The Lunchbox That's Not a Bento

At one point last month, Kelly made a post about bento (Japanese lunch boxes) and asked, "do you bento?" I believe that real bento making is an art form and that it takes a certain character type and appreciation for that art to really make the time and effort put into it worthwhile. I think many Japanese people find it gratifying because they find presentation to be just as important as the quality of the food.

When I commented on Kelly's post, I said that I make a boxed lunch, but not a bento. Even if I were inclined to take the time to make a real bento, it wouldn't be the sort of thing my husband would want to eat. He won't eat cold rice, potatoes, etc. and there's no microwave oven at his workplace. Also, he doesn't like his food to touch, so artfully cramming a lot of different food into the same box is simply not going to work for him. Finally, he doesn't like a lot of fruit and vegetables so there would pretty much be a limited palette to work with in regards to what was used to embellish the box.

In our case, the preparation of a lunch box is relatively utilitarian, but it's a bit beyond the standard brown bag or lunch in a pail in terms of effort. I make my husband's lunch 4 days a week both to save money and because it's better nutritionally than eating out. He eats out once a week for some variety (usually at Subway). The preparation starts with making my own high protein bread. I have to make this about twice every three weeks and keep it in supply in the freezer. The loaves are actually on the small side, so even though he is the only one who eats it (and it is only used for lunch), it doesn't last terribly long.

I also make espresso shots once or twice a week to prepare cold lattes to take in his cold thermos, and also make hot coffee for his hot thermos. If that weren't enough on the caffeine front, I also send along a Diet Coke wrapped in an ice pack and about once a week prepare two liters of Brita filtered water for him to drink at the office. His office used to have a filter on the tap, but they recently removed it so now he needs his own water (and we don't want to create waste by having him buy 2 liters every week).


The box itself looks something like this. Everything is in a separate container so that the food doesn't touch and contaminate the other food with various odors, wetness, or flavors. From the left on the top is a sliced apple (turning brown, though I know a bit of lemon would stop that, he doesn't care), fig newtons, and a rare inclusion of a white chocolate peanut butter cup on top of a container of pretzels. Usually, he takes baked tortilla chips, but this week he's having pretzels for a change of pace. On the bottom is a container of carrots wrapped in a wet paper towel to keep them from drying out and a baloney and cheese sandwich on the low carb high protein bread.

This particular box looks more put together than usual because the fruit actually fits in it. Often, he takes a banana, strawberries, grapes, or a bigger portion of apple that won't fit into the box and has to be taken separately. Often, my husband doesn't eat all of the starchy or sweet components that are packed here, but because he works 2 long days that start at 11:00 am and end at 10:00 pm (and 3 more "normal-length" days), and swims before work, he wants to have extra food on hand in case he gets hungry during the long day. Usually, I get this box back with 2-3 of the cookies still in it, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the pretzels or chips, and sometimes a portion of the sandwich as well.

He's not a big eater, and doesn't eat all of the carbs in particular. He'll almost certainly only eat half of that peanut butter cup, for instance, if he even eats it today at all. Sometimes he just takes it to work and leaves it there until he really wants it.

I've been making these sorts of lunches for him for quite some time now, and now that we're looking at leaving, I'm thinking that I probably won't be doing this sort of thing after we go back to America. It's not so much because I won't want to, but because our circumstances will certainly be different. For instance, I expect to work full-time if I can find a job, and he expects to be a student somewhere. Because of this, I'm immortalizing this process that I'll have undertaken for 6 years for my future reference.

Now, It's Real

One of my former students recently returned from a year in America as a university exchange student. She told me that, now that she is back in Japan, she wishes she could go back to the U.S. because it was like it was "not real". I understand all too well what she is talking about.

When my husband and I first came to Japan, part of the appeal was that it wasn't "real". Everything you encounter carries an air of novelty and mystery. Even things like the Coke cans, which when we got here were small and short to the way in which your change is handed over to you in a special way when you make a purchase is a curiosity.

The "mystery" aspect is in all of the things you can't understand or have never seen before. You never know when you buy something which looks like a carton of peanut butter (because it has a peanut on the front and is next to the jam and Nutella) is going to be what you think it is or if you're in for an unpleasant surprise.

Even something as mundane as traveling from place to place is pretty interesting when you see the train zipping past houses whose design is different from the ones you saw back home. When you see the huge apartments full of "rabbit hutch" apartments, rice paddies, and temples and temple gates, it all seems incredibly unreal. It's as if you've been transported to some ethereal land where the rules you grew up with don't seem to apply.

In fact, one of the things which makes the experience of living in a foreign country less real is that you lack an awareness of the rules. Back home, you're fully aware of all of the crap your parents have been putting up with all their lives like taxes, insurance, and home maintenance responsibilities. When I got here, I had no idea about the need to file an income tax return, pay city taxes, or health insurance and nobody at my work told me about it. I was completely unencumbered by these things. All of the reality of adult life is suddenly left behind as you go about your business in ignorance enjoying the exotic nature of your surroundings.

I'm not sure when it happened, and I'm sure it happened very slowly, but Japan became completely real for me. The novelty wore off of how cute the cans of Coke were. I started to understand what was in all the mystery packages I encountered. Watching the girl at the department store wrap my purchase like a gift was less of a cute idiosyncrasy of the merchants in Japan and more of an irksome waste of material. Cute little Japanese ditties that I heard again and again in shops or on T.V. became as annoying as the cute little English ditties in stores and T.V. back home. And, of course, all of those expenses and responsibilities which I was blissfully ignorant of became crystal clear to me and I started to understand what people were saying rather than experience it as background noise which meant nothing to me.

After awhile, the the way in which living in a foreign country feels unreal because you are disconnected from everything fades and it's all very real. I notice this very acutely when I read blogs written by people who haven't been here as long as me. They're delighted by all sorts of stuff which is now so mundane as to hold little appeal for me. Summer festivals are now the rage, but I've seen more than my share of them. Now, they're like the carnivals I grew up visiting as a kid. They don't change, and you can only ride the tilt-a-whirl so many times before it starts to feel boring or eat snow cones and think they're a special treat. In Japan, the kakigori (shaved ice with syrup) is no longer appealing. The opulent tanabata festival in my neighborhood is just incredibly annoying because it blocks access to shops and the train station.

The fact that Japan is now "real" is probably part of why the shine has gone off of it for me. That doesn't mean that my perspective isn't a valid one, but it does make it irritating to other foreigners who have no idea how it feels to be here long enough for the novelty to wear off. It's part of what motivates them to assert that Japan is "wasted" on me or that I should leave. To a lot of people, I don't belong here anymore, but that's only because they can't begin to imagine what it's like to live in the "real" Japan.

Long Time, No See

This evening my husband and I were walking along the huge, snaking shopping street about 6 minutes from our apartment. One thing I'm going to miss after we leave Japan is the proximity and variety of shops that we have at hand. This street is one of several reasons we have lived in the same neighborhood for our entire stay. It's not only that it is convenient, but also that we save so much money on food at the cheap markets located on it.

At any rate, as we were walking down the street, a Japanese woman pushing her bicycle shouted out my name. I looked over at her and I had no idea who she was. Fortunately for me, she said her name and then I remembered her. She was a student who I taught privately for about 3 years about with the last lesson ending about 10 years ago. We stopped having lessons together when she moved to a city in another part of Japan then moved to Germany due to her husband being transferred.

