The Senseitions

Farewell, Fukuoka!

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:42:00 +0000

Tomorrow, I'm leaving Japan for a funeral, and I'm not coming back.

It's been a bittersweet day. I've spent most of it, in between moving and cleaning and errands and paperwork, just riding around taking pictures and saying goodbye to all my favorite spots.

I must say, Fukuoka has given me a grand farewell: a night on the town with friends on Saturday, followed by two clear, hot summer days.

It's hard to put into words what I'm feeling right now. There's a lot to look forward to, a lot to miss, and a lot to regret. The last hurts most: the places I'll never get to see, the people I may never see again. While I'm ready to be living near family, I'm not quite ready to leave Japan. This marks the fourth time in my life I've picked up and moved to a different country. It doesn't get any easier. Then again, that's life, isn't it? You don't always get to finish things before they end.

Anyway, enough of my melancholy. Here's to three great years with a great wife in a great town in a great country. Here's to the next big adventure. And here's to Carl Eck - to Ampa - a great grandfather and a great man.

Prom!

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 27 May 2013 22:36:00 +0000

As if we weren't busy enough, Nana was actually in charge of prom this year. In true Nana fashion, she knocked it out of the park and brought the whole thing in at half the cost of last year's event. Bravo!

The key breakthrough in this year's prom was Nana's realization that we didn't have to rent out an expensive hotel ballroom. Indeed, there's an entire industry in Japan dedicated to helping people host their parties outside their tiny, tiny homes - and many of them come pre-themed and pre-decorated!

Jane Eyre the Musical in Japan/ ジェーン・エアミュージカル

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:37:00 +0000

OK, this post is only about.... six months late. But it's not like you guys were all going to hop on a plane and fly out here to see it, so nobody got hurt.

Justin and I love Jane Eyre. It's his favorite book, and my favorite "classic" (my favorite book could probably not be chosen if you held me at gunpoint). It's also a favorite of my sister's, and back when we were in high school, we used to listen to the soundtrack to the short-lived Broadway musical together. The musical is actually quite good, but I can understand why it didn't do well on Broadway. First, literary revivals aren't exactly "the thing" these days (maybe if they'd done the musical with songs from a band that was popular in the 80s, or made it somehow ironic), and second, the story doesn't lend itself to visual spectacle, a Broadway hallmark.

But a translated version of the Jane Eyre musical has actually done quite well in Japan, where the expectations for musical theater are very different. We were really excited to see the posters around town, since we figured it might be our only chance to ever see this show.

Our beloved music teacher friend Aki is my ticket hookup for Japanese musical theater. She has helped us with our Takarazuka tickets (although not the show in this post; we've been to 3 others), and also the tickets for Elisabeth in Osaka. She told us that the actress playing Jane, Takako Matsu, is a really big deal with a long theatrical and film career. In fact, Matsu played Jane Eyre before, and some of these performances are available on Youtube. Here's one of my favorites, a scene in which Jane paints a portrait of herself and her rival and finds herself lacking:

Japan (and East Asia in general) has a huge bias towards sopranos in popular music. I'm not an expert and can't give you a breakdown or anything, but I hear a lot of women on the radio or in public sound systems singing in chirpy, childish voices that sound very odd to Americans. There are a lot of other things to be said about this, and what it implies about gender in Japan, but that's too much for now. We can summarize by saying this is not the land of Adele, and that I enjoyed hearing Matsu sing like a young but definitely post-pubescent woman.

On the other hand, I didn't always love her speaking voice. She sounded artificially high, borderline chirpy territory, in a lot of her dialogue. It might have been an attempt to make Jane sound younger, or to have her sound conventionally feminine, but it sounded all wrong to me for Jane. Whether or not it sounded wrong to Japanese people, I can't say.

And then Rochester. My goodness, Satoshi Hashimoto is one heck of a Rochester. In fact, I'd say Hashimoto is the best Rochester I've ever seen, and yes, I've seen Timothy Dalton and Toby Stephens. With his long hair and six-foot frame, he was a dominant physical presence on the stage, and he can sing like anything. Plus, let's be honest: he's pretty ridiculously hot. Fortuitously, he was also Rochester in the 2009 version, from which these Youtube clips derive, so you can see the awesome for yourself. This is the musical's flagship song, Secret Soul in English, and the main idea is how Jane and Rochester love each other but can't share or talk about it. Hashimoto comes in about halfway through:

HOO boy.

