January 2010Archives

By Martin Faynot

by Emily Connor


There are a few questions that the Japanese seem to love asking to foreigners. Can you read kanji? Are you good at figuring out the train system? Can you use chopsticks? It's a constant test to see how well you've managed to assimilate to the land of the rising sun.

But my favorite question by far has to be ''Can you eat natto?''.

For those of you who don't know and haven't had the opportunity to try this culinary delight, natto is fermented soybeans that are insanely good for the body but insanely harsh on the five senses.  The Japanese have been eating natto since the beginning of mankind, using it in many forms of cuisine, all of which I can't stand. You can eat it over rice with a raw egg, eat it wrapped up in maki-sushi, eat it right out of the package, and many other ways that I'm just uninformed about. No matter what you do to the stuff, though, it's just not palatable for me.

Don't get me wrong, though. Whenever I'm asked if I can eat sushi, tofu, konbu, wagashi-- many things, really-- I always answer 'yes'. I won't lie about not liking uni, though. Eating the skin on chicken meat also freaks me out. I'm not going to lie and say that I enjoy natto, though. A lot of foreigners (like me) who come to Japan and want to fit in with the natives probably have made such a mistake and regretted it miserably. We Westerners weren't raised on natto, and weren't genetically engineered to even be able to swallow it properly.

The first time I tried natto it was in an izakaya in Okinawa. It was a really nice and well-known place, and a Japanese friend of mine was treating us all to dinner, so when she ordered natto-maki I felt obligated to at least try a piece. I figured that the rice, nori and shoyu would mask the flavor that was rumored to be unpalatable by so many. I put the natto-maki in my mouth and chewed, chewed, and chewed and the natto just wouldn't disintegrate in my mouth, and the pungent aroma of the fermented soybeans just wafted into my nasal cavities, almost causing me to gag. Spitting the food out of my mouth would be unacceptable, so I eventually managed to swallow it down after about three minutes of downing a glass of water in attempt to force the natto down my throat. Needless to say I wasn't a fan.

But my burning desire to someday be able to deliciously consume natto didn't end there. I was convinced that it would grow on me if I ate it enough times. They say that humans aren't capable of really enjoying the full-flavor of whiskey until they're in their forties, and I thought that maybe natto would be the same way for me. If I trained my palate and tried it in enough forms, just maybe I would be able to see what all of the rave was about. My futile attempts failed me, though. To this day I am not capable of enjoying natto.

Perhaps, though, natto isn't even delicious to Japanese people. Maybe they just say it's delicious because they eat it from when they're children, and told by their parents that it's good for you and that it's important to eat. It could possibly be comparable to when I was a child and told to eat my Flinstone chewable vitamins every morning before school even though the purple one tasted like cough syrup and I hated them with a passion. On some days I would just hide it under my tongue until I got out of the door and spit it out into the bushes, but there were days when I would stomach the potent flavor because I wanted to grow up to be big and strong. Apparently it worked, because I now stand at an impressive 176 centimeters. Thanks, Fred Flinstone.

When you come to Japan, try natto in attempt to mingle with the locals. Don't expect to enjoy it, though.