I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but it is possible that this student was the first private student I ever taught in Japan. I liked her a lot and even went to see the sumo with her at one point. It's nothing short of amazing to run into her after all of these years. It's not only that she's back in my area, but also that she was on that street at the same time as us in the same location along the street. For the record, walking the entire length of that street if you don't stop and check out any of the shops would likely take 10 minutes at a decent pace.

We chatted briefly and I gave her my e-mail address and phone number. My hope is that she'll contact me and we can at least catch up with one another. If she wants to start to study again with me, that'd be all the better, but I mainly would like to see what she's been up to. She was pretty shocked, incidentally, that I was still in the same place. Such is the life in Japan that no one expects you to remain in the same place for long. I think she was also surprised that we were still in Japan.

At any rate, this experience is one that I have occasionally mulled over in the back of my mind. I have taught and met a great many Japanese people in my time here. Some of them came to my home over a hundred times, but I'm not sure that I would easily recognize the ones who I haven't seen in the past three years. And, no, I'm not trying to say anything here about all Japanese people looking alike. :-p

The main problem is that I have seen so many of them and it all becomes a bit of a blur after awhile. I recognize their names, of course, but not their faces. It doesn't help that I endeavor not to make eye contact with anyone when I'm out and about because it is taken as an invitation for strangers to walk over and start talking to me while I'm just trying to go about my business and head back home.

This time, I was lucky that she told me her name. I don't know if my face was as blank as my mind and she saved me from myself or if she just figured out that it had been so long and I might not recall her. I still wonder if the day is going to come when a former student or coworker comes along and greets me and I'm just left looking like the middle-aged woman with the Swiss cheese memory that I am.

A small aside about people "recognizing" me on the street. I once had an experience where I was coming out of the subway and a tall, foreign man with very little hair and what sounded like a German accent said "hello" to me in a familiar way and then asked, "you don't remember me, do you?" I said that I did not and he started talking about having worked out with me at some gym that we supposedly went to together. Since I've never joined a gym of any sort in Japan, he'd clearly mistaken me for someone else. So, sometimes people walk up to me and think they know me when they don't. That's pretty surreal given how few foreigners are around who look like me.

The Joy of Immigration: Round 2

Today my husband and I went off to Shinagawa to complete part two of the immigration odyssey. I mentioned before that part one involves making the application. Part two involves actually getting the visa in your passport. I must say that I got my postcard notifying me that the application had been processed much faster than expected. I applied Monday morning and got the card Friday afternoon.

Since we had good luck with shortening the wait by going relatively early in the morning, we followed the same pattern this time. This was despite the fact that we had to stand on the trains almost all of the time and my back and hips were not happy campers. The most efficient way to get there was via the Rinkai line (from Shinjuku) as it bypasses a lot of stations and gets you to Tennozu Isle pretty quickly.

The second half of the process involves pursuing a line to counter "A". There's a long red line running down the carpet and a bunch of those roped off areas that snake around like they have at Disney for people waiting to get on rides. That means that you get to wait a bit before you get up to the counter and offer up your postcard, gaijin card, and passport.

You also have to buy a 4,000 yen (about $40) revenue stamp to pay for the whole thing. If anyone indicates that immigration processes are paid for by taxes, they are wrong. It costs $40 per visa application and $30 per single re-entry permit. The face time you get with an immigration official is about 2 minutes combining both the application and pick-up time. I don't know how long people spend on the processing, but I can't imagine it's too terribly long. Sure, they have to pull your files and check your forms for mistakes, but given the number of people making applications, there's no way it's more than 15 minutes per person for anything besides a permanent residence application.

At any rate, I got in the line and it took about 15 minutes to snake my way up to the counter where I surrendered my identification and applied the revenue stamp to a piece of paper that said what I was doing (extending my current visa status) and required a signature. After that, instead of waiting in line, I was allowed to sit and wait.

The waiting areas at Tokyo Regional Immigration in Shinagawa are hot and stuffy. We've been told by students that they believe public buildings don't have great air conditioning because walking into an uncomfortable government office reassures people that their tax dollars aren't being squandered keeping public servants and the unfortunate souls at their mercy comfortable. Personally, I'd be very happy if some of the money I pay to the Japanese government in taxes were used to keep immigration cool and dry rather than to finance cheap classes to teach grannies and grampies how to dial a cell phone and push a mouse on their computers.

The "system" for picking up the visa is a bit different from that for applying. When you apply, you get a number and your number is called and you go to the counter. It's a lot like visiting a busy New York bakery. When you pick up the visa, they don't call your number exactly. They call a number and anyone who is currently holding a number lower than the one called can rush to the counter and stand in another line to get the visa. My number was 185 so I was able to go up when 187 was called, for instance.

Unfortunately, there are always some people who think that they don't have to follow the system or find it too taxing to comprehend. When 187 flashed up and I was happily first to the counter, someone with a number around 218 jumped in front of me and started trying to submit paperwork which was not supposed to be handled at that counter. He kept asking the woman working there for something and she told him to go elsewhere, but he wouldn't give it up. Eventually, she convinced him to go away and then apologized quite sincerely to me for what had happened. It's not like it was her fault that he was either clueless about the process and/or okay with usurping the time and attention due to people who had already spent their time waiting.

I imagine the bane of the existence of a lot of immigration officials are people who think they can skip to the head of the line or wheedle their way into some area that they don't belong in. It wastes their time and just prolongs the process of dealing with applications in an orderly fashion such that I'm sure they fall behind more and more as the day goes on. That being said, they start out behind (by an hour or a bit more) and I think they never catch up, but every person who thinks they can horn in where they don't belong is only adding minutes to the rest of our waits.

At any rate, once this fellow hit the road, she showed me my visa and returned my passport with its shiny new renewal. I thanked her. We smiled at each other, and the CH and I hit the road. The entire business took about 45 minutes, not counting the ludicrously long commute to the office conveniently located in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, we forgot the camera so I can't offer you any scenic shots of absolutely gigantic lots stacked with enormous Chinese shipping containers or multitudes of big trucks surrounding our cab and filling the air with the delicate scent of diesel exhaust.

Since things went so swimmingly, we decided to stop off at an English language second-hand book store in Ebisu. We had about $35 worth of credit due to expire tomorrow and we bought 3 psychology books with it. We chose those so my husband can familiarize himself with some more concepts before taking classes back home. The man at the shop remarked, jokingly, but I think also meaningfully, that we spent little more than our credit allowed. I think they don't really like it when people only spend their credit as it's not very profitable for them. However, we need to liquidate our books, not get more of them, and this is the start of our effort to minimize our collection.

While we perused the books, we were treated to some pretentious conversation about how foreigners living in Japan lose their ability to have conversations and that the highly intelligent customer who was buying books couldn't have a good chat with his troglodytic friend who had lost his conversation skills after teaching English for awhile. Apparently, we English teachers spend so much time asking our students simplistic and simple-minded questions that we forget how to form any but the most primitive of sentences. I imagine after all of my years here, I'm going to be reduced to nothing more than grunts when I attempt to communicate with my fellow Americans upon returning to my native soil. The magnanimous foreign fellow did grant that, after spending some time with someone of his immense ego...er intellect that his friend regained some of his perspicacity, so I'm relying on my American friends and acquaintances to help me regain my capacity for sophisticated discourse.

Our books procured (and with a new sense of confidence that books would bring us into the light of intelligence once more), we headed out to Subway for double turkey and roast beef subs chock full of healthy, healthy veggies. We got them to go as we'd rather eat in the comfort of our home than the warm, narrow hallway the shop is set up in . My husband has become expert in asking the people there to load up my turkey sandwich with jalapeno and black olives. Apparently, these items are in short supply as they anoint my sandwich with exactly two of each even when asked to put "takusan" (many) on it. My hubby had to ask them twice for more in order to net me a total of 6 each.

