When bears attack

Beyond the obvious differences in weather between the 4 or 5 seasons in Japan, each season is also known for certain foods (eating seasonal was a necessity and a way of life here long before it became back in vogue in the US).  Mushrooms, chestnuts, apples and saury are famous fall foods (try saying that 5 times fast) for example.  One big spring food is sansai, or mountain vegetables (the same san as Fuji-san, which is how it’s called in Japanese).  What sansai actually entails can vary depending on what part of Japan you are talking about.  They are typically not cultivated but foraged for in the woods and mountains.  Around here we have fuki (butterbur; looks sort of like celery), warabi(fiddlehead ferns), and what Hokkaidoins call ainunegi (ramps or something similar; really strong garlic tasting green).  Many of my older students would tell me they had gone forraging when I would ask them what they had done the previous week.  Then they would describe the delicious food they had used them for.  One Hokuto man (one of the cities bordering Nanae) was not so lucky.

On April 6th, a 50 year old construction worker went out during his lunch break to forrage for sansai in some nearby mountainous woods.  When he didn’t return after lunch his co-workers alerted the city hall who called in assistence from some deer hunters to start a search party.  They discovered his body the next day with injuries that implied he’d been killed by a small bear, probably around 5 years old.  I didn:t ask how but they were also able to tell that it was male, about 1.2 meters tall and 70 kilos (not quite 4 feet and 154 pounds).

Can you imagine many American construction workers spending thier lunch break forraging for wild vegetables?

 

Makin’ Soba

Every August a bunch of foreigners (from all different countries–USA, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Brazil, Korea and Mongolia last year) who are all studying near Tokyo come to Nanae and other towns and cities in Hokkaido to have a 2 week homestay. During the day they visit schools and experience the culture of Japan. Lucky for me, I got to participate in all of these fun activities. One of the highlights was making soba. Soba noodles are grey-ish in color because they are made with buckwheat flour rather than wheat flour. They can be eaten hot or cold but are a very popular summer dish served cold on a bamboo strainer above a plate, dipped into a cup of cold soy sauce based broth and slurped up.

 

Kiyou wa…Kodomo no Hi (Kids’ Day)

We’re just about finished with Golden Week over here: Saturday was Constitution Memorial Day, Sunday was Green Day and Monday waclass=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-43″s Children’s Day. Because Green Day fell on a Sunday this year (which every already has off), Tuesday is a Substitute Holiday. Children’s Day used to be called Boy’s Festival and is often still referred to this way as a counterpart to Hina Matsuri (which isn’t a national holiday, btw), often called “Girls’ Festival” even though this isn’t the correct translation. These two holidays (along with Tanabata in July) are very old and traditional and always fall on the same dates 3/3, 5/5 and 7/7. This day is supposed to celebrate children’s happiness.

 

Money, money, money, moooney

You hear all the time about how expensive Japan is and in some regards that is true.  Traveling around within Japan is pretty expensive.  The trains are great and everything–clean, safe, punctual etc– but it comes at a cost.  You can buy plane tickets to most places in Japan for around $100 each way if you buy it 28 days before but this isn’t always the case.  There are really only 2 airlines in Japan (JAL, and ANA) and they control everything, even the “budget” airlines (although I think there is only one left).  

Hotels can be expensive and confusing since the charge is per person not per room.  Good food is expensive here but there are cheaper options (ramen, soba, Y100 kaiten sushi (depending on how hungry you are), some chain take-out bento places and the ubiquitous convenience stores [whose food by the way is much better than in the States]).  Produce can be expensive though, especially fruit.  People (ie housewives) don’t often cook with fruit here the way we do in the States (cobblers, crisps, pies, etc) partly because it is more expensive and partly because the fruit is such good quality it would be a shame to mar its beauty by chemically changing it.  

 

Fugu part 2

Yes, I’m still alive. I know I was gone for a while… but I was writing a lot of posts in my head if that counts.

I wanted to show you a photo of the actual fugu, blowfish, that I ate– it didn’t much look like the puffed up fish photo I showed last time.

My understanding is that you have to be fugu certified in order to cook/serve fugu. I’m not sure exactly what that process entails but most of the deaths from eating fugu are from fisherman who try to cut it up and eat it themselves after catching one.

