hmmn

The bittersweet taste of kindness

Kurt — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:33:14 +0000

Image courtesy of Flickr user mloge.

Today at one of my long-standing English-conversation teaching jobs, where I teach a group of five retirees over lunch in an upscale Chinese restaurant and have done so for over nine years, twice a month, I ordered this month’s “chef’s special”, which was a stir fry featuring 苦瓜 (nigauri, or “bitter melon”), perhaps more commonly known as ゴーヤー (goya), which is what the vegetable is called in Okinawa. Goya is one of those “acquired taste”-classified Japanese foods along the likes of fermented soybeans (納豆, natto) or sour plums (梅干し, umeboshi), and I’m sure there are a whole host of non-Japanese living here who hate the stuff, as well as plenty of Japanese folk who feel the same. For my part, although initially taken aback by its strong bitterness ten years ago, I quickly grew to like it, especially when served as it normally is in a stir fry along with eggs and tofu, which do a nice job of cutting some of the bitterness. In fact, in recent years I’ve grown to love it, so much so that on this same day one of the students gave me three pieces of goya that she grew in her community garden plot, as she has for several years now.

But the pleasures of goya will have to wait, for what inspired this post was what happened when I told the waitress my order. She replied, with a most concerned face,

「ゴーヤーは大丈夫ですか。」

(goya ha daijoubu desu ka, “Are you sure you can eat goya?”)

Now, I suppose it’s a measure of how long I’ve been here in Japan (10-plus years as of this writing) that this question fairly rolled off my back, though not enough so to keep me from answering her with a mock-seriousness to match her worry-contorted face, 「大丈夫だと思いますけど」(daijoubu da to omoimasu kedo, “I think it’s okay.”). And this particular waitress has asked this question before, regarding what I forget now but perhaps tofu, or baby shrimp, or some other food ripe for “foreigners must hate this” second-guessing. All to say that I was not entirely surprised by the question, but still tweaked enough to think this would make something worthwhile to write about.

The students for their part were of the impression that the waitress was 優しい (yasashii, ”kind; helpful”). In their view, no doubt, they thought the waitress was trying to stop me from ordering something I might not like, or find too bitter, and I can go along with that thinking somewhat. But it is my experience that a lot of what goes for kindness here in Japan would probably be viewed more as condescension back home in America. I tried to think of a similar situation in America where this might happen, but honestly I’m hard-pressed to come up with anything. Granted, the level of customer service being what it is, it’s not exactly a fair comparison. But in reality, in those places where customer service is top-notch, questioning whether a customer was ordering something they’d be able to eat just wouldn’t fly. I suppose a case could be made for the situation of the foreign tourist, struggling to read the menu, and the staff trying to steer them towards something less exotic and potentially unpalatable. But the waitress in my situation has been seeing me eat in this restaurant twice a month for over five years — not exactly a fledgling FOB needing to be coddled.

I’m not sure I really have anything “conclusive” to say about this whole thing. I mean, I find it curious that it didn’t rile me up more, but on the other hand I sort of take that as a positive. But I do think this level of do-gooder condescension does indicate, on some very small (but not inconsequential) level, that Japanese attitudes towards non-Japanese have a lot of room for improvement. But that said, won’t I miss the coddling when it’s gone — if I live to see that day?

Documentary on Japan’s Suicide Problem

Kurt — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:39:07 +0000

Ages ago — ten years ago, in fact — I wrote about Japan’s high suicide rate. Today I came across a documentary on the subject that must have been made around this time, commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK, which someone uploaded to YouTube last year. Following this search will take you to all five parts (with the somewhat misleading title of “Secret Life of Japan”), or you can watch Part 1 below and continue on from there.

Not knowing anything about this film — and there’s very little information on the YouTube page aside from a (again slightly misleading) description, I assumed it was a Japanese made film (it’s completely in Japanese, with subtitles), yet couldn’t help but be surprised as it was quite unlike most Japanese made-for-TV documentaries I’ve seen. Alas, at the end the credits reveal that it indeed was not Japanese-made.

Of course this is not to say it couldn’t have been made by a Japanese, but I honestly don’t think any of your Japanese networks — to say nothing of the average viewer — would have been comfortable with the way the subject of suicide was treated, and the honesty of the opinions and stories of the various interviewees. The documentary also avoids, for the most part, the overly maudlin and manipulative tear-jerkingness of standard Japanese TV fare. The lack of a comforting and distancing narrator forces the viewer to listen to the stories — of the victims’ surviving family members, of employees dealing with the loss of what they thought were lifelong jobs, of people who for one reason or another ended up deciding not to kill themselves — as it these people were in the room with us.

Highly recommended.

