Whole Wheat Pancakes (that are actually good)

I'm guessing one of the hallmarks of a good pornographer is that they can hide all the flaws and grossness of the activities they are portraying and make it look like happy fun time with beautiful people. Well, maybe not actually "beautiful" so much as thin, copiously implanted, and shaven.

A good food pornographer similarly takes a subject which can look like slop and make it look appetizing. What is more, they can take utter failures and make them look like successes. One of my major pet peeves (which I've mentioned before) is that a lot of the recipes I find on the Internet look fabulous or are steeped in superlatives, but when I try the recipe, I get something inedible or lame.

Invariably, a lot of the best looking pictures with bad recipes have a bunch of comments under them saying, "it looks fabulous! I can't wait to try it!" They never have comments from people who have actually tried it. This irked me as the comments are relatively useless to those of us wanting to actually try the food rather than just treat it like a statue to admire, but I have finally figured out why there are no comments from people who make the featured item. I have posted comments on some of these failures and said in a polite way that the recipe didn't work out for me. Sometimes I've even asked for advice about where I may have gone wrong. Unsurprisingly, these comments are never posted. This goes a long way toward supporting my suspicion that people who post their glorious food porn pictures know that the recipes suck, but they post them anyway and hide the consequences.

I've made whole wheat pancakes on many occasions, but the results have been somewhat disappointing. Mainly, they're denser than I'd like, too flat, or too eggy. On the whole, they simply weren't fluffy enough to satisfy compared to the glory of cakes made with white flour. The truth is that whole wheat can't hold up to the decadence of white flour cakes. It never will because it has a different taste and texture due to the extra protein in them. The best you can hope for is something which is as good as it can be, but not so different from beautiful white pancakes as to disappoint.

I was poking around for a recipe for whole wheat pancakes and you'd be surprised how many included white flour. How can it be whole wheat if there's white flour in it? It sort of takes away the "whole" part. At any rate, I found an abysmal recipe which was just 4 ingredients - whole wheat flour, baking soda, brown sugar and milk. I was going to try it anyway because I though a radically different approach might work better. The next morning I had second thoughts and decided to heavily modify the recipe to include things I think should be in any pancake recipe. The results were surprisingly good.

Whole Wheat Pancakes:

Dry ingredients:
1 cup (regular) whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 semi-heaping tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 tsp. salt

Wet ingredients:
3/4 cup milk with 1/2 tbsp. distilled vinegar added (or buttermilk)
1 medium egg
1 tbsp. Canola oil
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Sift the flour, baking soda, and baking powder into a bowl. Scoop most of it up and sift a second time. Add the sugar and salt and mix up the rest of the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix the wet ingredients until well-blended. Add the wet into the dry and stir until all of the dry ingredients are moistened. Don't overmix it or smooth out lumps. Mainly, you're just looking to make sure there's nothing dry in your pancakes.

Heat a skillet or griddle at medium-high heat. The pan should be good and hot, but not smoking hot. Add just enough Canola oil to coat the pan and let it heat for about a minute. There shouldn't be any pools of oil. You just want to add enough to make sure they don't stick.

Add the batter by the tablespoon. I used about two tablespoons per cake and they were not huge, but not small. It's very important to follow this next part when cooking if you want to have good, fluffy pancakes. You need to watch them carefully and flip them when the edges look dry and/or the very first bubble starts to form on the top. If you have the heat set properly, they will brown quickly as well. Only flip them once or you will have tough pancakes. You can test for doneness once they're flipped by pressing gently on the center of one of the cakes. It should feel firm, but be springy.


If you wait too long to flip them, they won't rise enough. You should also be able to tell if they're ready by the fact that they don't break apart when you attempt to flip them (and by the edges looking dry near the bottom). Essentially, the bottom should be cooked and the top still quite wet. If you look at the stack of cakes at the top of the post, you can see that they are uneven because they were flipped when top was still very moist and it splayed out a bit (bottom is smaller than the top). This is what you want.

