I miss Japan
May 30th, 2009
It’s been a while since I came back to the US, and I still have a few more months till I move to Japan, but I miss it a lot. Maybe more specifically I miss my wife.
On Japanese McDonalds
March 31st, 2009
I am writing this while sitting enjoying a beer in shibuya, taking a load off. I am using my iPhone, so excuse any spelling mistakes.
I went to a Japanese mcdonalds today to have the てりたま (teritama), which is short for teriyaki tamago, or teriyaki egg. Basically, it a teriyaki pork pattie with lettuce and an egg on top, with some mayo. It’s sort of the Japanese equivalent of the mcrib in that it is limited to only hanami time (sakura blooming season). It is almost an image of spring, which is funny since I don’t see the spring-ness of teriyaki pork and egg.
Anyways, it was really tasty. The sauce has a Ginger taste to it, and the egg is light. All in all it was good.
One thing that is interesting about mcdonalds in japan is that they all have wifi, so people go there with their laptops. Starbucks, on the other hand, doesn’t always offer wifi, and truthfully it doesn’t seem that the Japanese equate coffee with work. Instead it’s more a time to relax, so no one would think about using their laptop. So, mcdonalds is the place to go if you need to quickly check mail or skype home. I actually heard that mcdonalds in china have a phone you can use to call internationally for a few minutes for free since all of them are connected to a mcdonalds network, so the voip is essentially free.
A spectacular world we live in, huh?
On life and death in Japan… (i.e. serious)
March 30th, 2009
This is going to be less about the strangeness of living in Japan and more about some of the serious cultural aspects of living here, particularly in dealing with death.
The other night, I went out with a new relative. I say that now that I’ve married into the family, and also that he’s not related by blood (well, of course we aren’t, since I married into the family, but so did he). Anyways, his wife passed away recently, and it was the one-year anniversary of her passing. As such, we got together as a family to celebrate her life. Not wholly different from what I grew up with in Vietnamese culture, but for some reason it felt a lot more real.
We went out to dinner. This is the first time I met the guy, and actually the first time my wife had seen him since she was a little kid. She didn’t remember him at all, but did remember his balcony where she remembers riding around on a tricycle. The extraordinary aspect to that is that we believe this to be around when my wife was maybe 3 years old, so the idea of memories that young is pretty amazing.
Anyways, we went to a yakitori place in Tokyo. Great food. Chatted it up, drank a lot. Turns out our histories were somewhat intertwined, as he had done his post-grad work at CalTech (my home town), did things at Scripps (in Monterey, I worked in San Diego), and he had spent a lot of time in Seattle, where I lived for 6 years. We talked a lot about these places (his English is near perfect, so it was easy for me to talk to him), and eventually we all went back to his house nearby. Took some photos from out on his balcony, the same one my wife remembers from her childhood.
We talked a lot about being alone, about adjusting to his new single life. He showed us a bunch of dishes that we have pick over when I finally make the move to Japan, as he won’t need them anymore. He was also giving away a lot of his wife’s old clothes to my wife and my mother in law, not only so they can remember her, but also so he can see the happiness on their faces.
He showed me a placard that he got from the temple, that had his name and his wife’s name inscribed on the back side, and their Buddhist names on the front. For the given names on the back, his wife’s name was written in gold, and his was written in red. When he passes away, his name will also be filled in with gold. The front names were these long strings of kanji, meaning “one who brings happiness to others like wind through a garden” or something to that effect (I only picked up a few of the kanji, and I was a little drunk when he explained it to me). He was telling me about how he chose his own Buddhist name, because he didn’t want it to be a burden on others after his passing. He figures that if he does it now, others won’t have to worry if that was what he wanted. Apparently he and his wife never had kids, so I guess he’s trying to take care of it all himself.
We did some praying at the shrine that he has in his house. It’s how you expect an small shrine to the deceased to look: a small altar, a picture of them (usually very old, or very official looking), a small place for incense, a bowl/bell thing, and some flowers. As you all know, I’m not a religious person, but I did take part in it, as I knew it would make everyone around happier.
Overall it was a very emotional night. Apparently I committed somewhat of a faux pas that night when I noticed that he was struggling to get a box from up high in a closet, so I rushed in and helped. Apparently, that was his wife’s room, and doing so was kind of weird. But they understood I did it in good faith, and I didn’t know, but I was told later it was kind of odd.
This is a strange time in my life, I guess. I’m not only starting my own family, but I’m seeing others at the end of theirs. My uncle recently passed away, my mom is preparing for her last days… it’s hard to deal with at times, you know? Things that were so constant in your life growing up, you realize aren’t so constant after all. Mortality is a strange thing to deal with…
On Japanese beer
March 23rd, 2009
I’m going to write about something that a lot of other people have already written about. It’s really not new information, but at least it is interesting to me.
Japanese beer comes in three different varieties: “true” beer, low-malt beer or happoshu, and third generation beer. They are determined by the different levels of malt used to produce them, and therefore taxed in different categories.
Yebisu is an example of true beer, as in it uses a high malt content and is taxed accordingly. Yebisu in itself is Sapporo’s premium brand. Imagine a Sapporo that’s a bit more dry, but also a richer flavor. I’m personally a huge fan of it, not only because of the taste, but the fact that it’s something I equate as an item I can only get in Japan (when in fact, you can now get it imported in California and New York, although for almost Japan-like prices). Yebisu is the name of one of the Seven Lucky Gods (the fisherman guy that’s on the can). It’s also the name of the area in Tokyo in which the Sapporo beer museum is. What’s interesting about Yebisu is that the “Ye” it uses the deprecated Japanese kana, ヱ. The modern day place where the beer museum is Ebisu (エビス), which uses the more common エ katakana. I’ve heard that Yebisu depicted on the aluminum can sometimes has 2 fish (one that he is holding, and one in the basket behind him). Apparently these are super rare, as I drink a lot of Yebisu and I’ve never seen one!