There's a problem which faces any writer adapting Jane Eyre for film, TV, and stage adaptations: Jane, for all that she's a wonderful, lively first person narrator in the book, doesn't always talk enough to be as interesting when you can't hear her thoughts. About halfway, this (and many other adaptations) stops being Jane Eyre the musical and starts being Edward Rochester the musical. The proposal scene was the turning point, and you can see the problem pretty clearly in this video. Jane has a solid two minutes of just sitting and listening to Rochester sing about how flawed he is and how much he hopes Jane can save him. Then, after a momentary break for four words of dialogue, she gets to listen for another minute. In the book, she's having all sorts of thoughts and reactions to this sequence. On stage, since we can't hear any of that, Rochester takes over the scene.

Which, you know, he can handle. But still, it's a bit odd to lose Jane so frequently. That's a flaw in the script and writing, though, not in the performance of this cast.

The last thing I'll mention, because I couldn't think of another place to put it, is the staging. Hakataza (Hakata Theater) usually looks like a typical stage, but for Jane Eyre they added additional risers of seating in the back. It wasn't quite a theater-in-the-round, but it had a very open and interesting layout. It's the same as the one in the 2009 staging, so the videos you can click on up there look like what I saw in Fukuoka. I took this photograph before the show began to show the spare set and stage.

As Justin pointed out, you know you're in a 19th century novel when there are that many crosses lying around to mark the many graves you're going to need to get through the story.

Overall, this was an outstanding evening of theater, and I wish some of the US Jane fans could have seen it. I am very glad to have had the chance to see a great professional production of one of my favorite soundtracks, even if I only technically understood less than one in twenty words.

Okay, one in fifty. Just memorize the soundtrack before you go, and you'll be fine.

Mother's Day in Japan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 May 2013 03:03:00 +0000

Japan is adorable. Japanese Mother's Day (May 12, which I think is the same as elsewhere?) is therefore equally adorable.

Look at the adorable gift from my coworker:

Justin is the brown dog, I'm the white rabbit, and Mystery Child is the dog-rabbit hybrid. Dobbit?
This is darker than I thought...

Ever wonder why Japan is so much politer than other countries? In Japan, children start learning manners BEFORE BIRTH. Hey, with the queasies and the pukies and the ever-expanding wardrobe costs, Baby's already got a lot to thank me for! I dig this!

Great News!

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:10:00 +0000

I'll give you a hint: she's not old and she's not injured.

Well, it's been a pretty eventful few weeks, which is why you haven't heard much from us in a while.

A lot of what's been happening has been under the radar, some of it pretty bad news (friends and family can get details directly from us or our parents) - but we have some excellent news to share with you today: Nana and I are expecting our first early this winter, after we move "back" to Columbus in June.

Dan and Kath, as expected, are beside themselves with joy.

Of course, this means we'll be wrapping the Senseitions up in the next couple of months as we transition back to the US. There are a couple posts in the pipeline, including (I hope) a suitably sentimental farewell to the country we've so happily called home the last three years, but I'm afraid we're less likely to go out with a bang than with a whimper.

Just in case these next couple weeks fly by even faster than we're expecting them to, we'd like to thank our readers for following our travels here and at The Educated Burgher and School of ROK these last five years.

A wrinkle in space-time

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:03:00 +0000

Riding home tonight, I stopped to avoid a confused little girl, who then turned around and backed into my stationary tire. The mother told her, "Nana, be careful!" I said, "Her name is Nana? MY name is ALSO Nana!" Then Mom and I agreed that this was pretty "Sugoi," or "Wow."

I feel like if I had run her over, in addition to all other legal issues, I might have created the sort of space-time paradox of which sci-fi misadventures are made. Also the unraveling of universes. Better not to take the chance.

Japanese lesson:
お-なまえわナナですか？
(O-namae wa Nana desu ka?)
Name (subj) Nana is (question)?
Is her name Nana?
わたしのなまえもナナです
Watashi no namae mo Nana desu!
I-possessive name also Nana is!
My name is Nana too!
すごい
Sugoi!
Duuuuude!

