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2.25.2003 Tonight Julie and I hosted several teacher friends of Julie's at our house for some genuine American soft-shelled tacos. It's pretty perverse when your "authentic" American meal is the Julie and Zander version of the Minnesota version of the Texas version of Mexican food, all made with Japanese ingredients. We haven't the slightest idea what these ladies thought of our food, but they were very polite and kept any gagging out of earshot. I can see why Japanese people might not like tacos; they don't have tentacles or fermented soybeans or anything else gross and weird in them. I mean, the shells were only so big-- we had to take SOMEthing out! We're just kidding about the gross stuff. We love Japanese food. We finally got someone to come by and replace our boiler in the shower. Oh, you can't even realize what a difference that makes! As you can see on our appliances photoalbum, it took quite a bit of effort to get our shower started (turn 3 knobs with precision timing), but now all we have to do is turn a knob that is on the wall and we can get very easily warmed or cooled water with great water pressure in seconds! I know! Can you believe it? This is like the pinnacle of technology! That's it for now. .: posted by Zander Cannon 10:32 PM Tokyo Time 2.19.2003 Tochigi prefecture (the region in which Utsunomiya is located) is apparently famous for strawberries, gyoza (potstickers in the US), sake, quality pork and beef, and pumpkin soup. We went to a "Welcome to Tochigi" mini-festival last week, which was aimed at all foreigners working in Utsunomiya. The mix was about half Westerners, half Chinese. After biking a half-hour into town, we took a tour bus out east, right back past our house (grr!) and out to a town called Mashiko, which is famous for pottery and other traditional Japanese arts. And strawberries. We arrived at the strawberry patch, which had strawberries growing through plastic that was placed on long dirt mounds. The strawberries then hung over the sides of the plastic-covered dirt mounds and were therefore easy and convenient to pick. Ingenious! We were told that we had thirty minutes in which to eat as many strawberries as we could, ready GO! It took me four minutes to realize that the new common phrasing in the US, "all you CARE to eat" is really right on the money, because once you get right down to it, strawberries are, though undoubtedly ultimately healthier for you, pretty much the equivalent of Mars Bars. Delicious, and you crave them when they aren't available, but more than ten will make you want to throw up. So I marvelled at the irrigation system that must be in place beneath these mounds in order to keep these strawberries growing (any mention of this to the others present resulted in a blank, unimpressed stare, and that was the people that DID speak English). After we headed out, we stood for a few minutes in the bus parking lot, and watched as the people on the tour who just couldn't get enough strawberries went across the road and bought great big pallettes of strawberries to take home. Julie and I stood and people-watched in the parking lot and just took note of all the passersby and the very familiar behavior of the Chinese foreigners that reminded us a great deal of ourselves, e.g. sticking together, speaking softly in their own language, occasionally sidling over to the person who speaks the best Japanese and asking them what on earth is going on... We saw a little girl, being carried by her mom, who was crying hysterically, interspersed with eating ice cream. I theorized that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, and Julie slugged me in the stomach. Soon after, we got back on the bus, with many a cry of "I call same seats!", and headed down the road to the sake brewery. An earnest-looking man in a traditional yukata-style shirt jauntily led us on the tour in Japanese, trailing confused foreigners and hastily-translating tour guides. What I got out of it was that they use high-quality rice, they smash it up good, then distill it in these big vats and add some stuff. Anyway, it comes out as sake at the end, and we had some. I never thought I liked sake until I came to Japan. For some reason, every bottle of sake I had in the US tasted like nail polish remover. Perhaps it was kept too long, or left in sunlight, or was just cheapo stuff, but I thought it was vile. This stuff, however, was delicious. Some of it even tasted fruity (but not in the wine cooler category-- don't worry). We made our own labels for the complimentary bottles we got at the end of this tour, and moved merrily along back to the Foreigners' Bureau or whatever it's called back in Utsunomiya. There, we were served a delicious meal of all the stuff that Tochigi prefecture is famous for: pork, beef, gyoza, more strawberries (mercy!), tempura, and, naturally, tons of sake. That was delicious, of course, and we capped off the night by playing that traditional Japanese game of what else... BINGO. I never would have guessed, but Bingo is big here in Japan. We were at a bar/restaurant that night and a wedding party (perhaps the groom's dinner) was loudly playing Bingo in the other section of the restaurant. Bingo was particularly fun, because Julie was the first winner, and I was the second. Much was made of our being a "lucky couple" after that. That night, we saw the sneak preview of that brand new movie: The Two Towers! Come on, don't laugh, it's new to us. We got to the theater just after the early show had started, so we got tickets for the later show, at 9:00. That was fine, we just had to wait a little, so we kicked around downtown for a while, ate dinner at the conveyor-belt sushi place, played Taiko no Tatsujin, bought candy bars to sneak into the theater, ran into some friends on the mall, and generally had a fine time. Soon, we figured we'd better head in, since we wanted to get good seats. But when we went up to the theater, the guy at the door looked nervous, like he felt really bad for