In Memoriam

With video chatting and email, it's easy for those of us living abroad to forget the distance we've placed between ourselves and our loved ones. Though I was able to talk with my grandmother before she passed thanks to these technologies, they couldn't transport me to the memorial service to be there with my family. I did send a speech audio file, which seemed like far too little. I've been told that people want to see the text, and since most of my readership is family--and in larger part, because my grandmother read my posts--I'd like to share it here.

New Year

Happy New Year!

Erin and I spent New Year's Eve with two good friends in Kanazawa, enjoying traditional foods like ozouni and zenzai* as well as some non-traditional passtimes, namely playing Minecraft or watching significant others play Minecraft. We went to a Oyama Shrine at midnight to watch the hordes descend on the physical shrine itself to pray. The line was several blocks long, so we moseyed along to the fortunes and charms that all shrines sell around New Year's. We paid 100 yen for a paper fortune, and all of us got the best ranking for fortunes. Hooray! I, however, was cautioned that high places would lead to failure. Good thing I already vowed to everything in earshot that I would never climb Hakusan again.

I think spending New Year's in Japan without a Japanese extended family to take you in would be like spending the latter half of December in the US without an American extended family. There are decorations and you're supposed to feel merry and you have a vacation, but you'll never quite have the same holiday experience. Then again, you probably also won't be drinking champagne and setting things on fire while watching Sherlock, so I'm not terribly broken up about it.

Erin and I will stay in Japan for another year and a half, until July 2013. We both love our students and have so much yet to see here.

Now, time for a Japanese lesson. This time, it's Ishikawa winter precipitation!

弱雨　jakuu/ yowa-ame  weak rain. Covers anything that is not like your shower

みぞれ mizore slush. Literally slush, synonymous with slurpy-esque beverages, but from the sky. It's also a flavor of shaved ice, if you want your shaved ice to taste like frozen coats and suffering.

氷雨　hisame small hail/ frozen rain. We have had an inch of this fall in half an hour. At least it kind of looked like snow.

雹　hyou "hail of a diameter greater than 5mm". Self-explanatory. The character components add up to "parcel of precipitation," which is telling.

湿雪 shissetsu wet and warm snow. Demarcated on tenki.jp by a sad, partially melted snowman.

吹雪 fubuki blowing snow or snow storm. Demarcated by an unmelted but extremely distressed snowman. In this part of Japan, it means a chance of thundersnow. Which is awesome.

Temperatures in Ishikawa change quickly, but you can count on something falling from the sky. I have experienced all of these weather conditions in quick succession within one four-minute walk to work. I keep an extra umbrella in my drawer at work in case something unspeakable happens to the one I take with me in the morning. Since the temperature hovers at about 29 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit, the roads aren't plowed; they are instead cleared with sprinklers. Which malfunction and sometimes gush several feet into the air, the terror of bicyclists everywhere.

There is a reason why people in Japan love spring. Not only is it gorgeous...it's not three categories of winter precipitation that aren't really snow.


*Ozouni is a soup made from traditional Japanese broth, greens, mochi (sticky rice cakes), and chicken...or in my case, tofu. Zenzai is a dessert-ish soup made from red bean paste, water, and mochi. There's a theme here. It's mochi.

Forecasts

Today we're going to have a little bitty culture lesson. (I'm going to get disclaimers out of the way quickly: writing about Japan is a minefield of inaccurate and infantalizing cultural assumptions. If you could get a nickel for every blog post or published book that pushes the idea of either Japan as a land of tradition, dammit or Japan as a land of crazy, then Japanese majors could fund their own college educations entirely on the back of the majority of their field in all its self-loathing essentialism.) Anyway.

Japanese shopping and service culture thrives on creating products you at first find strange, and then realize you can no longer live without. This isn't unique to Japan by any means--mint flavored toothpaste is a prime example of the power of suggestion (advertisement) and how it redefines what we view as practical. Mint toothpaste--artificially created demand, but pretty neat. Silicone fried egg shapers to keep your fried egg heart-shaped and English muffin-sized--artificially created demand, but also pretty neat.

This combined with a widespread (but not society-engulfing) value placed on identifying and maximizing seasonal pleasures has created one of my favorite internet passtimes. Fair readers, behold the tenki.jp (Japan's weather.com) indexes in all their glory.

First, because winter is coming, I give you the nabe index.

This week's stew forecast.

For the uninitiated, nabe is a fall and winter dish that's a lot like a stew, but without the day-long simmering. Add veggies and meat to any of the 20,000 flavors of nabe stock (miso kimchi is my favorite) and fish stuff out as it boils...and there you have it. The pot is cooked with a camper stove at the table, and the whole family just fishes out what they want.  Depending on what goes it, it can be really healthy, and it usually warms up the house a bit too.

