It Started With a Puzzle

For a great many years, I've had a puzzle in my closet called "The Ultimate Alphabet" (scan of the box cover pictured above). It's a huge puzzle and I obviously didn't look carefully at the size when I bought it or I wouldn't have made the purchase. I believe it is 730 x 1020 millimeters (28" x 40") and no single surface in my apartment is large enough to assemble it on. So, while I've had the impulse to put it together on occasion throughout the last decade and a half, I haven't had a place to do it short of the middle of my kitchen floor and it wouldn't do to have my husband and I stepping over it all day and night, not to mention my students.

When I recently mentioned to my husband that I'd like to give it a go, he reminded me that he bought a large plastic sheet last year which we'd cut up sections of to block his cubicle off at work and rope in his air conditioning for a cooler space. The sheet is both large enough and sturdy enough to hold the puzzle so it could be moved around to unoccupied spaces in the apartment as needed. With this new possibility in mind, I decided to give the puzzle a go but wasn't sure where I'd stored it. I believed it was in the storage space behind my desks (pictured below).


As you can see from the picture, getting to this space requires that the desks be pulled out. They're not all that heavy but it can be a bit tricky because of all the wiring. Computers sitting on my desk are connected to devices stored in the closet. Nonetheless, I successfully got to the storage area but didn't find the puzzle there. I did find something I'd been wanting to dig out for some time, a set of cute retro porcelain cats (pictured below) that my husband bought me as a gift some time ago but I hadn't really had a good space to set them up in until now.

These types of plastic display boxes are commonly available in Japan from 100 yen shops (though this one cost 210 yen) and do a great job both of keeping dust off of your knick-knacks and pulling them nicely together into a specific space for a spiffy presentation. The parts of this kitten orchestra were relatively expensive and the remaining ones, unfortunately, are no longer available but, if anyone ever sees the piano player or any other missing cats from this set, I want to purchase it and would appreciate being notified of where the pieces can be bought. The stickers on the bottom say they were made by "Seven Corporation."

The trouble started after I'd successfully pushed the desks back into place and wanted to use my computer. In the shoving to reposition the desks, the keyboard tray got pushed back too far on the left side and was stuck. It would no longer slide out on one side no matter how hard I pulled at it. I even tried bashing on the back of it with a hammer and it was stuck fast much to my great frustration. There was nothing for it but to pull the desk back out again and remove the screws and see if it could be fixed.

To get at the back screw on the tray, I had to pull the desk out quite far but I forgot the fact that my computers were tethered to devices in the closet. On the third pull forward to get the desk out far enough to reach the back screw, my 160 GB external hard disk came crashing to the ground. The front face plate broke off but I still had hopes that it'd be ok internally. These hopes were summarily dashed when I turned it on and it made a sound like a needle repeatedly skipping on a record .

My desire to put together a puzzle had now resulted not only in a broken desk but also a broken hard drive and I was immensely frustrated and upset, particularly because I was having trouble getting the keyboard tray fixed and every time I tried to manipulate the disconnected left side, it would slip out of my hand and the still-connected right side of the tray would groan with stress on its screws and I was afraid the whole thing would snap off. The slipping resulted in my dropping the heavy left end on my arm twice and bruised my arm and caused a couple of pinhole punctures in my skin. With the aid of the hammer, I bruised up the front left end of the tray and finally knocked the tray into or out of the track in such a way that the tray slid smoothly in and out again.

After all of this, I had an insanely hard time getting the desks pushed back into place for a second time. My husband came home from a swim at the health club to find me crying on the floor in frustration. Being the most wonderful husband in the universe, he tried to help me get the desks back in with some success (he did about 80% of it and I finished the last 20% because he was stymied as to how I got them in so far before) and promptly went to Amazon Japan's web site and calmed me down about the hard drive by finding a very reasonably-priced replacement (320 GB for ¥15,000/$123) and ordered it.

In the end, I found the puzzle in a storage area above the computer which required no furniture moving or fuss and started to put it together only to find the sheet was so big that it couldn't be moved through the bedroom door for storage in another room so I had to give it up regardless. I'm pretty sure at this point that the puzzle is cursed. The attempted utilization of any one object should not result in the level of chaos and destruction that that puzzle has.