us, and said that this screening was dubbed in Japanese. We looked over at the poster and there was a handwritten sign on it that said, in English, "Japanese version". Julie and I think that was a recent addition. We were told then that there is a showing of the English version, with Japanese subtitles, just down the street at 9:50. That, I think, was where we turned the corner from lots of fun to not so much fun. Waiting three hours for a 9:00 movie is bad enough, particularly when the movie is three hours long, but waiting four hours for a movie that is 3 hours long and won't end until 1 am is really a bit much, especially when we realized that we would probably have been in time for the earlier English show. Not to mention that Julie was getting a migraine. Come on fantasy worlds! Why aren't you being nicer to us? That said, the movie was cool, and fun, and Gollum was neat, and computery, and ten thousand orcs trying to kill a dozen poor suckers in a castle... well, that wins out over sleep any day, in my book. Hope everyone had a happy Valentine's day! .: posted by Zander Cannon 12:28 PM Tokyo Time 2.11.2003 Well, I promised you an "Ian" story (last Wednesday) and by George you'll get one. Last Tuesday night while I was trying to figure out what to write about, Ian called. Let me set the stage...He's had a stressful couple of weeks. Recently he was almost arrested because a crazy American friend of his, without an international driver's license, borrowed and crashed his car. That made the police realize that Ian's international driver's license had expired as well. While he loves his little town of Bato, he also likes to visit us in Utsunomiya and get to Tokyo from time to time. Without a car, I'm guessing that it's about a 3 hour walk to the train station, which is where he needs to go to get out of Bato. He's one of those guys that can joke about anything, but last Tuesday night he'd had enough. We all have mail slots in our front doors. My mom tells me that the US Postal Service calls these mailboxes "knuckle-busters". He got his hopes up before he got to the door because he saw something sticking out. Here in Japan, something sticking out could mean peanut brittle from your Grandma, which cures basically anything. Guess what was in his knuckle-buster... (A) A "care" package from an old girlfriend, (B) A huge spider, (C) A fish-head-on-a-stick. If you guessed (C) you're correct, but what could this mean??? A million thoughts raced through his head, but he settled on two of them. Both of them made him angry. It could either be a student at his Jr. High school, (angry about speaking english) or one of the construction workers from next door, disposing of his leftovers from lunch. He pulled that fish-head-on-a-stick out of that knuckle-buster and hurled it across the yard. I wasn't there, but I imagine it not going far, thus making him more angry. I've been told that "having a cold one" sometimes helps these situations, and that's what he did. He also called his friend Martin (who's from Kansas City, but has lived in Japan for like 10 years or something) to gripe about the terrible things that people do. This is what he found out...Last Tuesday was the first day of spring. Here in Japan our houses fill with devils throughout the year. Some nice neighbor thought they'd help out the poor foreign guy and scare off those old devils with the traditional remedy: a good luck fish on a stick. I bet they watched from their window as they contemplated their good deed. That's the last time they'll do anything nice. For anyone. Ever again. That's all for this week. Love, Julie Sometimes the things that happen from week to week are just so darn Western that they don't seem worth mentioning to Westerners. I mean, we saw that Hannibal Lecter movie Red Dragon the other night, as it just opened here. Pretty good. Scary. Not better than Silence of the Lambs, but way WAY better than Hannibal. Tonight we had grilled cheese for dinner, with tomato soup. I read about American news on the internet on my American computer and updated my American operating system. We watched the preview of Ian's documentary film that he just burned to DVD, and I read a little bit of The Cider House Rules, and I spoke almost entirely in English today. What country am I in again? I need to go read some manga, see Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla, and get a vicious beatdown in Aikido. That would set me straight. But seriously, sometimes I wonder if I'm being a good foreigner. I wonder if I'm learning the language fast enough, or if I'm getting the most out of my time here, or if I'm one of those goofs who struts into Japanese restaurants and loudly orders American beers in English, heedless of the waiter's complete lack of comprehension (I try not to do that). Sometimes I feel like I should seek out situations in which I'd be forced to speak Japanese poorly to get my ideas across, and that I would get some practice that way. I know I made great strides over the holidays when I was in charge of dragging my family all over Kyoto and Tokyo and therefore had to (seemingly) fearlessly just walk up to people and ask them a thing or two in broken Japanese. I suppose it's all a matter of putting yourself in harm's way, so to speak. The problem is, my work is kind of solitary, so even if I bring my comics pages out to the little lobby I found at Utsunomiya University and work on them there, there really is no real reason for me to talk to anyone there, and less reason still for them to talk to me. Well, one guy actually did come up and talk to me once, in English. He was about forty-five or so and crazy as a loon. He opened his wallet and showed me the present he was going to give his daughter: about USD $1000 in hundred dollar bills. He told me mere moments later than he had to go to the doctor because he was "sick....brain sick" and just kept going on and on. I don't quite recall, but I seem to remember that I wasn't in the mood to talk to loonies no matter how many languages they knew that