End of Year Cleaning

Just prior to the start of the New Year's holiday, most Japanese people embark on a serious cleaning jag (sususarai). This often includes tossing out junk that has been cluttering their homes and doing deep cleaning of various areas.

Most of my students say they will be doing this sort of cleaning but not all. Some say they can't be bothered or will just be doing more usual cursory cleaning so not everyone does this. I equate this cleaning to what is commonly done during spring cleaning in the U.S. Personally, I try to do this sort of thing on an on-going basis so I don't have to do it all at once.

During my years at my former company, I witnessed the office equivalent of this pre-holiday clean-up. On the last day of work before the holiday (which usually lasts a week for most Japanese employees), most of the Japanese employees would come to the office in casual clothes and commence with scouring the office from top to bottom. This generally included scrubbing floors, washing windows, removing and cleaning light fixtures and bulbs, and cleaning out desks of accumulated paperwork and junk.

Every year, the foreign employees worked as usual on this day because our schedule was not modified to allow us to assist. We'd have to do scheduled telephone lessons and mark homework while the Japanese toiled away happily. Of course, not everyone toiled. My boss and I amused ourselves each year by noting who managed not to do any heavy cleaning work.

One of the more senior salesmen was particularly slack and made such a chore of tidying his desk that he never touched the vacuum cleaner or scrubbed a surface. He managed to do this for every one of the 10 years he worked in the office with us. Eventually, he was transferred to another office and quit soon thereafter. I'm pretty sure his laziness at cleaning time was linked to a certain lackadaisical attitude toward his work which eventually got him fired Japan-style (that is, put into an undesirable situation which is meant to force one to quit).

The president's wife, who worked part-time at the office, carped about how inadequate the office ladies were at cleaning the tiny office kitchen or how lazy they were. She felt they should scrub the floor under all the furniture and scrub off the front of every cabinet. When they refused to do it, she did it herself so she deserves credit for getting down and dirty as she expected others to do.

The idiosyncratic and mercurial fellow who owned the company and acted as president sold us off after my first 10 years at the company and a cleaning company handled the office cleaning when new ownership took over. Apparently, only small, cheap companies force their employees to do this clean-up and most places have outside help do the year-end scrub-down.

I'm sure that the Japanese workers were happy to not have to do the end of each year janitorial duties but there was a camaraderie in it all that was likely lost. During this last day, people not only dressed informally but also could break out of their usual roles in the office and they tended to be more jovial and let their hair down a bit. Interestingly, their zealousness for cleaning always mirrored their general work ethic.

The company also bought their lunch and had it delivered (though the foreign employees were not included in this) and there was a little "party" of sorts at the end where snacks were served and the beer from the winter gifts was consumed.

Quite often, I was the last one to leave on such days because the Japanese workers could leave when the cleaning was done and my schedule was full and finished at a later time or I would work the next day (a Saturday) alone. I always had a strong sense of being abandoned in a sterile room which wasn't going to be touched for some time.

After the party, a traditional New Year's ornament (shimenawa - Roy has a nice picture of one here on his blog) was hung on the front door and everyone headed off for vacation. Seeing these decorations on closed shops in my neighborhood on New Year's day always fills me with a strong sense of completion and an odd sense of emptiness. I will always associate these decorations with hard work that has been completed, a fresh and clean area prepared, and everyone deserting the premises because of my years of witnessing the yearly cleaning at my office.

My 2006

Goodbye, year of the dog.

I'm not one for reviewing the past year because, in my experience, one year has been much like another. Since I quit my job though, there have been more changes and I've been considering that fact as 2006 draws to a close. I've written about some of these things before and some I have not mentioned. For my own sake (if nothing else), I'm going to list them here for future reference:

• I started this blog as a means of fulfilling a desire to write and to record my thoughts and experiences living in Japan. I did so with a great many trepidations because so many blogs are ego trips. However, I was greatly inspired by the blogs that I enjoy which I feel are not about overt ego gratification or self-involvement. My primary "style" inspiration has been Q-taro as I've always enjoyed Roy's posts about his observations and life in Japan.
  
• I started writing for blogcritics to force myself to write in a more structured manner and to try and push myself to recapture some of my old academic writing style. I haven't written as often as I'd like but have been largely satisfied with how I've written. However, I hope to do better next year and with greater frequency.
  
• I learned how to pump up a bicycle tire. Previously, my husband had always taken care of this little task. It was a good example of some easy little thing which you never bother to learn because someone else did it that you finally get around to tackling.
• I seriously considered getting a distance Master's degree in adult education from Penn State University and even tracked down two references from my old professors who graciously recalled me after 20 years. I gave up on the idea when I considered the expense and my income. Ironically, money was the reason I didn't go to grad school when I first graduated from university and it's still a factor now.
• My husband and I had to replace a great many things at not inconsiderable expense including his entire wardrobe (down to the shoes and ties), his eyeglasses, my computer monitor, his notebook computer, our DVD player, telephone, my bed-side lamp, my pillows and our bed comforter. Considering our income was greatly reduced this year, I'm amazed that we managed this without going into debt.
• I started private teaching in February after not having done so for about a decade. After working in an office for so long, I was pretty insecure about going back to face to face teaching but it's like riding a bike. You never forget how to do it.
• I developed a new recurring, annoying, and painful psychosomatic illness or an allergy. I'm not sure which yet but I'll have to work harder at relaxing so it doesn't happen again. I'm aware of what a contradiction in terms that statement appears to be.
  
• My kitchen floor was replaced.
• I installed a video card in my PC.
• I did my largest volunteer project to date and laid out a complete 270-page cookbook for my sister's library. It looked beautiful and allowed me to learn to use the automatic indexing and table of contents functions of Adobe InDesign. Unfortunately, due to some conflicts with the new director at the library, the entire effort will not be used. I even busted my ass while very sick to get it done by an absurdly early deadline (which I made but has since been indefinitely extended). I have a lovely, complete cookbook but no one will ever see it. Needless to say, this was a very disappointing experience.
  
• My friendship with my friend Shawn was revived to full life after lapsing for about a year. This wasn't one of those falling-out things. It was more about lives going in different directions. I'm glad our paths re-converged.
  
• I started playing Guild Wars after a long absence from on-line multiplayer gaming.
• My husband started going swimming at a local health club after a very long absence from it. He did this after I found a flyer for reduced cost membership in our mailbox. Sometimes the junk they constantly cram in our mailbox is actually useful.
  
• I rearranged the furniture in our bedroom so the air conditioning would hit my husband. This included laying down a mat "carpet". I did it all by myself and it was a Herculean task but it is functionally a much better arrangement.
• We paid $6,000 in health insurance and reduced our bank account to $15 thanks to the way in which health insurance is calculated based on last year's income and my, ahem, delinquent payment from a previous year.
• I got a new digital camera courtesy of my father-in-law.
• I finally read my husband's Harry Potter fan fiction novels (which he wrote 2 years ago).
• I captured all of my home VHS video tapes and converted them to playable DVDs.
• I budgeted for the first time since coming to Japan and formed a fact-based understanding of how much it costs to live in Tokyo for the first time. However, it was so tedious that I stopped after 2 months but that was long enough to get an accurate picture of our situation.
• I made a conscious and conscientious effort to learn new recipes and vary our meals now that I have to cook most of the time to reduce expenses.
• My last uncle (I had 3) passed away. I hardly knew him but I still felt bad for my mother and the rest of the family.
• I've written a lot of content for lessons which could be developed further into a textbook for cultural discussions and have pondered doing just that.

All in all, it's been a pretty good but very expensive year. I've relaxed a lot compared to a year ago but still have a ways to go. I'm not one for New Year's resolutions and I'm not about to start now. I always have been one for having goals toward gradually improving or learning new things though I don't always meet them.

Hello, year of the boar.

Corrections That Are Incorrect

Back when I was in college, my Spanish teacher thought it was his job to enlighten us about news of which we should be socially conscious (rather than simply teach us how to speak Spanish). This was around the time that every bleeding heart rock singer and his brother were using the situation in South Africa to advance their media exposure. It was also while Nelson Mandela was still in jail.

This teacher asked the class if they knew what the problem was called and I raised my hand and said "apartheid" pronouncing it correctly and he reiterated my reply by saying "a-par-THede". He clearly was pronouncing it incorrectly but was not so subtly attempting to "correct" me.

Among the things I've overheard many times while working as a teacher is other teachers offering up corrections which are incorrect, giving out incorrect information, serving up dubious theories, and making serious grammatical errors themselves. My husband says he overhears a fair amount of such behavior in his work as well, particularly from certain specific teachers.

One of my former coworkers (who was a total nightmare) had the "dog" and "cat" theory of personality which he felt students needed to know and understand. I never really sat through the whole lecture but multiple exposure to snippets of his bizarre theory indicated that bad people were supposed to have the personality of dogs and good people that of cats (or vice versa). I can only imagine what the students thought of this notion and what it said about western people if they felt it necessary to reverse-anthropomorphize themselves in such a fashion.

Even when the students know the teacher is wrong (as was the case with my Spanish teacher and myself) or full of baloney (as was the case with the "dog" and "cat" guy), they don't say anything. In some cases, they resist out of uncertainty. In others, they don't want to anger the teacher out of fear about how it'll affect their grade or rapport with the teacher. I'm guessing in some cases it's also about being polite.

To be honest, I occasionally misspeak and make a grammatical error (as I'm sure everyone does) but I always correct myself. I think some people are embarrassed to acknowledge a slip of the tongue with self-correction and some people aren't aware that they're making mistakes. Teachers aren't perfect, no matter how educated they are or how hard they try. Still, it's hard not to cringe when you hear someone reinforcing a mistake with students or making their correct English incorrect.

Turkish Delights

The Turkish coffee shop where my husband acquired dates (as I mentioned in a previous post) also carries imported candy bars. My husband doesn't tend to buy these types of things very often. However, he is often compelled to purchase such things when he comes across something we've never seen before, particularly if it is not made in Japan. I guess that buying chocolates only when they are novel is one way to reduce the frequency of one's consumption of sweets. These bars were relatively expensive so that would probably dissuade us from repeat consumption on a regular basis if nothing else does.

All of these bars were produced in Turkey and have information on them in 4 languages including Turkish and English. One of them also has Arabic writing. It's specifically stated on one that it contains "no lard and alcohol". I'm guessing this is to make it clear that it is acceptable for those of the Islamic faith.

My husband and I split the Alpella bar this evening and I had a small nibble of the Peki and Kranci bars. The Alpella was incredibly good and it required a great deal of restraint not to gobble it down in its entirety. It's wafers full of hazelnut creme (my favorite). The name "Alpella" is clearly meant as a play on "Alpine" and "Caramio" for caramel.

"Peki" means "okay" in Turkish and I'm guessing it is a translation of the Nestle "Yes" bar (which this bar closely resembles). There's no Nestle logo on the bar so it's either a rip-off or Nestle doesn't include its logo on it's Turkish products. I didn't care much for the Peki as it seemed overly sweet and had what I felt was an odd texture. The Kranci is straightforward chocolate covered specs of hazelnut.

My husband and I rarely buy Japanese chocolate except for the occasional special Kit-Kat once in a blue moon. I'm pretty sure Japan must have the world's record for greatest number of Kit-Kat flavor variations. To date, I have seen white chocolate, pumpkin, lemon cheesecake, green tea, cappuccino, coconut, strawberry, banana, mango, maple, sakura (cherry), adzuki (red bean), bitter, mild bitter, passion fruit, yogurt and there are several white chocolate varieties made with various kinds of milk from different regions of Japan.

The Wikipedia entry on Kit-Kats lists an even greater variety than I have personally seen. It also mentions that they are the number one candy bar in Japan and that "kitto katto" roughly translates into "I hope you succeed". That last bit of information was news to me. I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have a name that translates appealingly though I think the general appeal of a chocolate-covered wafer and an infinite variety of possibilities has a lot more to do with its success. One thing the Japanese market seems to love is novelty.

