Attack of the Killer Carrots

Be warned; what I am about to show you is visually frightening. It is recommended that small children and those weak of heart refrain from viewing the images.

This, people, is a carrot. Yes, that is a Bic Clic and an A4 sheet of paper that the carrot is posing with.

The specimen in question was found in the Vegetable department of a Max Valu supermarket (parent company AEON) located in Akita Prefecture, Northern Japan. The discoverer of this monstrous vegetable at first thought they had found a new variety of daikon, but on closer inspection it became clear that the root was, in fact, a carrot.

Pardon the silliness. This was the highlight of my Saturday.

Look, here is my hand holding the giant carrot:

This humungous carrot cost me all of 38 yen. That's all of, what, NZ 45c? Sumiko and I were talking about the giant carrots (basically saying "OMG what am I going to with a carrot that size?") when I asked her why the carrots were so cheap despite their gigantousness. She said it was probably because of their size that they cost so little. Because Japanese people prefer little things. And that is so true. Next time I buy a cucumber I will take a picture and blog it: they're tiny!

Yesterday I went to see Sumiko. She and I went into Honjo to a little bit of shopping. I bought a new turtle-neck jersey (for going under other jerseys), a new bowl that matches my plates, and some groceries that I can't get in Konoura, such as cheese. I also found Crunchy Nut cornflakes! Then we went back to Sumiko's house and made beef stew for dinner.

After dinner I got to play on Sumiko's new Wii. So. Much. Fun! The only game they have so far is the sports one that was released at the same time as the system. I did a bit of bowling on my own. Turns out that I'm fairly good at Wii bowling (I doubt I'm so good at the real life version). Then Sumiko's husband came back and I played tennis against him. I lost. I lost against Sumiko too. Then I played boxing, and I was really good at that! Yeah! But I have sore muscles today. Playing sport on the Wii is pretty much as tiring as playing it for real. Which is a good thing! I would lose so much weight if I had a Wii.

Anti-internationalism

Yesterday I went to the Elementary school. I had a class with the sixth-grade students in which we played a passport game. I made the kids practice asking and answering these questions:

What is your name?
Where are you from?
How old are you?
Where are you going?

Therefore, as well as doing something fun and reviewing previous lessons, it was also a good way to make the kids think of something beyond the borders of Japan. I showed them pictures from many countries, and they had to decide which one they wanted to visit. During the role-playing activity at the end of class, the kids were all using English enthusiastically. Also, they had done very well at thinking outside the square. Sure, there were a disproportionate number of children who wanted to go to America or England, but there were also children who said they want to go to Egypt, Russia, Iceland, Mongolia, Peru . . . In short, a good lesson.

Until the end of class when the homeroom teacher DESTROYED ALL MY GOOD WORK!!! He decided to take the time at the end to point out that ‘foreigners’ are not as kind as Japanese people; in fact they are very scary. He told the kids to learn the dialogue and all other essential English off-by-heart, absolutely perfectly before even thinking about going overseas, otherwise they will get yelled at by scary airport staff. He told them about the time he went to Hawaii on a tour and a ‘big black lady’ was yelling “Hurry up! Hurry up!” at them to get them moving. If I know anything about Japanese people, I know that a group of them in an unfamiliar situation will stand where they are left, blocking the way for people, collectively thinking “What to do? What to do?” and waiting for one of their number to make the first move, so the airport lady was probably quite justified at telling them to hurry up. But even if Mr. Sixth-grade Teacher has been yelled at in Honolulu airport, that doesn’t mean that he should tell his students about it and scare them into spending their whole lives hiding in Japan and never going out to see what the rest of the world has to offer. Jerk.

Name Change

For quite a while now, blogger has been adding the signature 'posted by Catherine' on the end of my posts. I don't have any site tracking going on here, but I think that most people who read this blog either know me, or arrived via my new MySpace page where my name is quite clearly shown. (Hello, Jane. Thanks for dropping by.) So I don't really need to bother with a user name, do I?

Since this blog is now one year old, I thought I would celebrate by giving it a name change. But into what? I think the 'Togiren' part should go. It was a cool user name last year, made up of alternate readings of the kanji I chose to phonetcally represent my name. But since then I have learned that Togiren is also the name of an antibacterial medicine, which is not so cool. I can't change the URL of this blog without confusing people, but I can change the header at the top.

