Okonomi-likey

Meet Yoshida-san, the lovely woman who takes us in, teaches us, feeds us, helps us, and basically makes this island home.  She is a wonderful lady, and one of the only reasons I regret not re-contracting is that I won't be able to see her every weekend.  She is honestly a joy to be around.  This past weekend we made okonomiyaki together!

Okonomiyaki is Japanese pancake pizza, and the name means "as you like it."  You can add anything you like to it, and it tastes delicious!  Now, I had never made okonomiyaki before, so I was looking forward to cooking it with Yoshida-san and my fellow ALT!  I wasn't really anticipating any surprises; after three years here I thought nothing could phase me.  The hubris, the chutzpah, the cheek!  I have met my match.

Butchering squid?  No problem.
Disemboweling a fish?  Not even a shiver.
But nagaimo.... and it's tororo.... it looks like snot!  Exact consistency and color of snot!  You know, I used to think of this when I thought of tororo, but now it's just hanamizu.  It's not right.

 

 Well, anyway, the snot grated nagaimo was added to a mixture of flour, shredded cabbage, shrimp, and squid and stirred together.  First bacon was fried.

 Oops, forgot to add the salt and pepper.

 Fried eggs!  The next step was a bit difficult.  First, put on the special okonomiyaki sauce.   Then add the mayo, ideally in stylized waves, cross-hatches, or a tic-tac-to motif.  Sprinkle on some dried seaweed, garnish with dried bonito flakes, and voila!  To serve, flip the egg on top and plate.

 One of these was plated correctly, and one had a bit of an accident on the way to the plate and ended up in my lap, in my coworker's lap, on the table, and under the grill, outside, back in the US.. it was epic.  See if you can guess which one had to be surgically pieced back together.

ow, that one bowl of okonomiyaki stuff ended up eight pancake pizzas total, and by the end we were getting a bit bored with the decoration bit.

Finally, here is a video of the near finished product once the bonito flakes have been added.  As Yoshida-san tells us, since they move and dance due to the heat of the grill, children and foreigners tend to think that they're still alive.  Ghost fish on my pancake pizza!

Good Eleven

Eleven things I'm looking forward to when I get back to the US of A.  In no particular order!

1. A puppy! (and my cats)
2. Furniture that isn't all on the floor (I miss curling up on a sofa while reading a good book)
3. A gym with plenty of equipment that's open for long hours
4. Being able to decorate my own space more permanently since I won't be moving internationally
5. A job where I'm actually given responsibility and growth is possible
6. Being able to bake in an actual oven again
7. Mundane things like paying bills will be easy again
8. Libraries!
9. Friends
10. Family
11. And last but not least.... a working vacuum cleaner!

 

 It's going to be very difficult leaving my island, my home for three years, my job, my friends, and especially the kids.  I choke up when I think about it seriously.  However, I don't want to spend the next 83 days being a sad sack of sad so I thought up this list.  Unfortunately, the vacuum cleaner is so important to me it's a little sad in a different way.

I never knew how long I was going to stay here since you re-contract every year on JET, so I did my best to stay away from bigger purchases.  What's the point of getting a better oven, vacuum cleaner, sofa, etc. if I was just going to be leaving the country?  Why deal with the hassle of trying to get money out of my successor?  It would end up being either a waste of money or a headache in the long run.  This vacuum is a total joke, though.  I am looking forward to being able to actually clean effectively nearly as much as I'm looking forward to getting a better job.  My priorities are odd.

Updated Pineapple Pillow Pictures:

 

To finish, a short video of Shiohama, one of our beaches, on a windy day.  The first half of the video sounds like you're stuck in a wind tunnel, but near the end you can hear the sound of the waves.

Burning Down The House

Welcome to a land without central heating and no insulation, because that's what Japan is! Get used to being able to see your breath in your living room during winter. Don't worry about your refrigerator being tiny because your entire apartment is a refrigerator now!

Now, make no mistake, I like winter a lot. I don't like winter inside my living room, though. Where I live in the US gets pretty cold; even without wind chill we get below freezing easily. Our Halloween costumes are made to fit over snowsuits. We don't have snow days because if we got days off every time it snowed a lot then we wouldn't have school between November and March. Compared to that weather Japan should be easy. It barely gets below freezing here on the island and it rarely snows. Then again, thanks to the complete lack of insulation in the average Japanese building even low temperatures are too much.