Kagura Dance Show at the Hiroshima Kita Hotel

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:04:00 +0000

The night between our Mizuho Highland ski day and our drive through Yamaguchi to visit the famous five-story pagoda, Nana and I stopped with some friends at the Hiroshima Kita Hotel. We lucked out in terms of timing: the night of our stay was a special dinner show featuring a troupe of Kagura dancers.

Kagura is a kind of dance-theater that, like the better-known but significantly more staid Noh, grew out of old Shinto religious rituals. Modern Kagura draws on a wide range of folk tales, literary works, and episodes from history, and Hiroshima is one of its most active hotbeds. It's extremely high-energy, with a raucous live music ensemble and acrobatic choreography.

Sometimes, you go to these cultural things in Japan just to say that you've done them, but in reality they're actually so boring you leave halfway through. (See: Geisha shows.)

Kagura is not one of those things. It's loud, fast, and very intense. Really: it was so gripping I can barely remember what we had for dinner!

This is where Freddie Mercury gets it.
(Somehow I missed this guy's transformation into a crazy-haired fox. Too absorbed to take photos!)

Another tragic episode from the Tale of Genji.

These guys were awesome. Check out that hair!

This picture and the ones below are from our friend George,
who is a much more skilled (and more prolific) photographer than I.

I wish I could remember whatever stupid thing I was saying right here.

Pictures with the cast after the show.

Yes, that's a giant anchor.

I should also mention that the staff and the performers were profoundly amused to have a table of gaijin in the audience. When they were raffling off little souvenir plastic folders, they straight-up just gave them to us, after making a long speech in Japanese thanking us (I think) for coming all the way from America to see them. I didn't have the heart or the language skills to tell them we'd only come up from Fukuoka (and that a lot of us weren't American).

Yamaguchi: Ruriko-ji's Five Story Pagoda

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:40:00 +0000

Thanks, George, for the photo!

There is no building quite as iconically Asian as the pagoda. Earlier this spring, Nana and I visited an example particularly beloved among the Japanese as we passed through Yamaguchi on our way back from skiing at Mizuho Highland. (More on that later, perhaps.)

The five-story pagoda at Ruriko-ji isn't the biggest or most spectacular in Japan, but it benefits from being 1) very old (1442), and 2) in a beautiful location. It sits in a pretty little park on a wooded hillside at the edge of the city, looking out over the broad valley in which Yamaguchi sits.

But the pagoda wasn't the only attraction here: the rest of the temple grounds were also lovely, especially with the flowers just starting to bloom.

I think this is a Japanese foot shiatsu diagram. Maybe you put the coin on the spot where you would put the needle?

I loved this stone lantern in the pond.

Plum blossoms!

(Note: We were actually on this trip with a bunch of friends from our apartment building, but I forgot to ask them for permission to include them in this entry - and I don't like posting pictures of people without permission. My apologies to the rest of the Nishijima Mansion crew!)

Flea market find - guri tea caddy, I think

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 06:45:00 +0000

Today Justin and I went to the flea market at Hakozaki Shrine, where we've found some fun things ranging from ceramics to World War II propaganda kimonos to the Tanuki of Doom. We weren't looking for anything in particular, but ended up with this little thing when it caught our eye:

The tea caddy, not the book. That's for size perspective.

So what is it? I could be totally wrong about all of this, but here's my guess.

There is a technique called "guri" in lacquerware which consists of layering colors of lacquer, usually black and red, and then cutting through them to make a stripey pattern. See:

Bottom half is gently cleaned by me, top half is as-bought. I hope this helped us get it cheaper.

This technique was used in China as well as in Japan, although the Japanese name guri has won out over the Chinese name tixi. So if this is what I have, is it valuable?

Probably not. According to this forum, the fact that my piece has a blue enamel interior means it's probably a mid-20th century Chinese piece, nothing really old or super valuable. On the other hand, I paid about $20 for it, which I think is perfectly reasonable for a lovely little decorative box which is still technically an antique. I mean, a mass-produced bamboo box at Pier 1 Imports runs you $20 these days. Which is why we also got this cheapy plastic plum lunchbox for $8, even though it's a little scratched:

Plus it had bubble wrap. That kind of fun is worth at least $1.

When you're ignorant like us, you have to buy things based on whether or not you accept the price as written, because heaven only knows if you're getting a deal or not!