My brain is, as the Japanese say, 'ma-shiro.' I can't think of anything.

If anyone can think of a new name for my blog, please leave a comment at the end of this post. Mum, Dad; since you seem to be unable to figure out how to leave comments, just send me an e-mail ;)

Pictures of me looking like a twit

Here are the pictures from the photoshoot that I talked about in my last post. Don't I look silly? I would just like to point out that I didn't come up with any of the poses, so please don't use them as an excuse to laugh at me.

Here's the mismatching hair:

The guy did something funny to me in Photoshop on this picture. He tried to make me look thinner, but he has made me a very funny shape. Look at my left arm. He cut off the part of my arm that is big because of muscle and left the part that is big because of fat. I look like I have absolutely no muscle tone whatsoever :(

Day 3 in Korea

January 10th was my third day in Korea. The weather was once again nice and sunny.

That day Miwa wanted to do something that she often does in Korea: have her own picture taken. Before we had gone to Korea, Miwa showed me a book of costume photos she'd had professionally taken several years ago. She wanted to go back to the same studio and have photos taken again. In the book there were seven photos: two in a wedding dress, one in a black dress, one in kids clothes, one in chinese clothes and two in traditional Korean clothes. Miwa asked me if I wanted to have photos taken too. At first I thought No. I mean, a wedding dress? I'd rather not . . .. But then I started thinking about the traditional Korean clothes, and I thought that I could put up with having my picture taken in a wedding dress if I could also have a picture of me in the Korean dress.

The studio we went to was a professional studio, if a little shabby. The makeup artist came to our hotel in a taxi to pick us up. It was a shiny black expensive taxi with leather seats, and we didn't have to pay for it. The studio was on the other side of the Han River, and took a little while to get to. When we got there, we went down to the basement-level studio and met the photographer. He was a middle-aged casually dressed fellow who, unlike the makeup artist, could speak Japanese. He had quite a forceful personality on him (like most Koreans do; compared to the Japanese, at least) and he tried to talk us into having our photos printed large and presented in a large hardback-sized book. But we had, quite on purpose, only brought enough money for the smaller paperback-sized albums. It is a good idea to split your money up like that in Korea. If people get really insistent you can say "Look inside my wallet. I really don't have enough money for that." That shuts them up.

We changed into robes and had our makeup done while the photographer was in the actual studio surfing the net on his rather expensive-looking computer with a huge TV-sized flatscreen monitor. Even though the studio was looking a little worse for wear, it seems as if he is making a decent amount of money. Then the costume changing began. We did not have much choice in clothes (the makeup artist chose everything), and no choice in scenery. First was the two Korean outfit pictures. I managed to avoid being put on a hot-pink top and instead chose a nice teal coloured one. There was only one other time that morning that I managed to make my own choice of clothes, and that was for the last photo.

After the Korean clothes came the black evening dress. There was no hairpiece to match my hair colour, so my hair looks rather weird in that photo. Then came the two wedding dress photos (bleh . . .) and then the 'casual clothes' photo. The makeup artist was going to stick us in clown wigs, but luckily I was sitting near the wig drawer. I reached in and pulled out a slightly more flattering wig (although it was pink) and managed to change her mind. Bizzarely, the pink wig suited me, just a little (I will post the pictures later).

Last was the 'summer clothes' photo. At first I was given a pink floral sleeveless figure-hugging top to put on, but I wanted to wear a something Chinese, and I knew from seeing Miwa's old photos that the last photo can be Chinese-themed if the customer desires. And as I did desire so, I went hunting through the Chinese wardrobe for something I could fit into. Miwa also chose a Chinese themed top. She got to wear two fake bundles of hair on her head and look very cute, but because the fake Chinese hair was only available in black I could not wear it. Actually, I went in with my own hair, which unfortunately was looking rather messy after being stuffed into wigs and such for several hours.

When we were all done, Miwa went to see one of her friends. Because she had no idea what she and her friend would be doing, I decided to go my own way. I took a taxi back to Meongdong (for the third time - it was the only place I shopped in Seoul) and did a little more shopping. I went back and bought a belt I had seen the day before, but did not have enough money on me at the time to buy. Then I scoured every floor of Migliore looking for a t-shirt with something in the Korean alphabet written on it. Maybe I would have had some success if it had actually been, y'know, summer.