This is an index about the best time in the near future to eat nabe, and what kind will be most delicious in your area. Today's potential for nabe-enjoyment is expressed as a four-out-of-five nabe pots, and it recommends a kind of bean paste made near Ibara castle. Tomorrow is only a three-out-of-five, but it says that if you like duck, you should totally go for it. Saturday the 10th looks like awful weather in the meteorological forecast, so it makes sense that the nabe index would be highest then.  I have a feeling that part of this is to keep people's morale up through the winter by suggesting progressively delicious food as the cold and dark set in.

Up next, we have the legitimately useful blanket index.

Oh bother, another four-blanket week.

This is based on the night and early-morning temperatures in each area of Japan. Tonight's note is that if I use a thick blanket, I'll probably be okay. However, I shouldn't be fooled by tomorrow's 40 blanket index--if I skimp out and use a thin blanket, I will be cold in the morning.

I trust this index implicitly because today it told my partner, who has been known to fling comforters across the room in her sleep, not to kick off the covers. 


Now we're really about to step across the threshold into "how did I live without this?".  In case you find yourself without a grandparent with outerwear ESP, tenki.jp has you covered. Pun!

You need all these clothes on your body this week. Sorry.

In this index, a 100 means that it's tank-top weather. The cold category expressed, apparently, by a desire to put on ALL YOUR CLOTHES AT ONCE, has the widest margin.  I have to say it resonates with my experience with winter in Minnesota. When you get down to it, inside the right jacket, 0F and -30F just feel pretty much the same. Today's note--don't allow anyone to go out without a muffler and gloves. Tomorrow's note resembles the blanket index. Don't be fooled, if you leave the house without that coat, you will be cold.

Maybe it seems like too much information, but I really like how it takes meteorological data and in a few infographics, gives you a picture of your week. Temperatures and rain forecasts are nice, but I have a much better idea of how to dress for Friday and Saturday knowing that although it doesn't necessitate any more coats or blankets than Thursday, I will probably want stew those days more than any other day of the week...or at least a need for stew on Friday or Saturday has been successfully implanted in my brain. 

So, what's the moral of the story? What's the cultural lesson here? My take on it is another question. Why face the seasons unprepared for all they have to offer and all the misery they could throw at you? We have the technology and the mental capacity to recognize not only patterns in the area and how they affect our comfort (blanket and coat indexes) but also our desires. Since weather is one of the most primal shared experiences, why not predict the effect of weather on us as well? It's an interesting cultural perspective on the utility of quantitative data in the more subjective aspects of our lives--there are different lines between the "sciency" and the "non-sciency" in different societies.

I guess it all depends on how you view the variable, in this case, weather. Is it a shared experience or a series of data?

Nine O'Clock and All Is Well

All of my apartment’s (many) windows are single-paned. Luckily, energy saving measures spurred by the Tohoku earthquake have lead Japan to explore winterization and insulation wrap, so hopefully this won’t completely eviscerate my electricity budget this winter. It’s been warm here—highs have been 21C (69.8F) since late September—so I’ve been leaving my windows open in the evening to air out the place and enjoy the crisp evening weather.

Starting in mid-October, though, I started to hear strange noises coming from the town below. At around 8:30 or 9, I heard bells. These weren’t occasional peals from the big bells from the temple next door like I hear sometimes on Buddhist holidays. This is someone walking with a single handbell: ring, step, ring, step. I looked out my window every time I saw it, hoping to see one of the monks walking around. I never saw a monk, but the noise continued.

Around Halloween, I was riding back from visiting a friend. It was very dark, but even though they don’t have streetlights, the roads through the acres of rice fields a few blocks from my building are less crowded and therefore safer than the main streets. I went down a different road this time, one that goes through an old residential area before it opens up into the rice fields. Then, I heard a new variation on the same noise: clack, step, clack clack, step, clack. I actually followed the noise this time. An older woman was walking down the road with two wooden blocks, clacking away and looking somber. Once or twice, she muttered something I didn’t quite catch. I tried to greet her and ask what it was all about, but she didn’t seem to notice I was there.

The sound faded away as I biked off through the cut-down, dried out rice fields and rows of fruit-laden persimmon trees. What was that? Was she making noise to scare away stray cats from the garbage sites? Was it a religious thing, the muttering a prayer? What if I interrupted some sort of special rite she was doing? Or…what if she was a ghost? It was dark and the moon was peeking through the clouds in a very Halloween-ish sort of way—the thought did cross my mind.

From then on, I heard the clacking from my apartment at night soon after the bells. It went on for more than a week. In fact, I’m sure once it hits 8:30, I’ll hear it again tonight.