Blogcritics post #12

My next blogcritics piece has been published. It's about various arbitrary methods of estimating character and was inspired by the Japanese theory of blood type influencing personality. You can read it here.

Update (10/28): It appears that blogcritics is promoting its writers to outside sources more heavily than ever. I received an e-mail today saying my article had been announced on Netscape, Digg, and Reddit. It's not actually posted on these sites but is linked back to the page on blogcritics.

I don't know if they do this for every post or just the ones they feel carry a certain type of interest value but it's rather nifty and yet another reason why anyone who wants to write and become more widely-read should consider hooking up with blogcritics. It may also drive traffic back to your own blog.

Fake Concern

One of my students works for a major electronics manufacturer and has been working a lot of overtime over the past 6 months. Recently, she had planned to go to Australia for a vacation with her husband on the heels of a business trip to Hong Kong. Unfortunately, due to her poor health from working too much, she couldn't go to Australia.

During her last lesson with me, she related some details of her business trip to Hong Kong which were of interest. She said that she was feeling under the weather during the trip and her manager insisted that she return prematurely to Japan. He said that he, as the boss, was responsible for her health and well-being.

After a day's rest, she insisted that she was fine and could remain in Hong Kong for the duration of the trip. The manager told her she had to go anyway and reiterated his responsibility. My student said that she couldn't understand his logic because, if he were so concerned about her health, it would make sense that he'd stop working her so hard in Japan.

My student's naivete left me somewhat amused. I guess she's not cynical enough to realize that her boss had no concern for her health per se. He was worried about her becoming ill in Hong Kong because she'd have to go to a hospital there and the company would have to pay the expense. Additionally, her travel arrangements (hotel, plane tickets) may have to be adjusted in a manner which would cost the company more money. The reason he didn't express concern for her health in Japan is that working her to the point of illness in Japan costs the company nothing. If she misses work due to illness, her work just piles up and she has to work that much harder upon her eventual return.

Fortunately for her, she's being changed to a different area of work and will have a different boss. She told me her new boss will be a woman and her new work will be about dealing with advertising on the web in English. I'm not so sure she'll endure any less stress but she's fairly confident that her days of working overnight or until the wee hours of the morning are over.

Krispy Kreme madness

Hello, it's Shari's husband. I thought I'd just jump on for a minute to give an update on the Krispy Kreme situation (which I know is of the utmost importance to all of my wife's readers). There are still lines every day, and it seems to be getting worse.

I went there on Saturday the 16th, the day after it opened, at 9:30, and there was a line of twenty people, which grew to a hundred by noon. Two days ago, on Saturday the 23rd, I went again at 9:30 only to find over a hundred people already waiting. I find this significant because as most who live in Japan know, most shops don't open until 10:00, so people don't start shopping in earnest until around then.

On the 16th, I assume most of the people at KK were people just walking around Shinjuku a bit early, and decided to check out the new donut shop. But there's no way that a hundred people just happened to be in that area of Shinjuku on a Saturday morning, so it must be that they went there specifically to go to Krispy Kreme, knowing they'd have to stand in line. Why is beyond me, and the consistently long lines have mystifed my students as well. Anyway, I think this means that for the foreseeable future, there will be long lines all day long, except perhaps just after they open at 7:00 a.m. (And maybe even then, God only knows; I haven't checked.)

Note from Shari: Today it's rainy and dismal and I wonder if those lines are dampened a bit by this type of weather. Of course, neither my husband nor I wonders enough to check. ;-)

Christmas in Tokyo (2006)

A "Hello Kitty" papier mache figure at a tea shop in a Santa suit.

Since it's Christmas day, my husband and I decided to stroll around the neighborhood to see what the locals were up to. One thing we learned was that, by Christmas day, the holiday is essentially over for the Japanese because the commercial value has sufficiently diminished that it's far less worthwhile than the days leading up to the 25th. People have spent all the money they are going to on Christmas by this point. (As always, click any picture to see a much larger version.)

A Santa costume and various Christmas-themed headbands for sale at an accessories shop for young women and girls.

Last night, my husband passed by a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop and saw 40 people waiting in line to get their Christmas repast. He also saw the usual convenience store employees standing outside of 7-11 and others hawking Christmas cakes. Despite the fact that I've spent many Christmases in Japan, I've neither bought nor sampled a Christmas cake. I've asked my students if they usually have them and all of them say they do. One of them said the cakes are pretty poor quality as many of them are made far ahead of time, frozen, and then thawed before handing them over to customers.

Additionally, I've asked them if they give each other gifts and most adults do not. Most of them received one present on Christmas morning when they were children. Even if they had a tree, the gift was usually left near the futon. Most had trees though usually they were artificial. In the case of one of my students, she said her family had a real (about 4 feet tall) tree which they dug up and replanted every year so she had a rare experience with a live tree.


This sign was hanging in the shopping street we were walking along. It advertises a campaign where you could get chances to win either one of ten dinners for two at the Four Seasons Hotel or one of a hundred pairs of tickets for Disneyland or Disney Sea (hence the illustration of Santa next to a present with a dinner table and Mickey Mouse popping out of it). You could earn the chances by purchasing items from shops on this shopping street.


Our main goal in going out and about was to see what might be happening but our secondary goal was to visit the Baskin Robbins that had only recently opened up in the middle of the shopping street. I wanted to treat myself to some orange sherbet since no Japanese stores sell it and, hey, it's Christmas. My husband bought more properly festive blueberry gingerbread ice cream.

From previous experiences during Christmas, one thing we know for a fact is that every scrap that indicates the Japanese celebrate Christmas will vanish by tomorrow morning. It's like they are all set to self-destruct by midnight on the 25th. They're immediately replaced by traditional Japanese New Year's decorations so that the new cycle of sales can begin.


Addendum: I wanted to note I received a really lovely Christmas card from my friend Shawn on December 24th which helped boost my holiday spirit. I love the artwork as it reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. I also like the joke. :-) Thanks again, Shawn.

Peanut Butter Cookies

This being the holiday season, I've been making more sweets than usual. Rest assured, I haven't been eating all the things I bake. Two days ago, I made about 6 dozen chocolate chip cookies and didn't eat one of them. Three days ago, I made just short of 6 dozen peanut butter cookies and didn't eat any of them either. In the case of the peanut butter ones, I'm not even tempted because I don't care for them. There's something about the texture that doesn't appeal to me. My husband, on the other hand, loves them and asked that I make a boatload for his students.

This recipe is very old and I have no idea where I got it. I can say that it's a huge hit with everyone who receives these cookies, including my former Japanese coworkers. My former boss told me he could sit down with a bag in front of the T.V. and consume large quantities of them.

These cookies are easy to make and probably a good recipe to try if you want your kids to help you make them. They aren't fussy (no dropping, rolling, or cutting) and the dough isn't sticky or troublesome. They're pretty much no fail as long as you measure properly and don't overbake.

This is also another recipe which requires no special ingredients though I will caution those who live in Japan not to use "peanutsu cureamu" and to be careful to buy actual peanut butter. Skippy is available in most Japanese markets which stock peanut butter and it works well. Additionally, do not use Japanese lard (commonly sold in tubes) as a substitute for Crisco. You can use "cake margarine" (keiki margarin I'd enter the katakana but I have no Japanese input on my PC) which is sold in the margarine/butter sections of supermarkets as a complete substitute for the combined Crisco and butter. There are different brands but you can distinguish it from bread spreads by the picture of a cake on the box. Inside the box, you get a light yellow block equal to one cup so you can substitute one entire box for the 1/2 cup of butter plus 1/2 cup of Crisco combined.

Peanut Butter Cookies recipe:

1/2 cup Crisco
1/2 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup peanut butter
2 eggs
3 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla

Cream the Crisco, butter, brown sugar, and white sugar using an electric mixer. Add the peanut butter and mix well. Add the eggs, salt, baking soda, and vanilla and mix again. Add half of the flour (1 1/2 cups) and mix once more until it is incorporated. At this point, you will have to abandon the mixer as the dough will get too thick for the motor to handle. Add the remainder of the flour (1 1/2 cups) to the mixture and mix it by hand.


It will be mixed completely when it comes together (as above) and resembles soft Play-doh. Also, it shouldn't stick to your hands.


Roll the dough into balls about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. You can do it all at once or you can do it as you need to fill cookie sheets. I usually do it all at once so it's simpler once I start baking.


Place the balls about 2-2 1/2 inches apart on a baking sheet then press down with a fork to make a cross-hatch pattern (as above). Bake at 375 degrees F./190 degrees C. for 8-12 minutes until delicately brown around the edges. Allow them to cool for a minute or two on the cookie sheet before removing as they will be quite soft at first. Remove and cool on clean newspaper sheets (this absorbs oil). Makes 3 dozen. These cookies freeze very well.


This is what just shy of 6 dozen of these looks like. Since my cookie sheets are so small, it took 4 rounds with two sheets (one on the center and one on an upper rack) to get them all done and I was pretty worn out when it was over. If you also use two racks, be careful to rotate them at the midway point while baking so they cook evenly.

Depending on how carefully you roll the balls and how central your criss-cross marks are, these cookies can come out almost perfectly round. In fact, one of my former foreign coworkers seemed to imply that I hadn't made these cookies at home but rather bought them at a bakery because they were almost perfectly round. I explained to her that it was due to how they were made from round balls and squashed down but she still had an air of skepticism about the matter.

The Christmas Spirit (or lack thereof)

I wonder which present is for me?

The picture above is from Guild Wars. It's a screenshot of the game environment that was infused with Christmas as of December 21. The makers of the game know how to make the players feel special. In addition to the holiday motif that is added, you can take part in snowball fights, get drunk on eggnog, and collect candy cane shards and whole canes to be used for various purposes in the game.

This beats real life as neither eggnog nor candy canes can be had without a visit to a shop which specializes in selling to foreigners. In Tokyo, that's National Azabu Supermarket. It's sufficiently troublesome to go that one isn't inclined to go there unless there's a more compelling reason than seasonal treats. Also, there's no guarantee that they'll stock any particular item.

Mmmm. Tasty super-size gumdrops.

I wish I could say that the general atmosphere in Japan was 1/10th as good as what I get from a game. Spending Christmas in Japan is like being exposed only to the most commercial aspects of the holiday without any of the spirit-based aspects. I'm not talking about the religious angles as I'm no longer a Christian but rather about the emotional aspects.

While I'm fully aware that Christmas is very commercialized in the United States (and other western countries that celebrate it), there are usually some indications of emotional depth. People may be nicer at times or more helpful. You can perhaps even catch a whiff of the essence of the spirit of giving if you're lucky and not so mired in cynicism that you have the equivalent of a spiritual clothespin over your nose.

When I first arrived in Japan, I used to try and "make" a holiday for myself in spite of the shallow observance of it around me. I used to try and connect with people back home over the holidays and I'd decorate the apartment relatively lavishly. I'd go out of my way to make copious amounts of goodies for friends and coworkers. I'd special order a turkey expensively from the FBC deli and make a special meal.

After nearly a decade of sending out tons of Christmas cards and getting a smattering back, being around foreign coworkers who were indifferent to the holidays (or outright grumpy), having to work on Christmas day, and feeling increasingly disconnected from the U.S., I gave up. I can't even bring myself to take the decorations out of the closet this year, let alone put them up. The only thing I'm doing this year is make cookies for my husband to give his students and I'm having a lot of difficulty getting the energy to do that. I don't do it out of any sense of holiday spirit but mainly because I love my husband and want him to have the pleasure of doling out goodies to his students.

What I've learned is that there are limits to weaving a pocket of western culture in Japan and you hit them pretty hard around the holidays. There aren't really any Japanese holidays which have the same depth of sentiment as Christmas, not even among the Japanese themselves. In my lesson where I discuss every holiday throughout the year with students, none of them seem to have much of a serious affinity for any particular day although they do like the extended time off they get for New Year's vacation. So, it doesn't seem likely that I would be able to try to integrate myself more fully with the culture to find the sense I'm missing elsewhere.


