Why we are all a bunch of fat-assed knuckle-dusters with heart disease

Just returned to the mothership after a month back in the land of the free and diabetic. Every time I log into CNN or Yahoo! there is inevitably some story about how the asses of your average American now are able to exert some detectable gravitational pull on surrounding objects, or the rising epidemic of zygote diabetes. There are also usually some articles titled "Health Watch: 5 Foods to Lower Your Risk of Being a Land-Whale" or "10 Simple Diet Changes to Help You Avoid Wearing Pants With Enough Fabric to Rig a 19th Century Clipper Ship".


Fun Fact: The Goodwill donations of only two adult U.S. males were recycled into the sails of this ship. Ironically the ship was used to transport an emergency supply of butter to Big Bertha's Butter Covered Lard Cube factory which supplies the nation's public school lunch program.

And upon returning home I was again (as I always am after spending extensive time where the average body-type is closely modeled on a pipe cleaner) at just how unfathomably huge so many of my fellow Americans are.

Now clearly there isn't a huge degree of mystery behind the source of this discrepancy in water-displacement capacity.

In the US we eat this:


and this:



and this:



This last one is a funnel cake. Which has as much resemblance to a cake as the US House of Representatives has to a functional organization (rim shot!). When we believe that chucking raw batter into a vat of oil and topping it with confectionery sugar constitutes food we are clearly on the wrong path.

Compare this to one of my first meals on returning to Japan:


Fun Fact: In Japan this is food for four people. In the US this is an appetizer for a toddler. (in amount only, no way in hell is a kid in the US eating nearly so much green stuff unless it comes from a tube with Dora the Explorer on it or had enough lime green food coloring pumped into it to make Chernobyl look like a good place to raise children)


The dishes include (moving roughly left to right) grilled lotus root, boiled spinach with sesame seeds, salad, konyaku (which is a potato starch based gelatin) seasoned with shiso (a leaf vegitable), tofu cooked in the hotpot, sashimi, beef and eggplant stir fry, and cucumbers with seaweed and vinegar.

Now - I will digress to tell a story from my college days (readers may be shocked to learn that this 'writer' actually matriculated at and graduated from an accredited college). My friend and I would drag ourselves to the dining hall every night and face the same choice over at the grill where the food was prepared in plain view (If I was an underpaid line cook preparing food every night for a group of self-righteous and over-entitled teenagers who repeatedly asked, in a tone of voice that was all but dripping with skepticism, whether or not the vegan-only pan had been used to make any grilled cheese, I would seriously consider using a good portion of the prepared dishes as a gluten-based Kleenex). One of the choices we faced was whether to have the deep-fried chicken patty or the grilled chicken breast. The chicken patty had 16g of fat, and the grilled chicken breast had 4g. While the chicken patty was clearly tastier than the breast, we decided that it was not 4 times as tasty - hence we tended to opt for the breast (which we did in areas other than chicken! rim shot again!). Thus with the taste vs. heart-attack equation we were able to run a semi-inebriated cost/benefit analysis and determine our diet over the period of four years.

All this goes to say that the Reuben is clearly a great way to induce a mouth-gasm. I would even say it was 3 times as tasty as the Japanese meal I ate. But it was about 804,834 times worse for you. And like the grilled chicken breast, the Japanese meal was in no way bad - it was quite good in fact. Very good indeed. Awesome even. And while it was no Reuben, the results of the cost/benefit analysis were pretty clear.

Which leads to a second point.

To say that the Japanese eat naught but fish and seaweed would be false. There are plenty of gastronomical choices that involve some combination of "fried", "deep", "meat", "sauce", and other such artery-clogging descriptors. But really it is a question of frequency, and even more importantly portions size. Several years ago I made another trip back to the US. Before leaving I decided I was looking forward to a proper US steak house. Upon arrival I ordered the biggest steak on the menu:



It was enormous, but had all the flavor and texture of a pair of leather shoes left out in a monsoon, and then stored in a sand pit for a month. It was cheap. It was huge. It was crap.

A great number of our chain restaurants are quick to advertise, with great fanfare , just how enormous a plate of food you can get and precisely how little it will cost you. We boast of exactly how many varieties of cheese we can fit into a single entrée. Your bacon-wrapped potato wedges only have 4 kinds of cheese? You are clearly a vegan Communist loser. And then we turn around and run away from carbohydrates like they were the equivalent of rectally ingested cancer-laden heroin. We try and stay healthy be eating fat-free cream cheese on a carb-free bagel, with a bag of 'no trans-fats' kettle-cooked bbq chips, all washed down with a nice bottle of Coke Zero. And then we never grow tired of patting ourselves on the back, if only the seven extra inches of girth on that stump that was once our arm didn't prevent such a range of motion. It is a very split-personality approach to nutrition. And it is clearly not working.

