Counting Money . . . in Japan!

It's the little things that make countries different.

For instance, it used to be that whenever I got one of those customs forms asking me to declare currency in excess of $10,000, I could never imagine a situation in which a regular, law-abiding person would be carrying that much cash. What would it feel like to know you had that much money in your pocket?

Now I can tell you: it's terrifying, even in a place as safe as Japan.

You see, Japan is a cash economy. They don't use credit cards too often, and small restaurants (read: most restaurants) don't even take them. The withdrawal limit at the ATM isn't $500, it's $5000.

And to go along with all that cash, they have some interesting ways of counting it.

This morning, BoingBoing linked to a video showing the different ways people count money in different places throughout the world. East Asia is the first:


(link)

Indeed, this is the method I've seen Japanese people use for "normal" amounts. But for huge piles of cash, they use a different, much zanier method.


(link)

For the first few seconds, you're completely puzzled as to what they're going to do with that giant fan of money. Maybe wave it around while taunting their enemies? Then it becomes clear that the Japanese have had a lot of practice with this whole counting cash thing.

Of course, when I have to count large stacks of bills (which happens surprisingly often, despite my choice of career), I resort to the much less graceful method of turning a big stack into little stacks of ten - ten being about as high as I can count without getting lost.

Yes, I can drive. IN JAPAN.

This past June, after many trials and many more errors, I was licensed to drive in Japan. I claim no credit for my eventual victory: it rewarded no actual skills besides a stubborn refusal to look facts in the face.

But the day after I got my license, I was on a plane back to the States, so I would have to wait until this past Sunday to finally enjoy the fruits of my labors.

You have to understand, I spent a good portion of my summer daydreaming about all the cool things Nana and I could do now that I could rent a car. I saw us speeding along the back roads of Itoshima for Saturday lunch at an out-of-the-way beach bar, or driving off to some distant mountain ryokan some Saturday night. We could just  . . . Drive, and See Things, and Stop At Things If They Look Neat! Finally, we could stretch our wings a little bit, and get a taste of that other Japan, the one off the rail lines.

So how did I use my first taste of freedom?

I went to Costco, to buy American stuff.

Granted, I don't really consider this a defeat: throughout my ordeal last June, Costco was among the many green lights at the end of my dock. For Nana, it was always been less about me having a driver's license than it was about me having a go-to-Costco-whenever-we-want license. Which is fine with me, because Costco means hot dogs and peanut butter.

Still, I wish my first time driving in Japan--my first time driving on the left!--had been a little more momentous. I did nearly kill us twice, but that had nothing to do with the novelty of driving, and everything to do with the fact that the school van handles like a tank and brakes like a battleship. 

If we hadn't made it, though, at least you could have said we'd died as we'd lived: in search of smoked brats and affordable cheese.

Zazen Meditation

I spent Tuesday afternoon sitting on my arse.

Luckily, it turns out half of Zen is simply learning how to sit.

I have to say, I had some preconceptions about Zen going into our first Zen meditation session, which was part of the Japanese language course we took this week.

"Zen" has some pretty strong connotations. You hear the word "zen," you think of bonsai trees, rock gardens, motorcycle maintenance, maybe green tea. In the West, Zen has come to stand in for Buddhism in general, and to my Western mind, there aren't many things more Japanese than Zen. The clean lines and empty spaces of Japanese interior design, the careful simplicity of a Japanese garden, even the minimalist flavors of Japanese cuisine--I know I've described each of these things as "zen."

Look! Zen!

I even dared to feel a little "zen" last June, epic struggle with the Japanese driving exam.

But as we walked through the gates of Shofuku-ji, the oldest Zen temple in Japan, I realized I didn't know the first thing about what Zen actually means. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd never meditated before, aside from a few relaxation exercises, and maybe a couple good ski runs.

Somehow, I don't think this is the face of serenity.

Had I been of sound mind and body on Tuesday, I'm sure a host of appropriate questions would have been on my mind. As it were, though, I was too jet-lagged for anything but the most obvious worries: staying awake in the heat and sitting on the floor for an hour.

Indeed, these would prove to be the greatest challenges of the day.

When we got to the monk's quarters at the back of the temple grounds, we found he'd gone out: apparently some miscommunication had left him expecting us the next day.

Pictured: An absence of monks.

An older lady led us to a tatami room for some chilled barley tea and some snacks. It turns out she was the widow of the previous monk: apparently, low-level monks may marry, and in fact many temples are passed from father to their eldest son. That was how our monk had come to Shofuku-ji: born near Fukuoka, in Karatsu, he was the second son of a monk, and the Shofuku-ji monk died without a son to take over for him.

