So work is sending me to Japan for 2 months and I needed a way to keep in touch with everyone, hence this blog. Part “hey, I’m still alive”, part diary, part travel guide, part chance to prove I’m not truly illiterate – however you look at it, the intended goal is to entertain. Apologies in advance for when I descend into a morass of homesick whining.
Not that I’m particularly defining home as a place. I’ve lived in too many places to be that attached to any one of them. Home is where your stuff, your pets, and your people are. Where you can speak and be spoken to and actually understand the *entire* conversation. Where not every minute of every day is an adventure, so you can relax. Where you’re not an ambassador of sorts, so you’re allowed to have a bad day.
And it’s good to be home.
I couldn’t leave Japan without seeing a sumo tournament in person. Luckily, I have friends who felt the same way so, after disposing of the last of the junk from the apartment and saying a final good-bye to the little silver dirtball on wheels, I headed to Tokyo. We got to the arena around 2, only to realize that we were still pretty early and had plenty of time to take in the sights (the tournament actually runs 9am – 6pm, but the matches are scheduled in reverse order of rank, so no one but relatives show up until the late afternoon).
For starters, let me just say that sumo is very much more impressive in person than on tv (just like figure skating or ice hockey). Tv gets you all the close ups and replays that you’ll never get in person. But the tv doesn’t even come close to adequately conveying the size or speed or energy of these events. Sumo wrestlers are LARGE people. And they crash together HARD. And the normally very reserved Japanese populace apparently feels that this is one of the places where decorum is not required (or desired). No streakers like in a European soccer match, but would you have guessed that the Japanese were capable of tossing seat cushions like we throw graduation hats? (We were later told that’s a “boo”, not a cheer – which just makes it all that much more impressive.)
The arena itself is an octagon around the center “shrine.” The first rows of seats immediately around the pit are for the batters up, judges, and high paying patrons. The first tier is all “box seats”. And the second tier is more of those red velvet movie theater seats designed for little Asian people. We’d decided to splurge and get the box seats, without really knowing what we were in for. For the record, a “box seat” is a space about 6 feet by 6 feet, ringed with a metal railing about a foot off the ground, and furnished with 4 pillows. Yes, they really do expect 4 adults to fold themselves into this space for 9 hours. Apparently Japanese origami skills extend beyond paper. Luckily the people in the box in front of us didn’t show up until really late so we could stretch our legs forward. We got up a lot too – how else would we have seen the myriad of trinkets for sale in the booths?
We also had a couple of “sumo for dummies” type books. A few tidbits we found particularly striking:
* The reason I could never figure out the “go” signal from the ref is that there isn’t one. The two wrestlers stare at each other until they both decide to go. That’s in part why there are so many false starts (and is a large part of the strategy to winning).
* The arena management does, in fact, take out extra insurance on the people sitting in the first couple of rows.
* The loin cloth (at least at the higher levels) is made of silk and it’s considered bad to wash it. So it’s merely “aired out” until it’s replaced (typically once a year).
The coup de grace, though, came during the second to last match. Advertisers can put prize money on certain matches, which gets them a small banner parade before the match. I don’t know who paid what, but yes, Hello Kitty made it to the sumo tournament.
We’re done here for this contract! It’s been fun, but it’s definitely time to turn out the lights and go home. Now, how to empty the apartment back to its “furnished” state and pack all the acquired junk into the 4 bags the airline will let me have ... I think we’re going to introduce the Japanese (who generally value brand new things) to several concepts: a yard sale, “free to a good home”, and a pre-packed camping box. :-)
And no, I never thought that that quote would ever be appropriate in my life. But it’s oddly apropos right now.
So we were happily eating our tekadon (sp?) at lunch today (big bowls of rice with a thick layer of tuna sashimi on top), when the sushi chef started chopping up this really weird looking stuff for the next customer. It looked kind of like a really pretty, frilly, spiral streamer except it was all white and obviously soft. Our curiosity did not go unnoticed, and the daughter came over and started talking (she spoke pretty good English). It’s apparently very difficult to get because it has to be served super fresh. But when it is, it’s really good and “creamy” (her word, not mine). Well one thing led to another and we ended up trying it. It was pretty good, although a little on the squishy side for me.