Japan has four major types of heating: the kotatsu (heated table), the space heater, the kerosene heater, and air conditioner being a heater. Each has good points and bad points.

The kotatsu is my favorite. It's about the size of a coffee table, and it has a small space heater in it. You put a blanket, or kotatsu futon, over it, turn it on, and roast your legs. It's the most economical in that most of the heat stays under the heavy blanket. The drawback is that it only really heats your lower half and tricks everything from the waist up into thinking it's being warmed. This means that if you fall asleep under your kotatsu you'll get the mother of all colds. Don't fall asleep under your kotatsu!

Next up is the space heater. Expensive to run, but very powerful. They aren't as economical as kotatsu since the heat is all escaping into the open air, but they're indispensable for when you can't type because your fingers have frozen.

The kerosene heater is the standby of every school and many ALTs. They terrify me. If you don't keep a window open then the fumes will kill you. It's like Darwin's heating device!

Last is the air conditioner acting as a heater. This is a good way to heat an entire room instead of just a certain part of the room. Some people say that it's more economically sound to fill a barrel with 1000 yen notes and burn that in the center of your room. Very safe, but expensive.

There are other ways to make the winter bearable. I take a really hot shower before bed to get my body temperature high enough to fall asleep before the cold kicks in. There are heated packs that you can keep in your pockets to warm up your fingers. Most people have lap blankets that they take to work. Gloves with the fingers cut out help you type without your fingers snapping off from frostbite. Basically, it just makes you really grateful for the humid Japanese summer that tries to melt you into goo.

Anyway you want it

Transitioning to living in Japan can be pretty difficult. Japan is a land of unspoken rules and customs stretching back hundreds of years. If you do something wrong either no one will tell you about it for six months, at which point you'll find out they've been whispering about it behind your back the whole time, or someone will make a huge scene over how horrified they are that you're doing such and such. My coworkers and I once waited in the local gym's entrance for a taxi and I accidentally put my toes, encased in my outdoor shoes, on the carpet in the shoe changing area. The gym employee immediately charged at me from 15 feet away and my coworkers freaked out because about one square inch of outdoor shoe had touched the carpet you stand on for changing your shoes to go to the changing room where you change your shoes again before using any of the machines. Japan is very serious about purity and impurity.

Shoe rules are pretty easy to get a handle on. You get used to bowing when everyone else bows. It starts to feel weird if you don't clap your hands together before a meal. It doesn't strike you as odd that everyone backs into parking spaces here or that there are sixteen different cloths for cleaning, one for the floor, one for desks, one for your hands, one for your hands after you wash the dishes, one for the dishes, one for the glasses, one for the pots, etc. I'm not exaggerating that, by the way, there really are that many cloths at some of my schools. There's one set of rules that almost every foreigner has trouble with:

The Trash System. (dun dun duuuuuun)

You see, in Japan, throwing something away is pretty close to quantum physics. It is so complicated! First of all, the trash is divided into many different sections. Burnable trash, non-burnable trash, various recyclables, large trash, and large electric trash (like TVs) are just a few of the categories. The categories depend on where you live and what kind of trash processing is available. Since I live on an island we don't have as many categories as the places on the mainland, but we still have seven different categories. Some places have over twenty categories. This means that throwing things away is ridiculously complicated. Usually there's a nice color-coded pictographic chart that gives you the basics, but you will inevitably have something you need to throw away that isn't on the chart, and nothing is more fun than having to ask your coworkers how to throw away a dead battery. It took me three tries to get that answer (non-burnable) because the first two people I asked just offered to take my dead batteries and throw them away for me. You have to know what category everything goes into, and where or when to throw it away.

You see, Japan doesn't have one trash day; it has a million color-coded trash days. Burnable garbage is picked up maybe twice a week, recyclables are twice a month, large trash is once a month, you have to drop Styrofoam off at a specific part of the supermarket, milk cartons are every Monday, and so on. Some people get so intimidated by the entire system that they end up inadvertently hoarding recyclables because they're afraid they're going to put them out on the wrong day or in the wrong place. It can get really frustrating if you happen to be out of town the one day a month that a specific day of trash is picked up. I don't want to plan my life around trash pickup!

There are two upsides, though. Once you master the system you feel like a genius, and when you return to your home country it's actually relaxing to take the trash out because you only have to do it once a week.