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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)

I forgot about this part...

Warning, Warning, Warning - the following is a massive over generalization and yet is somehow consistently true:

So it's been a while since I lived here in old Japan, and I completely forgot about this common occurrence: Surprise that other people outside Japan do and have the same items and experiences as the Japanese.

Chalk it up to being an island nation, from which no possible knowledge, technology, or cultural attribute could possibly escape, but there is an odd tendency for people in Japan to be floored by the idea that other countries have similar practices/animals/food/thoughts/likes/dislikes/technology/ability/knowledge etc. etc.

Today I was reminded of this when I completely blew my father-in-law's mind by...well, let's back up.

We were at a Yakitori joint (grilled chicken on skewers) and after consuming an embarrassing amount of grilled poultry we were in repast mode with toothpicks firmly planted between our now-exhausted mandibles. I took a fresh toothpick and pointed out one of their more ingenious features - many toothpicks have a pointy end (the picking part) but while some are double-edged, others have a kind of bedpost ending where it seems to have been run through a Keebler-sized lathe. I had previously been informed by my friend Ian (note: he was a science major and thus very very smart so I basically trust anything he says) that this portion was designed to be broken off and used as a resting piece for the remainder of the toothpick - like a pillow for the pick that kept the mouth-destined end off the table and thus somewhat table-schmutz free.

Upon showing this nifty feature to pop-in-law, he commented that it was amazing that I, an American, should know more about toothpicks than a Japanese person. When probed, his wonder-source was that toothpicks were a uniquely Japanese tool and so how could I know about this clever, but little known application. When I told him that we do in face have toothpicks in America, his brains exploded all over the table completely ruining the previously jovial mood (not entirely accurate, but metaphorically speaking - spot on).

It reminded me over other "yes, we have that as well" moments that caused gray matter to splay across a table, such as the idea that other countries have (and here is just a short list) seasons, Baskin Robbins ice cream, kites, chopsticks and an ability to control them in a semi-capable manner (non-Asian countries only), toothpicks, etc.

UPDATE - This Friday was my first lesson with the students at my new school. Being such, it was a Jiko shokai lesson, or self-introduction. After seeing my ppt presentation, it was open question time - I was asked by students ages 8 - 12 if America has the following items:

Cucumbers
Chocolate
Children
Animals

too cute

Genius! Pt. 1 - Hot Water Pot

Boiling water in a kettle is for Luddites, suckers and lazy Americans who don't work insane hours and have the luxury of waiting around for water to reach adequate temperatures for tea. In Japan, such inefficiency is an insult to your hard-working ancestors who used to build entire train-lines just as a warm-up exercise before breakfast. To remedy this dishonorable inactivity, there exists the hot water pot, or denki-potto (電気ポット）.

Commonly they look as such:





As you can see, there are many features which make this more than just some Thermos with a plug. It has timers, temperature controls (some even have a baby-formula temperature setting), and the all-important "lock" (Also known to unwitting foreigners as the "What the føk?" button after the most commonly uttered phrase while pounding the circuits out of the promising-looking large silver button in the middle and getting nothing but cold electronic indifference).

Still, it is pretty sweet when you want green tea and you want it now. Also good for instant coffee, instant ramen, instant corn soup, instant miso soup, and instant reasons to go to the hospital when you decide you can fill a teapot while watching the TV at the same time.

(BTW, You can't.)

Playing with English

Ok, so maybe the last post was a bit harsh on the Japanese use of foreign languages in their signage, so as a counterbalance, I will make the point that they can actually be very creative when borrowing English words (and other languages I imagine, though I don't speak any well enough to know)

This is a sign in front of the local Mr. Donuts (which was apparently once a US chain that moved and survived overseas)



These cute little sugar-laden face-adorned snacks are called (and here is where we get clever) Hole Things, or Whole Things. Since it is written in Japanese, there is no phonetic difference between Hole and Whole. So are they "Hole" things since they have a hole in the middle, or "Whole" Things as you can eat the whole thing?