One concept big in nutrition in Japan is 'balance' (ironically there is no word for this other than the loan word 'balance' バランス read baransu - strange considering how central it is to the idea of diet and nutrition here) It doesn't mean that you should never eat anything fried or with fat as clearly stated before, only that you should refrain from portions that are usually reserved for large and impressive geological formations. If you are going to eat red meat, do it right and have a nice small piece Kobe beef. Have it with some vegetables, maybe steamed squash, sliced tomatoes, etc. In other words, show a little moderation.

Unfortunately for many in the US, 'moderation' is listed in the thesaurus as a synonym for 'loser socialist apologist'. The very word moderation makes Sarah Palin want to put a nice little piece of lead deep into the brain stem of some lower life form and use its jaw as a beer cozy on her Freedom Bus or whatever the fuck she toured the country in last summer.

Look, we are great in America at a lot of things - we have the greatest entrepreneurs, some of the top universities in the world, and we are pretty much unbeatable in the realm of pizza toppings. But let's not pretend we don't have a thing or two to learn from our more svelte neighbors regarding nutrition. If you really want that chilli-dunked double cheese burger with the disco fries and a cherry coke, then enjoy, but don't make it your new Saturday night thing.

New Era Bowl

This past weekend I went to the Osaka Dome (now called the Kyocera Dome) to watch the New Era Bowl - an American Football match that is in its 10th year. The game is between two teams (the Blue Stars and the White Starts) Each team is made up of players from a number of different schools, including a US university team. This year the Blue Stars featured the University of Hawai'i and the White Starts were assisted by UNLV. About 30 different Japanese Universities contribute a handful of players each. While the level of play was all well and good, the highlight of the event were the team names from the Japanese Universities.

I now present a list of best team names from the New Era Bowl divided by category

In the "That isn't actually a word" category we have

Kyoto Seika University Gawks:

Admittedly this is a word, but not many teams take the third person singular present form of a verb for a team name. And since it makes no sense without an object (gawks at what?) I am putting it in this category.

Kyoto Educational University Grampus:

Grandpa + Grumpy = Grampus. This team name makes me imagine the whole team shouting at other students to "Get off my field!!" I actually think this could become a word. Everyone please start calling your grandfathers grampus when he is being irritable and talking about how great everything was in the 60s...you know...before Civil Rights? aww...he's just set in his ways.

Hyogo Medical University Siegfried:
Again I suppose technically its a word, but really it is a person's name. And a gay tiger trainer at that. Bonus: The sticker of the side of their helmets is a caduceus




The Osaka University Shrikes:

And in case you were confused, their actual official team slogan is (and I am quoting here)
"We are SHRIKES!"

so hopefully that has cleared things up. Moving On...

In the "Inappropriate use of plurals" category we have

Ryoukoku University Seahorse: (yes...singular)


Technically, this image is more fear-inspiring than the actual name because it has multiple seahorses in it.

I would wager a large sum that the idea of a single seahorse has never been associated with the phrase "struck terror into the hearts of the opponent."
The 'also rans' were:

Ryoukoku University Puffy White Cloud
Ryoukoku University Field of Grass
Ryoukoku University Area Rug
and
Ryoukoku University Notebooks

side note: The kanji for Ryoukoku is 龍谷 which is literally Dragon Valley...That is the coolest fucking name I have ever heard for a school!

Dude: Dude, where do you go to school.
Wimp: Oh, I go to the Nagasaki School of Art and Culture. How about you
Dude: Dude, I go to Dragon Valley University!
Wimp: Sweeet! That is so cool! Dragon Valley - so what is your team name? It must be awesome! Like the Dragon Valley Fireballs! or the Dragon Valley Bone-crushers!
Dude: We're the Dragon Valley Seahorse! Singular!
Wimp: Despite the 100 kg you have on my and your clearly superior muscle mass, I now feel I have the confidence to beat you up and steal your hot girlfriend.


Osaka University of Law and Economics Blue Thunders:

Just when the singular is appropriate...These guys should send that s over to Ryoukoku, and possibly a list of animals more frightening than a seahorse.