I forgot to take a watch with me to Korea, and I didn't have my cellphone with me so I had no idea what the time was. After what seemed like hours of window-shopping and eating street vendor food (sausage on a stick and crab-meat in spicy pancake on a stick) I thought that it was about time to go back to the hotel. Another thing that convinced me it was time to go back was that I still had all the makeup from the photo studio on my face and I felt like an idiot. So I took a taxi back and when I got back to my room, found that it was 3.20pm. I had thought it was at least an hour later than that.

I didn't really have enough money to take a taxi somewhere else, so I just stayed in. I sorted out my suitcase for the trip home, I went down to the lobby and spent an hour on the internet (which was complimentary). I got all the silly makeup off my face. Then I spent an hour making the globe puzzle I had bought the day before. After having a long shower and double checking my suitcase, it was late enough for me to concievably think of it as bed-time. About that time Miwa came back drunk and pottered around having showers and stuff, but I got an early night.

Point and Click

On Monday I had a day off because I had worked the day before (it had been snow walk day). I did nothing much. On Tuesday I went to Kamagadai. It was lovely and sunny and snowy too. The scenery was absolutely breath-taking. But not very photographable. I tried taking pictures of Mount Chokai in all it’s glory, but my camera had difficulty telling the sky and the mountain apart. Here are some photos. They do not do the view justice, but they are the best I could do with my point-and-click, filterless camera.

Lost and Found

I just found this picture on one of my clip drives. It is a photo I had intended to blog months ago, but I never got around to it. I took this picture at the Kamagadai culture festival. This is the lunch we ate, made out of the products of the Mochi-making Competition. At the bottom right is mochi (rice cake) covered in bean powder. The bottom-left plate contains mochi in sweet bean stew. The soup at the top is chicken and vegetable soup with mochi in it. This is the lunch that gave me a terribly sore stomach.

Nobu Shirase

Last Sunday was the annual Konoura town Nobu Shirase memorial snow walk.

Nobu Shirase was a man born in Konoura who led one of the expeditions to the South Pole in late 1911, early 1912. Everyone knows about Roald Amundsen, who got there in December 1911 and returned safely, and Robert Scott, who got there in January 1912 and died on the way back, but no one remembers Nobu Shirase. I just checked Encarta Encyclopedia. He has no entry.

Nobu Shirase, the virtually unknown Japanese polar explorer, had serious troubles with funding his expedition. He did a lot of fundraising, and yet did not manage to raise much money at all. Not one to give up, he borrowed a lot of money and then went anyway. His boat was made out of wood. It was a miracle it was not crushed by ice in the Southern Ocean. His equipment was primitive compared to Scott’s, but ultimately better, because he used arctic dog fur and other natural materials to make his party’s clothing, which was much better than anything man could make at the time.

Shirase did not lose a single man on his expedition. But he never made it to the South Pole. He ran into bad weather, and then heard that Amundsen had already reached the Pole. Not willing to risk his men’s lives for a dream that had already been crushed, he turned back, and that is why the world forgot about him.

When Shirase returned to Japan in defeat, he immediately set about paying back all the money he borrowed. It took him the rest of his life to do it. He toured Japan giving talks about his adventures and about Antarctica, but because no one knew who he was, no one ever gave him much money. His wife stayed here in Konoura raising all their children (I think there were six of them) alone. His descendants are among my students.

After Nobu Shirase died, some Norwegians (I think they were Norwegians) came to Japan to find out what had happened to the third contender for the pole, and through their efforts the story of Nobu Shirase was brought once more to light. This tiny town on the coast of Northern Japan heard all about the remarkable and disciplined man that had been born amongst them. Now there is a Shirase Memorial Museum in Konoura, and every year on January 28th (which I think is the day he turned back) the children of Konoura walk through the snow from the museum to the small shrine in Konoura where Nobu Shirase was born.

This year the walk was a bit strange. There was no snow, and it was sunny and warm, so it was not much of a snow walk really. But we went anyway and paid our homage to a man who was overlooked and forgotten for most of his life, but who really did not deserve to be.

Changdeok Gung

These are pictures from my second day in South Korea. They were all taken at Changdeok Gung. I don't know what anything is because I could not understand the tour guide, so I will not try to explain any of the pictures. With one exception: the second photo from the bottom, the one with the tree. That tree was half concrete. That's all I have to say.

Outspoken

Wow! Read this blogpost from jane's daily blah. The bit I want you to see is the part about USA and Canada.