by Anna Kunnecke

     I have been reading about the devastation in Haiti, and it's so huge that I can't even wrap my mind around it.  I tend to enter into understanding through the chink of my own experience, so my mind has been turning again and again to 1995, when I was a senior in high school and a massive earthquake hit Kobe, Japan.
     While Haiti feels impossibly far away, Kobe was maddeningly close to Tokyo, and yet we were similarly helpless.  TV reports were filled with stories of relief workers stymied by crumpled roads.  We could see footage of people lined up for food, but there was no way of getting it there.  One salaryman took the day off work to make hundreds of onigiri, the flavored rice balls that are a nourishing, transportable meal.  I don't know if he ever got them to the people who were really hungry.
      Months after the earthquake, the city was still in crisis, and it came about that my high school class traveled by bus to help with ongoing relief efforts.  30 seventeen-year-old foreigners are nobody's dream team, but we were eager to help...if also eager for an adventure.  We sobered up pretty quickly as we saw collapsed highways and buildings with an entire wall sheared off.  We passed intimate spaces pried open to the world: tables set with dishes, beds that people were still sleeping in, a bookshelf stuffed with comics now stained by rain and soot.  We performed the most menial of tasks--shoveled ditches, trundled around relief packets, chopped endless pounds of potatoes and carrots for the cauldrons of stew that were cooked and served every day.  Such meager help.  What I still feel today is the shame of the old dignified ladies who sidled up to me and asked for packets of tissues and clean underwear.  
     That trip surely helped us students more than it did the people we went to serve.  This is the irony of going to a place to 'help'--it would have been most effective, in terms of efficiency, to take the money it took to transport and feed all thirty of us and our chaperones and simply donate it to the city of Kobe.  But because we went there young and open, we were entangled in the reality of the ruined city in a way that was irreplaceable.  'Earthquake' will forever mean to me something more visceral, more human, and more sad than any story I've ever seen on a screen.  So a part of me is awake as I think about Haiti.  I'll send money to relief organizations, because I don't know how else to help.  But I will also send up prayers, though I am not a religious person.  I mourn with them.  I don't believe this is self-indulgent.  I am not the only person who feels a personal chord vibrate to the tragedy of Haiti, and it's that vibration, that empathy, that moves us to step outside our comfort zone and try to be useful wherever we are.  

By Kevin Cooney

I spent the New Year's holiday in the most traditional Japanese way.  Cocooned inside layers of blankets watching TV and eating mikan oranges. Of course, the kadomatsu, kagami mochi and other seasonal decorations are an important part of the Japanese New Year celebrations.  They are, however, only minor distractions.  The TV is king during those lazy days of the New Year.  Kohaku Uta Gassen, the Ekiden are among a few of the programs that keep people glued to their sofas.

This year I passed on most of the traditional New Year's programming, and instead kept myself busy with a triple marathon of american science fiction shows.  I cruised the stars with Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 and Star Trek.  I know, I am a stellar nerd.    

The year 2010 is a bit technologically disappointing.  I remember as a kid thinking about 2010 being so far in the future. I would have though we'd have flying cars and food made out of plankton by now.  But we don't.  Well, actually I'm not sure about the plankton thing. I think I might have been served that recently in Tokyo.

One thing struck me from all the Sci-fi I watched.  In almost every future world conceived by Hollywood, most people eat with chopsticks.  What's more, people in the future almost always appear to be eating udon noodles.  How is it that the writers and creators of Hollywood collectively decided that in the year 2365 all humans would be eating udon with chopsticks?

Chopsticks are not new, far from it.  Their origin predates the fork by centuries.  I prefer chopsticks to the knife and fork, but I'm curious why so many different science fiction creators agree that our future is the chopstick.  I had such high hopes for the "spork."

Obsessively watching the details of every scene, I started noticing Thai triangular pillows in the alien sleeping quarters.  Ikebana in the intergalactic meeting rooms.  Martians eating out of a donabe hotpot! American sci-fi set designers incorporate a stunning amount of asianesque bric-a-brac into future worlds.

I suppose it's due to the exotic nature these things have from a western perspective.  I'm often asked by friends back home about Japanese robots and technology.  No flying cars here.  Though the door at Seven Eleven opens by itself.  That's cool, but not a sentient cybernetic personality.  At some level living in Asia demystifies the foreignness of these things and thus ruins the imaginary future.  Instead of enjoying the fantasy world in my TV, I just wonder quietly to myself why hundreds of years into the future, the universe is using chopsticks yet still these gaijin can't slurp noodles properly.

 

By Claytonian
I'm from nowhere, USA. By the time I arrived in Japan, I had a train riding tally of one: some in-state ride that made one stop about every three hours. So when I realized my primary means of transport out of my first town in Japan was trains, I was a bit scared to be honest. I remember my first ride in Japan quite clearly.

I needed to go to a gathering of ALTs in some nearby town. My handler took me to the station and ordered a ticket for me. Then she started to just walk away after passing it to me. "Wait!" I choked. "Where do i get off?" I couldn't remember city names at that point, let alone stations. We conferred with the station master, and I was told to get off at the fifth stop down.