In the "Naming your team for a foreign military force" category we have

Kobe Academy University Navy Seals.

Personally it would feel strange to root for the University of Miami Royal Mounties, or the Boise State French Legion.

In the "A little strange, but in retrospect very cool" category we have

Momoyama Academy University Thundering Legion Lions

So while Ryoukoku makes due with a single seahorse, these guys get not only lions, but legions of them (a Roman legion was about 6,000 but since 1) lions are way tougher and cooler and 2) these legions are thundering, I will arbitrarily assume that there are about 10,000 lions in a thundering legion). I am no psychologist, but if you were about to play a competitive contact sport against a group of large and padded guys in their early twenties, wouldn't you rather ride to battle under the banner of a thundering legion lion than a seahorse?

When I was in high school, our mascot was a mermaid. We were so horrible at sports that ball room dancing was actually considered an acceptable sports option for the winter term. On the upside our mascot was a topless mermaid showing a nipple. To a high school boy this was a perfectly fine alternative to having a good basketball team.

Tenri University Crushing Orcs

This is the team that should be playing in Dragon Valley. The Dragon Valley Crushing Orcs. 3 out of 4 words in that sentence are awesome.

Again with schools failing to match the school name with the team mascot, Tenri (天理) has two characters one meaning 'heaven' and one meaning 'justice, logic or reason' - So it's like the Heaven's Reason Crushing Orcs. Never before has an idea made such a left turn half-way through

And finally - in the "made beer come out my nose while reading the program" we have my favorite - ladies and gentlemen, a warm japanalog cheer for

Wakayama University Blind Sharks:

This name just begs a million questions. What kind of blind - is it blind with rage? blind like blind drunk? blind like you can't see? I get the shark part, clearly - But what the blind is doing there is perplexing. Are we trying to say that these particular sharks are so unconscionably badass that they can murder and destroy with one whole sense out of commission? Or perhaps these sharks are so profoundly battle-tested and veteran that they have sustained extensive wounds that leave them without sight...and yet they fight on?

Then I actually looked up blind sharks - turns out they may be referring to epaulette sharks. Which are small 90cm bottom feeders which survive on crabs and worms. This is why we don't look things up.


Bonus video:

While Japan and Hawai'i are both technically pacific islands, this kick-off return by a UH student demonstrates that there may be a small physical size and strength difference.



Bonus Picture:

Kyocera is normally used for baseball, so the promenade level was lousy with Orix Buffalo shops,
which were apparently selling Orix Buffalo-themed Mexican wrestling masks.



Professional baseball and Mexican wrestling together at last. It's like chocolate and peanut-butter.

Super Extra Last Minute Bonus - the book on the right refers to these as "T-back masks".
Just let that one float around in your head for a while.

More fun with Kanji

Just to remind - Kanji (漢字) are the Chinese characters that are used in Japanese. There are about 10,000 Kanji in use in Japanese, but the total that are part of the official school curriculum is more like 2,000 - this is what you need to really be proficient in reading a newspaper or other printed material. These characters are often described as ideographs or logograms - meaning that each character represents an idea (as opposed to a sound that can be read phonetically, and which has no intrinsic meaning on its own).

When I first studied Japanese, our teacher, in an attempt to lure us into some false sense of confidence, asked us to think of the kanji as pictures of the idea they represented. One example I saw again and again was a picture of a sun morphing flip book-style into 日



It is probably a bad idea to wonder too much why a dot appears in the middle...sun spot I guess.

This is all well and good at first. It doesn't take a massive leap of the imagination to see 一、二、三 as 1, 2, and 3. But why 六 should clearly be six or 忘 is somehow an obvious symbol for 'forget' begins to make that whole 'just a picture' idea start to seem somewhat of a stretch.

BUT

It begins to make a little more sense when you think of a complicated character as actually being made up of a number of smaller pieces. For example, the aforementioned 忘 which means 'forget'. I honestly don't know how I would represent the idea of 'forget' in a simple logogram. This is why you don't want me on your Pictionary team. I suppose I would do something like


(don't ask why there is baseball on TV in February)

Clearly this is not a viable option and open to interpretation. What one might see as forget, could be 'nagging' or 'frustration' or even 'evidence in divorce proceedings'.

