Japanese Microbrews

Until recently, beer in Japan was a lot like that in Korea: mostly mass-produced lagers, vaguely German in style, with occasional forays into other German-inspired styles. 

But in the last 15 years or so, microbrew culture has begun to catch on in Japan. Back in August, I had the chance to witness this movement first-hand, at the Kyushu Beer Festa here in Fukuoka. 

Most of the brews on hand were still German, but there was both greater variety and higher quality than is typically available from the big Japanese brewers.

I was surprised to find one brewery offering a Rauchbier--a "smoked" beer brewed with barley that has been roasted over an open flame. I happen to like the stuff, but it wasn't a big hit with my coworkers.

In the short term, the Kyushu Beer Festa was a great success: I had no idea there were so many great craft beers being made in Japan these days.

In the longer term, though, the event was a failure, as most of the beers on hand have proven almost impossible to find elsewhere. Which leads to the actual occasion for this post (and the reason I've set the world record for lag time by reporting on an August event in February): I finally found and purchased some good craft beers from the small booze shop attached to our upscale grocery, Bon Repas.

The beers come from Coedo, a brewery on Shikoku (also known as "the other main island that isn't Honshu or Hokkaido"). I was intrigued by them because they looked more British than German: one was essentially a stout, the other a kind of amber ale.

Both were pretty good examples of their styles. Nothing spectacular, but a whole heck of a lot better than Asahi Stout, and I don't think the big brewers even make anything but light lagers and black beers.

Video reminder

To email subscribers: The post I just did about pottery probably looks as though it has a few really, really grainy pictures in it. Those are actually videos, which don't show up in email. If you want to see the video, you need to come to the post on the blog itself. You can do that by clicking on the link at the very bottom of your email, where it says "Posted by Nana to The Senseitions." Or click on this link here: Pottery post.

In which all goes to pot

Justin and I have actually had a mellow work week. The kids seem to be "in the zone" and learning really well lately, and every year we teach, things get easier. The weather's been gloomy and wet, but after a year in Scotland that doesn't faze us (gloomy and wet is only really bad when you know it will never be anything else!). So what I guess I'm saying is... I have no explanation for why I haven't written a blog post since the weekend.

On Saturday we went back to the ACROS, home of the much-enjoyed saki-ori textile exhibition, for the Agano pottery exhibition. Agano is a local pottery style noted for its Korean influence, which dates back to a Korean potter who came to teach the style in the 1600s. (Korea was regionally renowned for pottery, especially celadon ware, the manufacture of which is the topic of the recent Newbery medal winning A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park. Justin taught that book this year, and it was a great hit with his many Korean middle schoolers. In my opinion it is a rare and awesome exception to the rule that award-winning books suck, and I highly recommend it to anybody with a young reader looking for an interesting book.)

I had friends in my material cultures master's program who are really into ceramics, but it was never my thing. I was surprised to really, really like the Agano ware on display. There's something sturdy and homey about it, but it's not at all heavy. The shapes, colors, and textures are pleasantly organic. We didn't take any pictures of finished stuff, but you can see some at this web site.

No finished stuff, you ask? Then what did you photograph? Why, our goofy and tragic attempts at throwing our own Agano pots on the try-it-yourself wheel, of course!

Alas, despite this auspicious beginning, all did not go well for Justin. One slip of the finger, and the pot collapsed beyond all redemption. Much like Justin's dreams of pottery glory.

Surely I could do better?

Well, it depends on what you mean by "better." By my count, it takes me approximately 14 seconds to completely ruin that pot. Since it took Justin much longer to ruin his, I think that means I win.

I was so bad that the pottery demonstration guy let me try again. This photo is from my second attempt.

Clockwise from upper right: my second attempt, Justin's first attempt, and terrific pot made by demonstration guy.


My first pot was so bad he actually threw out the clay, which is some kind of record when you consider what Justin's looks like.If we keep going to ACROS we're going to need a survey: "Which traditional Japanese craft did Justin and Nana fail at the hardest?" Stay tuned!

Japanese Envoys on the Eve of the American Civil War

The New York Times has been running a blog series, "Disunion," on the American Civil War. It's a cool concept--they run stories chronologically, with the same timeline that they would have followed in the 1860s. (For example, the November 2010 coverage was of Lincoln's November 1860 election.)

One of the posts I stumbled across today describes the experiences of a group of Japanese envoys in the US in late 1860 (link). It's full of great tidbits--for instance, there were basically no envoys who could speak English, but many educated Japanese could speak Dutch, thanks to the long-standing Dutch trading presence here in Kyushu. As a result, communication required two layers of translation: Japanese to Dutch, then Dutch to English.

Anyway, the post is a good read (as is the blog itself). Go check it out!

Snow solidarity

Our families in the Midwest and friends on the US East Coast have been socked in repeatedly this winter with blizzard after blizzard. Here, injurious skiff of bridge ice notwithstanding, we've mostly had to wrangle with chill and damp. Today's non-sticking fat flakes are about as close as we could come to what y'all have had to put up with, so we took pictures at a downtown temple to show our solidarity.




This is the same temple we visited last August, when it was so hot you could get heatstroke merely by thinking about going outside. What a difference six months can make!