The next style of beer is the “low-malt” beer, or happoshu. Happoshu (発泡酒) literally means “sparkling spirits.” I guess if you had to equate it with American beer, Yebisu and other true beers would be the high class lagers (take your pick), where the low-malt stuff would be like Coors Light.
What really sets the low-malt beers apart from the Coors Lights of the world is that they’re surprisingly good. You can taste a bit of difference between the higher quality stuff and the low malt beers, mainly in richness in flavor and a bit more sharpness on the palette, but in general they are pretty decent. Asahi Clear is the one I’ve been drinking recently, as it seems to be one of the better tasting low malt beers. It’s also marketed by Miwa Asao, who’s a pretty Japanese volleyball player. Guess that helps a bit.
Lastly, we have the third generation beers, referred to sometimes as the third beer (第三のビール, dai-san no biru). These beers are made with different types of fermentable products (such as beans) in addition to the typical malts that are used in traditional beers, as well as being mixed with other alcohols like happoshu. The most of this category of beer that I’ve had has been Suntory’s Kin-Mugi (golden wheat). To be honest, it’s not all that bad. It sort of reminds me of an MGD or a High Life, particularly tasty on hot days when all you want to do is drink a lot of it really fast as long as it’s cold.
I’ll write another time about how finding ales in Japan is hard (aside from Guinness, which is imported by Kirin). It’ll probably be tied into a general talk about Asian beers in general, and how they’re mostly lagers, and how I characterize all their tastes.
On having things delivered in Japan
March 21st, 2009
One of the things that I’m still getting my head around is what you can get delivered in Japan. The short answer seems to be: everything. In a land where everything is really close together, and no matter where you live there’s at least 1 of everything you want close by, it seems like if you don’t feel like going out, you can definitely have it delivered. Be it food, or a case of beer (which makes sense since not everyone has cars and getting anything more than a 6-pack of beer would be too heavy to carry home), we always seem to have something delivered for lunch on those lazy weekend afternoons where no one has even gotten ready enough to go out and eat.
Probably the most interesting thing we’ve had delivered to the house is fugu. Poison blowfish fugu. It was the first time I ate it, and I guess if I were to die of fugu poisoning, going out at home in comfort would be the way to go. But it was pretty crazy, IMO. Maybe what’s crazier is that IIRC, the fugu was delivered from Osaka or Kyoto or something crazy like that (for reference, we are in Tokyo). That’s a 2.5hr trip by bullet train, yet we just had poisonous blowfish delivered for dinner. Apparently, you can order things from Okinawa for home delivery (but they’ll charge you an arm and a leg).
As I mentioned prior, getting beer delivered is not that uncommon. Or maybe it is uncommon, according to a friend of mine. My friend (who is also Japanese) and I were chatting one day, and I mentioned that we tend to drink a lot of beer (especially while I am on vacation), so we usually get beer delivered since it’s too heavy to carry home. She was like “that’s totally not normal, and what rich folk do.” I dunno, doesn’t seem like a rich folk thing to me, especially since I’ve seen the bill and it comes out to about the same price as far as I can tell. I mean, if you aren’t buying just a bottle of sake or a few cans of beer for the night, why not get them delivered and put them in the fridge? The idea of beer coming to my door is pretty utopian to me (although the price of beer in Japan takes a bit of getting used to… I’ll probably write another blog post about that some day).
A corollary to getting things delivered in Japan is how you return the dishes they give you. We’re not talking about Styrofoam take-out containers. You get full-on dishes when you have food delivered. What you end up doing afterwards is cleaning the dishes as you would clean any dishes, and then setting them outside and they will come pick them up eventually. No one’s going to steal them when you leave them outside the house. But it does strike me as inefficient for someone to make a special trip to pick up dishes that probably didn’t cost a whole lot to begin with. I guess if a restaurant does enough business where delivery people are going out all the time in the general area, picking up some dishes left out wouldn’t be that hard. Although I also imagine that they’re going to wash them again anyways.
I think a good business idea would be a mobile-phone delivery service. By that, I mean you could have a login to a page, that would have local business listed, and you could choose the things you want to have delivered. So say you’re on your way home on the train, and you decide to pick up some ramen for you and the family, you could just log into the page on your mobile phone, pick the ramens you want, the quantities, and have it delivered. Although I guess you could theoretically pick it up and carry it home if you are on the way home from the train, but anything that contributes to laziness sounds good to me.
(Note: I didn’t take any of these photos. Future blog posts I’ll try to take photos of my own adventures, instead of finding some online.)
On working on the couch
March 19th, 2009
You would think it’s a great thing. Actually, it’s not. Even if you can pull a desk up, it’s actually really weird. I don’t feel comfortable, or productive, when I sit on the couch and work. Writing is fine, but actually trying to concentrate is not possible when you have a comfy couch to sit on.
But I guess it is good for writing blog posts. 
Future posts won’t be this inane, BTW. I’m just testing out some blog writing tools. I’d prefer to keep this blog about really what it is like living in Japan.