And Sometimes Why

Category: Daily Life

  • Toy car?

    I spotted this car last week in a parking lot near my office while walking to Sukiya to grab a quick bowl of gyudon for dinner. This is Japan, so it has to be cute, right?

  • My office

    Here’s a video I recently took of the inside of the English conversation school where I teach. 😀

  • I ♥ Iyokan

    Without belaboring the point too much, let me just say that I think iyokan are the best-tasting citrus fruit I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. They’re very sweet with a strong orange flavor and just sour enough to have a nice bite. Size-wise, they’re a little larger than a navel orange (and therefore significantly larger than a standard Japanese mikan).

    They’re the second most popular citrus fruit in this citrus-loving country, and they’re grown primarily right here in Ehime. In fact, the name comes from the old name for Ehime Prefecture – Iyo Province.

  • Engrish threads

    Since there’s no way I’m going to let a whole month go by without a blog post, I thought I’d toss up a quick post about clothes here in Japan. Specifically, clothes that have Engrish on them. There seems to be no market for clothing with correctly written English, as it’s used almost exclusively as a design element rather than a method of conveying meaning. That, combined with the facts that English is “cool” and that the vast majority of Japanese people can only derive a rude meaning from a string of English words, means that there are a lot of Japanese people showing off their “English” (and very often pseudo-American) clothes without knowing what abuses of the English language are actually written on them.

    When I see English in Japan, I’m genuinely surprised if it isn’t rife with errors. I couldn’t possibly hope to document it all, but when I have my camera, I try to capture the gems. The first few pictures you see are pictures of my students I took in my classroom. You can’t really read all of them in the scaled down versions, so I typed out the contents. I tried to help as much as I could through punctuation, though it didn’t often help.

    LEFT: Surf riding goodstream, Professing skilled profession
    RIGHT: Stinson Beach, California: The Wave is Forever
    From left to right:
    Individual For Pleasure Only
    Guaranteed to fit better D.O.Daddy 65
    Twist frontside [Remainder illegible due to shirt fold]
    It takes a little more to make a Champion. Champion authentic athletic apparel
    STAYING, you are on the verge of salvation! You are on the verge of salvation! When it is made to revive vividly, ground at a sense beyond the word stands up and appears that shaft line the world.
    LEFT: [New York Yankees logo on polo shirt breast]
    RIGHT: SAMURAI Japan
    Impregnerade SAMURAI säkerhets-tandstickor safety matches
    LEFT: Wask 22
    RIGHT: Pour les enfants hushush Avoir le coeur leger

    Included just because they’re goofballs. 🙂
    Long and [obscured] condition (?) PARADISE for the sake of attaining SUNSET BEACH, surfing least much comes
    The Eastboy go in the future begin to walk. The words that give me hope. A friend in need is a friend indeed. When I was troubled, I encourage it. As for you, how many “friends” are there?
    Engrish isn’t limited to clothing, as this bag proves. I love the American Nutrition Facts label.
    IT’S NEW, Honey sweet. Would you like a NATIONAL BISCUIT? You will be crazy about Rich Flavor! Special Value
    Burger Special
    GLUTTONS Special mega burger
    From left:
    [top illegible] 1970 GRATEFUL ROSES: It’a [sic] Beautiful In Black
    Pia angel 08
    [upper French obscured] esprit de paris 1998, TRÈS BON!!
    GRATEFUL ROSES: It’a [sic] Beautiful In Black
    I certainly can’t fault my students for wearing clothes with broken English. Here’s what they have to choose from when they go shopping:
    CRESCENT- Full of energy, Galaxy Grobal [sic] Universe, Starry night, Catch your dream
    Cleared up, it is fine today. THE SKY CLEARED UP BEAUTIFULLY. The tree leaves glistened after the rain.
    Lustrous Cherry lips from you
    WIND PURSUE lack of ability
    Excellent Clear Sight, Magnificent Scenes
    I MADE A PROMISE WITH HER ON THURSDAY
    Artlessness & Fleckle
    Delight smile and friendly competing with each other
    Let me take a moment to give you an example of the “height” of fashion in Matsuyama. Note the “man bag” clipped to a belt loop, embroidered jeans (with bonus sewn-up hole) tucked into cowboy boots, and poofy, bleached “Lion King” hairdo.
    Rock the World with you [the text is from a song of this name]
    We gotta know we’re on the run
    I just grab your stuff, and in a minute we’ll be gone
    We’re gonna pull away like strangers,
    but soon the world will know
    How far this kinda love could ever go
    Remember what I say
    Baby don’t matter what they do

    There’s always more Engrish to be had, so I’m sure I’ll post plenty of it in the future. I need to get some sleep though, so I’m going to pull away like a stranger. 😉

  • Matsuyama Fall Mikoshi Festival

    Do you know how a sumo match works? Basically, the loser is the first one thrown out of the ring or the first one to touch the ground inside the circle with anything other than the soles of his feet. Now imagine for a moment that you’re watching a sumo match; except instead of a pair of 350 lb men, the competitors are 350 lb shrines carried on the shoulders of forty men. Now imagine that there are men standing on top of these shrines taunting the other team as they crash into each other at a full run. Does what you’re imagining look about like this?