These are very hearty tasting and undeniably "wheaty" in taste, but they have the right texture and look and feel like an real, fluffy pancake. They're actually better with things like jam and honey than the average white flour pancake, but good with syrup as well. When you add the syrup, the pancakes will be more "crumbly" than usual pancakes because those made with whole wheat flour isn't as gluey as those made with white, but they don't disintegrate.

My feeling is that the baking soda made a huge difference with the whole wheat flour because it acts much more rapidly than baking powder. I think it gave these extra lift, but it also means you can't make too many at once or save the batter for the next day if you won't want to use it all. My recipe made 7 medium-sized pancakes. I ate two and put the rest in the refrigerator for the next few days. I recommend cooking them all up at once rather than saving the batter because I think they'll lose all of their capacity to rise by the next day.

Of Teachers and Idiosyncracies

For the last two and a half years, I've been tutoring a student who is studying criminal justice at a college on one of the American military bases. This is one of the reasons that I have insight into both the American and Japanese justice systems and wrote the "This is not America" posts. I'm not speaking from anecdotal experiences. I'm speaking as someone who has taken courses side-by-side with my student as she's mainly taken distance courses and my job has been to read her texts and provide a lecture for her to base her papers on. I'm just as much a student as she is, but I have the added benefit of her research into the Japanese justice system (in Japanese) as a part of my learning process. It's how I learned things like there are no rights provided in line with habeas corpus in Japan (or that they are ignored).

At any rate, one of the things about helping someone get through college is that you are taken back to the time when you were going through the process yourself. All of the issues that I experienced with some of my teachers back then are in play for my student as well, and I find myself frustrated on her behalf.

One of the biggest problems that students complain about is the amount of work that teachers give them. Each teacher tends to expect not only attendance at lectures and reading the textbook, but regular personal research into related topics and articles. Some teachers assign work as if their class were the only one the students are taking, or at least as if their class is the most important and therefore worthy of a disproportionate amount of the students' study time.

My student is currently studying with one of these types of teachers. She has a gigantic text chock full of more information than anyone could possibly retain on the first pass, but he also expects her to research for articles and information on discussion topics. This is on top of writing essays every week for homework. It appears to be a daunting task for even the students who speak English as a native language as my student has forwarded messages from the teacher where he complains that they are just writing their opinions too much and not doing enough volitional work to augment their essays content. Never mind that at least some of the questions that the teacher is telling them to answer are opinion-based questions...

The other point that I recognize as being akin to my college experiences is that some teachers don't actually teach. I considered myself fortunate that the vast majority of my teachers at university lectured on the content they wanted you to learn. A few of them, however, mainly told stories or anecdotes and did not actually teach so much as fill the time in a way which was easy and entertaining for them. My feeling is that teachers are supposed to aid the digestion of the material they want you to learn. They're supposed to take some of the hairier elements of the topic and make things much clearer than a book could. Teachers who just have chat sessions or tell stories tend to expect the students to regurgitate the book on tests and in papers while not actually helping you succeed at either of these tasks with their lectures. I will note that I only got a "B" in one of my psychology classes after choosing my major (the rest were all A's) and it was in a class with a teacher who did this sort of story telling and time-wasting class while testing us on the textbook material.

Another point I recognize through my student's work is that every teacher has different idiosyncrasies about how written work is done. Some of them take off points for sentences that are too long. Some of them take off points for paragraphs with too few sentences in them. Others have strict style guidelines which differ from those of other professors. Some of the really lazy ones insist that the students type out or copy and paste every question they are answering as part of a test or essay so that the teacher does not have to reference the questions while reading the answers. Others get miffed if you waste their time and word counts on putting the questions in your work.