day, so I began packing up my stuff and heading out. When I stood up, he started back and flinched, saying "I like peace! I like peace!", apparently thinking I was going to punch him or something right in the middle of this crowded lobby! I suspect I could be fairly threatening-looking to a 5'5" Japanese guy, being 6' tall, but it's probably the American reputation that precedes me ("Do you have a gun?"). No one tries to speak to me in Japanese, probably (rightly) assuming I wouldn't have any idea what they are talking about. I get a lot of work done there in that lobby, let me tell you. .: posted by Zander Cannon 9:20 PM Tokyo Time 2.4.2003 No new photo albums up just yet, unfortunately, but also, no bats in our apartment, so things just even out. If you want to see the old ones (well, last two weeks, so not THAT old yet), you can go here. I'm trying to think of something wildly significant and interesting to post here that happened since last Tuesday, and I'm drawing a blank. We went to Japanese class on Thursday. How's that? Oh, you know, that does remind me. When I was a little kid, and I would go on plane trips with my parents, I would look at the various languages on the safety card in the seat pocket... in front of you. And, like anyone else, I thought that Japanese and Chinese looked like they were pretty much the same. I mean, when it was one word, like "Safety" or "Emergency", the symbols looked pretty much alike. So I asked my mom, who knew everything as far as I could tell, if they were pretty alike. She said no. No? How could this be true? I mean, they looked exactly the same as far as this ten-year-old could tell! Well, this mystery really lit a fire under me, as I'm sure you can tell, and I have come up with a partial answer a scant twenty years later! Okay, I'll draw comparisons between Japanese and English and we'll just see how I do. From a history standpoint, imagine Japanese is English, and Chinese is like... Latin and Greek put together. Basically, Chinese forms the basis for Japanese, but Japanese really no longer has the same grammar rules or pronunciations, so in this vein, Japanese people will likely be able to recognize a few Chinese words, though they won't necessarily know how they are pronounced. English speakers may recognize Latin words as well, but not in a terribly meaningful way. In a writing sense, lets think of Japanese as English and Chinese as German or Swedish. Although the writing system is similar, there are a number of confusing variations that clearly set the languages apart (such as the ß, æ, or umlaut). In the case of Chinese, there are approximately 50,000 ideograms, or characters, each representing a concept or a part of a concept, which are all strung together. Japanese, luckily, only uses a still-terrifying 2,000+ Chinese characters, and takes up the slack with two 46-character syllabaries (so named because each character is a syllable, rather than a single letter) which can be used to, for instance, conjugate verbs (in the case of the cursive hiragana syllabary) or spell out foreign words or onomatopoeia (in the case of the more angular katakana syllabary). These kana syllabaries are made up of simplified Chinese characters and have no meaning other than their sound. So then, why don't the Japanese just spell out everything with these syllabaries and leave all the crazy calligraphy to the Asian continent? Too many homonyms, that's why. All too many Japanese words are pronounced the same as unrelated words, and so need some clarifying when written. I hope you have gained some knowledge from my mostly unresearched essay. And seriously, don't get Japanese people confused with Chinese people. Or Koreans. Or the Vietnamese. They hate that. They can't believe you would confuse them with all those other people who look so different! You Americans are so thoughtless that way! You... Oh-- you're German, you say? Never mind. So, back to the original topic. On Thursdays Julie and I go downtown to the Board of Education and take some Japanese classes from 6 to 8. That time is important because if Julie gets out of school at 5 way out on the east side of Utsunomiya, it's like the one-speed Tour de France to get in to downtown on time. So I am elected to make sack dinners for us to eat during the ten minute break. Although I could make sandwiches, we have found that bread is significantly more expensive here than it is in the US. It is also cut like Texas Toast, so it's twice as thick. And it's sold in the equivalent of half-loaves (that's six thick slices for ¥300). Not to mention, it's all white bread. So anyway, the far superior option in this case is onigiri, or rice balls. Ahem, that's rice that's formed into the SHAPE of a ... oh, you got it? OK, good. Here's the recipe. First, make rice. We make it in our rice cooker. As a side note, a rice cooker is about the best thing ever, EVER. Open the top, put in two cups of rice, then two cups of water, close the top, press the pink button with some kanji on it, and wait forty minutes. Ta-daa! Rice for you! And you can always add any flavoring, or uncooked chicken, or vegetables, or whatever. Best ever. So we make rice, then we put down a sheet of saran wrap, about as long as it is wide. Sprinkle some salt on it, then some sesame seeds. Then put about two heft scoopfuls of rice down. Then, I usually put in some eggplant or squash tempura-- not much, just a square inch or so, then start molding the rice around it. I add soy sauce and tabasco, then finish the molding and let it sit. I usually make them about the size of baseballs, which is probably too big, but that's the kind of eater I am. We could then wrap them in flattened sheets of seaweed, which helps hold them together while you eat them, but we don't really love seaweed enough. Well then, until next week! And as for me, I'll have to write something tomorrow. I've got an "Ian from Bato story," so stay tuned tomorrow for the juice. .: posted by Zander Cannon 10:21 PM Tokyo Time 
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