Day 2 in Korea

My second day in Korea started with an expensive hotel breakfast and a taxi ride to Changdeok gung, a big palace in the old centre of Seoul. The day was bright and sunny. There was snow lying about all over the place inside the palace compound although most had already disappeared from the concreted city streets. Icicles hung from the eaves of the buildings. It was all very picturesque indeed.

You can only enter Changdeok gung with a tour, and the tour that was leaving when we got there was a Korean language tour. I didn't mind because I was there primarily to take pictures. There were only a few people on the tour, so it was very easy for me to take pictures without people in them. Later on our tour caught up to a huge gaggle of Japanese tourists. Miwa wanted to join up with that tour so she could understand the guide. Since she can understand enough Korean to realise that the Korean guide and the Japanese one were saying different things, I could not quite follow her logic, but oh well. After we joined the Japanese tour it was very difficult for me to take pictures.

Miwa and I did not find the weather particularly cold. It was sunny and there was no wind, after all. We did not even bother with gloves or hats or anything. But a lot of the other Japanese tourists seemed to be freezing their asses off. We saw one woman who had gloves, scarf and hat on buy a can of hot coffee from a vending machine and then hold it against her face because she was that cold. Miwa and I looked at each other and laughed. "Where do you think she's from?" "Kyushu? Okinawa, maybe?" (Two places down the south of Japan). Miwa has lived her whole life in Akita Prefecture, but I have only been here for a few years. It seems as if I have acclimatised, though. I wonder what this years NZ winter is going to feel like to me?

After we had finished the tour of Changdeok gung we walked to the subway station. We found an underground bookshop on the way. I bought some postcards and a 3D jigsaw puzzle of the world (as in, make your own globe). The map itself is all written in English, but on the box it says "For sale in Korea only." Mostly the map looks just like any other, but there are a few differences in Asia. Such as, South Korea and North Korea are not separated, but instead labeled together simply as 'Korea.' Also the Sea of Japan is labelled as the 'East Sea.' Interesting.

We went back to Meongdong to do some more shopping. The evening before, Miwa had her picture taken at a portrait place, and had ordered 100 business cards with her face on them made up for her, so we had to go back to the same area we had been shopping in the evening before. After that we had lunch in a restaurant in the basement of Migliore, a big cheap department store. Then Miwa wanted to go have an 'estee,' which seems to be a facial massage and application of creams and stuff like that, in order to make one more beautiful. People are always talking about estees to me as if I know the word. In Japan it is written in katakana, so everyone assumes it is an English word, but it sounds to me as if it is actually French, wouldn't you agree? Anyway, I didn't want one, so I sat in the waiting room for an hour. I took the opportunity to write out lots of postcards.

We browsed around in Migliore until 5pm, and then headed back to the hotel. We were very tired, but Miwa had already organised to meet some of her Korean friends for dinner at 6pm. A little after 6, we were picked up from the hotel by someone (I can't remember any names by the way. I should get Miwa to write them down for me sometime, because I can never remember anything unless I have seen it written down). The someone used to be an employee of the hotel we were staying at. Anyway, he drove us to the area of Seoul in which he lives, which is near a big university. We drove up and over a mountain, through these very winding steep streets. The man spoke quite a bit of Japanese, about as much as me. When we got to the area, we wandered down a street looking for another of Miwa's friends, who was arriving on foot. There were all these baskets full of goods lined up in rows along the footpath. It turns out that they were the Korean equivalent of a $2 shop. People come out of the University and have to walk between the rows of merchanside. Sometimes they get tempted and buy something. People can't avoid the shop because it is the footpath.

We ended up walking back the way we had come, finding Miwa's other friend (a really nice woman about my age whose Japanese was very good, much better than mine) and then entering an establishment. I would hesitate to call it a restaurant. It was much more casual and laid-back than that. It was the kind of place that only locals, never tourists, go to eat. There were lots of wooden benches and iron-frame stools in a small, dimly-lit brick building. The menu was written on a saucepan lid. Ecclectic music was on in the background and the front window was a plastic sheet that was, get this, zipped into place. I really liked it, although it was a bit chilly.