Now, the rule I’ve lived by over here is that you never ask what you’re eating. Instead, just shut up, smile, and enjoy – life is better that way. If I’d followed my own rule, I would still be proud of myself for being brave enough to try fish intestines (which is what we assumed it was) and I would be a much happier camper. Instead, I’m sitting on the knowledge that I’ve just eaten raw cod testicles. “Creamy” indeed.
How do I know this? Because the only place within an hour’s driving distance of here that sold decent American pizza has sold out to some Japanese pizzeria chain. We drove all the way over there for lunch only to realize we could have gotten better pizza 2 km from work (and that’s not particularly good pizza either). Shrimp and raw tuna and corn just do NOT belong on my pizza.
And to top it all off, the little grocery store here stopped carrying my dark chocolate fudgesicles.
Finally, something cultural besides food! Ray-san and I drove down to Tokyo to watch Kabuki (ok, Ray-san drove while I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to – I just had to navigate, which isn’t particularly a walk in the park either). Now, the full Kabuki experience is a 6 hour long performance shown in three sections. You have dinner during the intermissions. And if you’ve actually splurged and gotten box seats, you dress the part. I think I saw more adults in kimono in one night than I’ve seen the entire time I was here.
For us less cultured slobs though, you can buy a ticket to just one of the 2 hour long segments for really cheap. And you can get earphones with English commentary for even less. You sit in the nosebleed seats, so bring binoculars. But that also means your entertainment includes all the dressed up people in the box seats.
I don’t know how old the national theater really is, but it looks like late 1800s – all red velvet and mahogany and great acoustics and those really uncomfortable seats. Cameras weren’t allowed though and they watched us gaijin like hawks so I couldn’t even sneak a couple without flash. I think that’s seriously the worst treatment I’ve gotten out here. Do we really look that disreputable? (ok, maybe I don’t want that answered)
The segment we saw was a morality play about old sins coming back to haunt you (with an element of fate thrown in –the first sin was predestined, his only crime was trying to fight it). But it’s the acting you go to see. The fight scenes in particular are really stylized. There’s not even a pretension that it’s natural. At intervals, the drums will beat once and the actors will suddenly hold their dramatic poses for a minute as the echoes die away. Cheesy as all get out, but arresting nonetheless. It’s also apparent that the poses have some meaning that adds to the scene and we’re just missing it. The death scenes went a little overboard though – talk about the embodiment of “just die already!”
And to top it off, we made it home without getting lost. At least, we don’t think going 270 degrees left around the beltway to go 90 degrees right counts as being lost because we knew we were doing it. We just couldn’t find the entrance going the other way. Maybe it’s like the bay area with exits that only work in one direction.
Today is a national holiday here (when I asked what the holiday was, I was told “in respect for aged persons”). Of course, this means there have been festivals in various cities all weekend. The one I went to was a little different than the last one here in Omiya. Instead of people carrying around a portable temple, this was a large covered float on wheels. The musicians and little kids rode inside, while the older boys provided propulsion and girls did some sort of fan dance alongside. The cool part was that the float and the first half dozen pullers were all draped in the same piece of fabric that all led to the lion’s head “mask” that was leading the whole thing.
The carts are on wheels and have a motor of sorts. So all the helpers really have to do on a flat street is guide it along. But their turning radius is pathetic, and apparently brakes are completely optional. It took at least a dozen guys throwing all their weight against the cart before it stopped on a relatively shallow downhill.
But dancing lion heads and oodles of people in yellow spider-man jammies still don’t beat naked butt-cheeks.
For something a little different, I saw two castles today. They’re both reconstructions built in the last century, but I’m assured they’re faithful copies (although it does explain why the one is in the center of town, next to the train station, instead of in some defensible location).
The first, “Turtle Castle” only has a couple of towers restored. But they have a small museum with detailed pictures of the construction materials used. I’m amused to note that the thick white walls you see all over are apparently just a beefy version of lath and plaster made with large bamboo sticks. And it was apparently easier to use tree trunks whole as support beams than mill them into a more manageable size.