The house was beautiful: clean lines, polished wood, sliding doors and glass windows framing the leafy grounds of the temple outside--very "zen".

The sitting room was beautiful, too, at least for the first few minutes.

That afternoon had brought with it a boiling surge of damp heat, and the atmosphere in the house was oppressive. It seemed the sitting room had no air conditioner, or at least none that we could find. I decided this was also Zen--the austerity, the indifference to physical sensations. Maybe we were being tested, I thought, for Zen-like patience.

These kinds of thoughts make sense after your sleep-deprived brain has been steamed into mush.

We had thirty minutes before the monk returned, and if it hadn't been for the snacks, they would have been among the most uncomfortable minutes of my life.

I call it "Sweaty Man Eating Walnut Gummy Stuff."

Instead, I nibbled a bit, slipped into a stupor, and let Nana do all the talking for me, which burden was lessened slightly when our Spanish classmate curled up on the tatami for a quick siesta.

I was just thinking about joining him--though not without pausing to wonder whether it was hypothermia or heat stroke that ended with a fatal urge to go to sleep--when the monk returned, gasped in horror at the temperature, then produced an air con remote from an obscure corner of the room. Had I been more alert, I would have snapped a photo of the good monk, in his robes, summoning cold air with a flick of his wrist.

Thus passed the first of several notions disabused that day.

Next to fall was the prevalence of Zen in Japan: according to the monk, although the vast majority of Japanese people self-identify as Buddhist, few practice with any regularity. In fact, besides grounds-keeping, funerals are the main business of most Buddhist monks in Japan. Some lay people meditate, and some celebrate Buddhist holidays, but for the most part, they don't have an active relationship with Buddhism. (They do practice Shinto a little more frequently - but more on that in a later post.) In other words, for a lot of the time, Zen monks are more like curators or park rangers than clergymen.

After our brief lesson in the history and culture of Zen in Japan, the monk led us away for some actual "Zazen" (seated meditation).

You can picture Zazen in your head, maybe blended with a dash of yoga: a serene young woman, perhaps, with her legs crossed and her hands together, breathing deeply. In the next shot she'll be eating probiotic yoghurt.

Well, Zazen is a little like that, but apparently it also has its practical side, too. In fact, our meditation lesson was supremely practical, consisting mostly of tips for sitting still comfortably without falling asleep.  For instance, before we went to the meditation room, we were all reminded to pee. We had little cushions to make the lotus position more comfortable, and we were given some variations on the lotus position aimed at old cripples like me.

We were told to focus on the far end of the tatami mat in front of us, keep our eyes open but our lids heavy, breathe in slowly through our noses and exhale slowly through out mouths. A wooden clapper signalled the beginning of the session, followed by three chimes to help us measure out our breathing (I think). Then, a wooden clapper signalled the end. We stood up, took a few slow turns about the room - to wake up our sleeping legs, we were told - then sat back down for a second session.

I, in the meantime, had sat perfectly still - and awake - for five whole minutes. Probably for the first time in my life.

The experience was definitely interesting. I was actually pretty successful at emptying my head, which is kind of the goal of Zen meditation. The first session seemed pretty long, but the second session - a ten-minute sit - seemed a lot shorter. I may have nodded off a bit, though probably not, as the monk was patrolling throughout this session with a long wooden stick slung over his shoulder.

It doesn't take much imagination to realize what that stick is for.

All in all, this was an experience I might repeat. It was certainly relaxing, and I can't think of any other circumstance in which I could sit in a humid, 95-degree room and feel refreshed. But it was nice, sitting quietly, listening to the birds and the leaves and the cicadas, enjoying the breeze. I'm not sure if there was a larger point I was missing, but you know what? I'm also not sure I care. Maybe that's the point. I don't know.

On the plus side, thanks to the mosquitoes, Nana stumbled upon a new koan, which she presents to you in the form of a haiku:

Meditate upon
the sound of one hand clapping
against a skeeter.

-Nana-san

It takes months to "solve" a Zen koan, but our monk solved this one in no time flat.

Lessons From Our Japanese Language, um, Lessons

Nana and I returned to Japan a week before the official start of work. Those with a little more sanity than we might have spent this time recovering from jet lag, lounging on the beach, or maybe even getting a head start on their school work.

But not us! Within about 12 hours of our arrival in Fukuoka last Sunday night, Nana and I had embarked on a week of intensive Japanese language lessons at Genki JACS ("Japanese Language and Culture School" - the same place where we took our evening lessons last spring). The course consists of four hour-long lessons daily, plus three two-hour cultural excursions spread out over the course of the week. (More on those excursions later.)