The first dish to come to the table was a big bowl of mussels (still in the shell) in a garlic soup. Everyone had a spoon and a set of chopsticks each. There were no little personal dishes to transfer the food to like there are in Japan. Everyone just spooned the soup straight from the big bowl to their mouths, or picked the mussels out with the chopsticks and left their shells behind. The soup was really delicious. Then a big plate of cheese-filled egg was brought out. It was kind of like a giant omelette cut up into lots of small pieces, but the egg did not appear to have been fried in oil. It was just nice and yellow and moist. However it was cooked, it had been done expertly. The guy who had come to pick us up randomly disappeared and came back later with two huge bags of puffy crackers, kind of like giant prawn crackers. I don't know what grain they were made out of. The next dish to appear was a large plate of seafood and rice stick stew. (Btw by rice stick, what I mean is sticky rice pounded until it resembles playdoh and then rolled into little sticks. There are similar things available in Japan, called mochi.) The sauce was bright red. Miwa would not touch the stew; she said it was too spicy for her. I dived right in (making sure to avoid the squid). The two Koreans were looking at me expectantly, waiting for the 'OMG! Hot hot!' but actually I had no trouble eating it at all. It was really delicious. The red chili pepper sauce gave it quite a kick, sure, but no more so than Tabasco. At first I was using a cracker as a dish, but then everyone laughed at me and so small plates were brought out. I thought it was much more fun using the cracker, but oh well.

A fifth person joined our little party, a student who had just finished his last class of the day at the University. He spoke no Japanese, and only a little English, but we were talking anyway. He is 24 like me, but has not yet finished University. Anyway, the five of us had quite a good time, although the guy who drove us at the beginning of the evening (who had seemed so boring and normal at first but who turned out to be a very strange and shameless person indeed) kept disappearing to give people drunken calls from his cellphone, and Miwa was not touching the alcohol at all. Speaking of alcohol, Koreans have a very interesting drinking culture. They don't just say cheers at the beginning of the evening, like their neighbours the Japanese do. They say cheers and clink their glasses together every single time they drink. They all sit there for 5, 10 minutes without drinking, then they clink their glasses together and all chug down everything that's in them. Then they fill each others glasses up again and spen another 10 minutes or so looking at their full glasses until enough time has passed that it is polite to call for another 'cheers.' I got told off for sipping at my drink over time.

Another strange thing about the restaurant that I have just remembered; the location of the toilet. It was outside on the main road. The door to the toilet opened right out onto the footpath. I don't mean a room of separate cubicles or anything like that. There was only one toilet, and only one door, so essentially it was a toilet cubicle that opened straight out onto an 8 lane road.

After we had finished at the restaurant we went to a karaoke establishment. It was the type of place that has separate booths. There was not a very good selection of either Japanese or English music, although the English selection was better than the Japanese one. All Japanese music was between four and ten years old, so there were no currently popular songs, and neither were there any classics. The English music at least contained some classics i.e. The Beatles. We did not stay there long because it was already very late. Miwa and I said goodbye and then caught a taxi back to the hotel, and by the time we got there it was already after midnight and we had to get up early the next day.

Cultural Oddities

I talk a lot on this blog about my life in Japan as if it were just ordinary life. Which it is. To me. But of course, not everyone has lived in, or even been to Asia. I should probably talk about some of the oddities or just plain ‘different’ things that I encounter in my life here, simply because someone else may find it interesting.

The first has to do with how well people are capable of growing used to things, given enough time. You know, I get a shock every morning when I go to clean my teeth and see my face in the bathroom mirror. Why? Because I can clearly see the difference between the irises and pupils of my eyes. Everyone I see on almost any given day is Japanese, and has dark brown eyes. I am the only person I see in a day who does not have brown eyes. My own eyes freak my sleep-addled brain out. How weird is that?

The other year, before I knew much Japanese, some people were having a conversation about something or other in the staff room at the Jr. High. I wasn’t really listening, because I could not understand what they were saying. All of a sudden the English teacher held out a box of coloured pencils and asked me to pull out the pencil which I thought of as ‘skin colour.’ I pulled out the peachy, flesh coloured pencil, of course. Some people said ‘yappari’ (I thought so), and some others went ‘heeeeeh’ (a noise made to express surprise). The people who said heeeeeh had been expecting me to pick either the white colour pencil or the pink one. Mostly the white one, I think. Because, you know, all foreigners overseas are paper white (despite the fact that the ones who come to Japan aren’t).

People still complement me on my amazing chopstick-wielding skills. Or are surprised to find that I like umeboshi. And noodles. And rice. And that I don’t eat hamburgers, or even bread, every day.