The Sapporo Brewery

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 02:56:00 +0000

(Our apologies for the long silence - what with Spring Break, then a busy week at work preparing for an accreditation visit, there's barely been a moment to blog!)

For most Americans, when you hear someone say "Sapporo," you probably picture a tall, silver can with a little yellow star. Sapporo Beer is Hokkaido's ambassador to the world - one of Japan's beer mega-brands, along with Kirin and Asahi (and to a lesser degree, Suntory, which you rarely see outside of Japan).

You have a point, snowman - why not spend an afternoon at the beer museum?

It's history and beer, all in one!

The Sapporo Brewery has a starring role in the very interesting history of commercial brewing in Japan, and by extension modern brewing across Asia. Founded in 1876 as part of a government project to develop the Hokkaido economy, the company that would eventually become Sapporo is one of the oldest commercial brewing operations in East Asia. The old brewery building is simply a spectacular piece of architecture, beautifully restored to house the museum.

An old mash tun.

An restored stained glass window depicting Hokkaido-grown barley.

The tasting hall.

The original brewmaster was trained in Germany, and thus helped set the course of East Asian beer for the next 150 years - Sapporo is a big part of why East Asian beer is almost exclusively based on German recipes, whereas the beers in India and Southeast Asia are typically British in origin.

While the displays are mostly in Japanese, there's enough there for a visitor with a tiny bit of Japanese to piece together a rough history of the company.

Though there are a few more of these labels around than might be in good taste.

The first exhibit included some really fascinating bottles from Sapporo-licensed breweries throughout Asia. It's the dark side of the history of Asian beer: the reason why Asian beer tastes like it does can be traced pretty much directly back to the Japanese Empire. Once Japanese soldiers developed a taste for beer in the 1880s, Japanese-style beer follow them into all the territories they occupied.

Of course, this being a Japanese museum, there had to be some elements of it that were simply inexplicable. Here, it was the Wonka-meets-Santa's-Workshop quality of the models depicting the brewing process.

I don't remember those other brewer tours having quite so many snowman-elves . . .

My favorite part of the museum, though, was a big gallery full of Sapporo advertisements. I loved the old wooden signboards.

But the posters were also a treat, tracing the broad trends of Japanese fashion and print culture over the decades. (These are roughly in order, from the late 19th century to the early 1980s. Apparently, I failed to take any pictures of anything later, though I remember some good ones.)

This gallery also included a small exhibit on Space Barley, a special-edition Sapporo brew made from barley grown on the International Space Station in 2006.

At about $100 a six-pack at its initial debut, it was one of the world's most expensive beers - and the best anyone could say about it was that it tasted pretty much like Sapporo. That was the point, though - to show that grains could be grown in microgravity without compromising their usefulness in a variety of food production processes.

Of course, like all good brewery tours and/or beer museums should, our tour ended in the tasting room, where we could sample a range of Sapporo offerings.

On the left is "Black Label," which is their main product (called "Premium," I think, in the US); the middle is "Classic," an old-fashioned light lager; the right is a hoppier pale lager from a small Sapporo brewery in northeastern Hokkaido.

Sadly, Japanese macrobrews aren't all that different from one another, and they start to get pretty old after a while. The "Black Label" doesn't taste much different from "Kirin Ichiban," the "Classic" tastes pretty much like a cheap version of "Black Label," and the pale lager tastes pretty much like "Asahi SuperDry" (which, for my money, is the best of the big Japanese beers).

The onion beer cheese round failed to cleanse the palate.

But it was still a nice place to sit down for a drink on a cold afternoon.

Plus, this being Japan, they had some stuff to stand in and/or stick your head through for silly photos.

Because you haven't really been there if you haven't taken a picture of your face shoved through a big sheet of particle board.

Sapporo specialty: Butter Corn Ramen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 03:30:00 +0000

Sapporo is Japanese dairy country. This is their specialty.

Verdict: OH GOD YES.

A question of character

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:40:00 +0000

Shamelessly expanded from an email I sent to my father, because EFFICIENCY.

