So what do we eat in Japan?

Sometimes, we're guilty of letting this blog depict a life we don't lead. A life of constant adventures, cultural and culinary. Readers would be forgiven for thinking we spend every afternoon visiting temples and every evening eating Japanese food.

The truth is much more mundane: we spend most days at work and most nights at home. In fact, we eat at home about three nights out of four, depending on how crazy things are at work. A lot of what we eat is essentially American, but often with a couple unexpected substitutions or a little Japanese twist. Nana, who is really the field marshal of our kitchen, does a great job with a limited palette, given all the things we just can't get, or can't get cheaply enough to eat on a regular basis. She manages to keep our diet fairly healthy, too - though not so healthy that a weekly trip to the ramen shop can't put my cholesterol right back through the roof.

Anyway, here's a brief look at a week of meals at our place.

Saturday:

On weekends, we go to the grocery store, which generally means fresh salmon for dinner. Salmon is cheap here, and it's super-easy to cook in the little fish oven that's built into our range. Some weeks, we do it teriyaki style with rice and a salad. This time, we went a little more European - an thrown-together dill sauce, some sauteed potatoes, asparagus, and onions. A baguette, some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the side.

Like many weekend meals, this one was a joint effort: I did the fish, Nana did the potatoes, and we both kept an eye on the veggies.

Sunday:

Enchiladas. Mexican is a sure sign of a recent Costco run, as that's the only way to get affordable cheese and salsa of any recognizable sort. The tomatillo salsa was actually made with these mild little green peppers you can get pretty much everywhere here. For the filling, Nana used ground chicken, onion, paprika, cumin, and a whole bunch of cabos limes. (Apparently, they're a big thing around here.) We also had some tomato rice in there, all wrapped in a (frozen) corn tortilla from Costco.

Monday:

Weekday meals are often a bit simpler, as we usually get home late from school. For this one, Nana made shrimp with butter, garlic, onions, mushrooms, and asparagus, over rice. Usually, we try to leave enough leftovers for lunch the next day, unless there's a good lunch at school. Sometimes such plans do not come to fruition.

Nana does most of the weekday cooking: she says it relaxes her, whereas cooking at the end of a long day just stresses me out. I usually go for a bike ride instead. It's my job to clean up after the meal, at which time Nana usually curls up on the couch in a metabolic stupor.

Tuesday:

There's usually some pasta in there at some point in the week. That's penne with canned salmon, onion, and broccoli  rabe. Kind of like a pasta primavera. The sides are "jalapeno" poppers made with the leftover little green peppers, a bit of cream cheese, and bacon. According to the doctor, precisely the kind of thing I should never eat again in my life. Which means it was absolutely delicious.

Wednesday:

We went out. Wednesday is after-school meeting day, meaning sometimes we don't get out of the building until well after 6. Some weeks, when we're feeling particularly pole-axed, we'll stagger into the Lotteria, which is a McDonald's-esque Japanese fast food chain . . . founded by a Korean. (It's complicated.)

Other weeks, we'll pop into Menchanko-tei, a Fukuoka-based chain that specializes in noodle soups in the style eaten by sumo - with smaller portions, of course. This Wednesday, I opted for a yasai banzai ("10,000-year vegetable" or "longevity vegetable") menchanko, while Nana stuck with the classic. Those at the top are fried burdock sticks. Burdock is this freakishly delicious and healthy root vegetable that's cheaper than dirt in Japan.

The little side bowl in the lower right is for cooling and seasoning your noodles. Nana likes hers unadulterated, but I usually take mine with a hefty dose of yuzu paste, a condiment made from a bitter Japanese lime, soy, and a liberal dose of hot pepper.

Thursday:


On Thursdays, we're so busy we can't even remember to take a photo. Thursday is the only day of the week we're committed to getting out of school on time, as that's the only way to make our 4:40 Japanese lesson downtown. Luckily, the lesson lets us out right between Daimyo and Tenjin, two of Fukuoka's culinary hotspots. There's no telling what we'll end up eating on Thursday - though this time it was just a simple Hakata ramen.

Friday:


Fridays, when we eat at home, we usually throw something together from all the perishables left in the fridge. This usually takes the form of some kind of omelette or stir-fry, though occasionally pancakes are involved.