Now, I won't try to teach you Japanese in the space of one blog post--and you should thank me for that, because I have a habit of nattering on about obscure points of linguistics that bore all but a chosen very few. Instead, I will try to teach you some of the big, non-Japanese lessons we've learned so far this week.

1. We can totally hear European accents in Japanese. Within the first few minutes of our first class, Nana and I had some pretty solid guesses about who spoke what language at home.

• German speakers, as in English, have a hard time sorting out the "w" and the "v," so that watashi ("I") becomes vatashi. 
• French speakers leave out a lot of consonant sounds, such as any "h" at the beginning of a syllable, so that hon ("book") becomes on. 
• Both have a really hard time with the "r/l" sound, which is in the back of the throat in French and German, but is actually a kind of a flutter in Japanese.
• British English speakers have those long, dark (?) vowels, so that watashi becomes more like wataaa(r)shi or even wawtawrshi.
• American English speakers make every darn vowel sound exactly the same.
• Spanish and Italian speakers have no freakin' difficulties whatsoever because the grew up speaking pretty much every sound that was ever uttered in Japanese. They maybe speak a bit too evenly--you know that rapid-fire Latinate monotone I'm talking about--and miss some of the intonation.

I wonder if these accents seem so pronounced to us because the course book is written in English. In other words, the European students are getting their pronunciation clues through the English alphabet, so naturally they'd pronounce Japanese like they'd pronounce English.

2. Fukuoka is being overrun by the Swiss. Now, I have nothing against the Swiss, but it must be said that they make up a disproportionate percentage of the population at Genki JACS. Even more so, probably, because a lot of Swiss sound German or French, so we don't really know if a German or a French speaker is Swiss unless we ask them directly.

Nana wonders whether it's a function of the exchange rate: the Swiss are among the few in the world for whom buying yen is a bargain. I wonder whether there's a large Swiss business presence in Japan, as the Japanese are suckers for small, well-designed, well-made, and well-engineered gadgets. Plus, of course, strong currencies and extreme fiscal conservatism.

3. Nana and I learn languages differently. Nana learns through muscle memory: she repeats words, phrases, and patterns until they're ingrained and can be recalled at a moment's notice.

I, on the other hand, learn through pattern recognition. I actually can't seem to remember anything beyond the basics unless I know why it means what it means.

Let me give you an example. When we had to learn the question dokokarakimashita (a stock question for meeting and greeting that appeared in our very first lesson), I was completely lost, but Nana immediately came up with a handy little song, which she repeated over and over until she could conjure the word at will.

I didn't actually get dokokarakimashitaka until I learned all the pieces: doko (where) kara (from) ki (come) mashita (polite past tense ending) ka (question particle). Add 'em up, you get "Where do you come from?"

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make the thing stick through brute force. It only stuck when I understood the structure.

Conversely, I seem to be a lot better at learning and applying patterns than Nana is. With conjugations, for instance, she typically needs to repeat the different forms of new verbs, whereas I can pretty quickly figure them out using a few basic rules. I also seem to be quicker with learning kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese), as these symbols have multiple readings--that is, you say them differently in different contexts--but the same basic meaning. I think I just have an easier time connecting kanji to different readings.

Nana, ever gracious, claims that our skill sets are equal, just different. She says I'm better at understanding (and especially at reading), while she's better at speaking and especially at responding to questions. Still, I'd rather be able to do it Nana's way: speaking is a lot more useful than reading, and it certainly makes you look a lot smarter than squinting at a poster for a minute, turning your head to one side, and proclaiming that shoving elderly people down the escalator isn't proper subway etiquette.

Back in Fukuoka

Nana and I arrived safely in Fukuoka last night--right on time. Give Delta credit where credit's due: after I panned them for getting every last thing wrong on my trip home in June, they got us from Pittsburgh to Fukuoka without a hitch in 24 hours flat.

Alas, JCOM hasn't been so good: the internet's out in our apartment, so updates might be sporadic for the next couple days.

Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams: Justin & Nana Eat Weird Stuff for Your Entertainment

East Asia may be the weirdness capital of the world, but they don't have a monopoly when it comes to strange eats--you can find plenty of odd flavors right here in the USA!

For instance: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, a local Ohio chain of adventurous gourmet ice cream shops.

I found out about Jeni's just this morning, from a Yahoo! Travel article on the country's best ice cream. Columbus, with its dairy-producing hinterland, has long been known as a good ice cream town, with several notable local chains. Neither of us had ever been to Jeni's, though--seemed like the perfect way to spend out last night in Ohio.