Matchmaking

There are several lines in the J. Geils Band song "Love Stinks" which go like this:

"You love her,
But she loves him,
And he loves somebody else"

One of my students recently tried her hand at matchmaking only to find it ending in the above result. My student has a friend who is one of those people who is "Japanese but not Japanese" for whom she wanted to help find a compatible mate. For those who are unfamiliar with the "Japanese but not Japanese", there are those in Japan who were born here and have lived here their entire lives but are the off-spring of parents, grandparents, or great grandparents (or even further back for all I know) who were not born here. Such people carry the passport of their parents' home country despite having no experience with living there or even being able to speak their ancestor's home country's language. The Japanese do not offer up Japanese nationality lightly.

In this case, the lonely-hearted woman is the child of parents from Taiwan who are permanent residents in Japan. While she is culturally Japanese, she is relatively worldly and grew up with her parents' cultural mores in addition to those of the Japanese. My student felt that the most compatible man for her friend was someone in a similar situation. While she personally did not know a suitable male, she had a male friend who works for an international company who was in a position to introduce a "Japanese but not Japanese" fellow from his company to her.

My student introduced her Japanese male friend to her female friend in order to put him in a position to introduce his coworker. Unfortunately, the "Japanese but not Japanese" female friend grew enamored of the Japanese male friend and had no interest whatsoever in the coworker who was supposedly the more compatible match. My student's male friend wasn't interested in her though.

This situation illustrates both a common way in which Japanese people handle matchmaking and the way in which many of them consider their mates. When the topic of finding a spouse comes up, every single student I've spoken to has said that compatibility is more important than "love" because love is not a lasting basis for a marriage. Therefore, they tend to match up friends (and themselves) based on more tangible traits (i.e., job, education, income) or character traits (i.e., patience, gentleness, level-headedness) rather than act on their passions.

My student told me that this experience and the embarrassing situation it put all involved in has taught her that she has to handle future matchmaking in a different fashion. That's not to say that she won't match her friends based on the same compatibility criteria but rather that she will not use an opposite sex intermediary when introducing one friend to the friend of a friend.

Lost and Soon Found

Last night I was watching television while waiting for my husband to come home from work with some take-out dinner for me when the phone rang. He had called the curry restaurant I sometimes get a bento from and pre-ordered the food so it'd be ready by the time he got there and, as he rode his bike from the station to the restaurant, he discovered his wallet had fallen out of his pocket. Since he had had his wallet when he left the station and there was a limited stretch of sidewalk between it and the restaurant, he retraced his steps but his wallet had already been picked up by someone.

He called me both to let me know that he'd have to head for the police station to report it and to have me jump on my bike and go pay for and pick up the food he'd ordered since he couldn't pay for it without a wallet. Fortunately for us, the main police station isn't far from where we live or where the wallet was lost so I went for the curry and he rode on to the police station.

Since my husband was riding around without identification and that can be a serious problem if the wrong cop stops you (that is, a foreigner) in Japan, I grabbed his passport before heading out. I figured that I'd drop it off at the police station after picking up the food so my husband would have something should he get stopped on the way home.

It probably took me about 7 minutes to get to the restaurant, pay, get the food, and reach the police station. As I was parking my bike, my husband walked out of the station with his wallet in hand. It seems that someone had already turned the wallet in with the cash still in it. While this is the point at which some people might start proudly boasting about how all Japanese are incredibly honest and how this would never happen in any major city in the world, I'm not so sure that this rapid return wasn't related to factors other than an innate sense of honesty.

That is not to say that Japanese people aren't honest or that this would happen anywhere else in the world but the truth is that the proximity of the loss of the wallet to the police station, a well-established and socially-expected course of action when locating a lost wallet (particularly on a busy street in the presence of many people), and the fact that only 2000 yen ($16.44) was in the wallet contributed greatly to it being turned over so quickly. I'm pretty sure that the chances of a wallet being returned intact increases with a smaller amount of money in it in any culture. When temptation is low, it's easier to do "the right thing".

Regardless, my husband and I were both immensely grateful to the folks that quickly took the wallet to the police station. He'd recently reinstated a U.S. credit card we hadn't used for quite some time so he could use it while visiting his folks in the States and a less morally upright individual could have taken it on a shopping spree on the Internet. Also, it's not as if doing the right thing didn't put those folks out because they likely have to go 5 minutes out of their way to go to the police station and have to put up with the annoying paperwork connected with returning a lost article. And it could be that the people who found the wallet had hearts of gold and always do the right thing. I can't peer into their souls but it'd be nice if that were true.