When we reached our home neighborhood, my husband and I briefly split up because he wanted potato chips with his sandwich and I just wanted to get to my bike. He sprinted off and I trudged toward the bikes figuring that our respective speeds should have us meeting up at the bicycles. During the entire time that I was out and about with my husband, no one approached me, but during the brief duration that we were apart, some Japanese guy gave me a major gawking and when I gave him the hairy eyeball in return, he started talking to me about my legs. I ignored him, but the experience reinforced something which I have noticed about Japanese people bothering foreigners in Tokyo. That is that they don't bother you if you're with another Japanese person of any gender or with a foreign male. If you're alone, they feel free to intrude on you in a manner which is utterly inappropriate in their culture (Japanese people as a rule do not strike up a conversation with strangers, and it's even less common in Tokyo than other areas).

After getting home and inhaling the sub and a Diet Coke, I decided to complete the final phase of the process and just go to the local government office and register my new visa. I didn't want to do it, and my feet doubly did not want to, but the allure of an entire day off tomorrow without annoying bureaucracy of any sort squashed the protest that my feet were making. So, we biked off to another massively overheated government office and allowed them to duly note whatever it is that needed duly noting. I noted that my ku (ward) taxes were being used to buy a bunch of new chairs for the waiting areas. I actually liked the old seating more, but I didn't get a say on how my yen got spent.

As of now, we've each got one more tangle with bureaucracy and then we should be in the clear for the duration. Unfortunately, our alien registration cards expire this year so we each have to go get new ones within a month of our respective birthdays. Sigh. I'm going as early as possible so I can tick this one last thing off the list and, hopefully, never look back.

Reality-Media Disconnect

Lately, I've been reading a lot about how the bad economy in Japan is forcing prices downward and how this is such a terrible thing. Supposedly, with consumers keeping as much money in their tight little fists as possible, competition is pushing merchants to lower prices which leads to lower profits which in turn means they lower wages and layoff staff.

I'm not a consumer of high-priced goods, and only buy big ticket items like computers, televisions, etc. when something breaks down or is outdated enough to cause great inconvenience, so I can't speak to how the market for luxury goods or pricier bags, shoes, clothes, and adult toys (no, not the dirty kind) is working. I can say one thing for absolute certain and that is that the prices of daily necessities has not been dropping. In fact, as of about a month ago, the price of dairy products and milk in particular went up yet again.

About three years ago, a liter (about a quart) of milk could be had in Tokyo at most markets for about 170 yen (about $1.65). The price went through incremental increases and was hanging at around 198 yen (about $2.00) until recently when it went up to 208 yen ($2.10). Similarly, 200 grams (about two sticks in America or 1 cup) of butter used to be available for around 260 yen ($2.60) and now you're exceptionally lucky if you find it on sale for as low as 300 yen ($3.00). Usually, the price hangs around 388 yen ($3.80) for the equivalent of 2 sticks.

The dairy prices are particularly curious in light of the fact that I read recently that Japanese dairy farmers are crying that they can't make a living raising cows. In part, I can see where their problems are coming from. Feed prices have gone up due to fuel prices (though gas prices have gone down) and increased global demand for grain products, particularly corn, as alternate fuel and manufactured products material. However, prices have continued to go up so it's hard to believe that they aren't compensating for increased grain costs through these hikes.

One of the farmers who was saying he couldn't profit in the dairy business said that he is going to switch over to the rice growing business instead. The reason why this is curious is that Japan is awash in a sea of rice. The government has so much stockpiled that they are actively encouraging people to eat more rice and to return to traditional Japanese cuisine to consume rice, which is relatively cheap in comparison to other grain products like pasta and bread, and vegetable starches like potatoes. If Japan is full to the brim with rice, why would it be profitable to become yet another rice farmer? The answer is that rice is subsidized by the Japanese government so it's a more secure choice. Also, you don't have to depend on the price of animal feed if you grow rice.

I find it relatively frustrating to read articles again and again about how prices are going down only to find that things at the market continue to creep up. Starting about 3 years ago, rather substantial jumps in prices for all sorts of staple goods occurred, and this was in anticipation of oil price increases and conglomerates buying up supplies, not in response to these changes. Toilet paper that used to cost 198 yen currently sells for 258 yen, for instance, and it has not budged along with changes in fuel prices.

My feeling is that companies know there are certain daily use products that people will buy because they have to or are extremely reluctant to give up and that they continue to take advantage of the average shopper by keeping those prices high. As Japanese consumers grow increasingly frugal in response to news of more job losses, diminished bonuses, and stagnant wages, they continue to shy away from buying new "stuff" that they don't need, and focus on the basics. My guess is that, given that this is the only area where people can't really hold back on their spending, the much publicized decrease in prices isn't likely to hit such items any time soon.

Fifteen Minutes

I'm guessing that a least a few readers are thinking I'm talking about Andy Warhol's famous line about fame with this post. Thankfully, that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I can't think of anything I'd like much less than being famous.

For quite some time, I've been trying to add a few things back into my life that had fallen by the way side and having no success at it. I've also been struggling for various reasons to keep some good habits (like exercise) in my life due to physical problems, and having difficulties with that as well. Part of the larger issue is that my time is incredibly fragmented. I teach students face-to-face about 12 hours a week these days and do 2-6 hours of freelance work on top of that most weeks. This is all for the good because I feel very lucky to have the work that I do. It is the difference between quite modest additions to our saving and rather generous ones. However, it's not like my schedule is compact.

Adding to that part-time work is the mix of being a housewife. People who think being a housewife is just another word for hanging around the apartment and doing a little housework or cooking aren't doing it right. In order to make our current life situation as successful as possible, a lot of time has to be spent cooking, shopping, and cleaning rather than doing what is convenient and expensive. Until you cook three meals a day (and prepare lunches, make homemade bread and baked goods), clean up after them (without a dishwasher), and shop for them, you have no idea how much effort and time it takes. I don't mind doing what I have to do, but it does introduce more fragmentation of time into my day.

At some point, I decided that a little was better than none. The only way I was going to be able to add certain habits back into my day on a regular basis was to do them for small amounts of time. Starting last week, I went on a "15 minute" plan. My hope is to do a quarter hour of Japanese study, exercise (twice a day for 15 minutes, hopefully), something creative, and, eventually, meditation. So far, I've got the Japanese study back in there and the exercise. I do spend the time on creative things if you count blogging, particularly on the snack blog. However, I'd like to do skill expanding things rather than just blogging so I'm hoping to develop that habit as well.

I know that fifteen minutes isn't much time to devote to something, but sometimes tiny steps will get you there (or at least stop you from falling back). I realized that the way in which my schedule works right now requires me to achieve some goals in pretty small bites rather than big ones because it's too daunting or difficult to manage otherwise. I have often encouraged my students to do something related to English study for just 15 minutes every day rather than cram a few hours in once a week because betting exposure often is more important than for a long time. I decided that, if that advice is good for them, it's also good for me.

Adventures in "New" Used Furniture

There's a style of low profile office chair which I ran across at a second-hand items shop about 6 months ago. It was black and only about 3000 yen (about $30) and looked like it'd suit the CH's need for a replacement chair at his office. Unfortunately, my rickety old chair, which I had repaired 3 times and extended the life of for another year and a half, finally gave up the ghost and I ended up with the chair intended for my husband. (He was in need of a new chair because his company's president replaced everyone's comfortable chair with nicer looking, but very uncomfortable chairs).