It's rather depressing, to be honest. Still, at least I can run around with a bizarre spiky ice creature with an oddly happy-looking snowman head, drink virtual nog and get virtually drunk, and have virtual snowball fights. It's better than nothing, but not by much.

We Passed

As I mentioned before, one of my students is taking a course at a junior college on one of the military bases. I've been assisting her with her homework and she got her final grade a few days ago. I'm pleased to say that she got an "A" in the class though I'm not so happy that she feels my assistance makes this my grade rather than hers.

My student already has a Bachelor's degree in pharmacy from a Japanese school so she has academic experience but she had problems structuring her replies to essay questions. I'm not sure if her problem was related to having studied pharmacy in school and not having to approach tests from the viewpoint of offering opinions (rather than data or research details) or if it has something to do with how Japanese universities structure their tests.

Her main problem was that she didn't talk "on point" when she answered a question. She tended to offer tangential information which was about a similar topic but wasn't addressing the crux of the question. I tried to teach her to meander around the answer less and to simply get right to it.

To offer a more concrete example, she had a question about whether or not the age of criminal culpability ought to be reduced but rather than say that it should or shouldn't and why she felt that way, she talked about a case in Japan that compelled the Japanese government to lower the age of culpability from 16 to 14. While the case was interesting and related to the general topic, it didn't support any particular opinion.

Many of her lessons were spent with my trying to rework her replies so that her wandering around the point became examples for opinions and my helping her see how to address the question as stated. I'm not sure if she actually "got it" but she definitely got a lot better at getting closer to it by the end of the semester. I'm pretty confident that she'll need far less help next time.

I wonder if this is her particular issue or part of a larger tendency among Japanese people to be vague and indirect. One thing that her writing strongly reminded me of was the business letter sample homework that I used to correct for students at my former job. The students were told to accomplish two straightforward tasks; write a letter asking for details about a pair of trekking boots and ask a hotel that they had stayed at to look for a lost address book. In the case of the former, the students would often begin the letter with long, irrelevant personal tales of having to go hiking and needing good boots. In the case of the latter, they'd start off with extended apple polishing which came across as buttering up the hotel staff.

Even though students were explicitly told not to do these sorts of preambles that are common in Japanese letters, they did it anyway because they were uncomfortable getting down to business. The problem my student had wasn't exactly the same thing but both situations were reminiscent of taking the scenic route to the point.

Great Balls of Fire

The eyesore pictured above is the gas-powered water heating unit that is installed in my kitchen. To operate it, you push in the big blue button on the front, you hear a clicking noise as the pilot light inside lights up and then you can see a blue flame through the narrow window above the button and hot water comes out of the hose. You can control how hot or cool the heated water is by dialing the blue button clock-wise (that controls the water flow) and/or sliding a lever at the bottom right which is under the button (that turns the flame up or down).

This system is not only unattractive, it's also inefficient but Japanese apartments are too small to have the type of water-heating systems that you see in most U.S. homes. A similar type of water heater is in the shower area. It can also be a little scary if you forget to use the ventilation fan in the kitchen while operating the kitchen water heater. If you don't use the fan, occasionally a large blob of flame will burst out of the top and make a loud noise. For real excitement, there are the times when flames shoot out both sides and the top. You can imagine that I try hard to remember to turn on the fan.

I consider us somewhat lucky that we have this type of unit at all. In my husband's first apartment in Japan (before we were together), there was no hot water at all. This was awhile ago so it may be relatively rare for apartments to no longer include hot water in the kitchen but I have heard other foreigners complain about not having hot water to wash their dishes.

In both of the offices occupied by my former company, they had tiny little cylindrical water heaters installed under the sinks so that you didn't have to have this type of monstrosity hanging over your sink. In one case, the water was scalding even at the lowest setting and, in the other, it didn't work at all. I'm guessing that's why few of those types of water heaters are used. I'm also guessing they are more expensive. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't shoot out balls of fire on occasion.

It's All About Portions

Papatto Rice

I've been reading a few other blogs and their comments about the introduction of Krispy Kreme into Japan and it's been pretty interesting. One of the common comments is about whether or not this signals the embracing of an unhealthy lifestyle that will lead to obesity in Japan.

One thing that you learn pretty quickly in Japan is that it's not so much about what you eat but how much of it you eat. People would be surprised to see just how much food which people in western countries consider verboten as part of a healthy diet is commonly consumed in Japan (particularly high fat food). The Japanese are expert at packaging for small portions in order to accomodate small appetites. The package above is 100 grams of rice that you can buy in a package that snaps apart so you can conveniently eat a tiny portion. It's actually one of my favorite buys as it's about right for me when I eat rice.

There are a wide variety of these types of portion-controlling packages in Japan. For instance, you can buy a Kit Kat bar in 8 individually-wrapped pieces which are half the size of one wafer. Imagine taking a regular Kit Kat with 4 bars that snap apart and cutting them all in half and individually wrapping them. Even a regular bar doesn't come packaged as one block of 4 bars. It comes as 2 bars of 2 wafers individually-wrapped. The exception to the small portions in Japan is giant bars (mainly geared toward kids as gifts) which are offered around New Year's. Roy has a picture of one of these big bars in his blog Q-Taro in the archives here. I believe there are also Giant Pocky on offer during this time of year as O-shogatsu (New Year's) gifts.

This picture pinched from Amazon (from which you can buy these in the States).

Beyond the individually-wrapped items, there is the the fact that all food is sold in smaller packages period. A "bag of chips" in Japan is around 70-100 grams (about 3.5-4.5 ounces). In the U.S., an average bag of potato chips (unless it is an individual portion meant to be put in a lunch pail) is 9-12 ounces.

In the U.S., you find that food companies for many years had been offering more and more in each package whereas Japan almost always offers less with a few exceptions. Studies show that people eat more if more is in front of them. This is probably a leftover survival behavior. If you eat all you can when it's there, you store fat and have a greater chance of living through leaner times.

Since food is cheap in the U.S. (the packaging sometimes costs more than the contents), companies have emphasized size as value and people have tended to choose more content for their money rather than less. This has pushed all food and snack companies to make bigger and bigger portions in order to make people feel they are getting value for their money.

It also doesn't help the restaurants have been on the same portion-bloating bandwagon for years. I read recently in an interview on Salon that dinner plate sizes now are similar to serving platter sizes from 80-100 years ago. Dinner plates used to be the size of current salad plates. People in the U.S. have a tendency to feel satisfied about what they're eating when they have a full plate and a bigger plate means more food.

When you mix the marketing value of larger portions with the psychology of eating, you get people eating more and more. Only now in the U.S. is the issue of selling individually-packaged portions to give people an idea of how much they should consider a reasonable amount starting to gain momentum. In Japan, the idea seems to have always been here.

I'm not sure if the control of portion sizes in Japan is the result of a culture which serves a variety of small dishes traditionally, part of the group culture, related to a culture which doesn't view size as such an important factor in "value" or an off-shoot of a culture which values packaging so much. The small portions in separate packages do make it easy to share and in fact encourage it when you're around other people. If you're alone, you're very aware each time you tear open a new package for another cookie that you're tucking in again. You get a feeling of going beyond one portion. You also don't have to think about food going stale if you don't eat it all up because it's vacuum-sealed and will stay just fine for weeks.

So, I believe there is little danger that Krispy Kreme is going to unleash a wave of obesity in Japan. There's far too much cultural push behind moderation and small portions for any one infusion of American culture to convert Japan to a culture of excess.

Fudge Brownies

If you search the internet for certain types of recipes, you'll find that a lot of them are duds even though there are reviews which say they're the bee's knees. Even good recipes for certain foods can disappoint. Homemade brownies are one type of food where the recipes often aren't quite up to snuff, particularly if you're a fan of the kind of fudge brownies with a nice crackly top and a fudgy interior that come from commercial mixes.

Fortunately for me, I don't often make brownies because it's quite a bit more sugar than I'd like to be eating. Unfortunately, on the rare occasions when I want them, I have no access to commercial mixes. Quite some time ago, I came across this recipe which includes an unusual step where you add boiling water. I haven't worked out what the chemistry is behind this step but I do know this is the homemade brownie recipe that comes closest to having the attributes of the venerable Betty Crocker mixes.

The nifty thing about this recipe is that it doesn't require you to deal with baking chocolate or other esoteric ingredients that are rarely on hand. It uses cocoa powder so, if you get a chocolate craving, you have a good chance of finding everything you need in the pantry and you won't have to run off to a grocery store. I use Van Houten cocoa because it's available in most Japanese supermarkets but I've had great results with Hershey's baking cocoa, too. I believe any cocoa will do fine (including the much cheaper Meiji brand in Japan) but there will be flavor variation depending on what kind you use. Hershey's makes a darker brownie with a slightly more bitter undertone. Van Houten makes a smoother-tasting brownie.

With the holidays coming up, you might want to give this a try as a special treat.

Fudge Brownies recipe:

• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 3/4 cup cocoa (unsweetened baking cocoa)
• 2/3 cup butter (melted)
• 1/2 cup boiling water
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 small or medium eggs
• 1 1/3 cups flour
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F/165 degrees C.


In a large bowl, mix the cocoa and baking soda. Blend 1/3 cup of melted butter with the cocoa mixture. (It should look as above.) Note that this is half of the melted butter.


Add the boiling water and stir until well-blended. This will make a fudgey paste (as above). Be careful as it can be very hot (steam is still rising from it in the picture above). Stir the sugar into the paste. Make sure it has cooled enough not to cook the eggs when they're added then add the eggs and remaining melted butter. Mix well. Add the flour, vanilla and salt and mix well. Pour into a well-greased baking pan (13"x9"x2" or 9"x9x3") and bake for 35-40 minutes. Do not overbake. Allow them to cool for at least 15 minutes before cutting.

The best way to test for doneness is to see how liquid-like the center is. If it is very "viscous" in a 3-4 inch radius from the center when you gently rock the dish from side to side, it probably needs more time. A tester or toothpick test (inserting it in the center) will not work as it will come out with moisture on it when it is done. If it comes out clean, you've probably overbaked. The center should be soft to the touch but feel "set" like a soft set custard or pudding. If it feels liquid-like under the surface, it isn't done.

Please note that my friend tried this with Hershey's cocoa and his batter looked rather different than my pictures (in fact, he said his looked the opposite of mine at the two stages above). I'm guessing the fact that Van Houten is more water soluble has an impact on the batter. He also reminded me that the brownies are better the next day and actually get fudgier overnight.

Of Samples and Bias

When I was in university, one of my favorite areas of study was experimental psychology (physiological being my favorite by a head). One of the things you learned pretty early on about psychological experiments and all surveys, from which a lot of behavioral data is gleaned, is that there is always bias and issues with just how well the data you collect reflects real behavior.

One of the things all foreign people tend to do is reach conclusions about Japan based on our anecdotal experience. We don't do this because we want to offer a skewed viewpoint of life here. We do it because that is what we have access to and it makes a huge impression on us. There is very little you can do about this issue except to seek out other sources of information (which will in turn include their own biases and erroneous conclusions) and, most importantly, be open-minded and flexible in your opinion.

Early on, many foreigners tend to form their viewpoints based on their experiences as English teachers. While conversation school teachers tend to meet a fair variety of people, they are still going to get a pretty narrow view of people in Japan. For one thing, the people you meet in schools usually want to have contact with foreigners and have an interest in expressing themselves in English. You don't meet the average person who has no interest or an active distaste for foreigners very often. Additionally, you tend to meet people who are affluent enough to afford attending such schools and who will tell you things which portray Japanese culture in a favorable light because they want you to like them.

Those who moved on from schools to working in Japanese offices and have direct exposure to the corporate environment have a somewhat broader perspective but it's still far from putting us in a position to understand the culture as well as we might. The types of companies that will employ foreigners tend to need foreign employees for their language skills or they tend to be in the tech industry. There are certain kinds of businesses that we don't get an intimate knowledge of. However, I think you really get a good feel for corporate culture from working in an office and can see beyond the stereotypes of Japanese businesspeople that western news sources offer.