The bottom line with the idiosyncratic choices for each teacher is that I have to help my student work out what they want each time and help her tailor her work to fit in with what a particular teacher's wishes are. Usually, it takes a few assignments and analysis of comments and corrections to work out what they want to get it right. This illustrates how subjective the academic evaluation process is as each teacher applies a different standard.

Finally, the one constant is that teachers grade you higher if you concur with their viewpoints on topics which require an opinion or conclusion. The teacher of my student's current class is a former police officer who identifies more strongly with victims. If my student expresses less punitive views of the perpetrator of a crime (such as mental illness factoring into punishment and charges), he's less likely to see what she writes or says favorably.

This is one of the stickier idiosyncrasies because there's a choice to be made in terms of either pandering to the teacher's bias to get a better grade or to simply be honest. Some teachers are open-minded enough to grade objectively if an opinion is backed up with research or evidence. Some are not. I haven't sussed this one out yet in that regard, but I'll know soon enough based on how she is graded on particular assignments.

One thing this has reminded me of is that we grow up seeing teachers as being authorities and being scholarly. In many cases, we see them as knowing much more than us and being in control in a manner which we are not. From a certain viewpoint, that is true. They are in control of the class and speak with confidence and authority. Of course, this is easier to do when you've presented the same material over and over and over again. The idiosyncrasies I've noted illustrate, however, that (at least some) teachers are just as human as anyone else and as likely as your boss at your office to apply arbitrary standards or unrealistic expectations as anyone else.

A Brief Note About Straw Man Arguments

Just a quick note for any readers who come over from Japan Soc and decide to quibble with me. I will ignore any straw men that are put up. I realize this means I will have to ignore most of what anyone says, since 99% of the arguments I encounter are based on straw men.

If you don't know what a straw man is, here you go.

This is Not America Pt. 2

(part 1 is here)

How do other foreigners feel about the changes to the way in which Japan will handle it's foreign residents? Well, many of the vocal minority appear to be just peachy keen with it. Some think it's a spiffy idea because they believe it'll help keep those awful illegal immigrants under control. You know those hordes of illegals, don't you? They're the smoke and mirrors politicians whip out to distract you from the real problems your culture is having like a tanking economy, rampant unemployment, a lack of social stability from the growing income gap, and the huge national debt.

At any rate, I don't have any qualms necessarily with the foreigners who support more punitive measures against foreigners if they have a sound rationale. Most of them don't, but that's really beside the point. What I'm really interested in is what causes people to support measures that are meant to make life more difficult for people like themselves. What motivates a foreigner to say, "yes, I'd like to see a measure passed where I'd have to fork over a monumental amount of money ($2,000 USD/200,000 yen) for being absent-minded enough to walk out of my house without my foreign resident's card and provoke the police into asking for my I.D. by willfully (and inappropriately) being non-Japanese looking."

This sort of question interests me because anyone who advocates making their own life harder has some interesting psychological issues at play. I know some people will take issue with this, but, frankly, they're being willfully stupid. If you don't believe me, go out and ask your family, neighbors and friends if they'd like to see their lawmakers institute a policy whereby failing to carry a certain kind of I.D. will result in a $2,000 fine.

And, incidentally, make sure you don't say anything about foreigners. We are talking about people advocating people like themselves being fined, not people unlike themselves. I can tell you that not one Japanese person I've discussed this with thinks that it is fair or a good idea to force foreign folks to pay such a fine (or to carry cards with computer chips in them for remote tracking or scanning, for that matter). It's mainly a certain population of foreigners who are fine with this. It's not the Japanese themselves. In fact, at least a handful of Japanese people I've talked to about this have concerns about the slippery slope. That is, they figure once it applies to us, it'll eventually apply to them.