I finally asked one of my teachers about it today. She didn’t know at first, which kind of creeped me out. I was about to try to ask one of the Japanese history teachers too when she remembered.

Apparently it’s really rare, but some neighborhoods carry on the tradition of beating wooden blocks and saying 火の用心 (hi no youshin, careful of fire) to their neighbors during fall and winter nights. Long ago, people did this all over Japan to remind their neighbors to put out their cooking fires and be careful heating their homes through the night. Given that houses in Japan are traditionally made of fire-safe materials like pine wood, tatami mats, and paper screens and that they were built so close they almost touched, if one house caught fire, everyone suffered.

No one uses cooking fires anymore, but the areas of Komatsu nearby are mostly comprised of traditional style homes. Combine that with a high percentage of smokers, kerosene heaters in every big room in winter, and lots of ungrounded plugs, and…you have ample reason to remind your neighbors to be careful of their fire-related things at night.

Now that I know the history, I think this is one of my favorite local traditions. Sometimes these little windows open into the past and I realize just how old everything is here. Electricity and firetrucks are very, very new in the history of Japanese cities, particularly out here. How many tens of times older is this now-rare tradition than an electric stove, and yet, it vanished so quickly. I love it when things from the past leap up, grab me by the collar and give me no choice but to reflect on the way people lived their lives generations ago.
So, no ghosts save the ghosts of times long gone.

Also, if you want to read something awesome today, look up firefighters in Edo-era Japan.

IOU: New House!

Back in June, I switched apartments. My old place was about 25 square meters (269 square feet), which actually had its upsides--it was fairly easy to regulate the temperature, I didn't gather more stuff than I needed, I could clean it in about an hour, etc. However, I couldn't have people over for dinner because there wasn't room in the place to have a shelf and table in the kitchen, or a more than two person table and a bed in the living/bedroom. The functional part of the kitchen/laundry room was one IH burner and a tiny sink, so cooking took a lot of improvisation. It was also really dark, and dark rooms and I aren't friends.

This was the whole apartment, taken sitting down on the bed. You can't see a table to the left or the sink/burner and washing machine behind the right wall. That door with the blue bag was my front door.


So, once I recontracted, I set my sights and my budget on getting a place that a) had a view of something besides a wall, b) had a kitchen counter, and c) was just big enough to have people over.

I got so, so lucky. My building is huge and rather empty, so once the landlord heard I wanted to move, he showed me all the bigger apartments I could move into without paying key money (non-refundable $1000+ housing deposit) again. The first one he showed me had a kitchen with three glorious gas burners and fish oven, a tatami room, a separate toilet and bath, glass sliding doors all around, and a roof balcony the size of the apartment again that I would have all to myself. I was in love. It's mine now, all 49 square meters of it.

The kitchen:

The balcony:

The view:

I'm short on good pictures of the tatami room and kitchen post-move in. The only problem I've had has been with the hot water heater. As the repairman put it, "its heart gave out." I got a new one free (!) and fancy control panels for my sink and bath that let me pre-program a full, 40c bath for when I get home. Not much trouble, really.

Clearly, luck and landlord were on my side. Now, off to fully appreciate my kitchen by making dinner and messing it up.

using exercise, a chance to use our skill!

Living in Japan is, in so many ways, absolutely amazing. The people in my town are nice, the food is delicious, and no matter what the season or weather, it's always stunning outside. However, living in Japan also brings forth a daily barrage of attacks on my self-esteem. These come when I look in a window and see myself in the reflection next to a Japanese woman my age, or when I try to shop for a nice work skirt, or when some bratty kid thinks I don't understand でぶ (fatty)...or, most recently, when health checks roll around.

The logical part of my brain recognizes that I'm in a country where an L or LL (XL) size is an American size 8.  Unfortunately, my logical brain is always busy with, you know, operating in Japanese when I'm out. This means it can't shut up my emotional brain when it looks at the LLL tag on a piece of clothing and sobs, "I'm a whaaaaaaale!" On a good day, I can believe it when I remind myself that hey, LLL is 10-12, what I've worn since forever.

School health check BMI charts are similarly problematic. They're adjusted for what's perceived to be the average Japanese build, and then applied to everyone--including foreign women with naturally bigger builds than some of the men. I'd lost 7 kilos since arriving, and that was still the most embarrassing doctor's appointment of my life.

It all adds up. I took a good, long look at my bankbook and family medical history and decided, fine. I'll join the gym.

Japanese gyms are mind-blowing. At least at first. Then you realize that it all makes sense.