Finally, there are those who marry Japanese people and they probably are in the best position to get a full perspective on the culture. However, even foreigners with Japanese spouses will be treated differently than Japanese people treat each other (and possibly shielded from certain behaviors. Also, some foreigners with Japanese spouses start to form a bias to help them integrate with Japanese culture better. That is, some people will start saying that there is little or not prejudice against foreigners in Japan or start to assert that foreigners deserve poor treatment on the occasions when they experience it because they don't try to fit in hard enough.

In my particular case, I have had the chance to speak to copious numbers of people for short periods of time. In my former job, I spoke to a minimum of 700 different people each year in short conversations. This allowed me to ask a lot of people the same questions. In essence, I have functioned as a one-person surveyor on a limited number of points and my sample size is easily over 10,000. This is a far greater sample than you see in most surveys. Unfortunately, my sample is still pretty skewed as 99% of the people I spoke as a part of my job were male company employees (or college students) and probably 70% were 25 or younger.

In my work outside of that company (at a conversation and as a private teacher), I've had many chances for in-depth conversations with a relatively small sampling of people who are predominately female and over 30. Their responses to questions are vastly different from those that I used to get when I was interviewing young men.

One way in which I attempt to find a little balance for my experiences with other perspectives is to read the surveys on What Japan Thinks. These surveys are also, of course, from limited sample sizes. In fact, most of the time, the samples are insignificant for a population the size of Japan's and the fact that all surveys are done voluntarily further degrades the validity of any survey (in any country, by any method, and on any topic). Only a certain personality type will take the time to answer survey questions. However, at least these samples represent people who are responding in Japanese and are done by a method other than a face-to-face encounter so reading them broadens the range of my perspective a bit more. They're also very interesting as anecdotal information. I often discuss them with my students to see if they concur.

I think it's pretty important to allow your theories about Japan and its people and culture to be open to modification as time goes by. It's also important not to take anything you read on the Internet at face value no matter how knowledgeable the source appears to be. Even after a lot of time and conversations with a lot of people, there are still things I get wrong or don't know.

Winter Gift Giving

Japan has two gift-giving seasons, one in the winter and one in the summer. The winter one is called oseibo and the summer one is o-chugen. These gift-giving times are different from the type of holiday gift-giving you find in the U.S. In the States, piles of presents are given at once during Christmas and family and friends are a heavy focal point for such gift-giving.

In Japan, the gifts that are given during the two seasons tend to be less personal and are given to people who you have a relationship with in order to express gratitude for the relationship and to juice the bond between the parties a little. They're also given out of obligation in many cases.

At my former company, we used to receive large quantities of such gifts twice a year. During the first half decade or so of the 12 years I worked at my office, the office ladies would take all the goodies around to every person in the office and distribute them. As the years went on and the company's business diminished and fewer gifts came in, they tended to keep them tucked away as much as possible for themselves, especially if the gift was chocolate, cake, cookies, or Japanese sweets.

They were especially good at skipping the foreigners on distribution rounds of such items because we were tucked away in cubicles and couldn't see what was going on until we entered the main office to see a goodie on every desk. Mind you, I don't think this was about prejudice, I think it was about opportunity. We were the only ones who weren't in the regular open office plan so it was easier to skip us without making it obvious. When it came to a choice between another chocolate in their desk drawer for later snacking or doing the courteous thing, the chocolate won.

Two staple types of gifts were senbei (rice crackers) and beer. Nearly every year we would get a tin the size of a 5-gallon drum full of a variety of senbei that would keep the office girls going for weeks. The cases of beer were very slowly consumed by salespeople or possibly taken home. The truth is that I only saw the staff drink on the job at the end of the end of the year office cleaning session.

Being foreigners, my husband and I are rarely direct recipients of such gifts as they seem to be exchanged more as part of business relationships than personal ones. While students give teachers little souvenir gifts (omiyage) on occasion or small gifts of appreciation, they don't tend to give summer or winter gifts to teachers. My husband received the box of Godiva chocolate and cookies (pictured above) from the mother of one of his very few child students. Given that the Japanese are embracing Christmas gift-giving more and more, it's hard to tell if this was an oseibo gift or related to Christmas but my money is on it being a winter gift (and quite a nice one at that).

Krispy Kreme Shinjuku Opening

I normally don't do posts like this but my husband happened to be nearby at the time of the opening and I sent the camera with him. Please click on any picture to open up a much larger shot. He got these shots of the first day. They were taken around 12:30 pm. As you can see, the shop is pretty large.


Here is the first line. My husband counted and said that there were about 200 people in line, counting this line and the second part of the line, as will be seen below. Considering that this is not something which is available for a limited time or is on sale to the first x number of people, it's rather impressive that people would bother to do this. When my husband asked how long it would take to clear the line and get in for donuts, he was told it would be 2 hours. Needless to say, he didn't get any. He's keen to get them, but not quite that keen.

My husband said that he felt that this line is exactly what the Krispy Kreme people wanted for their opening day to generate publicity. He felt the promotion (which I described in a previous post) was specifically designed to get this type of result. Apparently this too was successful, as he saw a man with a large video camera and a tripod, with an armband indicating that he worked for one of Tokyo's main TV stations.


When a new shop or business opens in Japan, these types of flowers are displayed outside. A shop near our house actually cleans and prepares these sorts of things.


There's someone with a video camera shooting in the center and a very happy woman with a huge quantity of donuts on the left. I believe each of those boxes has a dozen donuts. I have no idea what anyone would do with 8 dozen donuts unless they were taking them back to the office with them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some offices would give leave to office ladies to wait in line for something this frivilous. Office ladies in my former company would often run out for an hour or so for far less "momentous" events.


Here's the second line that snaked around the building. They're a pretty orderly bunch. One of my husband's students said that she believes Japanese people sometimes see a line and assume anything that people choose to wait in line for must be pretty good. She said she thinks some people don't even know all that much about what they're waiting for but just join in (if they have some free time). Even so, some Japanese at his office were equally mystified that such a long line would form for donuts.


And finally, it's the end of the line. The sign that poor guy is holding says "end of the line". I can't imagine a much crappier job than having to stand around for hours holding a sign like that. My husband said that he was pretty prompt about moving the sign backwards when more people got in line, pushing the end further back.

"I Know How American High School Kids Live...

...because I have watched Beverly Hills 90210." Believe it or not, quite a few students have said this to me. My reaction is somewhere between incredulity and horror though I keep that under wraps. It's pretty important for Japanese people to understand we don't all grow up rich, white, manipulative, and promiscuous with a colorful cadre of close rich white friends and friendly token ethnic friends.

Even though the show went off the air in the U.S. six years ago, it is still ran consistently on cable television (on a woman-oriented channel called LaLa) in Japan. In fact, it appears to be sufficiently popular that, as of 2 years ago, aging cast members were still visiting Japan to promote the show and special behind the scenes shows about the series continue to be shown. That means the show continues to "educate" the Japanese about youth culture in the U.S. to this day. I'm guessing that the O.C. will usurp that role eventually but manage not to portray life any more accurately.

While discussing prejudice, ethnicity and poverty, one of my students told me that she thought all white people in America were middle class or rich. I have to wonder to what extent the aforementioned types of shows foster this erroneous belief or if this particular student has a much more skewed viewpoint than most Japanese people. She felt that only black people were poor. The fact that her black college teacher has reinforced the idea that blacks are constantly living in poor conditions and at an economic disadvantage has probably fueled that notion but it's no more true that all blacks are poor than all whites are rich.

While I used to see my students as quite naive for their notions that U.S. television programs reflected real life in any way, I'm pretty sure now that other cultures and Asians in particular are misunderstood or stereotyped no less by Americans based on how they are portrayed on T.V. While we don't see as much culture imported wholesale into the U.S. from other countries, we do see distorted American views of them inserted into U.S. T.V. programs. This is sometimes for comic effect (e.g., Monty Python's depiction of Chinese and Japanese), it's sometimes fairly earnest and, on older shows, rather racist by current standards.

Given the number of old American shows on Japanese cable, I've at times stumbled on some pretty overt racist statements which were not seen as such at that time. On the old show Quincy M.E., Robert Ito portrayed an assistant for a dozen and a half shows and, at one point, Dr. Quincy remarks on how "inscrutable" he is. In Star Trek, the character of Sulu, being Japanese (yet not having a Japanese name), knew how to use a sword and the character of Keiko on Star Trek the Next Generation seemed to have grown up with less exposure to western culture than Japanese people in our era. Being Japanese, she had to wear her hair with sticks stuck in it, eat food from the sea, grow bansai trees (though to be fair, she was a botanist), and get married in a kimono.

These portrayals seem to be beating us over the head with the characters' ethnicity but I'm pretty sure that the writers didn't realize how trite their characterizations were. Just like my students know Americans from shows like Beverly Hills 90210, those writers know Japan from things like Shogun. Among U.S. television shows, the only one that gets it right is "The Simpsons" though, of course, they exaggerate things for comic effect.

K Minus 14 Hours and Counting

In about 14 hours, Japan's first Krispy Kreme will open in Shinjuku (Southern Terrace). I'm not so excited about it that I'm keeping a count-down but the Japanese Krispy Kreme web site is set up to do so, so it seems in the spirit of things.

The main reason I'm so aware of this is that my husband works about a 5-minute walk away from the soon-to-be-opened shop. Last week, employees wheeled out carts full of boxes of their raised glazed donuts and gave away entire boxes to passers-by on the streets. My husband didn't get one but a few of his coworkers did and they shared them with the rest of the office. He brought one home for me to try. I was struck by its freshness, which is, after all Krispy Kreme's main selling point in the U.S. There is something different about the donut itself as well. It was much more evenly-raised and not as tough as some raised donuts I sometimes encounter in Japan.

The first person in line for the donuts tomorrow morning will get a dozen free donuts a week for a year and the first 100 will get free T-shirts. I'm not sure how insane the Japanese will be at the prospect of what will amount to about 70,000 yen worth of free donuts but I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn that someone might decide to sit out in the cold all night for that honor.

While I'm sure that there will be a fair amount of hoopla and patronage of the shop early on, I do wonder about the long-term viability of another donut chain in Japan. The freshness will be a plus but Dunkin' Donuts has already lost out to the ever popular Mister Donut in Japan and succeeding in Tokyo takes a lot of business on a daily basis given the high cost of renting space in high traffic areas such as Shinjuku.

Mister Donut has done a good job of finding ways to cater to the Japanese market. This is due, in part, to offering some menu items that uniquely appeal to the Japanese market but it may be more likely that, in a country that almost universally shuns the notion of a free refill, they offer free refills of their (abysmal quality) coffee. In Japan, where many young people can't find privacy in their own home, the ability to linger in restaurants for hours on end nursing a drink is one of the things patrons value most. It's a lot harder to kick people out when you offer bottomless cups. (Incidentally, the reason that young people sometimes can't find privacy in many cases is that they live with their families for far longer than western kids. It's not unusual to find kids residing with their parents up until marriage or work requires them to move out.)

Mister Donut also has adapted to Japanese tastes to some extent by diversifying the menu. They include some noodles and soups as well as steamed buns so that "real food" can be had in addition to sweets. The donuts they offer do not appear to be any less sweet than American-style donuts (in my opinion) of similar varieties but they do offer seasonal variations which include ingredients the Japanese favor such as sweet potato, sesame, and chestnut.


Finally, they offer a "club card" with which customers can accumulate points which allow them to get free gifts. The gifts vary wildly but, at present, they are offering Japanese-style paper lanterns. The campaigns are rather cleverly timed such that you have to consistently patronize the shops in order to get enough points before the campaign's deadline approaches or the points you've accumulated become useless. Most of the items are fairly cute and seem to be designed to appeal to the teenage girl to young office lady crowd. This is probably wise since young Japanese women are notorious for daily consumption of sweets and are likely frequent purchasers of donuts to take back to their office and share.