Since that time, I've been checking the same shop every time I ride my bicycle past it hoping that another one would show up. This particular type of chair is well-suited to Japanese apartments because it is light and has a low back so it doesn't seem so large in a small space. It's also wider and has good lower back support and is more comfortable than most conventional office chairs.

My new chair, restored to working condition.

Well, today was the day another one of these chairs showed up. The odd thing was that it wasn't there when I rode past it to the supermarket, but it was there 10 minutes later on my way back home. This one only cost 1890 yen (about $18) so it was a steal at that price. The only bad point was that this one is red and showed a bit more wear and tear. It's a little dingy, but I figured I could reupholster it. My husband can take the black one to his office and I'll use the red one.

So, that would be all well and good if that was the end of the story. Of course, then this wouldn't be an "adventure". The used items shop is about a 7-minute walk from my apartment and charges for delivery so I decided to just push the bike I was on with my right hand and drag the chair along the sidewalk with my left hand. It was noisy, and a little troublesome, especially with my bad back, but I got it home and was very pleased.

I put my groceries away, chatted with my sister a bit on Skype, and then decided to try out the chair. When I sat in it, it leaned forward any time I did. It was as if it was hinged. I turned it over and saw that two of the four bolts were missing. The front ones were there but very loose, and the ones from the back were gone. Given how loose the ones in the front were, my guess was that they were shaken out during the journey rather than absent all along.

The main problem with losing the screws is that the base of the chair is very thin so you can't replace them easily with other bolts. They'd have to be exactly the right length and width. Also, Tokyo is not exactly overflowing with hardware shops with a plethora of bolts for every need. In fact, I have no idea where to find a specific size bolt. Given the difficulties in replacing them, I though the best course of action was to retrace my steps and hope to find them.

Now, if I lived in the isolated countryside or in some quiet suburb, this wouldn't be a big deal, but this is Tokyo. There are people and cars everywhere. To add more fun to finding the lost screws, ginkgo leaves are all over the ground and blowing around. That means there are chances that they could be covered, swept up by the ever vigilant shop keepers sweeping several times a day in front of their stores, or ran over by a car. Yeah, I crossed a major street (Ome Kaido Avenue) full of traffic on my way home.

Still, I gamely retraced my steps and found one of the screws, sans its nut, at the curb where I crossed the street. I was actually surprised to find one at all and pocketed it. When the light changed, I crossed the street carefully scanning the crosswalk. However, I figured I'd be screwed if one fell in the street because tons of cars drive over the intersection every minute. It could be thrown, crushed, or stuck in some one's tire if it happened to fall on the crosswalk.

After walking all the way back to the shop, I came up empty on the second screw and decided I'd give up after one more pass over the crosswalk. Strangely enough, I found it lying in the middle of the street undamaged and with its nut intact. I must say that I felt really lucky to recover them under the circumstances.

Of course, my entire experience was two parts luck (finding the chair, then finding both lost screws) and one part bad luck (the loose screws). I can't believe that the people who assembled the chair were so careless as to leave the screws so loose that simply pulling it along the sidewalk for 3 minutes made them fall out. I guess it could have been worse. All 4 of them could have fallen out and the chair could have fallen apart before I got it home.

Note: This chair is obviously the Stockholm office chair sold by Walmart in the U.S. There are no Walmarts in Japan so I have no idea where this came from. I've never seen one like it in any shop. If anyone else knows where these can be bought in Japan, I'd appreciate knowing. I did find a Japanese version of this style of chair called a "Roco desk chair" (ロコデスクチェアー), but it's not the same exactly, though it still has the appealing low profile style.

Pain

If you follow any blog for any period of time, you'll see that the frequency of posts sometimes drop off and then the excuses start popping up. I'm not one for offering such excuses because I don't feel obliged in any way to keep blogging. The fact of the matter is that I've often had things to say as of late, but have felt unable to say them. I offer an explanation of the situation not as an excuse, but rather as a bookmark in my personal history to tell myself what has been going on.

As of late, I've been experiencing more issues with my back than I had been and it's been draining my energy. Unless you've lived with pain day-in and day-out for years, you can't imagine the toll it can take on your ability to live a full life. Enduring pain, even when it's low-grade or bearable, taxes you in ways those who have not been in such a situation can't imagine.

Imagine a normal person's daily stamina as a fully inflated tire that loses air as the day goes on and refills to full capacity each morning after a night's rest. A person who is in pain everyday not only loses air at a faster rate, but finds that the tire never fully inflates no matter how much rest they get. This is because the pain represents a few extra holes allowing air to escape which make full inflation impossible no matter how hard you try to pump air into it.

As of late, I've felt like my tire has been near flat all the time and it's been difficult to raise the energy to type out my thoughts. It just feels like it's not worth the expenditure in effort when I have other things to do which are more immediate. Hopefully, this will pass and I'll be back to normal soon. One can hope.

Doctor Swag

Among the items are super soft micro cleaning cloths for eyeglasses, tons of ball point pens, a pass case, white board markets, correction tape, cable organizers and a dehydrated dish towel that plumps up to full size once you get it wet.

One of my students is married to a doctor and, on occasion, she has handed off portions of gifts that have been given to her husband. Some of the gifts she shares with me are from patients who give him case-size portions of various food items. She's given me fruit jellies, melons, and dried sweet potato. She's also give me notepads and pens before. A few weeks ago, she also gave me some facial tissues that her husband had been inundated with by companies selling allergy medication.

I mentioned to her that I could make use of the items she gave me and would be glad to take her "cast-offs". Today, she brought a small shopping bag stuffed with the assortment above. All of these items are freebies given to the doctor by various companies that want him to prescribe or recommend their products to patients. While this may look like bribery, I'm guessing it's more about brand name recognition.

One of my other students works for a pharmaceutical company and she spends a lot of her time visiting hospitals, clinics, etc. and hawking her company's wares. A lot of what she's encouraging nurses, doctors, and medical professionals to recommend are nutritional supplements. Her company spends a fair amount of their resources taking beneficial components of naturally occurring substances and extracting them to put into pills, powders or liquids so people can ingest them more efficiently on a regular basis.

After receiving this bag of doctor swag from my student, I couldn't help but wonder just how much her husband receives and how much is wasted. He's a single doctor with a single clinic and the amount of stuff he gets overflows such that he, his wife, her family, and his staff couldn't possibly use it all. My student gave some of it to me, but I'm guessing there is far more piling up in a corner somewhere. The way in which business is done in this way must contribute greatly to the wasting of resources in developed countries. How much oil is used on unwanted pens? How many trees are cut down to make gift boxes for those pens? It's a shame, really, but there's not much to be done about it. Still, I feel a little better knowing that I can either use these things or pass them along to someone else who can.

Fun at the Bank

Yesterday, the CH and I decided the time was ripe to pull the trigger on sending money back to the States. We're attempting to build a nest egg for when we're old and gray and the interest rates in Japan aren't doing much for anyone. If you've never had a Japanese savings account, I'll let you in on the fact that the rates are close to zero.

The way in which we return money is by wiring it home to our credit union. For the privilege, you pay 8,000 yen ($85) and get to park your fanny in the bank for 40 minutes or more. This was the 5th time in 6 years that we did this, though it actually has been about 2.3 years since the last time. Each time, the process changes a little. In fact, each time it has become more troublesome.

