervals and filled at each interval with fruity snacks. You could wear it as a wrap. So my theory is that you just couldn't make a candy machine adaptable enough to house all of these types of candies. How sad.  There was a great deal of student artwork up at the show. Mostly it was generally themed around environmental and health concerns, though (and I know the feeling quite well) many of the students preferred instead to draw their favorite comic book character. We saw a lot of Sanrio Characters (Hello Kitty, Keroppi, Shinkansen), "Sailor Moon", as well as "The Prince of Tennis", which is apparently a favorite with the girls. This one was my favorite, however.  Here is a classroom in Julie's school, Mizuhono Chugakko (Junior High). Note that it's called a "School Festival" even in Japan.  Finally, here is the on-demand artwork surrounded by its artists. This was about the fourth try at this picture. Tomorrow, I'll get some photos of our apartment and you all get a little tour. .: posted by Zander Cannon 3:36 PM Tokyo Time 
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have a pop-up window.