Wednesday Weirdness: Our Local Gorilla in a Bikini

No matter how you look at it . . . it's a gorilla in a bikini scaling the apartment block across the river.

I don't even think it's advertising anything. It's just there. Taunting me like the Great Gonzo with its blatant defiance of gravity and good taste.

TheSenseitions at ZOMG, Candy!

Our friend Rosa has a candy blog (linked to at right, or here: ZOMG, Candy!), so occasionally we send here some of the strange things we run into overseas. You can see all the things we've sent here. I sent a bag of weirdness when I was back in the US over winter break, and Rosa's just started putting up reviews.

When I pick stuff for Rosa, I try to prioritize three things. First, it has to ship and travel well in all weather, which knocks out chocolate, and be acceptable to customs. Second, I don't get anything expensive or upmarket, since in Japan those candies tend to imitate Western products more closely and therefore are probably less interesting to a candy blogger. Also, they are hard to find in small portions, and I figure Rosa doesn't need a ton just for tasting. Third, Japan is really into local things, so I try to get her products which are hard to find even here. I just sent Okinawan Hi-Chews (candies with a Starburst-like texture) and have some Kyoto specialty Kit-Kats which some day I'll remember to put in the mail.

Unless the product has an awesome name, like Crunky Nude Balls. Then all bets are off.

Diet and Exercise . . . in Japan!

In our last post, we took a look at a week of typical dinners at our place. It turns out those dinners won't be so typical any more.

On Friday, my doctor has recommended some major lifestyle changes: lose a bunch of weight, double my daily exercise, and radically alter my diet.

Some of you know this already, as Nana's been in touch with our herbivorous foodie friends, looking for recipes, tips, and tricks. Others are probably hearing this for the first time, and might be fretting about their holiday menus. (Don't worry, Grandma, we'll figure it out!) But I wanted to post this as soon as possible: partly for motivation, as by committing publicly I'm making it a lot harder for me to let myself fail, and partly because treating something as an interesting, blog-worthy experience can really take the sting out of what would otherwise be a big pain in my (hopefully diminishing) butt.

So over the next few weeks, expect the occasional post about how the typical diet-and-exercise strategies have to be tweaked when you're living in a country where you don't really speak the language and you can't identify half of what you see on the supermarket shelf.

And if you like, wish me a hearty ganbatte!

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.