The last time we did this, we were quizzed a little about why we were sending the money back. This time, we were interviewed extensively about:

• where the money came from
• why the money was being sent back
• who the money was paid to
• our relationship and history with the bank we were sending the money to
  

Toward this end, we were asked to produce documents proving we held an account at the receiving bank and had an ongoing relationship with them and proof that we were employed by the companies who paid us. The bank asked us to show a bank book for our credit union account which had both the CH's and my names on it and asked for a business card from his company that indicated he worked there. The problem was that we don't have a bank book from back home as we deal with them through an on-line account and receive no printed information. Also, my husband doesn't have a card, though he did show them his gaijin card which fortunately listed his company on the back of it.

They also asked to riffle through the history of transfers we just so happened to bring with us. That is, they wanted to look at the 4 previous wire transfers documentation. This was weird because they have copies of all of those papers, too, but we gamely went along with it. Even after seeing that every other time we wired the money it was to the exact same account and the exact same bank, they kept scrutinizing the information as if there were something missing.

After much fussing and questioning, we were sent off to sit and wait. No doubt they were performing forensic tests on microscopic residue we had left on the documents or some such. It's interesting to note that we don't have a Japanese ink stamp (hanko) and we were chastised for this when I couldn't recall precisely how I signed my name when I opend my account about 15 years ago. The bank lady said that you don't have to worry about remembering how you signed your name if you have a hanko. We didn't want to sass her, but after we retreated to the waiting area, I mentioned to the CH that, while I couldn't recall precisely how I signed my name, at least no one could steal my signature like they could a hanko. Also, only in Japan am I forced to sign my name different ways. In the U.S., I can sign (first name + last name) all the time so I don't have to remember how I did it as I always do it the same way. In Japan, they keep forcing me to write it in various permutations of (last + first)or (last + first + middle) or (first + middle + last).

At any rate, as we sat there, we noticed a few things. For one, the door to the safe, which is about a foot thick and has one of those big wheel handles you always see in safe cracker scense in movies, was hanging wide open with notices for the staff attached to it with magnets. The fact that this is the area where things are supposed to be secured for their bank patrons and it's just left hanging wide open as an ad hoc notice board doesn't exactly inspire confidence in their security. The other thing we noticed was that all of the women had to wear ugly grey polyester suits with fuschia blouses while the men were just wearing regular suits. Also, the women were in the front and had to deal with customers and the men were all in the back. I'm guessing the men spend their valuable time frowning at important paperwork.

The reason for all of the scrutiny and interrogating is that the banks have to comply with (police's? government'?) requests to keep an eye open for potential money launderers. I've read that this applies if you send back more than the equivalent of 5,000,000 yen or more, though I've heard that some people have been grilled for sending back as little as 10,000 yen when they've attempted to do it through the post office. I can't say for sure, but the banks can't really help having to put you through so much as it's not really their choice. Also, it's not personal nor does it apply to foreigners only, though foreigners are more likely to be affected by it since few Japanese are wiring money to foreign banks.

My advice if you want to send money home is to make sure you print e-statements from the bank you're wiring your money to if you don't have an old-fashioned passbook. Also, take your working contract, business card, or a pay statement that proves your relationship with your company. You also have to have your gaijin card. If you're married and operating from an account with your spouse's name on it, then you also need to take your spouse along. This time we were lucky that the CH just happened to take a folder with some extra documents which they accepted as sufficient proof our our relationship with our credit union. I don't expect that we'll be sending money again any time soon as we pretty much tapped ourselves out this time, but I'm going to go a bit better armed next time.

Knowing Some Things Scares Me

Back when my husband and I first arrived in Japan, we enjoyed playing Trivial Pursuit. We had the original version before it had been dumbed down as well as a couple of expansions. Though we liked playing it, there were a few problems. One was that I was seriously handicapped when it came to sports categories. I don't like sports and I don't know anything about them.

My cluelessness about sports inspired a running joke that is still going to this day. Any time a question about sports came up and I had no decent guess, I'd always say "Pete Rose". It didn't matter what sport the question was about, hockey, horse racing, football, I'd pause and think hard then answer "Pete Rose." Even now, if a sport comes up, I'll ask my husband something like, 'you know who is the highest scoring basketball player in history is?' And he'll reply with, "Pete Rose?"

Besides my sports ignorance making it damn near impossible for me to win a game (I'd spend half the game getting the last wedge), we also had problems playing with our friends because the game was so America-centric. The friends we attempted to play the game with were from England and Australia and there was no way they would or should know all of the pop culture, historical, and sports facts. We tried playing in teams to balance this, but it really wasn't much fun for our friends who didn't know silly things like who played Frank Burns on M*A*S*H. I'm guessing the British editions must include things like who played General Melchett on Black Adder. These are examples of the types of questions that are easy for those in the culture, but nearly impossible for those outside of it.

There is a web site called Mental Floss which has a lot of different articles, quizzes, etc. I've actually known about Mental Floss for quite some time as their articles were often featured on blogcritics (which I used to write for, but it's rather fallen by the wayside since my old blog passed away). Recently, I came across some pop culture quizzes through Mental Floss which reminded me of playing Trivial Pursuit. The first quiz I tried was about Milhouse on the Simpsons and I did very badly despite watching the show a fair amount. I guess I just don't pay attention to Milhouse, though I suspect that's part of his overall problem in life. (I hope that I retain some of my Simpsons credibility though when I say that I got 100% on the Troy McClure Film or Actual Terrible Movie quiz.)

One of the other quizzes is the "George Costanza Candy Identification Quiz". This one shows you various candy bars without their wrappers and you're supposed to try and identify the bars by their external appearance alone. They aren't bitten into or cut apart so you cannot see the interior of the bars. I was rather spooked to see that I got 100%. I didn't realize I was that into candy bars when I was a kid, but I guess I must have eaten more than I recall. I'm going to blame Halloween and trick or treating literally for hours. I guess getting so much candy that we had to empty out our bags into shopping bags in the car so they weren't too heavy to carry meant we got an awful lot of candy experience.

My husband did a few of the quizzes as well. He scored perfectly on things like naming all of the Democratic and Republican candidates who took part in the first presidential debates for the current election. He also was able to name all of the current supreme court justices and did very well on a quiz about what happened to a variety of presidents after they left office. Given that I knew all the candy bars and fake movies made by a character on the Simpsons and he knew all this political stuff, there was almost certainly more between me and victory at Trivial Pursuit than just a sports wedge.

The Peeper is Back

When the weather changes from stifling, humid and hot to cool and dry, my windows go open for a few months and stay open until it gets unbearably cold. That means that my privacy becomes an issue as there are four windows in my apartment and three of them can be clearly looked into by neighbors or their visitors. If I'm cooking at the gas table, I'm literally standing next to (less than 3 feet from) anyone who rings the doorbell of my neighbor's apartment.

In fact, yesterday morning, my peeper was back for another peek through the kitchen window. This time, I happened to be in the kitchen as she stood out there and gawked intently. When she saw that I was about to see her, she scampered away. That being said, I realized that this was not a person who was simply trying to invade my privacy. In fact, it was not my privacy that she wished to invade at all. Before she started peering into my kitchen, she had been ringing the neighbor's doorbell.

Said neighbor is the one who is in and out of his apartment day and night at the strangest times. He is certainly not your typical "salary man". The peeper was trying to contact my neighbor and, given the proximity of my window to his door, I believe she erroneously believed the room she was trying to look into to be his and didn't know it was connected to another apartment. I think she was trying to see if he was home and not answering his door. Given the fright I gave her (and the fact that my front door is not more than 2 feet from the window she was looking in), I hope she'll work out that this is the apartment next to his and stop sticking her nose into my business.