I was quite jumpy for the whole ride. Not only was it an alien feeling to ride the train, but I couldn't understand the announcements and was paranoid about my ability to merely count to five reliably. Luckily, another ALT got on the train at one of the stops because he was going to the same meeting. We exchanged tales of how weird life had been since we'd arrived in Japan a week before to relieve our mutual stress until we got to our final destination. In a way, I had dodged my first test by encountering the other ALT. But there were plenty of chances to fail at trainsmanship over the coming months and years.

I make mistakes, even today. Even with my magical ability to read those funny characters and tons of experience on the rails. It's kind of amazing that I still can't get trains right, but I take heart that even Japanese people make mistakes at this. One trick that does help is to ask the golden question: [station name]で止まりますか (~de tomarimasu ka, which means: does this train stop at station x?). That phrase has saved me countless times.

Unfortunately, since I moved to the much busier area that is East Japan, I don't get to see the train staff as often (the trains are too long and the staff are in the ends usually). They will direct you, using their encyclopedic train knowledge, to the correct train platform if the one in question is not right. If staff is not immediately available, sometimes I resort to asking civilians. But that can freak them out--yes, some people freak out when approached by a foreigner no matter what language said foreigner is using--, so I loathe doing so.

Lately I have been relying on my smart phone to find the simplest-possible route between places. If I have to do a 乗り換え (norikae, switching trains at a stop), that multiplies my error margin by about 10%, so the phone is a life-saver. But even the phone will sometimes make a mistake! I got to feel smug one night when I noticed that the phone was giving me bad advice. Take that, "smart" phone! I snickered to myself. It retaliated a few days later by running out of battery power in the middle of Shinjuku Station.

By Martin Faynot

Happy New Year! Enjoy 2010 the year of the tiger.

By Emily Connor


It's amazing how the Japanese continue to support the music industry. Japan is one of the few countries on the planet where the whole pirating boom hasn't quite taken over the minds of the youth, and record shops that are long gone in the UK and the US are still bustling with customers lining up to be the first to buy so-and-so's album on it's release date. Many people have absolutely no problems with putting down 1,500 yen for a single-CD, or up to 4,500 yen for a full-length album.

I'm led to believe that this is due to the fact that high-school students and university students are really driven to support an artist or a person that they think is admirable. After all, no matter how many boy bands release an almost painstakingly similar song throughout the year with a different title, everyone will still buy it. And if a truck with an idol's face goes driving through Scramble Crossing, you'll always see girls pulling out their mobile phones in the blink of an eye to snap a photo of their favorite boy-idol singer's face. It just makes some people feel good to support an artist, or idol, that they like. People feel like they're helping out their idols by dishing out the money for albums and music DVDs, and there's nothing wrong with that.

A lot of artists include a special fan good item with their CD on the first week or so of it's release, and I also think that that helps with album sales. For example, if you buy the A and B version of the same exact single (different covers and maybe one different B-side track on one of them) sometimes fans get invitations for very limited in-store concert events, or artist meet-and-greets, or sometimes just little things like sticker sheets and posters will drive fans to buy the CD instead of just downloading it. I also feel like this is maybe why iTunes hasn't taken off in Japan as well as it has in the US.

For people who don't wish to actually buy the CD, but also don't want to illegally get it, CD rentals are available in Japan. You cannot rent video games, mind you, but music CDs are very common to rent and end up being much, much cheaper than buying the actual CD... Unfortunately no extra prizes come with rental CDs, but it's still a good way to support an artist.

No matter how you look at it, record sales are declining considerably worldwide. Unfortunately it probably won't be too long before people in Japan stop buying CDs, too... But until then, being a music artist in Japan is a great thing.

This picture of drunkanese will become very relevant to the article, or so the statue tells me.

Recently, I went on an official writing trip to Niigata. It was a pretty unique experience, not only to be essentially a travel writer in the land I love, but also linguistically. For the former experience, with lots of pictures and links to places I went to, I'll defer you to my blog entries on the trip. For the latter, I will talk about my musings on language that I had while on the trip in this post.