A little over a month and a half ago, I found a wallet and turned it over to the landlord so he could give it to the police (overcoming a desire not to get involved and just leave in on the ground). When my husband called and said he'd lost his wallet, I thought that, if there were really any karmic balance system out there at work, he'd get it back quickly, easily, and intact. And he did.

Anisette Sponge Cake

When my husband came back from the U.S., he brought a package of Stella D'oro Anisette Sponge with him on the plane for snacking. He also brought back a bottle of anise extract. He has always liked Anisette toast and sponge cookies but you can't get them in Japan. This is very likely because they smell of licorice and, in my experience, Japanese people aren't keen on licorice.

I decided to try to create something similar to the anisette sponge cookies he brought back with him and I think I've come as close as I'm going to with a third experimental recipe based on a biscotti recipe. It's probably closer to cake than to cookie but it's definitely not as delicate as cake can be and can be easily eaten with fingers alone (and does not drop a lot of crumbs).

Anisette Sponge Recipe:

• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk
• 1/4 cup Canola oil (scant)
  
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1/2 tsp. anise extract
• 1/2 cup sugar
  
• dash vanilla essence
• dash lemon essence
• dash almond essence
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 cup white flour
• dash salt
  

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. (175 degrees C.) Whisk the egg, egg yolk, milk, oil, anise extract, and all essences together. Whisk in the sugar and salt. Sift in the baking powder and flour. Stir until smooth. Pour into a greased loaf pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes until a skewer in the center comes out clean. Allow to rest in the pan for 5-10 minutes and gently turn out onto a cooling rack. Slice when thoroughly cooled.

I recommend you allow the cake to cool completely and wait several hours before eating it because the anise flavor seems to need time to develop and is very subtle when consumed in warm cakes or cookies.

Subtitling Oddities

One of my student's work is making Japanese subtitles for English movies and television shows. During the course of my lessons with her, I've come to learn some of the reasons why subtitles in Japanese don't seem to match the English that is uttered. Incidentally, it's not only English speakers who notice the discrepancy between subtitled content and spoken content. One of my other students asked me just this week why what sounds like several paragraphs of English are uttered and one Japanese word appears on screen.

According to my student who does subtitling professionally, the biggest reason why these discrepancies occur is that there are strict rules about subtitling and the number of characters that can appear on the screen within a certain span of time. My student said that this rule was created in an attempt to ensure that everyone can read what is written in each subtitle before it vanishes from the screen and moves on to the next one.

Another reason is that certain ideas simply do not come across the same in Japanese and it's impossible to translate them in a meaningful way without mutating the intent. I've also discovered based on some of the work my student has done that the person doing the subtitling sometimes just makes a judgment call about what they should make the effort to translate and what they should simply sum up as succinctly as possible and move on. This is a decision that's made in part because of cultural differences and in part because of the character-limit rules.

Sometimes, I read the subtitles on television shows or movies and have come across some discrepancies that really don't seem to fit into these categories. One of the earliest was a movie which mentioned a tuna sandwich which was written in Japanese as a ham sandwich. I also ran across a few recently where a chocolate fountain was described as a chocolate cake. More oddly though was a character talking about people asking him about the war in Afghanistan being translated into something to do with Harry Potter.

When I asked my student about these sorts of changes, she was stumped. Most of the points I catch on the odd occasions when I read what I can of Japanese subtitles are unimportant details. It doesn't matter to the story if these small discrepancies exist but, on the other hand, it wouldn't seem all that much of a burden to just translate the dialog "as is."

Of course, anyone who has been here for awhile knows that it's not only subtitles that are altered but also movie titles. Back when I was working at Nova (in my first two years in Japan), a student asked me what movie I'd watched recently and I said I'd seen "Awakenings" with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro because I'd read the book it was based on and found it interesting. The student had no idea what movie I was referring to because the movie in Japanese is "Leonard No Asa" which is like "Leonard's morning". Even when a student can translate the English into Japanese, the title at times does not match. There's an interesting list of English titles and their Japanese equivalents here on another fellow's blog.