The second (Toyoda Castle) is a complete restoration (outside at least), and is impressive given that I’ve never seen an old building here more than three stories high and those are rare. This is seven stories (and you can tell it’s Japanese instead of Chinese because it doesn’t taper at the top – isn’t it amazing what completely useless information they choose to translate?). They’ve filled it with a really nice museum. Part of it is devoted to some poet I’m too uncouth to have heard of, but the displays of agricultural tools were really well done. I just can’t figure out why a culture that had a really advanced foot-powered portable water wheel to keep rice paddies wet had a hand-cranked spinning wheel. But they did have a display of snow-shoe looking things that I assume are used to walk across wet rice paddies. They also had a samurai display, complete with several katana blades. Those are really quite pretty (if anything that deadly can be called pretty).
And if you count the torii I walked through to get to the farm stand as a church, I actually managed to get in two castles and one church today.
One of the tourist maps I’d managed to collect over the summer has a cluster of waterfalls marked on it, only about 30 minutes from here. It’s in an area at the start of the mountain range where the regular atlas I have doesn’t show any streets at all, so I’ve been vacillating all summer as to whether it’s worth going and most likely getting lost or not. But waterfalls tend to be more interesting than temples and I figured I’d always feel like a wimp if I didn’t go. So I headed off this morning (after carefully stocking the car with snacks and drinks, just in case).
It didn’t take long before I was off the roads on the GPS map too (it’s an unnerving experience to be driving around on blank space on the map when you’re used to following red, green, yellow, and gray roads all the time). There were signs though. Nothing at all in English, but the blue signs sure looked like the “you are entering Mt Nantai State Park” signs we have at home. And the little brown signs pointed to all the attractions on the map very nicely – all I had to do was pattern match the squiggles. There were also lots of hiking trails scattered around and along the way I found several picturesque tunnels, a farming valley straight out of a fairy tale, and a cemetery with an unbeatable view. I’m really rather upset with myself that I didn’t go earlier and therefore more often.
Of the three waterfalls that were the day’s goal, one I never found (I think I know what I did wrong, but I’m not sure), one was completely dry at this time of year, and one was spectacular even if there wasn’t much water running over it. It’s in a little dell, and the path in goes through a simple torii. A statue of the angry Buddha guards the place (I’ve finally figured out that there’s a hybrid religion of Shinto and Buddhism – the old Shinto gods get Buddhist faces and names). He’s supposed to look mad to scare the evil spirits away. But the waterfall itself seems to be nature’s attempt to make the Buddha laugh in spite of himself.
The Japanese have some pretty neat gadgets. The latest one I’ve noticed is the little sensor at the toll booths that notices the height of your car/bus/truck and spits out the ticket at the right place for the driver to take it easily. I think my favorite though is still the parking structures. Think of a dry cleaner’s rack – you drive your car into a slot and park. Then the attendant dials up the next slot and your car gets stored vertically instead of taking of valuable real estate on the ground. It’s like a giant oval Ferris Wheel for cars.
But they also have things that don’t work quite as well. Like roasted chestnuts without an “X” carved into them – just how are you supposed to peel them? Or jelly sold in little paper cups. It seems like a good idea until you leave one in the fridge for a couple of weeks and then try to spread it on bread. You don’t have jelly anymore, you have a jello wriggler. And really, who first decided to pickle plums in pure salt? And then feed them to an unsuspecting gaijin as a regional delicacy?
In general, if it doesn’t swim fast enough, a Japanese person will chop it up, slap it on rice, and call it sushi. The most common things you see here are the same as at home: tuna, yellow tail, cooked shrimp (oddly enough, not as much salmon). But you do get some odder ones. Unagi, the fresh water eel almost always served in a special sweet sauce. The little translucent orange eggs that pop on your tongue. Raw scallops that look disgustingly squishy but aren't. Raw shrimp that taste unbelievably sweet and unbelievably slimy. Sea urchin which doesn’t taste bad but is beyond slimy (the association the mind makes when eating it is too gross to even bring up here). Some variant of tuna that is so tender it melts in your mouth. Egg cakes that look like yellow duplo. The list goes one and on.