Given that Krispy Kreme has a relatively limited menu and pretty much hangs it value and reputation on lavishly-sweet treats that are fresh, I'm not sure that they will be showing the adaptability that the Japanese market might require in order to succeed in the long run. So far, the only concession to the Japanese market seems to be a reduction in the variety of donuts that the shops offer. If you compare the U.S. menu to the Japanese one, you'll see that a lot of the more ostentatiously sweet varieties are missing (as are the cinnamon ones for some reason). This could be related to simplifying the preparation process for new workers or due to limited space forcing them to pare down the menu but it also could be that the Japanese don't like piles of sweet crumbly things on top of their donuts.

I'm guessing that it won't take more than a year to find out one way or another if they're here to stay for awhile or if they'll have to give up on the Japanese market and go home. If you're part of the foreign crowd and want to give them a try, I'd recommend trying them out sooner rather than later in case it vanishes in the not too distant future.

Happy Birthday, Sharon!

My sister's birthday is December 13th. When we were kids, I was aware of the fact that having this date as a birthday was a drawback on two counts. First of all, and somewhat of limited importance, her birthday sometimes fell on a Friday and everyone would be going on about it being an unlucky day. Second, and much more importantly, her birthday was only 12 days before Christmas and that invited the dreaded combo-gift situation where people would give one gift for both days rather than a separate gift for each day. It rather made me glad that my birthday was in August.

Anyway, the internet has been a great facilitator in allowing my sister and I to build up a relationship again despite distance. When I first came here, we had little or no contact because she's not much of a letter writer and neither of us had the cash for calls (nor are we necessarily big on chatting on the phone). More than the internet itself though, multiplayer gaming has been the force behind a renewed and closer relationship for my sister and I. Starting with Diablo II , we began to regularly meet up on-line to play games. The games gave us a reason to be on-line at the same time as well as a common topic to talk about. After a lot of years apart where we lost track of each other, this was an easy way to re-build our rapport.

Anyone who thinks on-line gaming is about geeks role-playing as they grow pimples and cultivate a pale, unearthly glow doesn't get the point. For a lot of people, it's about the socialization aspect. It allows you to come together in a community and relate to each other through the game. It's little different than couples who used to bond over games of Bridge or Hearts. It just doesn't require you to do it in each other's homes.

At first, we mainly chatted by typing in messages in the game and then later graduated to using talk. Now, it's very much like we're hanging out at home talking like we did when we lived in the same house. We have that same level of comfort that you have where you don't feel obliged to feel the gaps in conversation with idle chatter and you can just say things when you feel like it or just say nothing at all. Cheap computer-based talk has allowed for that and being able to do this with my sister has been immensely valuable to me in my relative social isolation since quitting my job a year ago. It's also been very nice to feel a part of my family again.

A lot of people have blood-bond-based relationships with their families and their siblings in particular. They associate out of obligation rather than a desire to be around each other but my sister is actually my friend. We have a lot of things in common and some things not so much in common but I'd want to hang out with her even if we weren't related. I wish I could be there to bake you a cake, Sharon! Have a great day and see you on Arena.net!

(The above image was pinched from Nimwendil's Blog - I'd ask for permission but I don't speak the language - I hope he/she doesn't mind! Please visit the blog to see other very nice bits of fantasy artwork.)

Looking Way Back

Since I've been in Japan for so long, I've seen a lot of changes, both big and small. Some of these changes are the result of technological progress and others a result of the encroachment of more western culture and business. While the rest of the world has simultaneously experienced some of these changes, a lot of them are more dramatic when viewed from the perspective of being relatively deprived of the comforts of home in a foreign culture and then being greatly less deprived nearly two decades later.

Here are some of the changes, both big and small, comparing nearly 18 years ago (when we first arrived) to now.

1. Spoken communication abroad was extremely costly and difficult when we first arrived and is now virtually free due to internet services such as Skype and GoogleTalk. When we first arrived, not only would phone calls back home cost a dollar a minute but a lot of foreigners chose not to have a telephone at all because NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) required a hefty deposit for the privilege of having a phone installed. At that time, the deposit was in the $500-$600 range.
2. Diet sodas were rare to impossible to find. The best you could do was a Japan-only beverage called "Coca-cola Light" which had reduced calories relative to regular Coke. Pepsi was completely off the radar. Now, you can get both diet Pepsi and Coke though you can't always get both at any particular shop and other types of diet soda can only be purchased at places specializing in imports.
   
3. Tokyo was a smoker's paradise. All coffee shops and restaurants allowed smoking and the non-smoking areas, when present, were relatively small and not the least bit shielded from wafting smoke from the smoking section. Nowadays, Starbucks is a smoke-free coffee shop option (the only one, I believe) and restaurants are expanding non-smoking sections relative to the smoking areas. Additionally, some streets are smoking-prohibited in Tokyo. That is, you cannot walk and smoke on them at the same time.
4. Foreign entertainment was strictly in the form of videotape rental or limited pay access to services which are the Japanese equivalent of HBO (Wow Wow being the biggest). The selection for these channels was pretty poor and the relative cost for the quality high. Access to U.S. television was only possible through the largesse of relatives who were willing to tape shows and send the tapes abroad. Now, there is cable television which shows select T.V. series as quickly as one year behind the U.S. and more channels seem to be dropped in every few years. Currently, "Lost" is airing about a half season behind the U.S. on AXN. However, comedy is still pretty hard to find except for "Friends", "The Simpsons", and other Fox-produced shows (since Fox has its own channel on Japanese cable).
5. Access to foreign food was limited to the odd item here and there at some markets and the expensive supermarkets in the "gaijin ghetto" areas of Tokyo. I use the term "ghetto" in the sense of it being a pooling of a certain type of person, not as any indication of poverty. The people living in those areas are quite wealthy compared to those of us living in Japanese communities. These days, you can get more foreign food consistently at local markets compared to the past, go to Costco (though only far from central Tokyo in a relatively long day trip), and order from the Foreign Buyer's Club though this takes a month and a half to deliver items.
6. Getting English language books was very expensive. The main way to get them was through Kinokuniya bookstore where you were charged double the cost of the books back home. A secondary way was through one of the used books stores that kept starting and going out of business like restaurants in bad locations. In both cases, selection was limited. Nowadays, we have a stable used book store to visit (Good Day Books) as well as any branch of Amazon. Both Amazon U.S. and Japan will allow you to buy English books. From the U.S., you can buy anything you want at U.S. prices but the postage can be a nasty bite. From Amazon Japan, the price tends to be higher than Amazon in the States because they don't apply the same discounts. However, selection is far better and overall prices much cheaper than 18 years ago.
7. The salary structure for foreign employees and working conditions have changed and are far less favorable than they were 18 years ago. The minimum amount a foreigner can make and still qualify for a working visa is 250,000 yen a month. In the past, you could make 250,000 yen in 25 hours of teaching work. Now, that has shifted to 30 hours for the same salary. Additionally, teaching children was a specialty and relatively uncommon as part of the average teacher's workday. These days, because of the shrinking population, almost all major language schools require some teaching of children. This is a way of increasing the market even though there are fewer and fewer people to teach. Finally, most schools have shortened class times as well as teacher break periods and schools that once offered paid national holidays no longer do so.
   

Some things have actually gotten worse rather than better. For instance, I used to be able to buy more English language computer software and hardware from Cyberian Outpost (now Fry's Outpost.com) before Japan jumped whole-heartedly into the tech boom. Once Japan's market bloomed, restrictions on imports seemed to be more wholeheartedly enforced and getting English software became very difficult without the help of a third party back home. This is somewhat off-set by the ability now to download and buy software rather than having to buy it in boxes at shops though you still can't get major releases from a download.

All in all though, it's a lot easier to live in Japan than it used to be. However, it's still not home.

Coddle Me, Or Else

Previously, I posted about a temporary student who was preparing to work in a major international hotel. She had planned for four lessons with me then to sally forth into the exciting new world of information dispersal. It turns out that it was a bit more intimidating than she expected and she decided to come back for another round of lessons.

She told me that she hadn't actually had to offer any information to foreigners yet but she has had to field questions from Japanese guests. The types of questions that she's been asked will be a problem for her if they are in English so she wanted to learn how to deal with the same types of questions in English. I must say though that I felt pretty good when she said, "now I know why you were teaching me those things!" I grilled her pretty hard but now she knows the guests may turn up the heat even higher.

One of the things she asked me about was how to get across various greetings that she is expected to offer guests. People who don't reside in Japan may not know this but it is common for the staff at restaurants and shops to say "irrashaimase" (which is the equivalent of "welcome" in English but there is no direct translation). This is more of an acknowledgement of a customers' or guest's entry into the establishment than a true greeting. My student is required to say "welcome", welcome back", or "good morning/afternoon/evening" to foreign guests when they enter the hotel.

My student wanted to confirm that the translations that were used for these greetings were correct because she noticed that quite a few guests seemed rather embarrassed when such greetings were offered. I explained to her that part of the problem is that westerners aren't used to being addressed each time they enter or exit a place. Usually, people greet you as you approach them for an interaction (like signing into the hotel). If you greet them, they also feel obliged to respond. With multiple greetings from various staff on multiple floors (this is a huge hotel with various annexes), it requires the guest to respond again and again or feel rude in not replying.

The most interesting thing she told me about this greeting business was unrelated to dealing with foreigners and had to do with a Japanese guest. It seems that the hotel believes repeat guests deserve special recognition. For new guests, it's okay to simply say "welcome" and "welcome back". For repeat visitors, the staff are supposed to recognize their faces and say "good morning/afternoon/evening." Even new staff members have to do this and it is accomplished by having pictures of those guests' faces and making the staff memorize them.

In one instance, a new employee failed to recognize a middle-aged Japanese businessman who was a repeat guest and he was so incensed by the young woman's failure to offer a more familiar greeting (she just said "welcome") that he insisted the hotel fire her. The hotel moved her out of a position where she would greet guests but it is amazing how childish this man was. When an employee failed to coddle him in the fashion he expected, he tried to get her fired for a very inconsequential "slight".

Shari's Swedish Meatballs

The point of making Swedish meatballs originally was to use up all the little bits and pieces that are left around the kitchen. Of course, these days, people tend to make them because they taste good rather than because they want to be frugal and use up whatever is lying around. I make them because they're cheap and tasty and pretty much the only way I will eat any sort of beef. I have a rather intense dislike of beef because, to me, it just smells like blood. Since we eat chicken 4-5 nights a week, it gets tedious eating the same thing, so this is a nice change of pace.

Using this recipe, the main portion of the meal (the meatballs) costs about 120 yen per serving if you can get ground beef as cheaply a I can (which is about 70 yen per 100 grams). This is also a dish which doesn't require any specialty (import) shopping. All of the ingredients can be purchased at an average Japanese supermarket and it is cooked on the stove top and requires no special equipment.

Shari's Swedish Meatballs:

• 500 grams (approx. 1 lb.) ground beef
• 1/2 small onion
• 1 medium green pepper or 2 small Japanese piman
• 2 tsp. garlic powder
• 3/4 tsp. nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 cup bread crumbs (dried or fresh)
• 1 cup near-boiling water
• 2 beef bouillon cubes
• 1/3 cup cold milk
• 1-2 tbsp. corn starch
• 1 tbsp. sour cream (optional)
• ~1 tbsp. olive oil (for cooking)
  

Put the ground beef into a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle the garlic, pepper, salt, and nutmeg over the beef. Process the onion in a small food processor (or dice very finely by hand). Add the green pepper and pulse to process into relatively small pieces or dice it by hand. Add 3/4 cup of milk and stir until thoroughly mixed. (Note: I've pureed the onion to mush before and that is fine - chopping too finely is better than too coarsely since the vegetables have to cook completely inside the meatballs. You can click on the picture above to see a larger one that should give you an idea of how finely I process them.).