Getting back to the main point, I have some speculation why I think some foreigners think that the proposed changes are fine and dandy like sour candy. My guess is that one or several of these may apply in motivating their "support" of future punitive and potentially highly invasive and insecure measures:

1. They want to ingratiate themselves to the Japanese by agreeing with anything they do rather than be seen as "troublemakers".
2. They are racist at heart and support racist measures in Japan because they'd like to support similar measures in their own culture.
3. They are frozen in Kohlberg's conventional stage of moral development and believe that lawful people will not be unfairly treated or punished. They see themselves as lawful and therefore immune to any sort of negative consequences to changes in the law.
4. They are so hopelessly self-centered and their worldview so limited that they believe bad things don't happen to foreigners in Japan because they've never had such experiences. That is, they don't even believe random harassment occurs because they have never been victims of it.
5. They hate other foreigners being in "their Japan" and would like to see others driven out. They figure making it more uncomfortable or unpleasant to stay here will weed out some of the riff-raff. These people are overlapping with those who find anyone who teaches English in Japan to be a blight on the country.

There are more reasons, I'm sure. However, the bottom line is that the situation for foreigners is dramatically different in Japan than other countries. One of the big reasons for this is that in other countries those in the same boat unite and help one another get better treatment and rights. In Japan, they attack each other and undermine each other's efforts to improve the conditions for foreigners. I'm guessing this is a pretty unique situation and it says a lot about the kind of people who decide to live here, and none of what it says is very good.

This is Not America

Occasionally, I'll watch one of the plethora of crime dramas from America that populate a great deal of Japanese cable television. Such shows are so popular that one of the Fox networks here is called "Fox Crime". Despite having a dumping ground for all crime-based programming on that particular channel, I still see plenty of other such shows on the plain old "Fox" channel and "Fox Life". If I had access to "Fox Movies", I'm guessing I'd see a lot more American crime drama there as well.

At any rate, when I watch one of these shows (usually with half an eye and half a mind), I occasionally see the hoary old routine where the police approach an immigrant and try to question him or her about a crime and try to intimidate said foreigner into cooperation by asking about his or her green card. For those who don't know, a "green card" is slang for one's permanent residence card or permission to remain in the country.

For the record, and for those who are not American or have been away for so long that they don't recall their own culture except through the lens of a T.V. camera, this sort of crap doesn't happen very often. This is not America. It's the fictional America which popular entertainment uses as a short-hand for reality because reality is so much more boring than pushy cops and weaselly immigrants who need to be coerced into cooperating in an investigation.

Lately, this topic has been on my mind as I've been following some of the drivel, er, comments attached to my friend Joseph Tame's video interview with foreign rights activist, Arudou Debito. Debito has his own site which he uses to raise awareness of news and issues related to life for foreigners in Japan. It's a place where people who need a platform from which to discuss their experiences can find an audience of supportive parties. Debito's aim is to act as if Japan were a place which should be held accountable for its actions toward foreigners and where the standards of ethics, equality, and morality which tend to be held in most developed countries should apply. He's a funny sort of fellow like that.

Debito's notions that principles that are good for everyone else ought to apply to Japan are not shared by the vocal minority of foreign folks in Japan. That is, there are a lot men from developed countries who think that what Japan does is just fine and justified. The part of this on-line cocktail party debate which concerns my introductory comments about America come in when these parties pretend America is "as bad" or "worse" than Japan when it comes to how foreigners are treated and the expectations of them when it comes to presenting identification.

For the sake of addressing my main point, which is a contrast and comparison between how America and Japan treat their respective foreign residents, I'm going to set aside the logical argument that one country's unethical or poor treatment of it's foreign residents is not in the least bit germane to a discussion of another country's. That's my way of saying that one country's poor behavior isn't a justification of another's. If you used that logic, we could justify anything including ethnic cleansing and religious persecution. If I live in Japan, my concern is how Japan treats its foreigners. The way America treats its foreigners is not the concern of Japanese expats. It's the concern of American expats, but let's set that reasonable argument aside, shall we?