Yesterday, however, was parent-teacher conference day, so we didn't get out of school until late. Solution? Dinner with two of our Japanese colleagues, at a local place known for its hand-made udon (chewy wheat noodles). I had some udon soup and Nana had some soba (buckwheat noodles), each with another portion of fried burdock.

Conclusions:


Seven nights, three home-cooked meals - the sign of a week a bit busier than most.

Snow in Fukuoka

This is what we woke up to this fine February morning.

We don't get a lot of it here, which is kind of a shame: Japanese roof tiled look great in the snow.

Wednesday Weirdness: Bunny-Eared Magnetic Salt & Pepper Shakers

(Note to e-mail readers: click through to the blog for the video.)

As advertised: bunny-eared magnetic salt shakers, discovered in a curry shop in Kurokawa - which was incidentally the only place open for lunch that afternoon.

Kurokawa Onsen - Fujimoto Ryokan

You don't get much more Japanese than onsen (温泉). These volcanic hot springs can be found all over Japan, and the restorative bath has been a Japanese tradition for centuries. Some of the great onsen villages have been tourist destinations since times immemorial, but they have really taken off since urbanization: because most onsen are found in the countryside, they represent way for Japanese people to soak away the stresses of city life and get in touch with the country's rural past.

The downside, at least for a couple of prudish Americans like us, is that the onsen experience typically involves getting naked in front of strangers - usually, but not always, of the same sex. A second downside: onsen, and the ryokan (旅館, inn or "travel place") where they are usually located, can be really difficult to navigate without a little Japanese.

So it was that Nana and I were halfway through our second year in Japan before we had our first onsen experience. (Note: We did go to a Taiwanese-style, bathing-suit-friendly hot spring near Taipei.)

Now, there are many ways to do the onsen thing. For Japanese people, it seems the most common strategy is to book a room at a ryokan in an onsen town then spend the day hopping from bath house to bath house. But for a little more privacy and a little more seclusion, you can book a room in an isolated ryokan, or a ryokan outside a larger onsen town, and completely immerse yourself in world of ryokan hospitality.

Nana and I chose this latter option, with the help of a co-worker who found us a promising spot - Ryokan Fujimoto (旅館藤もと), just outside the onsen village of Kurokawa (黒川) in Kumamoto prefecture.

It's hard to describe exactly what a ryokan is. It's usually translated as an inn or a bed and breakfast, but it's more like a temple of relaxation. There is a definite ritual to the affair. You arrive in mid-afternoon, cross the threshold, and immediately step out of your shoes - this being the last you will see of said shoes until the moment of your departure. You're given a pair of slippers and a couple ninja-toed socks and escorted to your room,  where the feeding commences: a light snack and some green tea, a small hint of the two feasts to come.

Afterwards, you change into a loose robe called a yukata, which is basically a bathrobe you get to wear in public the whole time you're there, and you head down for a shower and your first of many baths.

This is where things can get tricky. First, you have to choose your bath - indoor, outdoor, public, private. Our ryokan had a great selection of private baths, ranging from warmish to roughly the temperature of the Earth's core. They were all essentially outdoor baths, though some had sliding windows you could close. The baths were arranged on the bank of the rocky little Shirokawa river, whose rushing white waters provided the perfect soundtrack for the bath.

Once you've chosen your bath, you need to shower - very thoroughly, if it's your first bath of the day. (And don't you even think of getting suds in the water!)

Then you get in the bath and simply . . . sit.

For those of you who know me, you understand why this is more difficult than it seems. Unless I'm asleep, I don't typically stay still, so it wasn't too long until I wanted to get up and explore all the other baths - which was naturally pointless, because as luck would have it the first bath we'd stumbled into turned out to be the undeniable best.

Anyway. Essentially, the entire ryokan experience consists of repeating this eat-then-bathe pattern, with one or more bouts of sleeping thrown in. It is, in a word, glorious. You arrive. They feed you. You bathe. They feed you. You sleep. You bathe. They feed you. You bathe.

And at a good ryokan, two of those feedings - dinner and breakfast - are so far beyond anything you've ever experienced that the word "meal" doesn't come close to capturing the event. The dinner includes about a billion courses of Japanese hatue cuisine, most of them featuring fresh local foods. Breakfast is a big buffet of more fresh local goodies. And because this is Japan, the volume in the dining room rarely rises above a whisper. I'm not kidding, the experience is almost holy. There's even the faint sense of incense in each and every room.