It's like the Schroedinger's Cat experiment of snacks

What is in a name?

A recent constitutional around the neighborhood inspired me to snap some shots of local apartment buildings, or more precisely, the signs adorning local buildings. With addresses providing something short of a precise location, many apartment buildings have adopted names. While you might expect to find lots of "Nakanishi" or "Yamada" names, nothing shows what a classy and modern person you are like having an address with a bit of French or English thrown in for good measure. One building I lived in changed its name to "Orb du Mer", and another building I lived in dubbed itself "Sejeur Nangu" (although once run through the Japanese alphabet they were 'Oubu du Meru' and 'Seijyuru Nangu' respectively).

As in the states, the names can have precious little to do with what is actually around. The US is lousy with developments whose names are inspired by whatever natural surroundings were plowed under in order to litter the landscape with identical housing units. Thus "Beechwood Grove" has likely leveled out the grove and replaced the beechwood trees with those anorexic maple trees that never seem to grow and are buttressed by more supports than your average cathedral.

Let's take a look at some, starting with the obscure:



Rokko is clearly the area to those who have been reading the blog - EXA is...not in the dictionary



Definite points for succinctness, but minus points for total lack of imagination.



"Hill" is a popular word in these names. Forget that this isn't on any discernible hill, and what a box sought by Nazis has to do with anything is beyond me.

Let's move on to the French inspired:



Phonetically this is "Monarie Rokko" though no French-English dictionary could provide a clue as to what Monarie means (remember, this is from French, mashed into the limited phonetics of the Japanese syllabary, and reproduced into English so the spelling could be light-years off)

However, the place seemed reasonably full of tenants so this is clearly not of great concern.

moving on...



The tower of Rokko - nice! (it is rather taller than the surrounding buildings, so bonus points for accuracy)



This is "Taisei LaFoure Rokko". Taisei means successful life in Japanese
I tried a variety of spellings for "Foure" and the only thing that returned any result was "foirer" which means to go (and here I quote the dictionary http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/dictionary/ ) "tits-up" (i.e. belly-up). I am sure this isn't correct, but I love to think that the translation of this is "Successful life the tits-up Rokko"

On second thought, this could be a mistake of the English "Foray" for a French word and given a "la" which would render it the only slightly-less inane "Successful life the incursion Rokko"



Clearly these people had a dictionary...Beautiful Life Rokko.

The architects of Japan don't rely only on the French, they do love them some Spanish as seen here:



Pretty House. Simple...and boring so let's keep moving into the realm of English, where the figurative wheels come flying off the bus.



Nothing says good living like pleasant English words crammed meaninglessly together.



"Kou-nan Veru Shiti Rokko" or more likely (but we are entering the realm of conjecture...oh hell, we are already deep in the backwoods of conjecture by this point) "Kou-nan Veil City Rokko"　which does nothing for clarification on second thought.



Town Court Rokko - though given the lack of clarity in the pronunciation this could also be "Town Coat Rokko" (phonetically this is Taun Couto Rokko)



Here we have the optimistically named "New Sun Life Rokko"



This you can read, so I will simply explain that "Mansion" refers to apartments in Japan (and leave you to ponder why)

I can not explain the Lions, nor the lack of a possessive apostrophe, though perhaps it's best for the human occupants to not have Lions for landlords.



Again, you can read, so I will clarify that the "ekimae" at the end signifies that this is close to the train station - perhaps the source of prestige. Also, since prestige implies distinction, there is a grain of irony in this being prestige number 2.




And around the corner is a separate "prestige" titled apartment further diluting the meaning of prestige, although at least this one provides some "assurance"

you know, in case you were worried.

And last but not least



The WeLv buildings, so named because (and I quote from signage around the 4-building complex) "We Love, We Live". It looks like they just couldn't commit to that second vowel. (The Japanese pronunciation is "werubu"

This is just withing a four block radius of my house - more fantastic names abound and I will naturally post them as I came across them.