Add the bread crumbs and stir until well-mixed and the meat mixture starts to clump up (as pictured above) but is not hard to stir (which would mean it's too dry). The mixture shouldn't be soupy. If it seems too wet, throw in more bread crumbs 1/4 cup at a time.


Form small (about 1"-1.25" in diameter) meatballs inside the same mixing bowl. This next step isn't absolutely necessary but it's a good idea to cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator for an hour or more (up to a day ahead of time). This will allow the spices to permeate and for the meatballs to firm up and be less likely to fall apart while cooking.

Heat a large skillet and spread just enough olive oil over the bottom to coat it (to keep the meatballs from sticking). Place the meatballs one at a time over the bottom of the pan. It's okay if they touch but they should not be crowded. Cover and cook over medium heat, turning over when they are half-cooked and brown on the bottom. If you don't keep it covered, you won't have enough liquid for making the sauce.

Remove the finished meatballs and keep warm in a covered plate (using the lid you covered the skillet with to cover the plate works well). Skim the fat from the edges of the juices (or leave it if you don't care). Dissolve the bouillon cubes in the near-boiling water and add to the juices in the pan. Stir to mix. Dissolve the corn starch (use 1 tbsp. for thinner sauce and 2 tbsp. for thicker sauce) in the 1/3 cup of cold milk and add to the juices and bouillon. Stir constantly over medium heat until thickened. Stir in sour cream if desired. Skim the fat from the edges again if necessary or use a soup skimmer to remove it.

Spoon the sauce over each serving of meatballs and serve as a main dish. Alternately, add the meatballs back into the sauce and serve over whole wheat pasta as a sauce. The sauce also makes a great gravy for potatoes.

In Japan, I use standard dried breadcrumbs used for tempura that you can pick up almost anywhere and Maggi-brand beef bouillon cubes (as pictured above). I recently picked up a bag with a ton of tiny piman for 99 yen which served me well (though I doubt I'll be able to use them all up before they go off). This recipe will make 4 generous servings or 5 smaller ones and can be frozen for future meals. You can also make sandwiches from the meatballs if you've kept the sauce separate (it gets too messy with the sauce).

In researching this recipe, I found a lot of variations and the common element is the nutmeg. It may seem strange to add a spice generally associated with cakes, pies and cookies to meat but it works extremely well and should not be omitted. My recipe mixes and matches components of various recipes but the main thing I do differently is add in green pepper and prepare the sauce with bouillon. Even if you don't like green pepper (my husband doesn't care for it), it adds in a distinctive and enjoyable flavor and I recommend giving it a try. This was the first time I added sour cream to the sauce and I found that it didn't add much to the flavor but it did give it a super smooth, silky texture.

One of the reasons I like this recipe is that it allows me to pre-prepare the more involved part (the meatballs) far ahead of time then cook later. My husband's work schedule has him coming home at 10:30 pm so we eat dinner at 11:00 and I'm generally pretty tired and not in the mood to do elaborate dinner preparation.

Taxes While Living in Japan

A recent post by Roy indirectly reminded me about something I learned about taxes in Japan. The tax situation in Japan is pretty complicated and I can't claim to understand it very well beyond personal experience but my students and former Japanese co-workers have taught me a few other things.

In terms of personal tax responsibility, Americans don't need to pay income taxes in the United States unless they make more than $75,000 a year. Needless to say, few of us are in any danger of losing our tax-exempt status. We have to file a tax form regardless of whether we owe money or not. This was a fact that my husband and I were unaware of for an extended period of time while living here and there was quite a bit of panic when we discovered we hadn't filed for well over a decade and it may result in some problems despite the fact that we owed nothing. Fortunately, we didn't get in trouble. In fact, the IRS seemed to take it all in stride and sent us 3 years of back tax forms which we filled out and sent in. Now, we're on a regular schedule but it was a bit of a worry for awhile.

We do have to pay Japanese income taxes though the rate is relatively low compared to what we'd pay in the U.S. unless we opt to pay for the same sort of benefits we get back home (unemployment insurance, social security, etc). I'm not even sure that foreign residents can collect social security if they pay into the system unless they stay for a minimum amount of time (last I heard was 10 years). I was told that we aren't required to fill out a Japanese income tax form unless we want to get a refund and, since foreign employees are usually not over-taxed, we hadn't had to do it up until last year when I started doing freelance work for my former company. For some reason, they have a set policy of over-taxing all freelance workers (10% is the set rate) so you have to file to get the excess back.

Most foreign employees don't end up paying anything beyond the bare minimum because they don't plan on staying long enough to collect social security nor do they really know their options in regards to unemployment benefits. No one explains it to you when you start your job because the companies view most foreign workers (especially teachers) as transitory. At my former company, even though it was an office job, the president used to use the excuse that my boss (an Aussie) and I weren't going to remain with the company for long so we weren't entitled to some of the perks the Japanese, who were supposedly more dedicated to the company, received. Ironically, my boss and I outlasted all but 3 of the original staff who were there when we started at the company including the president himself who sold us off to a bigger company 2 years before I quit. My former boss is still there.

The big bite that comes out of our salaries in terms of taxes is ward taxes (commonly called "ku taxes" by foreigners living in Japan). These vary from ward to ward but the more expensive ones (like ours) amount to 5% of our income. Paying only 6% or so in income tax seems a lot less impressive when you add in the ward taxes and then the cost of socialized health insurance. The insurance rate is based on income but mine was about 9% of my salary...and I didn't make that much relative to other foreigners and I made less than the average Japanese salaryman.

Most Japanese employees are cut a break on the health insurance which most foreigners don't get. A lot of companies will pay a portion of their health insurance (generally around 50%). This can be quite a healthy chunk of money. My former boss used to pay about 60,000 yen a month in health insurance and I believe he made a salary commensurate with being a Japanese manager of his age. He'd have been pretty happy to have half of that paid by someone else.

If you add all the little bits and pieces up, that's about 6% income tax + 9% health insurance +5% ward taxes for a total bite of 20% and that's without any benefits beyond the health insurance. Since most foreigners rarely use health benefits compared to their Japanese counterparts, this is a pretty sweet payday for the Japanese government, particularly since a lot of services that the tax money is used for that directly benefit the Japanese, such as community center activities (like cheap access to a swimming pool) and adult education, don't get utilitzed by foreigners either.

Anyway, one of the most peculiar things I've learned about avoiding taxes in Japan came from one of my students. I've heard from several Japanese people that inheritance taxes are incredibly high. The highest figure I'd heard was 75% of the value of the property but my student reckoned it may be closer to 60% (at least for property outside of Tokyo). That means the Japanese government gets a huge payday any time a property owner passes on. My student told me that her husband is supposed to inherit some property after his father passes away and the way that they can avoid the huge inheritance taxes is for her husband to become her father's brother. This is accomplished by having his grandfather adopt him. This allows the inheritance tax to skip a generation rather than apply to every generation. This is one of the strangest loopholes I've ever heard.

Colbert Battles for the Favor of the Gods

...and wins. As you can see from the partial screenshot (above) from the on-line roleplaying game Guild Wars, the Colbert Report is inching its way into geek culture and the team is battling for America (who else?). Who would have thought that a comedian who plays a pompous Republican would have game guilds named after him? Well, I would. but I know geeks. I found this particularly amusing since I've been watching the Colbert Report more as of late. (By the way, you can click on any of the pictures to see full screen shots which will allow the onscreen text to be read more easily.)


That inset is taken from the relatively boring screen shot above of my character digging around in her storage trunk of saved junk in the game. I usually don't pay much attention to the messages about who has the favor of the gods since it applies to a portion of the game my character isn't a high enough level to deal with yet. In Guild Wars, the favor of the gods allows you to access another area to play in. If you don't have it, you can't get there but I'm confident in America's ability to re-gain favor in time for me to get into the Underworld.


I'm liking Guild Wars more than expected but that's because it has some features I hadn't anticipated. For one thing, you can have your characters do some Sims' style movement such as dancing (see my friend in one of his heavy metal dance moves above as we engage in mature and witty banter in the above picture while my young warrior, Tankarific Carl, (with the blonde topknot) doing a John Travolta move).


You can also laugh, taunt, sit, get drunk, agree, stand at attention, beckon, beg, boo, look bored, bow, cheer, catch your breath, clap, congratulate someone, smack your head to signify "doh", do a double-take, play drums, act excited, shake your fist, flex your muscles, play the flute, cheer your team, play guitar, do a high five, jump, kneel, laugh, moan, shake your head "no", raise your hand to get the teacher to pick you, point, ponder something, pout, roar, salute, scratch, shoo someone, sigh, sit, indicate you're sorry, play violin, wave, yawn and, on special occasions, transform into other things. You've got a lot of options to make a fool of yourself. Any game that permits that gets bonus points.


You can see a whole squadron of characters who transformed themselves into candy corn during Halloween and there's a disco ball in the center of town in the picture above. On many occasions when I was playing around the end of October, groups of animated candy corn did synchronized dancing under the disco ball. You could also turn yourself into someone with a pumpkin head and release ghosts from boxes. While you can do all the normal roleplaying things like going off on quests, killing things, getting skills and gaining experience, the expanded opportunities for goofing off are more important to me. Even some of the quests are goofy (like chasing lost hogs back into their pen, finding food for a giant pet scorpion named "Joe" or tracking down a wayfaring pig.)


The game also allows you to have a pet if you build your character in a particular way. Above, you can see the only kitty I'm allowed to have (since my landlord doesn't allow pets). If cats aren't your bag, you can keep a wolf, giant bird, or spider. If that weren't nifty enough, the game has yaks and warthogs running around in it. Unfortunately, neither of them are lethal but I'm still holding out hope that a future version might include throngs of murderous yaks and man-eating warthogs. That'd be incredibly cool.

I've been playing Guild Wars with my sister (and my old Battle.net friend, 0tarin) quite a bit for the past month and am still pretty incompetent at it. I'll regret it when I reach a point where I'll know what I'm doing sufficiently that I'll have grown bored with the distractions and start focussing on actually playing well. Of course, I'm sure my sister (Wandering Carl above), who has to tolerate the lunacy of my friend and I, will be relieved to not have to carry us all the time. ;-)

Why I Never Discuss WWII With Students

This evening, I did the final part of what ended up being a 3-part lesson on holidays with one of my students. The end of the lesson took an unexpected and somewhat unpleasant turn when the student misunderstood the meaning of the word "sentimental".

The lesson is one that I made myself and is meant to give students practice in explaining their own culture. We go through the entire year and the student tells me the holidays and what they're meant to celebrate and how they are celebrated. I also use this as an opportunity to discuss how "holiday" is used to mean "day-off" by the Japanese and those who use British English whereas it means a special day of celebration to most Americans. Additionally, I introduce what a "national holiday" is and have the students tell me which of their holidays are national ones.

At the end of the lesson, I asked my student which holiday she felt the most sentimental about. I figured that she'd choose New Year's Eve or day but she said August 15th because it was the "end of World War II." Since she wasn't even alive during the war (she's in her early 40's), I asked her why it affected her so deeply. She said that, for Japanese people, this was the most deeply affecting date in their history and went on to say the atomic bomb was the worst thing ever in the history of man.

She also said that there are still many people in Japan who suffer physical defects or problems because of the bomb. I expressed some doubt that, after 63 years, this could actually be the case but I can't say I know the long-term genetic effects from exposure to fall-out so long ago. However, I can say that I wouldn't trust Japanese scientists not to exaggerate such claims. Japanese doctors lie all the time and the Japanese government covers up, ignores and misinforms about illnesses as well (as is evidenced by Chisso corporation's feet-dragging on Minamata disease and the government taking 12 years to reach a conclusion about it).

I never raise the topic of World War II with students because the Japanese are taught only about the part which portrays them as victims. They aren't taught about allying themselves with Hitler, the occupation of China, or Pearl Harbor. Essentially, they are taught only to view it from the viewpoint of the harm they suffered and not Japan's instigation of the harm done to them. While my student gave a cursory acknowledgement of this, I could tell that she was only doing so in a pre-emptory attempt at waylaying any arguments she felt I might make.