The ideal ratio of fish to rice also differs, depending on the region you’re in. Some places favor an almost one to one ratio, others weight it heavily towards the fish. I had a new one last night though. Instead of the usual log shape, the rice was in the form of a sphere with a flat bottom. And there was barely enough fish to cover the top. But interestingly enough, the rice wasn’t just regular sushi rice – it had things in it. The rice balls with no fish at all had bits of seaweed and pickles. The ones with pickled mackerel on top had a little purple pickle in the middle. The salmon ones had roe mixed in the rice. All very carefully chosen so that it was appealing to both the taste buds and the eye. No idea what it was called or how to order it again, but it was good.
This year (Nov 1 to be precise) is apparently the 30th anniversary of Hello Kitty. Since she’s the unofficial mascot of Japan, they are doing it up big here. The Tokyo subways are lined with posters commemorating the round white fuzz-ball with ears. There are postcards with the well-known profile photo-shopped into all the famous scenes. Any gift shop worth its salt carries a familiar pink and white section. There are several Hello Kitty exhibitions around the country. And I’ve even seen a book commemorating the art commemorating the anniversary. I would say that this could only happen in Japan, but there was apparently a 30th birthday party for the cat at Rockefeller Center earlier this year.
Did you know that the slogan on her website is “30 years of cute”? I think I’m going to be ill now. I know! They ought to have a celebrity death match between the cat and Snoopy!
Complete with whipped cream and chocolate crunchies. Need I say more?
Growing up, I thought that chopsticks were all alike – 1 foot long light beige sticks of wood with a square profile which were designed expressly to torment hungry children whose parents believed in “cultural education”. Living in California taught me that they also come as disposables and as overly ornate craft store items. It wasn’t until Japan that I realized that they really come in a complete array of sizes and shapes and colors: carved wooden ones, pointy lacquered ones, elaborately gold-leaved ones, ones in solid colors, ones with cartoon characters ... Martha Stewart even has her own brand.
They also come in different sizes. The ones I’m used to are the ones you eat with, but there are also cooking chopsticks that come in big, bigger, and special big. For some reason, I’m fascinated by these oversized ones and couldn’t resist a pair at the 100 yen store (ok, so I buy a lot of ill-advised things at the 100 yen store – at least it’s a cheap addiction). Most of the cooking I do here poses no challenge for any utensil of any kind. But tonight I actually tried to fry eggplant slices and a little voice in my head whispered that it would be fun to try cooking with the chopsticks. You really would think that I would have learned not to listen to that voice after three decades.
First of all, eggplant is rather slippery. And, when cut in slices, adheres to a flat surface really well. This doesn’t bother me too much on a plate, but in a deep pan coated with sizzling oil and a live flame underneath, it’s a little more challenging. As far as I can tell, you have three options. You can try to squeeze the slice hard enough that friction keeps it glued to the chopsticks, but then you run the risk of accidentally shooting it across the kitchen. You can scoop the slice toward the side and try to use gravity to flip it, but then you run the risk of dumping it over the side of the pan into the flame or onto your foot. Or you can just spear the slice and hope to lift it just enough to twist it, but then you run the risk of vivisecting it. And your only hope at that point is to continue cooking it long enough that it will pour out of the pan.
I’m pretty proud of myself though. I didn’t start a grease fire and only one slice ended up on the floor. But prudence might win out in the end - the special big chopsticks might get left behind accidentally.
Today was a sightseeing trip out to a few places in the prefecture that I’d missed on my last trip – a tea plantation, and a mountain you can actually drive to the top of because there’s an observatory up there (I’m still abiding by my vow to never climb another mountain again – XDirtPushr, on the other hand, already has plans to climb another volcano). A co-worker who apparently hadn’t been warned about my sightseeing trips volunteered to come along (she’s fluent in Chinese, so she can read the kanji which often carry the same meaning in Japanese – it’s AMAZING what being able to read even only half the street signs will do for your navigation skills!).