Vivo! Beer + Dining Bar in Ikebukuro

Kurt — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:17:53 +0000

The entrance to Vivo, adjacent to a Starbucks.

[Originally posted to my nascent "Japanese craft beer" blog -- only two posts! -- last October.]

Today I took advantage of having to go to Shinjuku for an errand to check out the well-regarded Vivo! Beer + Dining Bar in Ikebukuro on my way home. (Or did I take advantage of a desire to drink good beer to do the errand?)

Vivo! is most definitely a beer bar, with 20 different beers on tap as well as bottles of import beer to choose from. I was there on a Sunday around 4pm, and there were about five or six other customers, with a few more trickling in as it got closer to evening. The place is non-smoking with a cubby hole looking booth for people to have a puff, and there’s free wifi (ask one of the staff for the password).

Kin-oni Pale Ale, in a “Regular” size glass

One thing I was ambivalent about were the sizes on offer, “Regular” which equates to 360ml, and “Half” which is 285ml, which was ¥150 cheaper than the Regular. In other words, whether you’re talking American or British pints, what’s on offer is neither. On the other hand, the prices did seems to reflect that you were getting less than a pint (at least compared to other places I’ve been to in high-rent areas like this one), and the smaller sizes can help to make even a high ABV IPA a bit more sessionable.

Of the 20 beers on tap, 14 of them were from Japanese, a great ratio if you ask me, especially when all with the exception of a Ebisu were from domestic craft breweries. Breweries like Sankt Gallen, Baird (which also makes a special IPA for Vivo), Coedo, Yoho, and Tamamura were represented, amongst others. (On the import side, you could get two kinds of Lagunitas, a Rogue, a Southern Tier, plus the ubiquitous Guinness.) You can see the full list of 20 (in Japanese and English) at Vivo!’s blog. Based on past blog posts, it would seem they change the lineup (slightly) every two weeks or so. Bottles were listed in the back of the menu, but I didn’t pay too much attention as I figured why go bottle when there are so many choices on tap.

For my first beer, I purposely chose something from a new-to-me brewery, in this case the Kin-Oni Pale Ale from Noboribetsu, a hot spring town about a hour from Sapporo in Hokkaido (and not a good enough web presence to link to, if I’m being honest). It was very good, well worth the ¥1000 yen I paid even though it wasn’t a full pint.

I did use the small size to rationalize getting another beer, and this time I chose the Harvest Ale from Southern Tier, a brewery from New York I’ve often heard of and seen in the shops but had yet to try. It was also rather tasty, though it didn’t knock my socks off the way the Kin-Oni did.

More beer than you shake a stick at!

I did not order any food but judging from the menu it seemed reasonably priced, but can’t comment on anything like portions or taste. And speaking of the menu, I like how they have all 20 beers on tap spread over two pages, with a fair amount of information or commentary about each beer. While this is in Japanese, important things like the beer name, brewery, and beer style are printed in English, a nice plus.

Here’s a link to the location in Google Maps.

A quiet Sunday afternoon at Vivo!

kama

Kurt — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 13:50:40 +0000

The other day my son and I ate lunch at a local branch of the chain udon restaurant Marugame (丸亀). I usually let my son order in these situations, partly to give him confidence, partly because I’m self-conscious of speaking Japanese in front of him. However, on this occasion he stumbled on how to read the first kanji of the 釜玉うどん (kamatama udon, “udon with a half-boiled egg”) dish we wanted to order. We ended up pointing to the menu and no harm done, but I was curious as to what was this kanji that he couldn’t read.

According to Goo’s Shogakukan Progressive Japanese–English Dictionary, 釜/kama means:

an iron pot; a kettle; a boiler

which made sense in the context of a noodle dish. However, I wondered if this “kama” was in anyway related to おかま (okama), which is used loosely for men who want to be women or to mean “homosexual” (more about that below).

Looking it up in the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, there is a mention under a “slang” heading of “homosexual”, confirming my suspicions. But I was also intrigued by another, separate slang sense of the character: “buttocks”. Now, no offense intended to anyone, but it’s not too far a stretch to see how buttocks and homosexual might be related. But how did we get from iron pot to buttocks/homosexual? Being a hobbyist etymologist of sorts, I felt I needed to get to the, uh, bottom of this.

Photograph by Christian Kaden. Used with permission.

As best I can tell from a 30-minute whip around the internet, the iron pot of old bore a resemblance to the anus (or perhaps it was the other way around?). Although an anus wouldn’t be the first thing I would conjure up when idly looking at a pot (one hopes!), I can’t say the association is way off base either. Anyway, it was this image of the pot as an anus, so the armchair etymology goes, that led to the gay male being labeled okama.