My friend the Japanese teacher recently suggested kanji characters for my name. Justin can't have any because his name has significantly non-Japanese sounds, but "Nana" is a common sound in Japan. Not only is it the pronunciation for the number 7, it can even be a name: there is a recent manga in which the premise is that two girls named Nana meet up on a train to Tokyo and become roommates in apartment 707. The joke, of course, is on the number pronunciation; you have two Nanas living in apartment "Nana-zero-nana." I wanted to just use the character for "seven," or "七", for my name (look how easy it is to write!!!) but apparently this is Not Done.

There are apparently two characters for "Na" which are appropriate for names, either of which would be followed by a character indicating that you double the sound. Forgive me for not typing that, since I have no idea how to type "repeated sound" phonetically on my keyboard, which is the only way to type in Japanese. Kind of a metaphysical question, actually.*

The first "Na" is the character for vegetables, and looks like this: 菜. I like this because vegetables are funny, and also I already know how to write it, which would save time. However, she said that felt a little soft for me, since it also has sort of a bendy, "amber waves of grain" connotation. After some reflection, I thought perhaps of the English name "Willow."

The second "Na," she said, would be "a much better fit." It is the same "Na" from the city of Nara, the old capital, and is used by one of the two Nana manga characters (the other just writes it ナナ, which is phonetic Katakana). This alternative "Na" looks like this: 奈

I looked it up. It means "hell, abyss, the worst possible."

Cannot decide if my feelings are hurt, or if I should consolidate power and rule through fear. Advice would be appreciated.

* After looking up the character Nana Komatsu from Nana, I found that her name is written with this character: 奈々. So now you can see it thanks to the magic of cut and paste, but I still don't have a clue how to type it.

ZOMG, Candy! features TheSenseitions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:25:00 +0000

Our college friend Rosa (she was in the marching band with us; metaphorical pouring-out of one for the grand old YPMB) maintains an excellent candy blog at ZOMG, Candy! We've sent her oddities from our Asia adventures before; in fact, we got her on Google's top three search results for "crunky nude balls." Our mothers are so very proud.

Some previous candy crossovers:
Weird kit-kats #1: TheSenseitions; ZOMG, Candy! (Wasabi, Sweet Potato)
Okinawa Shikwasa Hi-Chew
Okinawa Brown Sugar candy
Korean Candy: chocolate-covered peanuts, Lotte Pepero, Crunch Ball Crispy Candy, various Hi-Chews (actually from Japan and picked up in an airport), and the legendary Crunky Nude Balls.

So we - or rather, my aforementioned mother, whom I now owe $5 postage - sent Rosa some candy during our winter trip home. She put up her reviews a long time ago but I just got organized enough to actually do this post linking to them. We now have:

Candied Yuzu Peel
Kabosu (cabos lime) Caramels
and another Kit-Kat review, Kyoto Yatsuhashi.

Finally, if you'd like to see Justin take a shot at Kit-Kat reviewing, check out the old blog posts on Citrus Blend Kit-Kats and Hojicha (tea-flavored) Kit-Kats.

Have a sweet day!

History Education in Japan's Disputes With China & Korea

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:35:00 +0000

Nana pointed me to this article from the BBC, written by a Japanese student who started in the Japanese system but completed her high-school education at an International Baccalaureate (IB) school in Australia.

Her insights ring true for us IB teachers: students in the Japanese system learn a pile of stuff about the medieval era, almost nothing about the twentieth century in general, and even less about World War II. These days, Japanese nationalists are pushing to whitewash even what little instruction the students are given - for instance, by removing references to comfort women or to the Nanjing Massacre. (Note: those are not pleasant links.) Bad for two reasons, as it's annoying Japan's neighbors now and raising a generation destined to annoy those neighbors in the future.

Anyway, an interesting read. Check it out.

Sendai Earthquake: Two Years Later

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami that devastated northern Honshu here in Japan. While the immediate impact of the event has faded around the world - and, to a lesser extent, in more distant parts of the country - the many of the worst-hit regions still haven't recovered. In some ways, it probably never will, as to a certain extent the recovery efforts run counter to a long-term demographic shift in Japan: the younger generations are almost universally abandoning small towns in favor big urban areas like Tokyo, Nagoya, Kansai, Sapporo, and Fukuoka.