We made for an interesting pair: I, an American with my English and 1kyu Japanese, and my fellow travel writer, a German woman who writes in English and understands Vietnamese and French. She also had considerable Japanese ability, but my experiences with the big standardized Japanese tests and language school gave me an edge for the technical terms. Our handler from the company arranging all of this, despite his time abroad, generally declined to speak English, as he seemed to have given up on it. Not that I blame him. So it fell to me to translate for my German compatriot.

It's not the first time I've been a hapless and woefully under-qualified translator. Back when I lived in Kyushu, I was called upon to help translate for a couple of visiting citrus farmers from Spain. They would speak broken English to me, and I would speak yet more broken Japanese to the local mikan farmers we were visiting. Then the locals would speak their local confusing dialect, and I would translate that back to simple English for the Spaniards.

This time around I was a bit more proficient. As we were guided around Niigata, Sado island and the Echigo area, my listening techniques, as I've noticed in retrospect, seemed to be rather zen. Instead of trying to listen and understand each term, I just took whole sentences in. I would stand and keep an ear half-cocked for whatever explanation we were getting at the moment, and have revelations like, Ah, yes, they are talking about the Bakufu's corporal policies. This worked pretty well for me most of the time. Occasionally, the German would ask me what a word meant. Usually, I had to admit that I hadn't picked out whatever term had gathered her interest. The zen of listening to Japanese is to not listen, or something. But happily, I am to the point where I could relay the German's terminological request and understand the explanation. This part required actual concentration.

On day two of our journey, we had dinner with a local couple. The husband was actually a Spanish citizen. They spoke to each other in Japanese at times and English at others. They wanted to speak his native language when together, but wine always got in the way. Ah libations, they can both help and hurt linguistic abilities from what I've observed.

Skip to our last night of travel luxury, in a ski area hotel, and the three members of our team were all talking in Japanese, which was a bit of a nice marvel to me. We had not gotten our handler to break down and actually speak English (which he could understand) outside of one good drunken karaoke session -what did I tell you about libations?- where he sang some, and eventually I and the German were the ones that broke down and spoke more and more Japanese over the course of the trip. By that final night, I was feeling almost fluent and my fellow writer was very impressive herself.

But when I got back home that fluency fell back to its usual embarrassing levels. What was different? Maybe I lost my zen in my normal setting. Maybe it was that I had to go back to teaching English the next day. It's hard to say. I'm not particularly good at languages to begin with, but it was nice to feel like I was for a while. I am not going to stress it. I don't even carry my dictionary around anymore. If there is a need to communicate, a way will come. Way? Maybe I'm a linguistic Taoist instead of a zen-listener. Or maybe I am just awesome at muddled-metaphors.

