Comment Problems コメント問題

Some people have reported comment issues - you can always email me at
hyogodan (at) gmail.com to tell me how much ass this sucks

最近コメントできないということがあった。、hyogodan (at) gmail.com にメールしてもいい。

The Japanese version has none of the sarcasm of the English for those wondering.

Forgiveness please for the poor Japanese. 変な日本語許してくれてください。

School Outing a.k.a. Bad ideas and vengeful teachers

I have begun my new job in a combined elementary/junior high school whose name transliterates literally to “stop stop spine beautiful” – this again is why I love character based languages as place names often take on a surreal nature when read literally (my own “Yahata-cho” translates to 8 flags – so according to the Six Flags’ slogan this place should be off the hook!)

Anyhow…

This past Monday was “Kougai Gakushu” (校外学習) – outside the school learning – or basically ‘field trip’. However, while the outside the school part was true (mostly), the learning was a charitable description. In the morning, we started with a game of tag (called Oni gokko 鬼ごっこ), or "playing demons", in the sense of playing house, or playing doctor). There were four “oni” and the rest of the seventh and eighth grade class ran away. Now, the part where the ‘bad ideas’ comes into play was releasing the students into the neighborhood, most of which is newly built houses or under construction. So either one kid was going to meet an unfortunate end via a backhoe, or the residents were going to get pissed at a group of screaming kids running all over the place, and cutting across their lawn. It was number two. Surprising that no one thought to 1) ask the neighborhood association, or 2) let the neighbors know – although they probably would have told the school where they could stick it upon hearing this brilliant plan of turning their neighborhood into pre-teen scream-fest at 9 in the morning.

At this point the treasure hunt scheduled to occur in the same neighborhood was quickly relocated to the main grounds of the school. Hard to make a good treasure hunt in an open dirt field, but better than getting berated by the restless natives.

Following the world’s least challenging treasure hunt, it was lunch time, which was a barbeque (Japanese style, which is basically Korean BBQ – small cuts of beef and pork, grilled quickly over an open flame.) Now, to fully grasp the degree of “this would never – EVER – be permitted in the US,” allow me to set the scene – on the one hand we have half the students cutting vegetables with ginsu-style finger removers, and the other half starting a fire in the grill. The “grill” was essentially a rusted steel barrel cut in half lengthwise to form a trough of tetanus, stuffed with newspaper and charcoal all being lit by the staff-described “trouble student” with matches wearing cotton work gloves that kept (surprise surprise) catching on fire!

Now of course there was some supervision in the way of a few teachers standing back and making noises of reprobation along the lines of “Whoa! Be careful there!” each time the kid’s hands erupted into a lively conflagration. Once the fires were lit, it was time for the cooking.

To say the Japanese beef is high in fat is to engage in a degree of understatement along the lines of “The Titanic had a leak,” or “It got warm on the Hindenburg during the landing.” So when the teachers started piling this (admittedly extremely delicious and tender) high-fat beef on the open flame, the fat immediately melted and dripped into the fire erupting in a massive plume of flame reminiscent of stock footage from a steel mill, which basically cooked the beef immediately, while teachers attempted to pull the pieces out of the holocaust with 30 children screaming “Meat Please!” and arm hair being lost at a profoundly alarming rate.

Although in the end, all was accomplished without any real damage (aside from the hair loss) – so perhaps I shouldn’t be so critical.

Other teachers, however, may have had an axe to grind, because after lunch it was sports time. By now it was raining, so we moved into the gym for a game of basketball. The students were divided into three teams with the teachers making up a fourth team. Have you ever seen the Monty Python sketch from The Meaning of Life where the school children are forced to play the rugby match against the staff (or alumni, I can’t remember)? If so, you know how this game between the teachers and the students went down. It was brutal – teachers were grabbing balls out of kids hands, stuffing their shots at the rim, whipping the ball down court and bowling them over for easy layups, running the score of one match up to a 34-0 rout. There was no “let’s take it easy and not use our dominating size to utterly crush these kids” – it was the exact opposite of that.

It was also hilarious to watch a 40 year old math teacher smack a 12 year old girl’s air-ball into the next time zone, or a 28 year old gym teacher rip the ball from the hands of a waifish boy and whip the ball down to another young gym teacher for the fifteenth layup in a row.

Life lesson? Revenge? Whatever it was, I have never been so good at basketball in my entire life.

Good times.

DIY Drinks!

One of the more popular drinks in Japan is Japanese plum wine (梅酒 - umeshu). However, there are a number of different fruits that can be used in addition to Japanese plums. Some of the more common flavors are regular plum, apple, yuzu, and peach, but these are usually not sold in bars, rather they are made at home. Being someone who lives in a house, I thought I'd give it a try. I had hoped to use regular plums, but they are not a common fruit here in Japan and so not easily found. Instead I settled on Mexican Mangos which are also called Apple Mangos.

The recipe is very simple -
1kg of fruit
200-400 grams of sugar
1.8 liters of Shochu, which is often called Soju in the US
A complete lack of urgency

Here are the ingredients (lack of urgency not pictured)



You simply cut the fruit up (actually, this depends on the fruit - something like a plum with a thin skin you just add them whole, something like a yuzu or lemon with a think rind, you peel first but leave the rind in the mix)
and drop it into a large plastic jar as such:



add the sugar and shochu/soju (焼酎）and viola!



As you can possibly suss from the label, there is a bit of a waiting process - this was made on May 5th, and so should be ready to drink in time for the big summer fireworks festivals in August - although 3 months is more like a minimum for these things, it really is supposedly much better to wait about 6 to 8 months, and for the plums, some people say to wait a whole year for the best flavor. So this isn't really what I would call a Martha Stewart-style quick fix to unexpected guests that can be whipped up in a jiffy. (complete sidetrack - in what world are people always just dropping by unannounced and somehow expecting to be fed something? Wouldn't regularly feeding them do nothing to discourage this behavior? Did Martha whip up something quick to feed the officers who came to bust her for insider trading? - discuss amongst yourselves)

In about a month I will have a taste to see how it's progressing (at that point apparently you can get a sense of whether this will end up as something drinkable or a total waste of ¥2,000)