If it weren't for the less-than-forgiving floor mattress, which was pretty rough on my then-cracked ribs, I think I could have washed out an entire semester's worth of stress in a single night's stay - well worth the price of admission.

--

On either end of our stay at Ryokan Fujimoto, Nana and I had some time to kill in Kurokawa itself. We didn't do any of the onsen there - we just poked around the town.

Highlights included a heated public tatami room specifically for travellers in need of a quiet place to sit, plus a riverside bath that was, ahem, exposed both to the elements and to public view.

It was here we were treated to the unexpected sight of two young men dashing along the riverside, clutching towels to their nether regions while the steam rose from their backs. Yeah, I'm glad we found somewhere a bit more secluded - naked riverside sprints not being my preferred way to relax.

SOPA/PIPA Strike

You may have noticed some of your favorite sites going dark today as part of the SOPA Strike. Justin and I would have taken the blog down except we're not smart enough to figure out how to do it, and we're not sure if it would take itself down for Japan time or US time, or what. So we figured we'd stay lit but use a moment to talk about SOPA/PIPA.

SOPA and PIPA are two bills in front of the US Congress. The bills are ostensibly about copyright protection but are worded so broadly that a huge swath of sites, from Youtube to Wikipedia, to book review sites to web comics, could be taken down without due process.

There is also no guarantee that the bill's provisions would be used for copyright at all. Since takedowns are issued on accusation of infringement rather than proof, the bill could be abused by anybody, including the government, to censor grassroots political action, to squash e-business rivals, or simply to silence a critic. (What would the Manila Airport Hotel, for instance, or the makers of Apple Milk think of our blog?) This is a colossal threat to internet free speech. The bill also tampers with internet domain names, which opens up serious vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the Internet.

Opposing SOPA/PIPA does not mean supporting piracy. Rather, it means opposing swatting a fly - or, if you prefer something larger to represent piracy, killing a rat - with a SCUD missile.

As educators and as expats, we rely heavily on the web. I don't know how anybody taught overseas without it, frankly, both from the standpoint of delivering lessons to students and from the standpoint of keeping up with home. Therefore we are deeply concerned about the fundamental threat to the Internet which SOPA and PIPA represent. If you are a US voter, please contact your member of Congress to tell them you don't believe SOPA and PIPA are right for American and overseas users, or for the Internet.

Kyoto - Arashiyama Monkey Park

After a few days in Kyoto, Nana and I were beginning to feel pretty cultured, what with all those temples and museums and all those fancy clothes. So on our last day in Kyoto, we decided it was time for some monkeys.

The forests of Japan are home to a robust population of around 100,000 Japanese macaques. These intelligent "snow monkeys" are the northernmost population of non-human primates in the world, and are probably most famous for their love of hot springs in the winter. (You've seen shots like this before.)

On Mt. Arashiyama, on the western outskirts of Kyoto, there lives a troop of about 170 semi-wild Japanese macaques. At the Iwatayama Monkey Park (oddly enough, called the "Arashiyama Monkii Paaku," 嵐山モンキーパーク, in Japanese), visitors can feed the monkeys from inside a little building with caged windows and can snap photos of the monkeys on a pretty little hilltop plateau. (Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing visited with his family last August.)

"Monkey Mountain Entrance."

Another of the photorealistic illustrations so common in Japan.

I don't think this little shrine at the foot of the hill
has anything to do with the monkeys.

The park encompasses a hilltop partway up the eastern slope of Mt. Arashiyama, so it's about a thirty-minute hike to get there from the river valley below, unless you stop to watch some monkeys do their thing. The park doesn't recommend this - these are not small animals, and like most of us primates, they can be pretty dangerous when upset.

However, while the park may encourage guests to make their way to the top as quickly as possible, sometimes circumstances intervene. Suffice it to say that the monkey holds a place in Japanese culture similar to that of the rabbit in the West - amorous young couples are said to be, ahem, behaving like monkeys. When a pair of actual monkeys begins behaving like monkeys in the middle of the path to the top of the hill, it can create quite a traffic jam.

I will refrain from posting a picture here, partly out of respect for the noble monkey's (nonexistent) sense of propriety, partly because the male seemed pretty peeved at this Japanese guy who tried to photograph them in the act.