However, in the case of the kanji, it begins to make a little more sense when you learn that 忘 is made of two smaller parts (called radicals). 心 on the bottom and 亡 up top. The first means 'heart', and the second means 'die' so to forget is actually 'to die in the heart' (Ok, ok, so you clearly need to remember those two small pieces which still don't really seem to look like what they are, but again, the heart has four parts - like the four chambers of you actual heart, and as for die...just remember that.) Another basic radical is 女 which means woman. It kind of looks like a woman making a curtsy, so not too hard to remember (the trick is to remember these smaller radical parts, and when you see a large nasty kanji, just remember it is nothing but a collection of these smaller pieces) so if 女 is woman 姦 (3 women) clearly means 'wicked', 'noisy', or 'mischief' and if 子 means child put woman and child together and you get 好 which means 'like' or even 'love' and the lady shows up again in 怒 which (if you were paying attention) has 'heart' again. The other new part is 'furthermore' So, woman + heart + furthermore = angry. Naturally.

Clearly kanji were developed before women's rights was big. Other combinations include:

'death' + 'woman' = reckless
'stand' + 'woman' = concubine
'old' + 'woman' = mother in law
'man' + 'woman' = loud talking
'limited to' + 'woman' = marriage

Not every character has women. For example there is 凧 which means kite. It is 'wind' + 'cloth'
草 means grass and it is made up of 'plant' and 'quick' or 'early'
Some seem strange now, such as 美 which means beautiful and is made of 'sheep' + 'big'. But I guess when your livelihood depended on sheep, a big one was a beautiful thing.

Insert you New Zealand or Scotland joke here.

If an octopus and a highway planner had hot passionate sex...this would be the mistake

A photo of the GPS system in the car as we approached the Akashi-Kaikyo Ohashi (Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge) on our way to the staggeringly underpopulated island of Awaji several months ago. If you are wondering what possible wonders could await on Awaji that might necessitate a level of traffic control such as this seventy-five lane cluster-fuck of merging, you will be not in any possible way surprised to learn that it is onions. Yes, get ready for a concrete recreation of a drunken tapeworm so that you all can get your tasty onions post-haste.

And just in case you think our GPS has been huffing glue, Google will confirm the pave-bortion that is this interchange



Side note: Do you see any other roads coming in here? With 17 different lanes, you would expect a confluence of about 6 to 8 other major roads...I see 3 - One from the north and two from the south. I think some concrete magnate paid for some government official's hooker about 15 years ago.

For the love of all that is sweet and merciful run this shit by a native speaker

The idea of poor English making it onto T-shirts has been beaten into the ground like a tent-peg by someone on MDMA, but it should be pointed out that is not just uber-hipster ironic T-shirts that are in extreme need of proof-reading. It extends to all products and a shameful amount of signage. I present to you this product which I get to see every morning on my way out the door.



Most disappointing contents ever.

But on a more (or possibly equal or less) serious note. This product raises enough questions to fill an entire episode of Erotic Jeopardy (a show that is seriously needed in my opinion).

So lets do this erotic Jeopardy style:

Alex, I'll take Obvious Questions for 100.

"This is the first thing you do before releasing a product featuring a language on which you have a minimal grasp"

"What is have a native speaker ensure that the products name doesn't refer to some part of the sexual anatomy in another language?"

That is correct, and you have control of the board.

Alex, I'll take "Obvious Questions" for 200.

"This is what a gynecologist might ask upon learning that product called the "Clit Album" existed" (total side note - blogger's spell check recognizes irregardless but not clit...only one of those words is standard English...dirty, but standard. The other is something news casters on CNN say when they want my to punch my TV)

"What is 'Exactly how many medically relevant photographs are contained within the aforementioned Clit Album?'"

Correct again and the board remains in your control.

Thanks Alex, I am going to take 'Possible ways to employ native speakers in Japan' for 100

"This is one way to possibly employ native speakers in a country rife with products as poorly named as the Clit Album."

"What is a proof reader?"

Well done!

Thanks again Alex, I think I am going to move to "Questions with no satisfactory answer" for 400.

Ok, and the clue is "There is no good answer to this that comes to a sensible mind"

"What is the phrase they were trying to go for when they blundered onto 'Clit Album'?"

Great!

Ladies and Gentlemen...I give you the Clit Album.

Call me lazy

Or call me gainfully employed - your choice.

Regardless (or irregardless as morons like to say when they think adding syllables is equivalent to adding IQ points) It is time to get back into this thing and post all about the past few months which has seen its share of insanity.

Arima! The Hot Spring Resort that is in my back yard.