    This is a picture I took yesterday at the Matsuyama Mikoshi festival, just before impact. A mikoshi is a portable shrine, a spiritual vessel used to carry around the patron god of a normal Shinto shrine once a year when it’s paraded through the streets of the surrounding neighborhood to bring its inhabitants and businesses good luck.
    Speaking of good luck, the chosen route for my neighborhood’s shrine took it right past my apartment on Monday night. I took this picture and video leaning out the window by my stove.
    They’re louder than I expected, but I still have no idea what they’re saying.
    The men’s shrine was followed shortly by these two teams of cute (kawaii!) kids carrying their smaller versions.
     
    Surprisingly, they left the shrine in the empty lot next to my apartment overnight before the matches Tuesday morning. Here’s the team about to maneuver the shrine into the place.
     
    Here’s the team actually setting it down.
     
    And there it sat until morning.
     
    So I took some more pictures.
     
    Most of the actual matches took place early in the morning on Tuesday. The crowds were thick on every available viewing place.
     
    What does it actually look like in action, you ask? Here’s a video I took of an actual bout taking place. You can see the initial charge with the whole team pushing on the backs of the men in front of them, the initial impact when the shrines hit each other, the teams slowly turning while each team is trying to push the other backwards (100 men in a giant disorganized pirouette…), and the shrines and teams pulling apart when the match is over.
     
    The winners were happy enough to do some crowdsurfing from the top of their shrine.
     
    After the bouts were all over, there was a closing ceremony with all eight of the shrines that were in the day’s competition.
     
    There were also some food vendors set up to catch the foot traffic.
     
    I bought a frankfurter on a stick and fresh french fries from two of the stands. Then, feeling rather weighed down by the grease, I stopped by a Lawson’s convenience store (it’s so much easier to just say “conbini”) and grabbed an onigiri rice ball and a drinkable carton of active-cultured yogurt. Walking away from the site, I was surprised to see some of the contestants and other event participants leaving in the backs of open-bed trucks.
     
    Overall, a highly enjoyable and exciting festival.

  • Hi Ho, Silver!

    Horse Meat Sashimi Last night I ate at a new restaurant with some JET folk. Like most restaurants in Matsuyama, the menu was in Japanese. Some restaurants have pictures, and luckily, this one had many.

    One of the things I try to do when I eat out is try many different kinds of food. If I’m eating out and can’t decide between two dishes, 99% of the time I’ll choose the one I haven’t had before. In fact, it was just recently that I had to start relaxing that guideline, as I ran out of untried dishes in the restaurants in my neighborhood. I like takoyaki, I’ve eaten whale sushi, I eat raw eggs over my gyudon, and I do actually eat plenty of squid, despite my earlier experience with squid heads. I’ve even had natto recently that I didn’t mind at all. (For the record, the only thing I refuse to eat is shrimp in the shell. I don’t mean “peel and eat,” I mean “eat the shell with the shrimp”— unlike Ms. Semba, who sees it as another opportunity to get Calcium.) I’m an active and avid explorer of the culinary landscape of Japan. 🙂

    Anyway, we went to a yakitori restaurant in the Okaido shopping arcade I’ve mentioned a number of times. I couldn’t read much of the kanji on the menu, so I just ordered by picture. I wanted a sushi dish to go with my chicken skewers and gyoza, so I ordered what looked like a deep red fatty tuna.

    When it came, I was a little surprised at how much more it looked like beef than the picture. Not the squeamish one though, I plunged in after a brief moment to consider whether I trusted the restaurant’s preparation. I was interested to see what beef sushi tasted like.

    It tastes exactly like you think it does. You know when you open a plastic tray of (fresh) raw beef from the supermarket, and you can smell the beef? It tasted about like that. Not really all that appetizing, but not enough of a turn off to not finish the three pieces I got.

    After the meal, I was flipping through the menu to see how much I owed for my three small dishes; and relaxing after my meal, I realized I could read more of the kanji than I originally thought. Looking up at my beef sushi, I couldn’t find the character for “beef.” After a few puzzled seconds, I realized what it did have though, was the character for “horse.”

    Yes, I ate horse sushi. My stomach turned just a little bit at the realization.

    I’m happy to report that I’m feeling no ill effects of last night’s meal- not that I really anticipated any. Overall, I’d say it’s worth trying just to do; maybe order one dish between a couple friends so everyone gets just one piece, though. I was piling on the wasabi when I thought it was beef. I think I would have needed twice as much had I known it was horse.

  • Milestone 0.003

    I bought this 500mL bottle of soy sauce the day I arrived in Matsuyama, and I just finished it.

    Incidentally, if you look on the label, you can see where it says しょうゆ “shōyu” – Japanese for soy sauce.