by Anna Kunnecke

    We have a tradition in my family that on Christmas morning, each stocking-hung-with-care will contain a new ornament.  So over the years we've accumulated quite a collection.  Mine are all angels, my brother's are toys, and my sister's are animals.  I've continued the tradition with my daughter: she is now the proud owner of three snowmen ornaments, and she's stuck with the snowmen motif whether she likes it or not.  We're the tiniest bit sentimental about our ornaments.  Each one has a story: That's the one you chewed the wings off of!--or, Oh look, this is the rocking horse I always tried to steal from you!  It's very touching. 
    This year when three generations of the Kunnecke household gathered together to trim the tree, there was the usual gushing and reminiscing.  But an actual reverence came over us as I pulled out a pathetic, battered little plastic boot.  It was blue, with dirty netting that had once bulged with candy.  It's a relic from the first Christmas my family ever spent in Japan, lo these (achoo!) years ago. 
    My mother told us how she searched Yokohama high and low for Christmas-y things to fill our stockings and adorn our tree.  It's hard to believe now that Japan decks its halls, streets, and stores with such Yuletide abandon, but back then there was no Christmas here.  It was still a foreign tradition, and not celebrated by most Japanese people.  Sure, a chain of chicken stores dressed its mascot in a Santa Claus outfit, and a few people bought whipped-cream-and-strawberry Christmas Cakes on Christmas Eve, but that was it.  So my mother, my candy-hating, raw-honey-advocating, red-and-green-are-the-only-Christmas-colors purist mother, was faced with a dilemma.  She could discontinue the ornament tradition, or she could purchase for us little plastic boots in garish colors filled with teeth-rot.  You already know how the story ends; we have the blue plastic boot dangling on the family tree to prove it. 
    If you know my tribe, it's no surprise that tradition trumped nutrition.  Traditions are taken very seriously in our crowd.  You do something once, and boom! it's a tradition.  My theory is that we appointed ourselves impromptu-tradition-creators-extraordinaire because of all those years we celebrated holidays in a vacuum.  There were no decorations on the streets, no Christmas trees, no carols playing in department stores, no candy canes, no turkeys or hams in the supermarkets.  No one exchanged presents; all our friends got envelopes of money (otoshidama) at New Year's, while we got piles of wrapped packages under the tree.  It was lonely, but it pushed us to be creative.  We ended up with such beauties as "The Traditional Trimming-Of-The-Tree Chocolate," and "The Traditional Sleeping By The Tree The First Night It's Up," and the mortifying "Singing Carols At The Train Station" that my parents insisted on and we miserably complied with. 
    This year Tokyo was glittering, blinking, merry with frost and holly.  It was festive, to be sure.  It made shopping and decorating simpler.  But nothing trumped the Christmas cachet of a little battered boot full to the brim with a mother's tenacity. 

By Kevin Cooney

I've never been very good at remembering what year it is.  That's kind of a strange thing, since I have no such problem with, for example Tuesday, the second week of August, or even a smaller yet full month like February.  I generally know what day of the week it is, and usually what day of the month and yes, even the current month.  However, the year for some reason often slips my mind.  Many times I have filled out some form or dated some document only to have it returned to me with a quizzical stare that says, "Seriously, you think its 2008?"  It's with great embarrassment that I have had to scratch out and re-pen a year here and there.
    It would seem an eminently large enough unit of time that I could remember it.  But sadly, I can not.  So while most people are busy celebrating what a great new year it is, I'm always trying to just remember which great new year it is.  The months before January are not so tough.  I've usually just gotten the hang of it by August.  I'm fully engaged in the yearly cycle by November.  Then comes a whole new one.  For the next three months I'll be constantly dating things 2009, and getting wincing "you idiot" looks from friends and colleagues.
    I have actually had the following conversation at a post office.

Me: "Whats the date again?"
Them: "The fourteenth."
Me: "Oh... and this part" (gesturing to year)
Them: Uhm. (Silent Disbelief)

    While my issue with what year it is was comparatively minor stateside, I now have to deal with the Japanese calendar as well.  With its various periods, Taisho, Showa, Heisei and more all marking the reigns of various emperors I can say that I came to Japan in the 13th year of the Heisei period.  But only because I just did a web search to find out.  When filling out a bank statement and suddenly being asked what the current date is in Heisei, I draw a blank.  Which is fitting, considering my overdraft.  I know the day, week, month... but which year it is in the Japanese calendar always throws me.  (Pro Tip: I just write 09! Well soon it will be 010, if I remember.)
    Another issue is working with and living amongst other English speaking people who not only drive on the wrong side of the road but order their dates bizarrely as well.  Is it day/month/year or year/month/day or even month/day/year? I've seen fisticuffs erupt in an international workplace over the statement. "07/08/06... So was this in July?"
    I've thought about it, and I suppose the reason I have such difficulty remembering the year, is that it is of little relevance to my life.  I know its Tuesday because I have my Japanese lesson on Tuesday.  I know its the fifteenth, because that check is supposed to get deposited in my account.  I know It is February because I am freezing.  These smaller units I'm working with on a regular basis and interact with at great frequency.  But years? I don't have much cause to think about what year it is. I suppose that is Old Father Time's dirty little secret.  We get so busy with the Mondays and the Twenty-thirds that we forget all about the picture.  Time passes so surreptitiously that I hardly notice its already Hesei 22!  Oh my goodness, where has the time gone?  I'll tell you where it went, into lots of little 24 hour blocks of life here and there.

Happy New Year!