Regarding what exactly okama means, I found it hard to pin that down for your average Japanese in today’s context, though it would seem that the “gay male” or “homosexual” meaning has taken a backseat somewhat to a meaning along the lines of “effeminate male”. My wife, no expert on the matter to be sure, but fairly representative of her generation, insists it has little “gay” meaning and basically means “a man who wants to be a woman”, and that it’s a sort of umbrella term under which you would classify terms like 女装 (jousou, drag queen) or ニューハーフ (nyuu haafu, transsexual). For her, and she claims most young people these days would do the same, she would refer to a gay male as ゲイ (gei, gay). However, it doesn’t seem nearly so cut and dried, as this old Usenet thread between mainly non-Japanese colorfully shows. (By the way, the apparently much newer slang term おなべ (onabe, literally “a pot”) refers to women who like to dress up as men, although I’m not sure how often such a term is used, to say nothing of how prevalent this form of gender crossing actually is.)

One interesting discovery made along the way was learning the Japanese for “fag hag”, that rather harsh-sounding but wonderfully assonant slang term for a straight woman who likes to hang out with gay men: おこげ (okoge). Literally, お焦げ (okoge) means the food that sticks to the pot after cooking, particularly rice. I really don’t know the level of perjorative nuance this word carries, but you have to give it points for cleverness. These days, the term やおい (yaoi) has a fair amount of currency both in Japan and abroad among those interested in manga and anime, and is a type of fag-haggery, if you will — it refers to romantic manga (usually written by females) revolving around two male protagonists, and is a genre favored in large part by straight women. As if that bit of subculture wasn’t interesting enough in its own right, the term yaoi, coined in the 1970s, is an acronym of sorts that comes from 山なし、落ちなし、意味なし (yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, “no peak/climax, no fall/denouement, no meaning”). Apparently this was a disparagement used by older established manga elite like Osamu Tezuka to refer to what they saw as the meaningless drivel being put out by younger (and often independently-published) manga artists in the early 70s. Not surprising then that the fuddy-duddy’s opprobrium got appropriated and mantle-ized by the new kids on the subversive block.

Which brings me on to 薔薇 (bara, literally “rose”), another genre of gay manga that is actually meant for gay men rather than okoge women and whose name might originate from– No, I gotta stop there, or I’ll still be writing this post days from now. You see, this etymology stuff is both addictive and in reality, never-ending.

Whisky Highballs

Kurt — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:40:23 +0000

Japan has been in a whisky “highball” boom for at least the last couple of years or so, if not longer, spurned on by the big makers like Suntory. There are “highball” bars and highball-focused izakayas and restaurants in Tokyo’s oyaji havens, and canned highball drinks seem quite popular.

Being a beer drinker primarily, I didn’t pay much thought. But I’ve been trying for the last year to “get into” Scotch after going to a Scotch society event in 2011, with moderate success (actually very little, a lot of it tastes “the same” to me which is a sure sign of failure). After reading the highball can post linked above, recently I asked my wife to pick me up a couple of the highball cans, and although it didn’t really seem to tickle my fancy, I was intrigued enough to buy a bottle of Suntory that came with a tumbler this past weekend – I figured at least this way I could pay around 75 yen per highball drink instead of the 150 yen the cans cost. And lo and behold, I’m liking what I’m drinking!

Mind you, Suntory’s packaging recommends a 4:1 ratio, and mine is more like 2:1! But this metallic tumbler really keeps the damn thing cold with very little ice-melting, for well near two hours.

The Japanese actress Koyuki (she was in The Last Samurai apparently, though I’ve never seen that) is Suntory’s main marketing presence for it’s whiskey/highball campaigns. I hope she gets paid a lot because I’d be willing to bet she has been a big reason for the highball’s resurgence:

This is a good overview of that resurgence.

Odori

Kurt — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 09:47:06 +0000

I finished the video below a few days before the March 11th earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan and has caused so much destruction and loss of life. It didn’t seem appropriate at the time to mention it.

As I’ve written about before in these pages, there is “something ethereal, something dreamlike” about the Japanese Bon Odori festival which takes place typically in August every year. No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite capture its essence in any other form than my own mental wanderings. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to try and try again.

That chronicler of so many things Japanese at the turn of the century, Lafcadio Hearn (known to those in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo), wrote a beautiful essay about the Bon Odori that perhaps comes closest to capturing how this festival makes me feel (you can find it in the collection, Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, or here):

Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily this is enchantment; I am bewitched, bewitched by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flitting of the marvellous sleeves– apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this.