Privacy has also been on my mind as of late for another reason which is rather removed from my personal experience. I've been reading a memoir written by Leonard Nimoy's son, Adam. Any time a celebrity or psuedo-celebrity writes a book, you might expect some juicy bits of gossip or at least some amusing observations or anecdotes. Wil Wheaton's "Just a Geek" is a good example of one such book. And, no, not every memoir I read relates to Star Trek.

The reason Adam Nimoy's book brings privacy to mind is that it fails largely because of what I believe was an attempt to keep too much private. The book reads like a decent blog which keeps any really deep and intriguing information or serious introspection or emotional response under wraps. In terms of his family and particularly his father's privacy, I admire the restraint he shows. However, he didn't really even reveal much about himself or any sort of profound self-discovery about his life as a result of growing up with a silver spoon, succeeding, and then failing as a result of being a drug addict. As a reader, I found the book very shallow as a result.

The lesson I learned from reading his memoirs is that it's okay to protect everyone's privacy and to keep your deeper thoughts and demons to yourself. However, you can't write a very interesting book if you keep such things out of the view of prying eyes. There is no having your cake and eating it too when it comes to privacy. You can either sell yourself and your story and jeopardize your privacy and those around you who are inevitably revealed, or you can keep yourself off the auction block and work as, oh, say an accountant. You can't write a good memoir though if you restrict yourself to talking about the bland facts.

All good writing involves putting yourself at risk. Even when you don't display your deepest, darkest secrets or feelings, good writing will ultimately betray your character to attentive readers. In both fiction and non-fiction work, you can always see the needs, fears, and ego of the writer embedded in the stories and perspectives.

Old Baticide

I have to remember never to go shopping mid-month. The 15th is apparently the day on which many old folks receive their government pension. Great hordes of shriveled old crones descend upon the cheapest shopping spots at this time and linger about the shops because they have nothing better to do with their time except try and avoid their retired husbands. For many an old grandma, their husbands have now outlived their usefulness and are just big piles of useless garbage ("sodai gomi") sitting around the house to their wives who have long since lost interest in them.

Today, I had one of those not atypical (though not incredibly frequent) experiences where I just wanted to pound some old bones to dust. I was making my way through a massively congested, small green grocer-type store and generally trying to balance patiently waiting for the ancient creatures to move along of their own accord and judiciously and politely say "excuse me" to get the ones that lingered overly long to move aside. One gnarled specimen, who was dressed as if she were going to the theater rather than shopping at a cut-rate market, was the lone blockage between me and sweet escape from the store so I said in a low but audible voice, "sumimasen". She looked up and loudly launched into speaking and rudely about me and my gaijin appearance to her withered companion who did what the Japanese always do when one person in a pair or group notices the gaijin and starts yammering about her. She slowly turned her head to catch a glimpse of the freak and I was right there at the moment of contact to look her right in the eye. This always makes them look away as it's harder to be rude when the gaijin understood what was said and is now also responding to your companion's rude Japanese. Once I locked eyes with the companion, the main old bat went back to doing her detailed inspection of the fish at the end of the aisle because she, too, realized I understood Japanese enough to know what she was up to.

One of the things I've realized about this behavior is that it happens only when I'm alone and it happens far less to my husband. It also is far, far more likely to occur when Japanese people are with companions or groups. They tend to behave themselves when they're alone (though now always). I think that a male presence is generally intimidating so having the CH along tends to quash this sort of overt rudeness. Unfortunately, if I had to have him accompany me on all shopping sojourns to keep the old bats in check, we'd starve to death.

I've noticed that this type of bad behavior has increased in the last few years among old people, particularly women. I recently read that crimes among the elderly in Japan have increased nearly four-fold in the last decade. Somewhere on the order of 42,000 old folks have broken the law this year. The feeling among many people who try to understand what is happening is that there has been a marked increase in what they call "angry old people". These are people who are mad and act out because they feel insecure about their future, live alone, or don't have much contact with their families. From a social viewpoint, being estranged from your family or alone in Japan is probably more stressful than being so in the U.S. where culturally it's expected that your kids won't be there for you when you get older.

Personally, given the behavior of some of the old people I've encountered including the old bitty today (and the line of old bitties and jerks who are members of the same rude club as she) and the old bastard who nearly shoved me off my bike earlier this year, I can see why their families don't want to live with them. Though I don't have personal experience with it (thank whatever entity runs the universe, if indeed anyone is in charge), everything I've read about mother-in-laws also fuels the idea that you just don't want to be living with such pushy old people.

I guess I'd better do my best to avoid the shops around pension day from now on to mitigate the chances that this sort of encounter will happen again, or at least go at night or when it rains. Darkness and water appear to spook the elderly types a bit. If not, I'll be at some risk of committing old baticide in the future. While it may be understandable, I'm guessing the Japanese police wouldn't be willing to look the other way.

Guests and Gifts

Because of serious back pain, it's hard for me to get out and visit people in their homes. I can do it, but it's something I have to plan out carefully to minimize walking and ensure rest stops as well as mentally prepare myself for the pain and the stress that comes along with the experience. People who can just walk out their front door and go anywhere they choose have no idea how liberated they are compared to the likes of me nor can they understand how I envy what they can take for granted.

Since it is so difficult for me to get around, I invite my friends to come to me and I really appreciate it when they make the effort. I know that it is time consuming and tiring to go to someone's house relative to having them come to you. Of course, there is preparation for guests coming to my place as well like cleaning and at least some food preparation, but I'm more than happy to do that as it's something I don't mind and I can operate in controlled circumstances which allow me to manage my pain.

Getting back to my kind guests though, because I appreciate their coming to me, I like to try and prepare a little something for them to take home with them when I have the time and energy to do it. Last time I had guests, I sent them home with some homemade brownies. Darryl (my former boss) came by yesterday and I decided to go for something a bit less sweet for him. He's not so into the overwhelmingly sugary stuff, I believe, though he is a fan of my peanut butter cookies. ;-)


I decided to revisit my sweet potato scones recipe after a very long absence so I could send Darryl off with a few of them (and toss some in the freezer for future breakfasts for me!). These are definitely the kind of thing that I can't make often because they are labor-intensive and require both boiling and baking. The hardest part of making them is forcing the cooked potatoes through a mesh sieve to make the mashed potato fluffy and airy. It's very difficult and messy, but I tried to make scones from sweet potatoes by just mashing them the quick way using a mixer and it produced scones with a less than desirable texture.

Sweet potato put through the mesh strainer looks like small bits of saffron rice but is very light.

I had two large potatoes which I steamed and peeled and forced through the mesh. My hand really hurt afterward, but it was actually enough potato for 3 batches worth of scones so I tossed the rest in the freezer for future goodness without the hand cramps. One lesson I did learn though was that it's a lot easier to mush up warm cooked sweet potatoes than cold ones.


I decided to modify the recipe I linked to because Darryl doesn't do artificial sweeteners. I upped the brown sugar to a half cup and I also decided to apply an egg wash this time so that the top wouldn't rise and would be shinier. The results were excellent with a crispy outside and a tender interior when they were fresh. Tiny bits of sweet potato are interspersed throughout the scones adding moisture and a good distribution of sweet potato flavor.

Unfortunately, the crispy top disappeared overnight as is often the case with baked goods, but the crispness may be revived by wrapping the scones in foil and giving them a little run in the toaster oven.