Anyway, a park ranger, no doubt puzzled by the sudden lack of visitors cresting the hill, came down to scare the lovebirds off, and the rest of the visit went without a hitch.

At the top of the hill is a small plateau where the monkeys come and go, with views of the city to the east and the Arashiyama suburbs to the north.

The plateau is patrolled by white-suited rangers, who generally keep the monkeys in line, and can also stage photos for guests. The little guy in the shot below was lured over by a few well-placed chestnuts.

Inside the hut, you can find laminated profiles of the monkey parks' "stars." This one appears to be named . . . Miso? I think? In any case, it seems she rates four stars.

Inside the hut, visitors can buy little treats for the monkeys - apple slices, peanuts, and chestnuts seem to be the favorites. Monkeys hang from the caged windows around the outside, looking for handouts.

Nana and I tried to feed the little ones first.

Nana was particularly charmed. (E-mail readers: This one's a video, so you'll have to come to the site itself if you want to view it.)

Oh, and the feeding-time bell? Which led to a disconcerting stampede of monkeys just as we were making our way down the hill? The cancan, from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. The perfect soundtrack for a ravening horde of macaques.

Maiko Makeup Make-over: Dressing like a Geisha in Kyoto

I've wanted to do geisha dress-up since I saw a photograph of someone in costume in our Lonely Planet Japan guide. Visiting theatrical performances aside, however, Fukuoka is not exactly a hotbed of geisha culture. By contrast, Kyoto and geisha go together like New York and cabbies: for the epitome of geisha culture, you have to go to the source.

The most interesting thing I learned in the course of this, besides how bad I look in geisha makeup, is the fact that I actually wasn't dressing up like a geisha at all. What we think of as the "geisha" look - white face and red lips - is actually more of a "maiko" look. Maiko are apprentice geisha, and their look is much more elaborate and colorful than adult geisha (which, just to make sure you're totally confused, are called "geiko" in Kyoto dialect). The best source I can find suggests that this is a look for young women, and that you might continue to wear it for a few years after promotion from maiko to geisha, but gradually a geisha starts to wear less and less, and by 30 the geisha will only be seen in full makeup for a performance like the dances we saw here in Fukuoka.

This is one of the problems with writing about geisha, however - most of the writing really is "about" geisha and not "by" geisha. (I recommend Discovery Channel's The Secret World of Geisha; it's the best English source I found while writing this post). Maybe that's different if I became fluent in Japanese, but geisha are (professionally?) discreet and don't talk much about themselves. Beyond the public performances which have always been a part of geisha employment, they have chosen to avoid catering to the massive tourist interest in them. It is impossible to just waltz into Kyoto and set up tea with a geisha (assuming, of course, you could afford it... Secret World puts a typical 3-hour evening at $600 per person, and that was over ten years ago). This appears to be because a geisha tea-house is like an old-school British gentleman's club: part of the point is that it's exclusive.

Geisha are sometimes harassed by tourists when out and about in Gion. Good guide books or hotel owners can tip you off on places to go to spot geisha, but they will also advise you to leave the ladies alone as they go about their work. If you didn't know, the word "geisha" means "artist," and modern young women who are drawn to becoming geisha generally do so because of a passion for the dance, theater, or music involved. They don't become geisha to be celebrities, and they don't like to be paparazzi-stalked and certainly not manhandled. They do not pose for photos with tourists, either.

Justin and I decided not to go to the location recommended by our hotel, not because of any discretion reasons, but just because the time of day (4-6 PM, when the geisha set out for their earliest appointments) didn't work with our schedule. However, when we were walking through Gion (Kyoto's geisha district) on our way to my makeover appointment, a panel door slid open and out popped a full-gear maiko. She peeked around, laughed with the friend in the doorway, and then scurried out to the vending machine to buy a coke. So that's my big authentic-geisha spotting experience.

The place where we went for dress-up is called Maica. They are not fluent in English but have enough translated paperwork for yutzes like Justin and me to get by. The way things work at Maica is you pick a package. None of these are cheap - they start around $75 - but the more you pay, the more you get. I chose the cheapest package, which included make-up, wig, kimono, unlimited time to take my own pictures in the (badly-lit) downstairs room, and one professional picture in their studio. More expensive packages include bonuses like half-wigs integrated with your own hair, pricier kimono or kimonos which have actually been worn by geisha, or the chance to leave the building to take pictures in the tiny courtyard. The most expensive one lets you go haring all over Kyoto to take pictures at temples and shrines. I wonder how many of those women are mistaken for the real thing by tourists.