Slate.com has a photo gallery depicting the ongoing effects of the disaster. At school, we're also doing our small part to help the relief efforts through various charity activities and through the considerably larger sacrifices made by the teams of students and teachers who head there to lend a hand twice each year. If you feel like pitching in from afar, have a look at this donation page from the Japanese Red Cross Society.

Park Air at the Sapporo Snow Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:08:00 +0000

In the middle of the Snow Festival, halfway down the length of Odori Park, stood a giant ski slope on a scaffold. Throughout the festival, teams of (mostly local) skiers and snowboarders put on aerial exhibitions high above the shivering crowd. The guys and gals below tackled the freestyle moguls the night Nana and I came by to watch. The skiers ranged in age from about 13 to 50 (no joke); they were freestyle beginners, national team superstars, and everything in between.

That guy's 50.

Softening the landing.

That guy's 14.

13, I think. Doing a front flip.

Yeah, it seems you can get pretty good at this sport if you grow up with world-class skiing in your backyard!

Sapporo Snow Festival 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:30:00 +0000

Last month, Nana and I spent a long weekend in Hokkaido visiting the famous Sapporo Snow Festival (yuki matsuri, 雪祭り). Every February, the city of Sapporo turns its long, narrow, snow-bound Odori Park into a magical celebration of the winter season upon which so much of the area's tourism is built.

First, the amount of snow involved is simply unspeakable. When we arrived, the snow was already piled several feet deep along the roads and sidewalks - and for most of our time there, it just kept falling.

What's more, all along Odori Park, huge blocks of snow had been built up into nearly a dozen towering, multi-story sculptures that loomed over the festival site.

An old Japanese hotel.

A Thai temple. Every year, a foreign tourism board is invited to sponsor a sculpture.
This was right next to a Thai Airways booth.

Some Japanese cartoon characters visit Hawaii. This one was sponsored by Hawaiian Airlines, who have started offering some direct flights to Honolulu from a few secondary Japanese airports. (This includes Fukuoka - we're going later this month!)

An old Japanese government building (I think).

Taipei's Chiang Kai Shek memorial, in snow and ice lit from within. Also, with a bunch of freezing cold B-list J-pop stars and a few inexplicable mascots.

The Chiang Kai Shek memorial in the daytime.

Ise Shrine, the holiest site in the Shinto religion. Now in snow form.

It was hard to capture in a photo, but this sculpture actually had a lot of depth. That bridge projected out about 10 feet from the background. A really neat effect.

Some kind of crazy mercastle thing. In ice.

A detail of the Ise Shrine sculpture at dusk.

Ise Shrine again.

But these mega-sculptures weren't the only attractions: various civic organizations also sponsored their own smaller sculptures, and at one end of the park there was an international contest for snow sculpture teams from all over the world.

A person-sized tower.

A shout-out for Nana's homies.

Instant nightmares.

An ice fox.

Ultraman (naturally).

An Okinawan shi-sa.

This was the US team's entry into the sculpture competition. The team was from Portland. They chose to depict a beaver riding a sled with a very frightened Sasquatch. You do the math.

New Zealand pitches some trippy Maori stuff.

Sapporo landmarks.

Orangutans by the Malaysian team. (Yes, there was a Malaysian snow sculpture team.)

The winners? Thailand's sculpture of these very artistic elephants.

And Finland did a cricket. Hm.

Bonus: it turns out the snow was only one of the attractions at the Snow Festival. The Festival is also a celebration of regional cuisine. (More on that later.) Tons of walking, tons of snow, tons of interesting food? Throw in a day of fresh powder on the ski slopes, and you pretty much have the best weekend ever.

This Week in Daibii-Chan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 07:15:00 +0000

デイビーちゃん (Daibii-Chan, or "Little Davy") is my sister's baby. His exploits teaching us Japanese have already been documented here. We had class again yesterday and once again Daibii-Chan rode to the rescue.

Yesterday's lesson was the phrase "-そうです”, which attaches to an adjective to indicate that you think the adjective is accurate, but you haven't confirmed it personally. Its rough English equivalent is "looks [as if it is]," as in "That cake looks tasty" (but I haven't tasted it yet), or "I heard that..." "I heard that that movie is good" (but I haven't seen it myself).