The best way to explain this is through the WiiFit. (The WiiFit is a balance board connected to a Wii fitness video game program that measures your weight and balance and has game-like exercises.) Stay with me. When you start using the WiiFit, it measures your weight, BMI, and balance. It then begins to track all of it, requiring the user to weigh and measure themselves each time they wish to play. When I signed up for my gym, they had me stand on a body comp analysis machine that read my weight, fat percentage, musculature, and balance rations and even provided me with my base metabolic rate and an explanation of how it related to my muscle density. A personal trainer then explained it all to me and came up with a set of exercises meant specifically to address imbalances and help with my weight.

Like with the WiiFit, every time I go to the gym, I have to weigh myself and take my blood pressure before the personal trainers let me on the machines. They record my weight and make a pencil and paper chart to show me that I'm improving, quarter kilo by quarter kilo. They come by while I lift and ask how much I'm lifting compared to last time. They tell me how exactly to use the weights to hit targeted areas. They recommend speeds on the bike and elliptical. They ask what I ate for lunch.

Even at my skinniest and most fit, no one with expertise ever really helped me make the connection between the actions of eating well and exercising and the results. They drew the weight loss graph a scale that made the small amount of weight I was losing a day--less than half a pound--seem like a big step because little steps are big steps. At American gyms, unless you pay through the nose, you get one or two sessions with a trainer. Here, there are 3 on staff at 11 at night. The gym is invested in its members' wellness on a personal level, and knowing that when I go the gym next a trainer will be there with that graph and words of encouragement motivates me to swap the sugary drink for tea and bike the long way home.

Americans view weight loss as a sudden, transformative event often entirely disconnected from any process that involves learning about their bodies or food. You see this in plastic surgery procedures, Hollywood diets, fad diets, and before and after pictures. You hear, "she ate grapefruit and lost 20 lbs in 2 months!" more than you hear "she got a solid fitness plan from someone with medical training and found a way to monitor her progress." Moreover, weight loss is seen as an entirely individual endeavor-- "she went on Atkins" or "she started running." Groups like Weight Watchers that use humans' basic need for affirmation from a social group for any change are often mocked or dismissed as the resort of the weak-willed, even when research shows they are the most effective.

How much, I wonder, would America benefit if we changed our outlook on weight loss? How much healthier would be be as a people if we viewed it not as a cosmetic miracle, but a process geared just toward feeling a little stronger and more energetic and physically capable every day? How much money and pain would we save ourselves at the doctor's office if we let go of all the shame we hold around our bodies and just join that walker's group or that dance class?

I used to have no idea why Japanese people are, by and large, so much healthier than their counterparts across the Pacific. I thought it was diet until I saw just how much rice and just how many fried things people here seem to eat. Recently, I've come to think that it's more about how people think of their bodies and more importantly, how much they're willing to learn about their bodies and what their particular body needs to feel its best. If that's the secret, maybe it's not so miraculous or even all that hard.

excuses excuses

Over Memorial Day weekend, my Dad's side of the family had a reunion/mass baptism. While they told me about it, I realized just how long it has been since I've updated this blog and how disproportional my blog frequency is to how much I miss my family and friends and want to share my experiences with them.

By way of explanation, I have a confession to make: I can't find my camera cable.

This is a big problem because the camera I used to take pictures of Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara and also of Gifu and Komatsu's spectacular hanami (cherry blossom viewing) seasons doesn't use a removable memory card. These pictures were to be the stars of my next posts, examples of how life goes on after national catastrophes, but...no cable.

I like blogging linearly. The thought of passing up the picture posts and moving on to less gorgeous things made me sad, so I opted to pretend like I didn't care and wait for the cable to realize it was being ignored and promptly reappear again.

Then I moved. I packed: no cable. I finished unpacking yesterday after a flurry of studying, English competition preparation, and lesson planning. Still no cable. It turns out my (surprsingly effective) habit of almost sociopathically passive-agressive commentary toward my internet connection doesn't get results with camera cables.

I think it's time to eat crow and head over to Yamada Denki and see what they sell. Incidentally, why does every digital camera seem to have a different port? Cables don't make companies that much money. Clearly the wide variety of ports exists as part of a vast and systematic conspiracy to further modern man's sense of alienation and puzzlement over the irrational rationality of a technological world.

Speaking of which, I've tried adding to this blog from my iPhone, but blogger compatible apps I've tried have left a lot to be desired, including picture posting. So far the best mobile blogging tool interface for photos has been Tumblr's, but I loathe Tumblr's self-referential reblog-as-comment format.

So, here's what I'm thinking for how to share my next year in Japan with everyone:

1. This blog, with the photo-sharing pressure off, as a way of sharing stories and happenings, plus
2. A picture a day on Tumblr to actually show people what my life looks like.

How does that sound?