I don't want to argue this with students because I'm pretty sure that few people from any culture are capable of objectively discussing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In general, you have the revisionists who factor in their current dislike of America when assessing the situation, the Japanese who only see their own suffering, and Americans who give a pat justification. Few people even attempt to put themselves inside the World War II era zeitgeist. This is essential when viewing any event in history and is responsible for some of the most short-sighted conclusions in the study of history. Few consider the political and economic context of the events. Even fewer consider the respective cultures that were involved.

In general, everyone is interested in asserting a personal agenda and a Japanese person and an American are absolutely the worst two people to be talking about World War II. That's the reason I never bring it up and I wished the student hadn't brought it up because, despite the fact that I refrained greatly from arguing, she was visibly upset by the end of the lesson. The only thing I did point out to her was that the Japanese education system didn't teach a complete history (which is true and she said so) and that I felt the main reason the Japanese focused on the bombs as the most integral part of the war was that it signalled their loss whereas the allied powers tend to focus on the events that sparked the war as the integral moments (because this is what dragged them into a horrible war that they didn't want to be a part of).

In the end, I learned that she thought "sentimental" meant something she felt deeply sad about and that was why she gave that answer. She also said she had a former American teacher who seemed to really like to talk about World War II. I assured her that I never discuss it with students because it's too likely to be upsetting. I didn't say that I also feel that one needs to discuss such a topic in one's native language because there is a lot of subtle talk if you want to really have an intelligent discussion and that I think no two people who are together because money is a part of their relationship should discuss such a volatile topic. But, I thought it.

Cleaning On My Mind

Several things have put cleaning at the forefront of my mind as of late. For one thing, every time I pay the rent, I think about cleaning. Our landlord lives next door to us so we always drop by with the rent money around the 28th of each month. When I go in, I am presented with an absolutely immaculate entryway which leads into what appears to be an immaculate home. Granted, the landlord built a huge, new house about 8-10 years ago so their place is less than half the age of ours but it's definitely about more than age.

Usually, I walk into their spacious entryway (about 100 pairs of shoes could fit in their genkan without overlap or crowding) and hand over the money with a little booklet which they use to keep a record of our rent payment record. Each booklet lasts 2 years (the term of one rent contract) and they write the date and amount of payment on the page then stamp it with their name stamp (hanko). The inkan which makes the hanko isn't stored near the entryway because it's a very important item used for bank and other legal transactions. It essentially functions as a signature in Japan. In fact, most Japanese stamp rather than sign documents. If someone steals your hanko and bank book, in theory, they could take all your money from your bank account. However, I've never heard of this happening. (I may be confusing or misusing "inkan" and "hanko" here because I've sometimes heard "hanko" refer to the whole apparatus and sometimes to only the mark...I'm sure someone savvier than me will step up to the plate if I'm wrong.)

Since the inkan is in a back room somewhere, the landlord or lady always takes the book from me and goes trotting (literally) off to the back room to stamp the book. They always do this after meticulously counting the rent money in front of me. They don't do this because they don't trust me. They do it in order to avoid conflict or misunderstanding in case of any error. While they are in the back room, I have little to do but twiddle my thumbs and look around the entryway. If I could take a picture of it, I would, but it's a bit rude to snap shots of their home without their consent and it'd be just weird to ask.

So, I have had many chances to wile away some time checking out the same area again and again and I can say without hesitation that there is not one nook or cranny of that place with one speck of dust. From the top of the large picture of goldfish on the left to the crevices of a statue with a woven-look on a huge cabinet for shoes on my right to the tops of a long row of closets, there isn't any dirt or dust to be seen. It confounds me and makes me feel inadequate at the same time.

To be fair, the lady of the house spends all her time doing housewifely duties with some part-time care of her grandchild thrown in and I can't see all of the house but I'd wager a fair amount that it's just as clean. I can mollify myself by saying that she doesn't teach part-time or pursue any academic interests or use a computer but that's just a justification. I'm guessing she's an expert at her craft. The energy and time she must put into this amazes me. She's a dynamo.

The other things that have got me thinking about cleaning are a recent post on What Japan Thinks about smells in Japanese homes and Helen mentioning in her blog how her cleaning tends to go unnoticed by her husband. The survey translated in "What Japan Thinks" actually made me feel better since I don't think my house smells like "poo" so I've got to be cleaning better than some Japanese people. ;-) And I tried to console Helen by telling her that my husband doesn't notice my cleaning either and that I think it's a biological incapability of men when it comes to not seeing dirt or disorder.

crushed crap on the kitchen wall

I actually don't mind cleaning and enjoy it at times. The only problem is that it's a minimally-rewarding experience. In Tokyo, the pollution is such that you get a ton of soot and dust all over everything. In the case of our apartment, the crappy wall covering is also constantly flaking off. Literally, within 6 hours of dusting, you can visibly see the tops of furniture pick up a new fine layer. Within a day, it looks like you never touched it.

nubby crap on the bedroom wall

My former boss, who has lived in places more ancient than ours in his history in Japan, also said he thinks living on the first floor is worse for us because people walking around on the second floor causes dust from an old place like ours to constantly rain down from the cracks and crevices. Since little sunlight gets in, I don't often see dust falling. On the odd day when the angle between the buildings and our limited exposure to direct sunlight falls just the right way and a shaft of real light gets in through a window, I can see tons of crap floating in the air in a constant shower of particles.

So, it's pretty much a losing battle but I still vacuum twice a week and dust once a week to keep the level of dust down. If nothing else, it's kept my husband's allergies at bay for the last several years.

Blogcritics post #11

My latest blogcritics piece is about whether or not racism against caucasians is possible. It is based, in part, on the trend I've been reading about on other blogs where Japanese people don big noses and busy hairpieces and pretend to be foreigners. You can read it here.

Bicycle Repairman

My bike broke last week and my husband and I finally got around to taking it to the local repair shop. As you can see from the picture, it's jam-packed with bikes and festively-decorated with a string of Christmas lights (right under the sign). That level of crowding extends into the shop itself where there are extremely narrow isles to walk through.

The picture looks like it was taken at night but it was actually about a quarter to five in the evening. The Japanese don't use daylight savings time so it gets dark early. This is because, as my students put it, "it's not their custom." It seems pretty hypocritical to whine about the U.S. not signing on to the Kyoto accord and then refusing to do something that'd save electricity by turning the clocks forward and back twice a year but nevermind.

My husband believes this bicycle shop is part of a chain of such shops ran by Bridgestone (the tire company). One young fellow works there so you have to wait sometimes if someone gets in ahead of you. In our case, a woman was in front of us so the repairman told us it'd take an hour. We decided to kill the time and be productive by getting some grocery shopping done while he worked. We headed down the local shopping street and my husband noticed these signs (click on this picture to see a more easily readable large version):


He was particularly amused by the idea that your hair needs to relax. I liked how you could get a "blow" for 3,150 yen.

Anyway, my husband was on foot and I was riding his bicycle down the shopping street. You're not supposed to ride bikes on the shopping street but people do it all the time. In fact, there were at least 3 other people in easy view of us also riding bikes but some old goober harassed me about riding mine (tapping my shoulder and pointing at the signs - which shows how slowly I was riding because he was on foot - I was hardly being dangerous). Of course, he ignored all the Japanese people who were on bikes. This frustrates me because I don't ride a bike because I'm lazy. I ride it because of my serious back pain which can become unbearable when I walk for a long time. Generally, walking while shopping is enough to wear out my pain tolerance so having to walk to get to the shops is out of the question. I let the prejudiced old fool walk ahead and got back on my bike again after he'd passed.

My husband wants to treat some of his students to Christmas cookies this year so we were trying to track down ground cloves and ginger for gingerbread cookies. Ground ginger has been especially troublesome for me to find in local shops. I'm guessing this is because it's so easy to get fresh ginger in Japan and it's what they use in their cooking. I've also been able to easily find whole cloves but not ground. Fortunately, a supermarket with a fair number of imports had them. My husband had to go to a shop specializing in imports to buy an expensive bottle of molasses.

Our shopping took about 40 minutes but the repairman hadn't touched the bike while we were gone. He also told us when we returned that he may not have the necessary parts until tomorrow and took our phone number. About 40 minutes after we got home, he called to say he was finished and it'd cost about $30. That's about 1/3 the cost of the entire bike but it's relatively reasonable. And it's a lot better than some of the car repair bills we used to get back home. ;-)

Supremely Spiffy M*A*S*H collection

inner box

I posted about ordering the M*A*S*H complete collection (11 seasons plus the original movie) from Deep Discount DVD and the box arrived several days ago. I had seen a few shots of the set on various web sites but never any that were large enough to give me a real sense of what it was like.


If you click on the small pictures here to see larger ones, you can see that the box is unusual in that it's covered in the sort of textured cover (resembling canvas) that old-fashioned 3-ring binders were covered in when I was in high school (which was about 25 years ago). I don't know if they even make these sorts of binders anymore since plastic is much slicker-looking and probably cheaper to produce. The cool thing about the design is that it'll resemble the psuedo-military tent-look all the more as it takes on wear. There's also a pressed board "clipboard" on the inside flap which holds a booklet listing the contents of the discs and has some photos and information on the show. This faux clipboard is more solid than the pressed board bookshelves I buy at Japanese furniture shops. :-p

Since I study design as a hobby, I really appreciate the care that went into putting this together. It looks great and matches the style of the show. It's relatively compact for the quantity of discs (36) and feels pretty solid compared to other huge "all season" collections. For instance, the 7-season box for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"is a compact design marvel but fairly flimsy. The discs' plastic holders come detached from their flimsy cardboard holders. Still, the Buffy "Chosen Collection" is the same height as a standard CD case so it fits in my DVD cabinet and the M*A*S*H collection is too tall and will have to be stored elsewhere.

homemade pocket protection

The discs themselves are stored in cardboard fold-out sleeves. This is the only point at which the design of the case shows flaws. The discs are tightly held in the pockets and when you pull them out, they get scratched. The first one I pulled out got two very long and nasty-looking scratches down half of one side and the disc played with problems. I'm going to try to prevent this from happening again and put each disc in a plastic holder with a thin cloth backing (as you can see above). I folded up and taped down the bottom of each holder so they are "rounded" at the bottom and fit more easily into the tight cardboard slots.

Getting the discs out without scratching them in order to put them in the sleeves required me to gently pull out the edge of the cardboard as far as possible before removing the disc in each case. Even though I tried to be careful, I still managed to tear one of the pockets.

I don't feel obliged to mention the content itself because most people either don't care or have already seen the T.V. series. However, the movie is another story. I had only seen it once before and that was a very long time ago when I was too young to understand a lot of the humor. My memory was that it was relatively depressing for a comedy.

I watched the movie first in order to have a point of comparison as I watched the series and was struck by how episodic it is. It really is more like a series of T.V. episodes placed end-to-end. This is a point that is mentioned in an interview with Robert Altman on the disc. He said the use of the speaker in the movie (which was also used in the T.V. show) was invented to tie the episodes together. He also said that Korea is never overtly referred to in the movie because he wanted it to be unclear whether or not this was about Vietnam or Korea. By making it vague, he could make a movie that would have been considered subversive if it were about Vietnam.

The movie isn't nearly as good as the T.V. show, mainly because the characters don't have the same charm and some of the "episodes" don't stand very well on their own. The final sequence is about a football game between units and it fails to be funny most of the time. It could be that so much of the movie was dissected to make stories for the earlier seasons of M*A*S*H that it seems recycled.

Textbook Speak

As I've mentioned before, one of my students is studying Criminal Justice at a college on a military base. She's taking a class in Juvenile Justice and has the same sort of textbook that you use at most colleges. It's extremely difficult for her to understand in large part because of the specialized vocabulary but that's not the hardest part for her. She can look up random words and get translations.