And Daibii-Chan? I have a new photograph of him on my phone wearing a bear hat. My sister has asked me not to post pictures of her child here, so you can just trust me when I tell you it is objectively the cutest photograph of an infant which has ever been taken, and I include baby penguins in that statement. That prompted the following practice sentence:

デイビーちゃんはうれしそうです。

Daibii-Chan wa ureshisoudesu.

Little Davy (subject) happy looks to be.

I described this to my sister and she said, "This is the perfect phrase for that photograph. He looks happy, but two seconds after I took the picture, he ripped the hat off, screaming."

In which case we could say:

デイビーちゃんはうれしくなさそうです。

Daibii-chan wa ureshikunasasoudesu.

Little Davy (subject) happy does not look to be.

Little Davy looks unhappy.

And this gets even better. To check that I didn't mess up the phrase, I ran it through Google Translate, which came up with "Davy Chan is unlikely to be pleased." Jackie, I think that kind of sums him up!!

Citrus Blend Kit-Kat

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:08:00 +0000

A new entry in the "weird Japanese Kit-Kat flavor" category. According to the package, it's exclusive to Chugoku and Shikoku. (Nana bought it in Hiroshima on a school trip.)

They're actually pretty good, but they're hardly classifiable as Kit-Kats. The flavor is somewhere between a creamsicle and an orange Starburst.

Dan & Kath in Kyoto: The Golden Pavilion

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:20:00 +0000

In the afternoon of our second day in Kyoto, after a morning spent at one of Kyoto's massive flea markets, we stopped by Kinkaku-ji ("The Temple of the Golden Pavilion"), which perhaps one of the most famous temples in all of Japan. At the center of this temple's sprawling gardens lies a broad, shallow pond with a soaring pavilion coated in gold leaf. You've probably seen it before, though you may not have known what it was: along with, say, Mt. Fuji, or one of Japan's multi-storied pagodas, the Golden Pavilion is among a handful of images that can regularly be found on Japanese post-cards and calendars.

Fortunately, we managed to arrive at just the right time in the afternoon: with the Golden Pavilion shining in the early evening sun, even the crowds of fellow tourists weren't enough to take the magic out of the place. A joy to look at, and a joy to photograph, too.

As you can see, the water that day was incredibly still.

I also indulged in a few shots from behind the pavilion, looking out over the pond.

You can see how the pavilion juts out into the water, so that it looks almost like it's floating. This is a favorite trick in traditional Japanese architecture.

Buffalo, venison, and elk, oh my! Shipping Jerky to Japan with Climax Jerky

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 03:12:00 +0000

Sometimes Justin and I like to feature things on the blog which have contributed in small or large ways to our quality of life. Today's feature: the good people at Climax Jerky.

Foreign food is relatively accessible in Japan, certainly more so than in Seoul (although that was five years ago now, and we've even seen Fukuoka become more international in that time, so who knows what you can get in Seoul these days?) What you can't get can often be mailed by collaborators back home, which is the source of my precious brownie mix, still unavailable here. (I saw reduced fat brownie mix at the Kaldi Coffee Farm at the mall... so close, and yet, so far.)

Meat, however, remains difficult. Most is too perishable to ship, and stores here typically don't stock "foreign" meats like turkey. Even non-perishables are severely restricted by international shipping and quarantine laws. I once had a care package from my mother impounded after customs discovered jerky inside. This being Japan, they were happy to remove the jerky and send the rest along, which was nice for the brownie mix but did nothing to assuage my jerky craving.

We love jerky, Justin and I. When we go home, we drive back and forth to visit relatives and usually keep a bag of jerky in the car for snacks. You can find beef jerky here, but not the holy grail of jerky. the mighty bison jerky. Or buffalo jerky, if you aren't really fussy about terminology.

My brilliant mother contacted the post office and some shipping folks and found out that jerky would be exportable to Japan provided that it was shipped directly from a licensed manufacturer, as opposed to from a consumer who bought it in the store. Which led her to the good people at Climax Jerky, a specialty jerky producer in Colorado. They have everything from beef to buffalo to salmon, in flavors like hickory, lemon pepper, and teriyaki. (Contrary to what you might think, bringing teriyaki bison jerky to Japan is not like bringing coals to Newcastle. It's more like bringing Tex-Mex to Mexico).

Mom called. Brooke said, "I think we can do it." They did.

I am too lazy to rotate this. Please note hand-signed thank you note.