  • Chopsticks

    The first time I was ever complimented on my chopsticks use was while I was living in Reno. I was sitting in Meadowood Mall food court eating my Panda Express chicken teriyaki bowl on some lazy afternoon, and this random Asian couple actually came over to my table to ask me where I learned to use chopsticks. Thinking I was doing something wrong, I replied that I had just figured it out on my own, and how should I be doing it? Through seemingly non-native English, they replied that I was using a specifically Japanese grip. I was confused, but didn’t think much of it.

    Over the years, I’ve had a couple of other people mention that I hold my chopsticks in an unusual way, but still thought nothing of it. However, since moving to Japan five months ago, I’ve been complimented on my chopsticks usage by half a dozen random Japanese people (including my Japanese teacher, my school’s manager, and the ramen slinger at a shop near my apartment), most recently this afternoon.

    I occasionally eat lunch with my Japanese teacher after our lesson, and today she told me about a traditional Japanese-style restaurant with a lunch counter (which doubles as a sushi bar) a few blocks away. I don’t really have any way of finding little hole in the wall restaurants in the area on my own, so I gladly accepted the invite.

    During the meal, she told me the special names for soy sauce and green tea when each is paired with sushi (both of which I promptly forgot), and quizzed me on my ability to describe my surroundings in Japanese. When we were each paying for our lunches, a waitress asked her about my chopsticks, and described my usage as “more Japanese than most of our customers.”

    Having finally had enough of the mystery, I wanted to know what was up with how I use my chopsticks. After a brief discussion, I learned that I hold my chopsticks in an “elegant” and “noble” manner. Apparently, when Japanese kids grow up, they tend to grip the chopsticks in whatever manner gets food to their mouths in the most expedient way possible (and don’t bother relearning), but children of high upper class families have a specific way they hold their chopsticks, which I’ve accidentally taught myself.

    From the way she was describing it, I’d analogize it with the difference between a Cockney accent and Received Pronunciation.

    So I guess I’m one step closer to being Japanese than I thought. If only I could speak the language.

  • Weather

    It’s time I talked about the weather in Matsuyama.

    Here is one of the corners on my way to work. The small road on the left will take you to my apartment, the large road to the right will take you to ALS Matsuyama. I think I’ve mentioned before that Matsuyama reminds me very much of San Diego. So much so, in fact, that I’ve begun to think of it as a smaller Japanese version of that beautiful southern California city (minus the plastic aesthetic).

    Despite its importance on the world stage, Japan is a small country, physically speaking. At about 375,000 km², it’s a little smaller than Montana and a little larger than Germany. One of the neat things about a country that size is that the nightly news gives weather for the entire country, rather than one local area or region. Not only that, but Japan’s newscasters must have some weird 6th sense (Shirley MacLaine, not M. Night Shyamalan) that allows them to determine the precise times, locations, and magnitudes of weather patterns in three hour blocks.

    Seriously, the local nightly news here not only gives temperatures throughout the day, it tells you what time it’ll start raining tomorrow and what time it’ll stop. Unfortunately, only the national news is simulcast in English, and having just recently acquired internet access at home, I’m not yet accustomed to checking the forecast online.

    This brings us to the trigger that convinced me to write about the weather in the first place.

    On Thursday, there was a light rain in the morning that let up around the time I needed to leave for my Japanese lesson. Smiling at the clearing sky for cooperating with my need to hurry and get there on time, I set off on my bicycle sans umbrella.

    A light mist started falling almost immediately, and the skies darkened the further I got from my apartment. Ten minutes into the twenty minute ride, I was severely punished for my foolishness when the rain really got going. Fat raindrops fell in my eyes and soaked the front of my shirt and shorts. Knowing I was soaked either way, I kept going to my lesson, arriving dripping wet.

    I wasn’t really sure what to do at that point, as I had no way of drying myself. Paper towels are virtually nonexistent in Japanese bathrooms. Most small and medium sized businesses rely on you to bring your own towel. I kid you not- my school and many restaurants are the same way. I’ve asked a few Japanese people in Matsuyama, they’ve all said that Japanese people always carry around a washcloth or handkerchief, at least. Large businesses that expect foreign visitors might have an air dryer, but EPIC doesn’t have one of those.

    So I found my teacher, and of course she started laughing the moment she saw me, asking “Didn’t you look at the weather forecast?”
    “No,” I said, “unfortunately I did not.”

    Then she surprised me by going to the front counter and asking to borrow a towel on my behalf. The woman stifled a laugh when she saw me and quickly brought out a towel from what I think is the employee lounge. Anyway, I dried what I could and tried to hand it back to the woman, but my teacher told me to take it home, wash it, and bring it back on Monday. “It’s the Japanese way,” she said.

    Surprised and thankful, I said I would do just that.

    Here’s a picture of the Matsuyama University towel I was lent. Beneath it is the towel (I got from an onsen that) I will start carrying with me.