It was tempura-ed so it mostly just tasted like tempura-ed fish. It wasn’t so distinctive but then again it came at the end of a long meal so it is kind of hard to remember.

More coming soon…promise.

 

And I survived!!!

Breaking news:

I ate fugu and lived to tell about it!

 

The Japanese toothfairy

Absolutely out of the blue the other day I asked Emi what happens in Japan when kids lose their teeth.  Apparently it depends on whether said tooth is an upper or bottom tooth.  In Emi’s family the upper ones are thrown onto the ground in her families barn (her dad is a rice farmer) so the new teeth will be as strong as the mice’s teeth that live on the floor.  The bottom ones are thrown onto the second floor of the barn (not sure why).  While lots of rice is grown in Japan (since they obviously eat a lot of it and have laws against importing it) certainly not every family has a barn at their disposal.  I was a little surprised that Emi didn’t immediately know what other families did but maybe its because all of the kids who lived around her were also the children of farmers.  Maybe it isn’t something that is talked about as much in Japanese culture?  We asked around the office and the guys told us their families threw the bottom teeth either onto the second floor, or from outside the house they threw them onto the roof depending on the house/family and the upper teeth were thrown under the house.   Just to be completely thorough I did some checking online and found that there is a saying in Japanese regarding what to do with baby teeth:“ue no ha wa en no shita e, shita no ha wa yabe no ue e nageru” which literally means “throw your upper teeth under the floor and your lower teeth over the roof”.  There was some concern in this article about what people who live in apartment buildings do.   I also found another site that includes some customs from other countries that gave a slightly different reason for the whole below-the-house/over-the-house thing.  It said this practice is done to encourage the upper teeth to grow towards the ground and the lower teeth towards the roof.  I say drink your milk, brush your teeth and get braces.

 

…with a bu-bu here and a bu-bu there…?

We tend to think of animal noises as falling into the language category of onomatopoeia — cats meow and cows moo– which is why I think it is so weird that different languages have different sounds to represent these animal sounds. Here are some for Japanese: 

• cat:  niya-niya 
• dog:  kan-kan  or wun-wun
• pig:  bu-bu 
• sheep: meh
• horse:  hi-hin
• cow:  moo-moo (this is how they spell it put it sounds like mo-mo)
• owl:  ho-ho
• frog:  gero- gero (with a hard “g” sound) 

 And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. 

 

Kiyou wa…O-Higan!

Kiyou wa… O-Higan– or at least the Spring O-Higan. My Japanese English teachers’ calendar gives an English translation of “Vernal Equinox Day” but that isn’t quite right. O-Higan is the week that surrounds an equinox. The equinoxes (not quite sure if that should be “equinii” or something and dictionary.com wasn’t very helpful) are Japanese Buddhist holy days in celebration of the balance and harmony that the equinox symbolizes–not just in terms of hours of daylight but also in terms of a return of more moderate temperatures. O-Higan actually translates to “the other shore.” Buddhists believe that at these times of year conditions are optimal for crossing the shore from this world to the other shore, the shore of enlightenment.

 

Language Part 2

I realized sometimes last weekend that my last post totally changed course as I was writing it. While everything I wrote may be interesting to you it wasn’t the post I intended on writing.

I spent most of last Friday (after the MRI) proof-reading a 10-page brochure (is that even still the word if it’s that long?) that the Tourism Section puts out about Onoma. Onoma is a quasi-national park (that includes a mostly dormant volcano) that is located in the Northeast of Nanae and has had a long history of tourism. The brochure was last printed in 2006 and was looked over by one of the other foreigners working in Nanae at the time but they wanted me to look it over just in case something caught my eye. Because the printing company people don’t speak English (I’m assuming) there were some little mistakes with spacing etc. that they didn’t catch. I also took out a few words here and there to make it more concise. When I was done Emi brought it down to the Tourism Section but returned a short time later with the marked-up brochure and a 3-page hand written letter. Turns out, a year or two ago a Japanese man living outside of Sapporo came across our broucure somewhere in Sapporo and found some mistakes . Apparently he is some sort of English expert and native English speakers who happen to live in the Sapporo area sometimes ask him for help editing. What?!?@#