Darryl one-upped me (unintentionally and in the spirit of pure generosity) on the baking front though by bringing along 6 delicious and moist banana blueberry muffins. The CH was especially taken by them and I hope that Darryl will share the recipe with everyone on his cooking blog (drop by and leave him a message to encourage him to post it... this is my way of forcing his hand and getting him to blog as I already have the recipe in my in box). I was compelled to order some whole wheat flour from Tengu Natural Foods so that I could attempt to reproduce his fantastic muffins.

The visit was just like old times for us. Even though I quit 3 years ago, it's just comfortable with the three of us sitting around gossiping about things back at work and catching up. I only miss my former job when I think about how much I enjoyed working with Darryl as he's a jewel of a person and an ideal boss for the gaijin in Japan. I'm hoping we can manage to synchronize our schedules and get together more often in the future.

Failure to Communicate

Math is supposed to be a somewhat universal language, at least among people who have had some modest level of formal education. Conceptualizing money isn't something that requires specific vocabulary. It only requires the ability to know a bit about numbers.

This morning, I visited a local convenience store for a quick round of milk and bread shopping. An older gentleman in front of me struggled with his change purse and paid for his purchase. Since he seemed to have difficulties manipulating his change because of shakiness, I assumed he didn't offer up the proper change when the cashier handed back several of his coins and then gave him other change.

When my turn came along, the bill was 812 yen. I didn't want to get back a pile of coins so I put down 312 yen and a 1000 yen note. This would get me back just one 500 yen coin. The cashier gave me a sympathetic look which conveyed that she thought I didn't understand Japanese money or numbers and tried to hand me back my change. I had to insist she take the change and give me back a 500 yen coin. After this little exchange, I figured that the older man probably tried to do the same thing and she didn't understand what he wanted either, but he didn't push it.

My students love to go on about "joshiki" or "common sense" and this sort of way of conceptualizing money falls into that category in Western culture. In Japanese culture, the umbrella meaning of common sense also encompasses common knowledge in addition to common logical concepts. The vast majority of people I've encountered in Japan seem to possess both, but this morning I came across one who was lacking in at least one of those. I can only imagine how quickly she's going to run the shop out of small change if she doesn't get a clue.

Whey Au Gratin Potatoes

When I posted about making my own cottage cheese, Tess mentioned that I should save the whey for other purposes as it can be used for things like soup stock. Given that whey has attractive nutritional properties, and smells like cheese (and that is always good), I threw the whey from my paneer-making session into the freezer with the idea of making good use of it rather than tossing it down the drain. I didn't have a concrete plan for using it, but considered that I might try substituting it for chicken stock next time I made au gratin potatoes.

Given that cheese is getting more and more expensive, I wanted to add more of a cheese flavor without upping the amount of actual cheese. I also wasn't happy about buying a liter of milk, extracting the curds, and tossing out the rest. However, before I was willing to pour whey all over expensive cheese and potatoes which I took the time to peel and slice, I had to make sure the whey wasn't going to taste funky and almost certainly ruin the dish.


For those of you who didn't look back at the cottage cheese making post, I've re-posted my picture of the collected whey. It doesn't exactly look appetizing, does it? It's not the kind of thing you are just itching to start spooning into your mouth, especially when it's stone cold. Never let it be said that I won't be adventurous in the name of food research. I tasted the whey and "it passed the first test, I didn't go blind" (that line is for the geeky sorts out there who recognize it). It tasted like it smelled, like cheese water. It wasn't something I'd knock back on a hot day, but I couldn't see how it'd spoil my precious potato dish.

The end result was very tasty. I couldn't tell if it was significantly cheesier tasting than usual, but it was certainly good and I'm hoping the protein and blood sugar maintenance benefits of the whey remained intact through the cooking process. I think I used too much whey though as it took 2.5 hours to cook properly. However, I'm not sure that that is necessarily a big drawback. The result was tender potatoes in a creamy cheese sauce. Here's the recipe:

Whey Au Gratin Potatoes

• 4 very large potatoes peeled and sliced
• 2 cups grated cheese (I used a mix of Gouda and cheddar)
• 2 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• **whey extracted from 1 liter of milk (about 3 cups)
• 4 tbsp. cream (or milk if you don't want to make it too rich)
• thyme to taste
• salt & pepper to taste
  

Toss the flour with the grated cheese. I usually use blocks of cheese which I cube and pulse in the food processor until it's like tiny pebbles. I toss the flour in while processing the cheese. This gives a very even distribution of flour which then thickens the sauce.

Place one layer of potatoes in a lightly-greased baking dish. I recommend glass because it's easier to clean. Sprinkle with cheese, thyme and salt and pepper. Repeat for two more layers. I recommend going light on the seasoning, especially the thyme. You don't want to overwhelm the dish.

Whisk the cream with the whey and pour over the potatoes. Bake at 350 degrees F./175 degrees C. uncovered for 2.5 hours until the potatoes are tender and the sauce is thickened.

**While this is what I used, I think it might be better to reduce the amount of whey to 2 cups. This will significantly shorten the baking time as the water won't need to be reduced so much or take so long to heat up and cook the potatoes. Next time, I plan to use less whey.

I would have preferred to make more at once and freeze the remainder, but my baking dish is on the small side (as is my oven). If you want to scale this up, you can just add 1/2 cup of grated cheese (not packed down), 1/2 tbsp. of flour, and a 1/2 cup of whey for every extra large potato you add. I think 6 potatoes and 3 cups of whey might be better than my 4 potatoes and 3 cups.

Forming a Bond With Your Farmer

In one of my posts on the Japanese Snack Reviews blog, I noted that the Japanese tend to put the faces of ordinary people on products in a way which I don't recall happening back home. In the U.S., we put fake figureheads (Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima), famous people (Paul Newman), or company figureheads (Mrs. Fields) on packaging, but we don't tend to see average Joe Smith.

I generally don't buy fruit or vegetables at the local market because they're more expensive, but tomatoes have been expensive at the green grocer and they were more reasonable at the supermarket. The package of 6 small tomatoes above cost just a little under $3, and yes, that was pretty cheap. There were a wide range of choices in choosing similarly-priced trays. Some had three large tomatoes, others had four medium ones, etc. All of them had little pinkish slips of paper with the pictures and names of the farmers who were offering us their bounty.

As near as I can tell, this sort of information is included with peppers or tomatoes sold by members of the Marukyo agricultural group. On its web site, this group has all the normal fluff you see surrounding Japanese food companies about producing healthy, attractive food which is cultivated in peace and harmony with the earth, but it also claims to try and do all of this at a reasonable cost. Given the cost of red and yellow peppers in Tokyo, I'm not inclined to believe the cost part, but I'm sure they do their best. Chances are they are more about fixing prices than about keeping them low, but I may not know of what I speak.


The farmer and his wife on my slip are supposed to be conveying a message to the customer. I have had different farmers pictured on other tomatoes I've bought in the past, but I never paid attention to the messages. Therefore, I don't know if the phrases are all the same. Given the vague, bland and oh-so-Japanese message on this (' we do our best to earn the customers' trust...we work hard...we take great care...blah, blah, blah'), I'm guessing that it doesn't matter if the phrasing is different on these messages. I'm guessing the content is essentially the same.

Crispy Around the Edges

I haven't posted for 3 days. For some people, that's par for the course. For me, it's quite a long absence. It's not that I have nothing to say nor that I have no time necessarily to say it, it's just that I'm just a little burnt out from various tasks and find it hard to collect my thoughts and get them to flow into post form. I think that's okay though. I really believe that posting less often may be better than posting too much anyway.