My diet has changed since I have been in Japan. This past half year or so, my diet has been more Japanese than Western, and I don’t just mean the school lunches. I eat lots of stews and soups for dinner, made from mostly vegetables, a lot of which I never really ate before, bulked out with things like tofu and processed fish sticks, or with dim sums or Chinese dumplings as a side dish. Vegetables I eat a lot of now: carrots, leeks, potatoes, spinach, onions (that’s normal enough), but also Chinese cabbage, Japanese parsley, various forms of seaweed, weird skinny mushrooms and other assorted fungi, and lots of root vegetables we don’t really have in NZ such as ‘nagaimo’ (a super slippery sword-length vegetable) and burdock root (which I eat as often as carrots, and maybe more often than potatoes). The only meal for me in a normal day which is not at least half Japanese is breakfast; I am still eating cereal.

When there is no snow there is no winter, and at the moment there is no snow. I can’t quite believe that I already think this way, considering that before I moved to Northern Japan, I had never lived in a place where winter snows could be depended upon. We were lucky to get more than one day of snow a year in Crawley, and from the age of eleven onwards, I only ever saw snow from a great distance, i.e. on distant mountains.

Most people make me feel welcome here in Japan, but every now and then I’ll be walking down the street and someone coming towards me will cross to the other side so they don’t have to get close to me, despite the fact that there is only a footpath on one side of the road.

You will not believe some of the things I have been served at work parties. I once got served a part of an eel’s head in sauce. There was this eye as big as mine right in the middle of it looking up at me. Raw fish guts make an occasional appearance. There was also this time when I found a little bowl of white lumpy stuff that looked like curdled cream on my tray. I asked what it was. The maths teacher told me what it was, but I didn’t understand the word. So he said in Japanese, “You know how we can eat fish eggs?”
“Yes,” said I.
“That comes from a lady fish.”
“Yes . . .”
“Well, this comes from a man fish.”
Yay, fish sperm on my plate.

It is not safe to order chicken kebabs in Japan, unless you are very knowledgeable on the specific terms for different parts of avian anatomy. You are just as likely to get chicken skin on a stick, chicken feet on a stick, chicken hearts on a stick, chicken cartilage (sans meat) on a stick or chicken necks on a stick as you are chicken muscle meat on a stick.

In Japan, fish is not meat. It is totally acceptable to serve fish to a known vegetarian.

Even my male Jr. High students have little cute things hanging from the zippers of their pencil cases. They would get beaten up in NZ. Oh, and speaking of strange Jr, High boy behaviour, boys here like to sit on each others’ knees and play with each others’ hair. I’ve often wondered about this, and I think the reason is that most Japanese people seem to believe that there are no gay Japanese people, that it’s a foreign phenomenon. Therefore they don’t have to worry about being labelled a ‘fag’ or whatever. I suppose that boys may act more free in expressing affection, i.e. more like girls, in any society that is free from homophobia. Or maybe it is just that most of the young popular male actors on TV here are so damned effeminate.

I cannot find CDs in CD stores here. I am in Japan, but I order all my Japanese music online. I know what order the CDs should be listed in: a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki . . . , but even so I can never find anything. It is not just because everything is written in Kanji. I was looking for a CD by the Yoshida Kyodai, who are two brothers who play the shamisen in a ‘cool and hip’ way. I made sure I knew what kanji their name is written in before I went to the store, and what the pictures on the front of their CDs look like. I looked under the ‘a’ to ‘wa’ Popular category at every single CD in the ‘yo’ section, to no avail. So I went to check the Classical section. Again, no Yoshida brothers. At a long shot I checked under Jazz/Blues. Nothing. These guys are super popular in Japan. I cannot believe that a largish CD store would not be carrying their CDs. Looks like I will have to put in an order with amazon.co.jp again.

The setting sun really is red here in Japan, just like on the flag. I think it has something to do with Chinese pollution or sand from the Gobi Desert. I have tried to take pictures of the sun, but as I’m sure everyone is aware, you cannot take good pictures of the sun or the moon with point-and-click cameras. They shrink down to little blobs.