Some Thoughts on Tiger Mothers

Being an educator in Asia, I feel a certain obligation to weigh in on the whole "tiger mother" thing. (If you need a crash course in Amy Chua's "tiger mother" approach to parenting, here's an editorial she wrote summarizing her book, and an analysis-plus-counterpoint from the NYT.)

Unlike a lot of Chua's detractors, I've had plenty of opportunities to observe the tiger mother in the wild. In fact, seeing as I've spent my entire (young) teaching career either in Asia or working with Asian students, I've probably dealt with more tiger mothers than I have with any other type of parent.

That said, I won't spend much time on the standard objections to Chua's parenting approach: that it makes learning (or even life in general) a joyless competition, that it stifles creativity, that it's emotionally (and sometimes physically) abusive, that it stunts children's social skills. These points are valid, and fit neatly with my observations, but they've been repeated often enough that I don't need to dwell on them here--as terrifying as it is to see the US edging closer and closer to the tiger-mother's heaven (that is, a world where everything depends on high-stakes tests with an emphasis on test-taking skills and memorization).

Instead, I'd like to focus on an argument that recently appeared in Slate: namely, that tiger parenting does not exploit America's competitive advantages in harder-to-measure areas of education like creativity, problem solving, self-motivation, and innovation. In doing so, I'll place emotional and psychological questions aside for the moment and evaluate tiger mothering as a strategy for success in different contexts.

The principle of competitive advantage is an idea in economics: simply put, it suggests that countries should focus on producing the things they're best suited to produce, then should trade for everything else. People often use sports analogies to explain it: a track-and-field coach would never consider a 300-pound freshman a failure because he can't keep up with the sprinters--instead, he'd focus on developing the student's discus skills, thus making use of his "competitive advantage" in size and strength and sidestepping his "competitive disadvantage" in quickness and speed. It would be stupid to try to turn the kid into a sprinter.

This, argues Ray Fisman in the aforementioned Slate article, is exactly what the tiger mother phenomenon--and the current high-stakes standardized-testing movement--threatens to do to US education. If the US has a competitive advantage in producing creative, problem-solving, socially skilled innovators, why should we revamp our system to out-compete the Chinese in producing precision-minded (but relatively uncreative) technicians? Notice that this argument doesn't privilege one type of worker over the other--both are necessary pieces of the global economy.

The Slate article focuses on large-scale economic effects, but the idea of "competitive advantage" also applies to individual cases--and, just as it does on the level of national economies, it also argues for different strategies in different situations on a personal level, as well.

Nana and I are always telling students that, in preparing for college, they should be themselves, but be the best versions of themselves that they can be. In other words, students should find a handful of things they enjoy and are good at, then should strive to become as good at those things as they can. The stereotypical tiger mother approach ignores this sensible advice: the goal is to out-compete other children (and their mothers) in the same fields (math, science, music, tests, award-collecting). The thing is, there are kids out there who are simply super-geniuses in those fields, and thanks to stereotypical tiger-mother parenting, there is also a legion of second-rate sub-geniuses in those fields. Trust me, I know people who work in college admissions, and Asian students who are pretty good at math and music and not much else are so common that they've become a cautionary tale against admitting students simply on the basis of high test scores.

The real strategy for Asian students in English-language schools should be the exact opposite: they should sell out for language and communication skills, since they're in a unique position to finish high school fluent or near-fluent in two or three languages. Nana and I often work hard to convince students here who are interested and skilled in the humanities to go for it. College freshmen who can do original research in English, Japanese, and Korean or Chinese? They'll rule the world!

But by the tiger mother paradigm, those students are failures: they should have spent more time studying for the SAT, or practicing the piano. That, for me, is the real tragedy of tiger mothering--that despite all the abuse and misery, for many students, it's simply poor strategy. Too often, tiger mothers try to turn linemen into quarterbacks, instead of just letting them be the best linemen they can be.

(Note: Nana says she's going to weigh in with her own set of objections to tiger mothering soon.)

Commuting casualty

Justin and I have an obnoxiously easy commute. It takes us maybe five minutes to get to school on bikes, on a route with essentially no traffic and a great view. We go over the bridge, with a mountain range downriver to the right and the ocean to the left, and often catch a glimpse of the cranes from the nearby sanctuary hanging out in the river. Then it's along the river, heavily populated by little dogs in stupid outfits, up the hill, down the hill, and we're done. Meanwhile, my sister still has flashbacks from commuting in Atlanta.

The only downside of my commute? Last week, we had a tiny skiff of snow. The bridge itself wasn't icy, but the ramp down from it was. I braked, I failed, I bit it. Here is the result:

Apologies for the leg hair. I promise the part at the lower right is a leg warmer.

Looking back on it, a five-colored kneecap was a small price to pay. As mentioned, I was on the bridge ramp, and when your bike wipes out, so does everything in your bike basket, including cell phone, house and classroom keys, wallet with foreigner card, and precious tuna sandwich. In a stroke of inexplicable luck, everything I was carrying stayed on the ramp instead of flying over or through the railings and into the river, where Justin would have had to fish them out. (Of course Justin - hey, I just fell off a bike here, people).

Moral of the story: Muppet Family Christmas was right. "Watch out for the icy patch!"