(Side note: the English paperwork specified that men were welcome to dress as maiko, including wig and full makeup; however, they were not permitted to purchase the walk-about-Kyoto package "to protect the image of real Maiko.") Maica also offers male-clothing packages for men, and I forced Justin to get one so we could take a picture.

Once you pick your photo package, you are taken upstairs where you have to lock away your phone and camera for the changing process and change into a loose under-robe, which is also sort of translucent, so I recommend not wearing black underwear. Then you go upstairs where you choose the kimono you want to wear. Interestingly, I picked a red kimono for myself, and when Justin came into the room, he picked the exact same one for me.

You may notice a slight problem with that last statement, which is that the men and the women are in the same room, and you're wearing a flimsy translucent pink cotton shift. I warned you about that black underwear. Once I chose my kimono, poor Justin had to stand around that room for about twenty minutes while random Japanese Maica clients came in and out in various stages of dress and undress, doing his utmost to merge with the carpet until I came back out.

They put your hair up and give you a hairnet, then do your white makeup. Since I wasn't allowed to have my camera in there, I have no pictures of the proceedings, but I do have this one I illicitly snapped afterwards in the makeup removal restroom (incidentally, it also shows the flimsy pink garment).

Japan math: maiko makeup + inappropriate facial expressions = disturbing resemblance to the Joker:

Next they put my wig on, and I finally got wrapped up in my kimono. I thought it would take longer, actually, but they have it down to a science. Here is a photo of the final wig + makeup final product:

They paint your lips on extra small. I've read alternately that that's because small lips were considered beautiful and because the white makeup makes any lip look larger. Probably a combination of the two. The little dangly pink thing on the right is a maiko headpiece. Full geisha won't wear that.

Here's an extreme close-up of the eye makeup (and believe me, if I'd known I would be doing a zoom, I would have taken better care of my eyebrows):

If I'd done basic research, I would have realized that red is an essential part of geisha makeup. In fact, geisha only use three colors: black, white, and red. But I hadn't thought about it beforehand, so when the lady started putting red eyeliner on me, all I could think of was how I was going to look like a Scot on Saturday morning, or Justin within fifteen feet of a cat. The ultimate result was not as unflattering as I thought it would be, but I maintain that red eyeliner may be best suited to people without green eyes.

Another unflattering color issue with geisha makeup? A super-white face makes your teeth look dingy:

Interestingly, geisha used to get around this by dying their teeth black, so the teeth would just sort of fade away into the mouth. I'm not sure that's better.

Here's the neck makeup (and the obvious wig):

The nape of the neck is the only part left uncovered by geisha makeup. Traditionally, this area is quite sexy in Japan, and you can see that the kimono deliberately displays it. Think of this makeup as playing the role of a necklace worn with a low-cut shirt.

So now you've seen bits and pieces, but what about the whole look? I made Justin take like seventeen thousand photos in there to make sure something came out. Here are some of the highlights, featuring me doing my best to badly imitate what I imagine is correct geisha body language:



Reverse shot showing obi, worn hanging long maiko-style (geisha have bows):

DRAMATIC BLACK AND WHITE FILTER:

DRAMATIC JUST PLAIN WHITE INDIVIDUAL:

Justin did not take getting into character quite so seriously:


Note the one-toed Ninja Turtle socks. From our time at the ryokan (traditional hotel) we discovered that these are excellent and quite warm in winter, although I'm still boggled that traditional Japanese footwear calls for these and sandals outdoors in winter, and nothing else.

Justin behaved himself a bit better for the obligatory local-person-asks-to-pose-with-crazy-foreigners shot. (This happens sometimes and we always say yes. I figure it's the least we owe Japan for putting up with us.)

My favorite picture of the day is on another post.

Overall, I thought my time at Maica was totally worth the cost. I don't think it's worth it for men, but it would have been really lame for Justin to go with me and for us not to have a picture together, so in that case it was worth it as a couple. And now I can put another check mark in my "things to do in Japan" list!