Japanese people think that the rules of cricket are far too difficult to learn. “They throw a ball at those sticks, right? But how do people get home runs? And what’s with the number with the decimal point in it?” I’ve tried explaining cricket to people, but before I’ve finished they say “But one game goes on for a week, right? Too long, too long,” and they stop listening and start smiling and nodding. As in “I’m never going to have time to sit down and watch five days, or even one day of the same game, so why bother learning the rules?”

My friend Atsuko thinks I’m a dirty foreigner. This statement may need a little historical backup. You see, Japan has an abundancy of water. Japanese people have never really had to worry about water shortages. Therefore, a rather interesting *coughwastefulcough* bathing culture has emerged here. Japanese people, each and every day, have both a shower and a bath. First they wash themselves completely under the shower. Then they get into a big steaming bath to soak and relax for a few minutes. No soap or flannels are allowed in the bath. No washing occurs. This is because in a family household all people will use the same bathwater, so everyone has to be absolutely clean before they get into the water, and leave the water clean for the next person. People who live alone still go through the whole ritual. That is a shower and a full steaming bathful (right up to the shoulders) worth of water to wash only one person each and every day. I think that is bloody wasteful, so unless I have a cold and really want a bath, I will only have a shower, just like before I came to Japan.
Now, this is where Atsuko’s opinion of me comes in. She thinks that because I only have a shower and not a bath every day that I am dirty. And that I can’t help it, because that’s just how gaijin are. I tried bringing up the point that, if a Japanese person has to clean themselves fully under a shower before getting in the bath then surely a shower alone is perfectly capable of getting a person clean. But she can’t see it. No bath, no clean, is the Japanese point of view.

In Japan, everything comes in oodles and oodles of packaging; such as on a tray, in plastic, inside a plastic wrapped cardboard box; or in a bottle that is wrapped in plastic; or on a tray in a bag, with each individual item (e.g. biscuit) individually wrapped in plastic. I’ve heard that all of this stuff can be recycled, but where? I think that some towns have a day for plastic collection, where all the plastic wrappings can be put out together, but my town doesn’t. I’ve also heard that a lot of the plastic wrappers can be put out with the PET bottles, but I had a peek at other peoples’ rubbish on PET bottle day, and all people were putting out was bottles. So I throw huge mountains of plastic away every week on the ‘burnable rubbish’ day because I don’t know what else to do with it. And I thought that Japan was supposed to be leading the world with its recycling capabilities.

Japanese people typically don’t have gardens. They buy a small plot of land and fill the whole thing up with a huge house. They can look right out their kitchen windows into the kitchen of the house behind theirs. No cooking in your pajamas in Japan.

Speaking of Japanese houses, people here don’t seem to believe in insulation. The specialists all apparently believe that insulation, although it would be nice to have in the cold Japanese winters, would keep houses hot in the hot Japanese summer. Which is a fallacy. Insulation helps to keep the heat out in summer, does it not? How the entire building industry in a country can fail to learn from the accepted wisdom of many other countries and also fail to do tests and learn for themselves such a basic fact, I do not know. As a result, the whole Japanese population suffers from hot summers and cold winters, even inside their own homes, and has to pay a fortune in heating and cooling because half the heat from their heaters escapes to the outside, as well as half the cooling power of their air conditioners. In summer, the cans in my kitchen cupboard are warm to the touch, all chocolate has to be kept in the fridge (which I don’t like doing because cold chocolate doesn’t taste as nice) and I can’t use my computer for very long or it will overheat. In winter I spend a small fortune running my heater enough to keep my breath invisible, but all the while the snow (when there is some) melts along the wall that my heater is set against.

A lot of people here, when they meet me for the first time assume that I am American. They ask stupid questions like “Do people eat sushi in America?” and I’ll say “I don’t know, I’ve never been there,” even though I know quite well that there are plenty of sushi restaurants in America, and I have in fact been to Hawaii, which is (politically) a part of America.

People seem to think that New Zealand is a dry, hot, flat country like Australia. They don’t seem to believe me when I say that NZ is green and has a lot of rain. Not until I remind them of The Lord of the Rings, anyway. They also seem to think that koalas may be found in NZ. I will admit that this problem is not limited to Japan, but in fact affects most of the world.

Apparently I speak ‘The Queens English’ as all Brits, Kiwis and Aussies do. Of course all our English is exactly the same. North American English being so different to make all other Englishes look essentially the same merely by comparison has nothing to do with it. Actually, I hear that ‘Queen’s English’ phrase a lot. I wonder where they are all getting it from.