One of the oft-cited reasons for justifying the upcoming changes to their dealings with foreigners is that America requires its foreign residents to carry identification and present it upon request as well. This is absolutely true. However, there is a marked difference in how the authorities in each country use their power to check identification and how they treat those who fail to present it. Japanese authorities abuse that power. American authorities generally use it only as necessary.

In Japan, the police will stop you and request that you offer your gaijin card merely because you look foreign. They can do this simply because they feel like harassing you, are bored, or want to flex a few power muscles. This is racial profiling and random harassment at its finest and it's easy for the Japanese to do because they figure most people who don't look Japanese aren't Japanese.

In America, the police don't go around randomly asking for I.D. for "foreign looking" people. They couldn't even if they wanted to because no one knows what a "foreigner" looks like in a country full of mixed cultural and ethnic histories. Beyond that, America has a long history of habeas corpus which anyone acting in a capacity related to criminal justice must act in accord with and is educated in. Don't know what habeas corpus is? In a nutshell, it's protection from being unlawfully detained by an official or unofficial person or persons. For the record, Japan does not have habeas corpus in its laws (or if it does, it's totally ignored). That means they can detain you for any reason any time. Their system does not operate from this judicial compass.

American police also have to act based on probable cause, not based on whims as the Japanese police do. The shorthand and oversimplified version of this that means the police have to establish that they have a reason to bother you before they can bother you. There are consequences for any authority that decides to randomly harass anyone for any reason. The Japanese police can essentially question you for no reason, drag you into the police station and interrogate you for no reason, and charge you for a crime without evidence. They can also hold you for up to 21 days without charging you for anything if they feel like it.

I'm not saying that the authorities never ask for the identification of foreign residents in America. I'm sure they do. However, they don't ask unless they have a reason to ask like you are a criminal suspect (for which they must have some evidence that you are connected to a crime, not simply that you look like a foreigner) or you are at a checkpoint for sobriety testing (at which every person is checked, not just those who look a certain way). What is more, any foreign resident in America who is mistreated already has a base of power from which to operate if he or she wants to lodge a protest. Even illegal immigrants have powerful support networks in the United States. I know this because I used to work at a community center which was for the Hispanic people in a particular area of California. I shared an office with one of their advocates. In Japan, we have no such support or power base if we are randomly mistreated.

So, yes, foreigners in America have to carry their foreign registration cards all the time, but the chances that they will be asked for them merely for walking around while looking foreign are exceptionally low. Could it happen? Sure. Does it happen on rare occasions. I'm sure it does. Does it happen often? No.

How can I reasonably conclude the latter? Well, besides the fact that the ethnic composition of the American population would make the same sort of random harassment you receive in Japan damn near impossible and that the laws in America are set up to protect everyone from such racial discrimination, I did some research. If you check forums for those holding green cards in America, what you don't find are discussions of being singled out and asked for I.D. pointlessly. You find talk about people who committed crimes and are worried they might be deported. You find information about paying taxes and citizenship hearings. You don't see anyone saying they were stopped and asked for I.D. for no reason at all.

The situation which Debito addresses in Joseph's interview with him isn't even about the current situation where police are asking for I.D. for no reason or subjecting foreigners disproportionately to bicycle theft checks. It's about the fact that the singling out of foreigners for carrying I.D. with computer tracking chips and punitive measures should they fail to carry their alien registration cards at all times is going to get harsher. If the new laws are passed, any foreigner who happens to walk out and forget his wallet can be fined 200,000 yen (that's $2,000 U.S. dollars) for not having his card. In America, if you don't have your card, you can bring it the next day or so. There's no fine or arrest. In Japan, you currently get hauled to the police station for questioning and are detained until a third party can deliver the card. That's the situation now. In the future, you can be held like a criminal and have to pay an exorbitant amount of money if you forget to take your card everywhere you go. So, forgetting your wallet or misplacing your card could be a terribly expensive and emotionally stressful mistake.