Before the weather changed, I had a lot of tasks in mind that I wanted to do once it snapped off from oppressively warm and muggy to crisp and cool. Now that that has actually happened, I'm getting to those tasks. Mainly, they include repairs and little home improvement projects that I'd get too sweaty doing in the summer, but also there is a lot of cooking I avoid in the summer. In particular, there are dishes that require use of the oven. Being in the kitchen at all in summer is hard enough without super heating the kitchen to levels that would melt butter to a liquid state just by leaving it on the counter.

Pale bits of dough full of lively and happy yeast about to fry to death in the oven. Oh, the humanity!

Yesterday, I squeezed in some cinnamon roll making between lessons. This is a recipe that I wrote about in my former blog which I make as a very rare treat for my husband. I'm happy to say the freezer is now full of pumpkin cake, brownies, and cinnamon rolls so I won't be baking again for awhile.

Iced rolls... the glaze looks vaguely pornographic in nature. Prudish types and diabetics may want to avert their eyes.

Besides the cooking and household odds and ends, I've been doing 3 or 4 lessons a week with the same student on top of the regular students. She's taking a sociology course and the lessons with her are essentially tutoring sessions. When she writes a paper, I'm essentially writing a paper. When she takes a class, I'm taking the same class with her. It's a bit of a brain drain really as I have to skim the book quickly, organize the contents at light speed in my mind, then spit it all back out for her to record the lecture and use it to go home and write up essays from. It's like mental calisthenics. I enjoy it, mind you, because it's much more stimulating and challenging than practicing verb tenses or prepositions, but it is a bit intense.

Anyway, this is just a brief verbal nod and a wave, and a reminder to myself about why I skipped several days at this point in my personal history.

A Shiny New Chariot For Madam

It's a bit smaller than it looks.

My 6-year old bike recently passed the point in rickety-ness where I could no longer continue to use or repair it. We had it fixed a number of times in an attempt to not create more waste. In fact, I believe we probably paid the entire price of it all over again in various repairs, but the last straw was when the seat coils rusted and snapped on one side. Replacing a seat costs close to half of the price of a new bike, and mine was a rattle trap with a cornucopia of little and medium-size problems. We put the old one on the great Viking bicycle barge to Valhalla and bought a new mount.

The CH had spied some cheap (9,000 yen) city/utility bicycles (aka "mama chari") at a local supermarket a short while ago and secured me the vehicle pictured above. My old bike was orange and that may lead you to believe that it was easy to find in a sea of bikes, but the truth is that everyone buys these cheap bikes and there are only a few colors so there are always a lot of duplicates around of any given cheap bike. As I learned on my new bike's maiden voyage, this silver number is no exception to that. There are tons of twins out there for it so sometimes it's like finding your car in a huge lot in which you've forgotten where you've parked.

Incidentally, I tried to track down why these are called "mama chari" (ママチャリ) and found a lot of different explanations and highly varied translations. I always thought that "chari" was short for "chariot" and the nickname for these low-budget models was rather waggishly offered. Others have claimed that "chari" means "bicycle" in Japanese, but the only word I know for bicycle is "jitensha".

These bikes are decent transportation, but they are clearly designed for someone with a smaller frame than the average foreigner, even the average foreign female. The span of the handlebars is a little too short and the bars themselves relative to the position of the seat are too low. That is, when I put the seat at the proper height for comfortable leg extension while peddling, my knees nearly hit the handlebars. The bike was clearly designed for people with a shorter reach and shorter legs, and I'm not particularly tall or short for a foreign woman. They obviously are designed for the petite Japanese housewife (possibly even with the ever-shrinking older ones in mind), but I'm only running errands, so it's not important that the bike suit me perfectly.


My first major run on the bike was to one of the local markets that specializes in cheap fresh fruit and vegetables. Well, maybe they're not incredibly "fresh" as I believe they are probably cheap because they're not good enough for markets selling more expensive fresh produce. My bike is parked about in the center of the picture above, two bikes away from the bike with a poodle in its basket.

Seeing pets in bike baskets is not uncommon in Tokyo and I always find it troubling for two reasons. First of all, bike parking is always tight near shops because you aren't allowed to park along the sidewalk in many places as its illegal. It's actually illegal to park in this space (that's what the signs say), but everyone does because it's the only space from which this very popular market can be accessed. They only cart your bike away if you park there for over an hour or so. Anyway, because the space is tight and all the bikes have kickstands and brakes on the handles which easily snag other bikes parked as close as possible to them, it's very common for bikes to get knocked over as people struggle to extract them. In fact, the domino effect where one bike goes down and the rest follow occurs on a relatively regular basis. The woman who put her dog in the basket is putting it at serious risk in the event of an accident where bikes all topple over. When I parked, I had to be super careful not to even nudge the bike next to mine lest it fall over and hit the bike with the dog in it.


The other problem is that the dogs are almost always tied to the bike by their leashes and a lead that has been tied in such a way as to be short so the dog can't move around too much. As you can see in the picture above, there's a green lead tied to the bike. If the dog were to jump out of the basket, it could hang itself if the length is just a little incorrect so I think this is really an irresponsible thing to do. I realize that people can't take their dogs into the shops, but I think they should tie them to a pole or some other stationary object rather than leave them in their bicycle baskets like this. Behind this particular market, there is a small park where a dog can safely be tied to a variety of objects, not to mention a pedestrians' only covered shopping street where he could be tied.

Getting back to bikes though, if you look at the parking shot, you'll see a lot of the bikes have huge baskets on the back and the foremost one has what look like black pot holders on the handlebars. The big baskets are often kiddy seats, though sometimes they are extra baskets for carrying purchases. I hate both of these kinds of lumbering monstrosities because they are really hard to navigate around when you park and one of these people comes along and forces their bike into a narrow gap between you and another bike. If there's only a front basket, it's a lot easier to get out in such close, disorganized parking.

As for the pot holder things, in the winter I always think these are to keep hands from freezing, but women use them in the summer as well. My only guess is that they keep them on in the summer to protect their hands from exposure to the sun. Japanese women hate freckles (and tans for the most part), and often wear long sleeves or sweaters in the sweltering summer to keep their skin as white as possible. Personally, I'll take freckles over baking in a sweater in 90 degree (32 degrees C) weather any day.

Don't Make It Any Harder

The other day I was taking a picture of something for this blog when I noticed a fuzzy dark spot was in the viewfinder. I figured a piece of dust or something was on the lens so I cleaned it but the dark cloudy spot was still there.

I zoomed the camera in and out and the dark spec got smaller and darker when it was on extreme zoom. I realized that the spec of "stuff" wasn't on the outside of the lens, it was on the inside.

After noticing this, I got rather frustrated because I don't need a new camera, but this one is about a year past its warranty so I couldn't have it looked after by Nikon without paying for it. Since it's a cheap camera, there's every likelihood that having it serviced would cost at least a third of the camera's original purchase price. I wondered if there were any camera shops out there which specialize in cleaning the inside of cameras and, if so, where they were and how hard it'd be to get to one. I also inspected the screws in the camera and thought about taking it apart and trying to clean it myself. I've never done such a thing though, and I don't know how likely it is that I'd manage to destroy the camera in trying (pretty likely, I'd guess). I considered all possible options and wasn't particularly happy with any of the available solutions.

Later on, I was in the kitchen preparing dinner when something occurred to me. A piece of something was stuck on the lens inside. I didn't have to clean it, all I had to do was get it off the lens. I shook the camera and the dark spot was gone.

Rather than any of the costly, risky, or time-consuming solutions I was pondering, all I had to do was find an effective one. This was a little lesson for me in not making things any harder than they have to be and in looking for the easiest fix rather than the most permanent one. Sometimes, the easy one will do.