Now, thanks to the magic of the taster spoon, we were able to sample several flavors before committing to our scoops.

The salty caramel was first. Exactly as advertised: caramel, with sea salt. Definitely appeals to the guy who's been known to eat an entire bag of chocolate-covered pretzels in one sitting . . .

We also tasted black coffee (coffee ice cream that tasted like actual coffee ice cream, according to Nana's mom), brown sugar almond brittle (a bit sweet for Nana's tastes), and coriander raspberry (a nice combo, but with the yogurt flavor perhaps a little too strong). In addition, Nana's mom was kind enough to share some of her mint, which tasted like actual mint (you'll notice a theme here), a flavor achieved, I'm told, by steeping actual mint leaves in the cream.

For our own scoops, I started with Queen City Cayenne--dark chocolate with a hefty dash of hot pepper. For me? Just awesome. I've had a long and tumultuous love affair with spicy chocolate, and this was like eating a cup full of red pepper truffles.

It was a bit spicy for Nana, though.

We followed up with wildberry lavender. A very delicate flavor, kind of like floral tea with a hint of blueberry and blackberry. Really freakin' good.

And we ended with sweet corn raspberry. Nana hated this one, but it grew on me with every bite. It really did taste like sweet corn--buttery, a bit salty.

Finally, Nana's sister kindly offered us a few spoonfuls of her take-out scoops, dark chocolate and milk chocolate. Classic flavors, done exceptionally well. Tons of chocolate flavor, without the blast of sugar you usually find in chocolate ice cream.

All around, Jeni's was a huge success. Go check it out if you're an ice cream lover with some time to spare in Columbus!

Just Ducky: Playing the Tourist in Pittsburgh

Travelling is more of a mindset than it is a journey or a destination. One of the reasons Nana and I like living overseas is that it constantly sheds new light on old, familiar things. You quickly learn not to take, say, grocery shopping, or commuting, or ordering dinner for granted when you have to face each of these little challenges in a new and unfamiliar way. It's constant discovery, constant trial and error (with an emphasis on error). Really, it's almost like being a tourist all the time, right where you live and work.

Unfortunately, Nana and I have a tendency to turn off the tourist mindset when we're in the US for the summer. We're home, right? What more is there to see or do or learn? I mean, why not just sit around, go to the gym a few times a week, hang out in the coffee shops, and haunt all the old restaurants we liked back when we lived here? All told, it's not a bad way to spend the summer. Just a little less exciting than we're used to. But this isn't through any fault of the local geography: there's a ton of cool stuff to do in western PA and central OH, we just weren't really doing it.

So Nana and I made a resolution earlier this summer to try at least a couple new things in Pittsburgh and Columbus. The resolution didn't last long--we quickly reverted to our standard summer occupations of reading, loafing, and hanging out with family and friends--but while it did last, we spent a great afternoon with some family on a Just Ducky tour of Pittsburgh.

Photo: Patti Brahim

Just Ducky operates a fleet of amphibious truck-buses (World War II surplus, the lot of 'em) out of the Station Square area of Pittsburgh. On the spur of the moment, we met some family members down there for a midday tour a couple weeks ago. Just the sort of thing we were looking for: literally, a new perspective on a familiar old place.

(A note of warning to anyone related to me walking around Pittsburgh: as time "t" increases, the probability of running into one of my relatives approaches 1. While waiting for the tour to start with my dad's side of the family, we ran into some cousins from my mom's side outside the Hard Rock Cafe.)

Photo: Patti Brahim

Just Ducky Tours uses the DUKWs as a platform for perky land-and-sea showcases of downtown Pittsburgh. The tours focus heavily on architecture, which is understandable given Pittsburgh's rich architectural heritage, with some history and pop culture thrown in.

For the young at heart, however, the highlight definitely comes after the boat is afloat: the tour guides choose a couple children to pilot the boat (at a roaring speed of five miles per hour) past the Carnegie Science Center. It's really a treat for the young ones--so serious, as they strain to get their wide eyes over the wheel. The kind of thing these little munchkins will remember for the rest of their lives.

This one kid, though, had trouble keeping her eyes on the road.

Photo: Patti Brahim

Dear readers, I give you Nana, driving a World War II-era amphibious troop transport down the middle of the Ohio River.

Give her a hand, folks! Isn't she great!

Apparently, the skipper shared my assessment of Ensign Nana's debut performance, awarding her with not one, but two "I Drove the Duck Boat" stickers, the latter of which is now blazoned on the right palmrest of her laptop, an eternal testament to the glory of her short but distinguished naval career.