There are no trolleys in supermarkets here in Japan. None that I’ve seen, anyway. They have baskets and little wheeled frames to put the baskets on if you happen to be old or have trouble walking. But no trolleys. Why? Every household does grocery shopping every day, that’s why.

And speaking of trolleys, Atsuko told me that Americans just put anything in their shopping trolleys without even looking at what it is. Um, what am I supposed to make of that? I assume she got that idea from watching American movies, where the actor doing the shopping has to look at the actor of the character they are having a conversation with, as well as keep their face turned kind of towards the camera. I wonder if Atsuko thinks that ‘Americans’ don’t watch the road when they drive because people on TV are always looking at the person in the passenger seat.

And speaking of roads, many Japanese people seem to think they are the only left hand drivers in the world.

Oh, and roads don’t have names here in Japan, which makes it very difficult to find a place you have never been to before. Addresses look like this in Japan: Akita City (city level), Higashi Akita (district level), Omachi (section of a district encompassing, in my area at least, about 10 streets), 350-89-2A (a code that indicates which particular building within the area of 10 streets, and also room number if the building is an apartment building). These numbers are not written on peoples’ houses like street numbers in other countries, nor are they written on street signs. In big cities the number for that block may be written on the corners, but not out here in the country. Therefore the only people who addresses are actually helpful for are postal workers who have charts and diagrams on their office walls and in their vans telling them the code of each building in their area. Oh, a lot of people have the family surname written on the letterbox, but since half of all Japanese people are called ‘Satou’ or ‘Sasaki’ that doesn’t really help. If you tell a Japanese person how, back home, all streets have names and all buildings on the street are numbered linearly so you just have to walk down the street until you get to the right place, they go “Wow, that’s such a good idea! I mean, you could find someone’s house without them having to send you a map first!”

I guess about 95% of Japanese people can play a musical instrument, and I don’t just mean the kazoo.

Japanese people on the whole eat a lot of food and yet remain skinny. But a lot of young people these days practically starve themselves, and are on average about 0.5kg lighter than their noodle- and fried shrimp-loving brethren. I don’t know why they bother.

Any stream in Japan bigger than a trickle in a ditch has concrete banks.

Hot, canned, sweet milky coffee is very popular here. It is available in vending machines all over the country. I have to wonder what on earth they are putting in the coffee to stop the milk from going off as it sits for weeks on end in a perpetually heated can.

Vending machines can be found anywhere in this country. There are of course vending machines in the places you would expect to find them; outside stations and sports gyms etc. But you can also find vending machines placed randomly on residential streets, clustered at the side of the road in the middle of all these rice fields without a building in sight, overlooking a particularly nice beach, or even high up on the side of mountains! Most vending machines sell drinks. A select few sell snacks. There are also vending machines that sell tobacco or alcohol, and these vending machines are also placed in random areas, with no way to make sure that kids are not among the customers. Then there are the types of vending machines that just make you go ‘Huh?’ such as egg vending machines, which tend to be large and bulky, and inside their own little building. Or bouquet vending machines, just in case you wake up and suddenly realise it’s your anniversary and you haven’t bought a present yet. Apparently, before I came to Japan there was a vending machine behind Akita Station that sold used panties, but it’s gone now. 1,500 yen for nylon or polyester, or 2,500 yen for nice scent-retaining cotton. Yuck! That kind of thing is usually found in ‘omoshiroi’ shacks, these little tin huts found on inter-town roads that have the word ‘omoshiroi’ (interesting) painted on the side. They typically have one parking space hidden behind some bushes, and inside they are filled with vending machines selling everything from magazines to DVDs to the aforementioned underwear. I remember being told about ‘omoshiroi’ shacks half a dozen times when I was new here. It is a story foreigners living here just love to tell, one of those “OMG Japan is so weird!” stories.

Japanese people peel their grapes before they eat them, because apparently they are covered in pesticides. They also peel their apples, pears, and any other fruit that I would normally eat the skin of.

I had a lot of trouble last week trying to convince someone that I have no religion, that I am in fact an atheist with very slight agnostic tendencies. Actually, I don’t think I convinced her at all. She just kept saying “No, I think you’re a Christian.” When I said I was never baptised, she said “I think you’re lying.” But then this was the crazy woman who randomly sent me three bowls of ramen one weekend, and who keeps leaving books in my letterbox that I don’t want to read.