Kobe, from a physical layout standpoint, is in many ways similar to Chile - the developed and urban part of the city is a long and skinny belt squeezed between the mountains and the sea running (roughly) from east to west. And in this thin belt lies some majority of the population (I would guess 80 - 85%). However, unlike Chile, the physical boundaries of the city extend well beyond the mountains.



Basically everything shown here is part of Kobe, but clearly the majority of the development is by the sea.

This all goes to say that there are parts of Kobe which are rather rural (and partially towards explaining how a major metropolis of 1.5 million can be world famous for an agricultural product - Kobe beef). One such seemingly un-urban destination that lays (lies?) within the city boundaries would be 有馬 (Arima - lit: Existing Horses) the hot spring town. From the current world headquarters of Japanalog, this enclave of geothermic delight lies (lays?) a mere 15 minutes by car, thanks to years of public works money that have honeycombed the mountains with an endless web of slope-hugging highways, valley-spanning bridges and mountain-piercing tunnels, all of which seem to be strictly obeying the axiom that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, regardless of how many tons of earth must be rearranged in the process.

So here nestled among the mountains, yet profoundly accessible by car, bus, or (of course) rail, is the little valley of Arima:





Arima has a wide variety of body warming bodies of water in which to indulge. Everything from the free foot baths:



To the two main public baths:



This is the Gold Bath (not to be confused in anyway whatsoever with a golden shower) - it is so called because of the presence of minerals which give the water a rusty orange-ish tint. (although even those of without a PhD in marketing can recognize that "Gold Bath" sounds a quint-jillion times more appealing than "Rusty Bath")

The other main public bath is the Silver Bath:



This bath features more regularly colored waters, but again, "Silver Bath" beats out "Normally-Colored Water Bath" any day of the week.

The rest of the baths in town are some form of hot-spring resort, often attached to a hotel and featuring spas, massages, skin-peels, reflexology treatments, restaurants, scented candles, low lighting, waterfalls, cotton robes, and have the same general affect on your central nervous system as a Quaalude.



Oh - and since there is a high degree of not-wearing-clothes this is about as far into the land of resort spa as my camera was allowed.

So lets say you are an uptight westerner with an aversion to stripping bare in the presence of total strangers to share in a nice hot communal bath. What else is there for you to do and see in Arima? Honestly not a whole hell of a lot.

You could sample the famous soda rice-crackers that are sold every twenty-three centimeters on the street at souvenir shops








Don't get me wrong - they are rather tasty but there is only so they will go towards providing a meaningful diversion.

So why not try some of the other fare available around town:



Dango! Sweet mochi balls on a stick! (Mochi is essentially rice that has been pounded by a wooden hammer to the point that it has become a chewy, sticky, gelatinous paste.)




Or (much more in my vein) some sausages and pickles with a nice dark beer while puzzling out the latest level of my Japanese study game for the Nintendo DSi.

Once you have sated your physical needs for nourishment, why not try the Toy Museum?



Was it awesome? I don't know! Someone who shall remain nameless balked at the idea of paying $8 for a ticket - although this same individual thought nothing of dropping a much larger number of yen on a massage which could only be enjoyed by one person. So if you ever go to this museum please let me know how it was. I am totally not bitter about this part of the day.

I did get to see the gift shop however. It is nice to know that the Scandinavian countries have found a way to take a block of wood, some string, and a ball bearing, carve it into a toy that does one mildly amusing trick, give it a name with some crazy vowels (like Grønåbül) and then charge as much for it as you would reasonably expect to pay for the latest video game system. Apparently a diet of herring gives you enormous balls.

If you are in a more inquisitive mood, you can hike around town and find the 源泉 (Gensen, or origin of the spring)



Found it! Now what?

Below is another one that was under construction



And if none of this amuses you, just go hit up the alcohol vending machines:



Though these are by no means unique to Arima, that shouldn't stop you from partaking in their fine wares.

Other scenes of note:

This town is not fucking around when it comes to hot springs; even the water in the gutters is in on the act:



Here the central river has been made into a lovely Dr. Seuss-ian maze of bridges, collecting ponds, staircases and platforms.



But before you think this is all fun and games be sure to note:



I have never seen two children with more terrified expressions over rain - however they are not without reason for showing such pant-wetting panic in the face of weather.



This is showing a 10 minute difference. So run kiddies run.

And who is going to save the children in such an event?



Why these fine folks! This is a recruitment poster for the fire department, but could easily be a poster for a late-70's fire-brigade drama airing Tuesdays at 7 on CBS.