Even Hearn’s essay, through the voice of Akira, a young Buddhist acolyte accompanying Hearn, acknowledges that “you will see the Bon-odori danced here as it is never danced in cities–the Bon-odori of ancient days….[I]n the cities all is changed.”, and undoubtedly our local Bon Odori is even more removed from that which Hearn wrote about. It is as tacky and provincial as the cotton candy and tilt-a-whirls of my American childhood. But its charms are a part of the Japan I live in, a part of the Japan I never want to leave.

Elliott Sharp’s SyndaKit

Kurt — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:32:29 +0000

I went to see Elliott Sharp and 11 other assorted Japan-based musicians perform his composition SyndaKit the other night at the Pit Inn in Shinjuku. It was a full house, testament not only to the renown of Sharp himself, but also to the impressive roster of performers sharing the stage with him.

I have to confess I was not really aware of Sharp until I came across the event’s listing online, and although I did do the requisite YouTube research (this video is a good start — he played the same instrument last night) what attracted me to the event was the chance to see all the other musicians at the same time — you know, value for the yen and all. In addition to Sharp, some of the names that popped out at me were Michiyo Yagi (koto), Kazutoki Umezu (alto sax, clarinet), Yumiko Tanaka (shamisen) and Jim O’Rourke (guitar).

Unfortunately, because I decided on the event late, I wasn’t really able to get a seat near the front (The Pit Inn actually seats people based on when they bought/reserved their ticket, a fair system I wish other venues would implement, even though in this case it meant I was sitting near the back). That meant that it was primarily an aural experience for me, and on that score it was okay, but not great.

A friend to whom I mentioned that I was going to the show emailed me that he thought that with that many musicians it must be an improvised performance. In fact if wasn’t, “SyndaKit” being the name of Sharp’s composition that the ensemble played. How it worked was that each musician had what was a slightly different sheet of music, or perhaps more accurately, a different part of the composition. After the group would do a run through (the length of each run-through seemed to be in the hands of Sharp as performer and conductor), they would pass their sheet of music on to the player beside them, who would do the same. And so it went after each “session” or section of the piece. (Things got comical later since the crammed nature of the stage meant that there wasn’t really a nice circle formed, and later the sheet passing became more of sheet exchanging and was punctuated by many “No, I’ve already done this one” comments.)

Sharp made some comment early on that we would be hearing the same piece over and over again, but that it would be different each time, and he was certainly right about that. Later, when it got really chaotic with the sheet exchanging, he commented that he didn’t want to tell the musicians but in reality the sheets were not really needed after they had done the first run through since they were playing loops. I really have no idea what that means or if it was in fact true, but I thought the increasingly chaotic nature of the sheet exchanges added a lot to the performance. One thing that was interesting was how one performer (violinist Keisuke Ohta) at a couple of different points spoke into the mic something repetitive, such as “Ikebukuro” (the name of an area in Tokyo) 20 or so times. I would love to know what the score said there — did Sharp insert something topical like a place name, or were there instructions on the score to the effect of something like “repeat over and over again the first word that comes into your head”. And why was it that with all the sheet exchanging, the same performers ended up doing the same thing during another section of the piece? Coincidence?

In the end, it was probably these questions, as fascinating as they were, that gave the performance a slightly academic or contrived air and made the evening just okay for me. Not being able to really see the musicians, and wondering how much they were playing a part rather than expressing something near and dear to them, left me feeling slightly cold and unsatisfied.

I recorded a few minutes from one of the segments on my iPhone, so you can get a taste of the music (it runs 4:51):

Gotta love YouTube Sometimes

Kurt — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:17:45 +0000

Wall of images

Kurt — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:58:45 +0000

A while ago Google changed the way they displayed results of their Image Search. However, judging from various comments I’ve seen, and from browser extensions that have been developed, that quite a lot of folks hate the new look, which I like to think of as a wall of images.

I suppose this grumbling has something to do with poor internet connections and long load times — otherwise I can’t possibly see the problem. I for one, blessed with a decent cable internet connection, love the new look. Frankly I only ever used Image Search from time to time, but the new layout makes me want to use it a lot more, and even to spend idle time coming up with search terms quaranteed to produce serious visual stimulation.

The above “fillmore posters” search is one example. Another is the “blue note album covers” below.

Auto Detect Failure

Kurt — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:04:14 +0000

Uh, no, I’m not in South Korea. What’s worse is that there doesn’t seem to be any where on the page where I can change it, at least not intuitively. Clicking on the Blizzard link takes you to Blizzard’s Korean page. Of course, being popped onto a Japanese page with no recourse to “English” would have been annoying too.

UPDATE: Found via Twitter a link to US purchase page. After signing up and everything, I get this:

“Because you live in Japan we have assigned you to this game region: North America”. The whole thing is rather shocking localization failure on the part of a major entertainment powerhouse. Their system couldn’t even accept the seven-digit Japanese postal code, so let’s see if my order goes through.