It was the usual back-country trip through really pretty countryside. All the rice is now yellow and the farmers are out tying up sheaves to dry, pumpkins and apples are for sale everywhere, and the weather is distinctly cooler. The trees are all still green though, so it’s not quite fall yet.
It turns out that 5 weeks at home was just long enough to completely ruin my patience with Japanese speed limits without ruining my ability to drive on the wrong side of the road. Besides, if the road is narrow enough, you just drive down the middle anyway. The only trouble is if there’s an oncoming car. I pass on a little piece of information in case it’s useful to anyone - there’s usually a deep ditch on the uphill side of Japanese mountain roads, even if there are so many leaves on the ground that it doesn’t look like it. To her credit, if C squeaked, it wasn’t audible. She merely suggested (in a rather calm voice) that we move more towards the center of the road.
On the way up the mountain, we missed the first turn and ended up taking the windier way up. On the way down, it was harder to miss the turn (after all, there are only two roads at the top), so we headed down the luxurious two lane road. Oddly enough, at the top of the road was a partial road barrier with a sign that C translated as “beware falling gravel”. We promptly noticed that the uphill bank was fairly steep and held by a retaining wall for as far as the eye could see, but figured that as long as the road wasn’t completely barred, it must be safe enough. So, like the moron I am, I headed on through. There were some patches where you could see there had been rock slides despite the retaining wall, but it wasn’t until a couple of miles further down that we came to the pile of boulders in the road (C swears the sign at the top says beware of SMALL rocks, but these were large, pumpkin-sized chunks of mountain). But there were tire tracks through the maze, so we took the poor little rental car on through (see the previous moron comment). Only to find out that the road was completely closed by an old rockfall a little bit further down, so now we had to haul the car back through the mine field. I can only hope the rental agency doesn’t look at the car too closely when I return it.
All summer long, I’d been buying myself flowers every week in an attempt to make the apartment a little nicer to come back to. So when I left, there was a large bunch of cut flowers in a vase sitting by the kitchen sink. (I also considered it partial apology to the Redhead for leaving sand all over the bathroom floor after the last beach trip.)
Now, I wasn’t naive enough to think that there would be new flowers waiting for me when I got back here (if there had been, I probably would have keeled over in shock). But I also didn’t expect the *same* flowers to still be there, all brown and brittle and covered with weird white fuzz! The Redhead claims he didn’t notice them until all the water had evaporated and then it was too much trouble to throw them away. Note that the vase is 2 inches from the sink where you do dishes (there are only 2 forks, so I know he had to do dishes at least a few times in the last 6 weeks) – even if you didn’t see the flowers because you were blind, how could you not notice that smell??? And the garbage is only a foot further, well within arm’s reach (although it does require some coordination to not touch the fuzzy parts)! And to top it all off, when I offered to take out the garbage, he said not to bother because there wasn’t anything worth taking.
He did leave the freezer well stocked with fudgesicles though, and one can argue that that’s more important.
I’m back in Japan - same bat cave, same bat routine. And oddly enough, not much has changed. Yes, it’s cooler than in July. But that doesn’t mean cool, or less humid, or even comfortable. At least I didn’t waste suitcase space on sweaters and long sleeved shirts this time.
btw, I’ve realized that I forgot to bring the card reader for the camera, so there won’t be any new pictures until XDirtPushr sends me a quick care package. But the last entry of our Japan vacation is finally up – page backwards a couple of entries
This is really not something you want to hear your pilot say, especially if your flight is already 40 minutes late because the plane has been back to the gate to offload luggage for some people who never showed up for the flight (we all imagined some elderly couple desperately hobbling around, trying to find the right gate, and stubbornly refusing to ask for help, but there’s always that slight chance that someone wanted to ship something they shouldn’t have, so on the whole we all approved of that decision). This time, though, it was a broken hydraulic pump (apparently we’d done too much taxi-ing on a hot day) and to add to the fun, we had to wait for a tug to come pull us back to the gate. It was going to take an unspecified amount of time to fix the problem, but we should all stay seated like good little sheep. Thank the powers that be that I didn’t decide to be cheap and turn in my business class ticket for a coach class one and the $500 incentive! (In the end, we actually got off the ground only 2.5 hours late.)