The downside of ordering from Climax: well, their jerky isn't cheap, but it is a specialty product. Buffalo jerky, for instance, is expensive wherever you buy it, but it is completely worth the price. I don't know about shipping because this has always been a gift from my mother at the holidays. I'm sure Brooke could tell you.

The other downside is that the arrival date is not predictable. Based on package stamps, I can tell that Climax sent it out within 24 hours of my mother's order, so the delay is on the post office and customs side. I don't hold Climax responsible. The first time my mom sent it, it took about 6 weeks to arrive. However, this time, it came in just over 2 weeks. Maybe that's the result of the Fukuoka customs office being familiar with it the second time around. Still, it did get here both times, and it's not like jerky spoils.

Overall, ordering from Climax Jerky gets two big expat thumbs up!

Sapporo Skiing & Snow Festival Teaser

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:08:00 +0000

Ise Shrine, made out of snow.

As many of our loyal readers may already know, Nana and I spent the weekend in Hokkaido at the 64th Annual Sapporo Snow Festival. We also managed to squeeze in an excellent day of skiing at Sapporo Teine Highland (read: two feet of fresh powder overnight, followed by clear skies in the afternoon).

Hard to tell, but that's the northern sprawl of Sapporo down below.

It will take us a bit to get the pics sorted and the posts written (and, egad, we still have a couple posts from my parents' visit in November . . . !). This is just a little something to tide you over while we catch up from doings nothing productive for four whole days.

(Full disclosure: I'm writing this post partly to test a new IFTTT recipe. Any accidental entertainment you incur from this post is just a happy side effect.)

Kyoto: Fushimi Inari Taisha

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:47:00 +0000

Another episode from the adventures of Justin, Nana, Dan, and Kath . . .

Our first stop on arrival in Kyoto - after a flight from Nagasaki and a train from Kansai - was Fushimi Inari Taisha (伏見稲荷大社, "the great shrine of Inari in Fushimi"). This is the head shrine of Inari Okami (稲荷大神, "Inari the great spirit"), one of the most important of the kami, the god-ish beings central to Shinto.

Inari is traditionally honored as the spirit of worldly success in all its forms: agriculture, fertility, business, and such. Like most kami, Inari takes many forms (of either gender, though more often female). But she's most commonly associated with her messenger, the fox. Hence her shrines can usually be identified by pairs of flanking fox statues and clusters of bright orange torii gates erected by local businesses hoping to gain her favor.

If you can't afford a big one, you can buy a little one instead.

At Fushimi Inari Taisha, though, this has gotten totally out of hand: the shrine occupies an entire hillside on the south-eastern edge of Kyoto, criss-crossed by dozens of paths under thousands upon thousands of torii.

The four of us spent about an hour wandering the wooded precincts and still barely scratched the surface of the place. It's essentially a day hike, with little clusters of noodle shops and tea shops scattered along the way, looking like they'd just dropped out of the 1790s.

Awesome little playground for the camera!

Fukuoka, mon.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:29:00 +0000

I supervise, among other tests, the SAT here, and I don't even bother to check in the mail for my rosters. I'm in my second year as college counselor, and they've maybe come before the test twice? The joys and perils of test distance, I suppose.

I also get copies of the scores of students at my school. I hadn't gotten any for a while, and I was wondering what had happened. Turned out they took a little detour:

I am impressed by two things. First, that things are missent to Jamaica so frequently that there is a stamp for it. Second, that the best way to get it back to me once it had gone to Jamaica in the first place somehow involved Germany (check the stamp). This is a well-traveled set of misplaced scores.

I do actually know how this happened. Someone must have had to sort the letter electronically, and whenever you use the dropdown menu to enter a country name, you type "J" to get to the right section. Japan, however, is not the first J country on an alphabetical list. Jamaica is. (Reminds me of our time in Korea where you never knew how to find that country on a dropdown menu at all - depending on the makers of the list, it could be under K, for "Korea, South,"; under S for South Korea, or under R for Republic of Korea). So if you're rapidly tabbing through the list, you could easily end up on Jamaica by mistake.

The capper:

Me, showing envelope to student: "Isn't that hilarious? The letter went to Jamaica instead of Japan?"
Student: "Haha! Jamaica! That's in Africa, right?"

I think he has a future with the post office.