And lest you think the police don't give random checks, let me say that I've been randomly checked as has my husband, and we are very non-threatening-looking people who rarely go out at night (let alone late at night), don't drink alcohol or drive. We're very boring middle-aged people. My brother-in-law also told us early on in our stay in Japan that he had a coworker who stepped out in front of his apartment in his bathrobe to grab his mail and he was asked to present his card. After a great deal of persuading, the cop let him go step back into his place to retrieve his card. Needless to say, I don't take one step outside without my card. Every time I take out the trash in the morning, I have to take my wallet for fear that I could be at risk for being hauled off for detention and questioning. Having to make sure I never forget to take my wallet even for a brief trip to the trash pile about 20 paces from my door and directly in front of my building is a reminder to me each time I put a toe out my front door that I could be treated as a potential criminal.

(Part 2 to come)

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.

No Lives Were Lost

I just got word via Twitter that the green tea Cokes arrived with no related fatalities. A picture of the unexploded bottles was put up by their recipient here. ;-)

Angry Rant is Angry

There are 212 posts on this blog (and 218 in my other snack reviews blog). I can say with confidence that there are no angry posts on the snack blog since food, unless it is being hucked at my face by an angry mob, doesn't really angry up my blood. On this blog, any time I complain with a bit of fire in the blood, I tag the post as "whining". There are three such posts tagged on this blog and even those three are more like a very low simmer on the blood boiling scale.

The "There's no rule, but..." post garnered a bit of attention, and one of the commenters labeled me as "angry" because of it. The truth is that I'm not an angry person, but I'm also not a robot that drifts through the day providing programmed responses to stimuli without any sort of emotional response. When dumb things happen, or when I've had an especially hard time of it and something unpredictable and frustrating happens, I get mad, and I may drift into hyperbole or fail to express myself in an optimal fashion. This doesn't make me an angry person. This makes me human.

The truth is that I used to be pretty angry because my life has generally been a hard one and I live with pain on a daily basis (which is an emotional burden you can't imagine until you've lived with it day-in and day-out), but I've labored long and hard to control my temper and to mellow with age. And, honestly, I've done very well as my husband can attest to. For me, letting loose and actually having a proper rant is a rare and brief period of letting myself go in the interest of blood pressure control and free expression. The absurdity of someone reading that one post and reaching the conclusion that I'm angry, hate Japan and should leave should be apparent to anyone. They can more reasonably decide if I'm an angry person after they've read all 211 other posts on this blog and the more than 500 posts on my former blog. Even then, the picture of my character wouldn't be a true one, but it'd be a lot closer than judging me on one post.

The truth is that most people don't blog about indifferent experiences unless they are doing a diary-style blog, something which is rarer these days because of other outlets like FaceBook and Twitter which afford people with a chance to note experiences in their daily lives as they occur. Most people blog about something they have some sort of emotional reaction to whether it be happiness, anger, or curiosity. Mostly, I blog about curious experiences because that's what I think about most of the time. I'm actually happier far, far more often than I'm angry (by a country mile), but I'm pretty sure no one wants to hear about how the angels sing, the sun shines beautifully, and life is a wondrous cloud of love every time my husband comes home from work and once again shines the light of his soul directly onto mine (this happens on a daily basis, folks, I'm utterly smitten as my long-suffering sister can attest to). Hey, but if there is a demand, I'll start posting about that.

I also have a lot of gratifying conversations with my Japanese students on an almost daily basis, but I can only share snippets with people on occasion due to time constraints and a concern for protecting the privacy of the students. Also, honestly, how interesting would it be if I posted, "had a nice chat with a lovely student today" five times a week every week. Let me just say it now and then everyone can assume that is the case unless I say otherwise.

So, for the record, angry rants are angry. That's kind of the point of them. They don't define me, but if you choose to believe they do, then perhaps you shouldn't be reading this blog because I'm not going to pull any punches in responding to any commenter who judges me based on such limited contact with me.