By Emily Connor
I couldn't help myself from laughing out loud and seeming more insane than I usually do the other day when I saw a convenience store advertising ''KRUNKY CHICKEN'' for 50 yen a piece. The word KRUNKY is one of those words that just happens to pop up every so often in Japan, and it took me almost four years to finally figure out that it's supposed to mean 'crunchy'. KRUNKY shows up occasionally on poorly translated restaurant menus and also on chocolate snacks (although they spell it Crunky on the chocolates) and I must say, I am a very big fan of the KRUNKY. In fact, if I were not appalled by fried chicken you can bet I'd be in line to pick up some value KRUNKY chicken at the convenience store. Sounds like a great time to me.
Another thing that gets me every time is the constant misuse of the letter W to stand for 'double'. I guess W first began being misused when some Japanese advertising company read the letter out loud-- DABURUYUU. 'Oh, how cute! 'They must have thought. 'It sounds like the word double! Which means two! Let's just stick it on anything that has to do with two!' And that's how the W burger, as well as the W many-other-things was born. For some reason the misuse of the letter W makes me a bit sad. I understand that maybe the word 'double' is a bit tedious to spell, but seriously-- W? At first I thought they were using it to stand for the Japanese abbreviation for LOL, which would have made even less sense-- but for some reason it just stands for double. And sometimes they even use WW for a double double burger, whatever that means. Am I being too strict? Probably. But if I don't throw it out there, no one will, and I cannot allow the letter W to be misused for much longer. It's a travesty.
I've been in Japan for too long now, and I sometimes feel my brain melting in such a way where I can no longer differentiate between what's actually funny and what's not. Japanese humor is bizarre; they don't understand sarcasm (which is unfortunate, because my favorite thing in the entire world besides dried figs and EMO cinema is most-definitely sarcasm) and they don't appreciate belittling others for the sake of amusement. The other day I saw a construction truck go by with the letters KKK painted on the side (probably stood for Konnichiwa Krunky Koujyou or something) and although it was terribly horrifying it was equally as hilarious. But because this is Japan and an absurd and wonderful place in a much different way than the USA, even if I were to point out the KKK cement truck to a Japanese person I'm sure no one would have laughed. So I held in my crude comments to myself and just snapped a picture for the scrapbook I'm sure I'll compile in 20 years when I'm old and weathered and have 20 cats in my Manhattan apartment.
There are so many more things that I could rant about, but if I did all of the ranting today then I would have even less material for blogging than I already do. Keep in mind as you read all of my complaining that I do love Japan-- dearly, in fact-- so consider that my disclaimer and please don't flood the email boxes which I make sure never to check with your catty little comments like ''If all you do is complain, then you don't even deserve to live to Japan!''. Save yourself a bit of energy typing and just laugh at the absurdities and wonders of the land of the rising-and-ridiculously-hot-thanks-to-global-warming sun. Adieu.
by Anna Kunnecke
Understandably, Tokyo residents are worried about fire. Train stations have big billboards proclaiming its danger; kids are taught early to turn off the stove at the valve at the first tremor of an earthquake; our earnest building staff test the piercing fire alarms more often than I am convinced is strictly necessary. When we went out for yakiniku, I remembered why.
It had been a long week. Two tired parents and one cranky girl--none of us were up for cooking. We settled in at our table and they brought over the great tub o' fire. This is literally a big iron bowl full of coals that fits neatly into the round hole in the center of the table. Yakiniku with a grabby little kid is a special way for anxious parents to torture themselves, but even with lots of warnings and dire consequences foretold if she got too close to the glowing coals, it turned out that the fiery cairn itself was enough to inspire total respect in our little hoodlum.
The plates of raw meat came fast and we did our dance with tongs and long chopsticks, draping, turning, dipping, and burning our mouths. As the bits of meat got hot and sizzled, drops of fat would drip onto the coals, causing a little storm of sparks to erupt. My daughter was mesmerized. "Ooooh! Sparks!" she would exclaim, each and every time. It suddenly struck me that here we were, the archetypal family, huddled around fire, poking meat with sticks. Sanitized, commercialized, and safety-fied as it may be, it seems to me that the yakiniku table is basically a modernized urban version of the campfire.
Minus the songs. And the marshmallows. And the mosquitoes.
Not that I'm complaining. This is just about as much fire as I can handle in my life. And I liked that for my daughter it connected the word 'fire' to something more tangible than the candles we light. All of our scary stories about candles and fire and terribleburningthings aren't nearly as effective as one evening spent around an intensely hot bowl of actual smoking burning stuff. I'm happy for her to have a controlled version of fire to get some of that extremely useful and irreplaceable ouch-they-weren't-kidding-when-they-said-don't-touch biofeedback.
Since so few four-year-olds are allowed to play with matches out on the street anymore (these crazy over-protective modern parents), there isn't much reality to those big red trucks their kindergarten teachers take them to see. And so intense curiosity sometimes gets channeled into experiments like trying to light candles in your mother's closet or setting off firecrackers in the yard, leading to charred clothes and the wrath of the entire neighborhood. (Really. Both those things happened to a friend of mine within the course of a year. It was quite a year.)
So I have a suggestion. Instead of those Hi-No-Yojin marches the neighborhood associations are always trying to guilt-trip people into joining, which involve marching and banging gongs and bells and chanting "let's be careful of fire," I think they should just take the whole ward out for yakiniku. Let everybody grill up some tasty morsels, down a few icy jokki of beer, and at a crucial moment, stop, point at the coals and say, "People. Just remember: it's very, very hot." I think that should do the trick.