The harder part for her is that she has issues de-scrambling the sort of language that textbook writers feel obliged to use. Sometimes, the grammar in the sentences is contorted such that you have to read it more than once to understand the point. This is often the case even for native speakers. One of the sentences which she had particular difficulty with was something which said something along the lines of 'a framework from which to study (a topic)'. I can't recall the rest of the sentence, unfortunately, but it was clear that the way in which the sentence was written was awkward (though grammatically correct) in order to avoid the use of "I" or "we".

When I was in college, I remember specifically being told that one was never to use "I" or "we" in academic writing. I don't know why that was the case but, to this day, when I write anything, it's in the back of my mind that I should try to avoid using such types of sentences.

Besides the tendency of textbooks to use contorted grammatical structures, they also seem to go out of their way to use uncommon vocabulary. I'm no slouch in the vocabulary department and my husband is even less of a slouch than me but the book I'm currently reading, Adaptation and Human Behavior, often has us both clicking our way over to dictionary.com. I'm reading this book, incidentally, as a nice little palate cleanser between novels though the number of $20 words is really clogging up the mental pipes as I try to slog through the book.

I'm not talking about jargon. In fact, I understand the jargon pretty well having studied psychology and appreciate the need to use a word like "phenotype" because it saves the writer from using multiple words to describe "body type" and it fits in with the phenotypical body descriptions (ectomorphic, mesomorphic, endomorphic) aka somatotypes. Now, wasn't that far more confusing than saying body types which tend to be thin, muscular, and fat?

At any rate, I don't take issue with this type of jargon because I know that the ideas underlying them are more sophisticated than "thin"," fat", and "muscular". In some cases, using simpler words undermines the meaning the writing is trying to get across. In other cases, however, it seems to have little to do with conveying words which carry more depth of meaning than more commonly-used vocabulary. For instance, what is the point of using a word like "adduce" instead of "cited"? There is no added nuance carried by "adduce" over "cite". It's just a less commonly-used word.

I'm never sure if academics sit down with a thesaurus and find new and uncommon words in an attempt to appear more sophisticated or to use words that are less common to spice up their dry content, or if they use these words because their exposure to vocabulary is extraordinary. Either way, for both my student and I, this is sometimes a pain in the ass.

Creamy Potato and Onion Soup

Calling this by such a mundane name as "potato and onion soup" hardly does it justice. This is immensely good soup which, despite being "creamy" contains no cream, is cheap, easy to make, and relatively healthy. It's especially satisfying in the colder months and can be a vegetarian meal by itself with a bit of crusty bread to dip in it.

I used to make this soup regularly several years ago until my husband went low carb and potatoes became verboten. Since I'm not likely to go to a lot of trouble making homemade soup for only myself, I just stopped making it. My husband has relaxed his carbohydrate restrictions and allows himself small portions of foods he once avoided entirely so this soup came back on the menu.


I've only ever made this recipe while living in Japan so I've always made it with Japanese green onions. These onions are large with hollow green stems and do not have a bulb. I believe that they are called "Welsh onions" in western countries and have a less pungent smell and a milder flavor than scallions or smaller green onions which resemble chives. I think the small green onions wouldn't work as well in the soup so, if you try this recipe, look for onions that resemble the ones above. They are about 15 inches long and about a half inch in diameter. However, if anyone does attempt it with smaller onions and feels it works well, please let me know.

The only substitution I had to make in this recipe because I live in Japan is using chicken consumme cubes instead of canned chicken soup stock. The soup didn't appear to suffer at all for this substitution but those who are sensitive to salt may have to use canned low-sodium chicken stock (which cannot be purchased in Japan).

This soup freezes well so you can store the rest for future consumption if you live alone and don't want to eat soup for a week. ;-)

Creamy Potato and Onion Soup:

2 tbsp. butter
3 tbsp. flour
3 cloves of garlic
3 negi (green onions)/Welsh onions
1 white onion (medium-sized)
4 large potatoes or 6 small ones
4 cups of chicken stock or 4 cups of very hot water with 10 cubes of chicken consomme dissolved in it
1 cup of milk
pepper to taste

Peel the potatoes and cut them into bite-size pieces. Let them soak in cold water to let get rid of some of the starch. You can soak them for awhile then change the water to remove more starch. Chop the negi/Welsh onions finely. Dice the white onion. Peel and mince the garlic.

In a large pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Stir in the flour and cook for 2-3 minutes. Add the minced garlic and stir. Cook for another minute. Add both the negi/Welsh onion and white onion and stir to coat. Slowly add the chicken stock/consomme and stir it into the onions. Allow this to come to a boil. Add the milk, potatoes, and pepper. Simmer on low heat until the potatoes are tender. Stir occasionally.


The soup will appear relatively thin at first (like the above picture) but thicken as it cooks. If you'd like thicker soup, scoop out two cups of the potatoes and onions (try not to take much liquid) and puree them in a blender or food processor. Stir the pureed vegetables into the rest of the soup for an extra creamy soup.

Makes 6-8 servings.

Christmas Pack

Santa is almost perversely overjoyed.

One thing my husband and I used to do when we first arrived in Japan was buy some random packaged item and find out what was inside. We stopped doing that a long time ago. I rather forgot why. It struck me that it might be interesting to give that a try again. After sampling the contents of the happy package above, I believe the reason we stopped is for the same reason that you touch a hot stove once and then never do it again. Curiosity may not kill the cat but it can sure turn off his tastebuds and offer up a belly-ache.

The Christmas Pack pictured above is meant for children and only cost 99 yen at a convenience store. I didn't have great expectations of gourmet contents and I thought that it may be more interesting because it would show what sort of items are supposed to appeal to children. Unsurprisingly, the items in the bag are the kind of things you see in the candy and snack aisles which are geared toward kids in markets.


This bar resembles a cake when you see a smallish picture of it but if you click and see a larger picture, you can see it is far from a cake. It is called "Merry Christmas wheat gluten (fu) snack". I'm sure many children this year will be writing Santa and asking for special treats made of wheat gluten. The package, as best I can read, seems to be saying that it is a nutritionally-balanced snack. Among the main ingredients are brown sugar, sugar, glutinous flour, and all-purpose flour. It smells like a mixture of burnt sugar and boullion cubes. The description says something about minerals being in it. The outside is incredibly sweet and the inside is a tasteless quasi-puffed corn snack texture. It was perfectly vile when I forced myself to taste it.


This is a "black sesame mochi choco". I tried to pull this apart so you could see the center but it was too tough to separate. The chocolate just broke up. I did take a small bite of this and it out-did the wheat gluten bar in disgustingness. It was absolutely horrible. I'd try to describe it but I'm trying to allow the brain cells that retain that information to atrophy and die. Among the ingredients for this one are "chocolate" (no ingredients for the chocolate are given), corn syrup, sugar, cornstarch, seseame seed paste, mochi (like rice "taffy", though it's usually called rice "cake"), powdered milk, and soy beans. I liked how the package actually used correct English but confused "they're" and "their" (click the picture to see a larger one to clearly see the slogan). Of course, American young people who have grown up on the internet probably couldn't tell the difference between the two anyway.


This is "morokoshi wa taro" or, essentially, "corn and corm rings". Among the ingredients are corn, taro (a Japanese corm), vegetable oil, and spices. They don't smell like much of anything and taste like an airier, relatively flavorless Chee-to. I'd call these rather inoffensive to mildly pleasant because of the texture.


This one is called "Umaka Christmas" which as best I can work out means "sweet Christmas". My research indicated that "umaka" is another way of saying "umai" in a particular dialect but this may be an incorrect translation. Among the ingredients are corn grits, vegetable oil, sugar, pork extract, salt, onion powder, chicken consomme, Japanese rice (uruchi rice) and fructose. This was the only item in the package which I thought was relatively pleasant tasting. The onion powder and consomme were noticeable and the texture was fine.


This is "Merry Christmas Umai (Sweet) something**". We couldn't track down the kanji on this one without going to more trouble than it was worth. This actually wasn't bad. The chocolate on the outside tasted okay and the inside was a hollow log which tasted like and had a similar texture to Kix cereal only it was puffier and airier. Among the ingredients are sugar, vegetable oil, corn, powdered milk, chocolate mousse, cocoa, flour, non-fat powdered milk, soybean milk and flavoring.

**In the comments, Luis told me that this means "stick". His Japanese girlfriend graciously translated it. Many thanks!

If nothing else, this exercise pushed my husband and I to do some translating. It also explains why Japan imports so much corn. I think a good portion of it must be processed into these sorts of snacks.

To me, this was a classic example of something you see a fair amount of in Japan. That is, it's something which looks far better on the outside than it actually is on the inside. Maybe kids go nuts for this stuff but I bought this bag over a week ago and the QQ branch I bought it from looked to have just as many in stock as when I purchased mine.

Middle-Aged Man Winter

If places that have a proper winter are visited by "old man winter", Tokyo is visited by the much less crotchety and severe "middle-aged man winter." Winter here is relatively mild and it also came very late this year. It usually snows no more than 4 days per season, and sometimes not at all. The high temperatures tend to run between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the lows between 30 and 40. It stayed comfortable without the use of heating up until about this week when the temperatures finally started to fall regularly into the low 60's.

Each year, my husband and I do our best to endure the temperature changes for as long as possible before kicking in with the cooling and heating. In the winter, this is far easier than in the summer for a variety of reasons. For starters, my husband and I are both more sensitive to heat than to cold. In my case, this makes sense since I grew up in the northeastern part of the U.S. where winter is long, dangerous and freezing cold. My husband is just one of those people who heats up fast and stays hot.

Beyond that though, it's far easier to dress to warm oneself up than to strip off enough to cool down. There's only so much you can take off but it's easy to pile on layers of clothes to stay warm, especially when the temperatures are no worse than those you get in Tokyo. I usually get by for as long as possible with a sweater and a blanket for my legs when I'm at the computer. This pretty much sees me through anything down to about 60-62 degrees, particularly if I make an effort to get up and do fairly physically demanding housework at regular intervals.

Having grown up in Pennsylvania where the winters require you to save up enough during the rest of the year so you can afford to pay for heating oil during the winter, I'm used to the idea of setting the thermostat low and putting up with the cold as much as possible. In my family's case, they also have adapted by using a wood burning stove to diminish the amount of expensive fuel they need every winter. It's a bonus that growing up conditioned not to use heat when you can avoid it spares the environment as well as reduces the gas bill.

Unfortunately, it became clear to me this week as I became uncomfortably cold while teaching lessons (in which I can neither use a blanket nor get up and walk around to kick up my metabolism) that I was going to have to give in and drag out our heater for the sake of my students if nothing else. The heater we use was actually purchased second-hand from my brother-in-law who recently blogged about his purchase of a new heater. It's my guess that he wouldn't need one now if we hadn't bought his venerable gas heater when he had to give it up over a decade ago when he left Japan to return to the U.S. for his Masters degree.

While this heater is quite effective, it's at least somewhat dangerous when you have to place it in areas which require you to step over it to get to other rooms. The wire guard on the front of it is bent up a bit because I once fell backwards on it when I was pulling laundry (that was hung on the balcony to dry) into the apartment and forgot it was there. As I backed into the bedroom with a huge pile of clothes in my arms, I tripped over it and landed with my leg firmly on top of it. Fortunately, it was on at a half intensity setting so the flame wasn't very high and I didn't get burned. I decided from then on never to retrieve anything from the balcony with the heater on.

Having rearranged the furniture since that incident, the heater is no longer in a place where one is likely to fall over it but it is incredibly close to the bed where there is a danger of blankets falling on it while one is sleeping. That means we can never leave it on at night but that's okay since it just encourages us to snuggle under the blankets for warmth at night.

Update: With what I felt was a great deal of kind consideration for my well-being, Roy mentioned in the comments section that old gas heaters may be at risk for leaking toxic gasses so I contacted Tokyo Gas about checking our heater. I was told that ours isn't really old enough to be a problem and that they could come and check anyway for 2,000 yen but it probably wasn't necessary unless we smelled something wrong or we started having headaches when we used it. Phew!