Nagoya Day 22: Revision and Conversations

This post will be about revision, partly because I have a grammar test tomorrow (and I’m rather weak in grammar), and about some conversations I had at the Japan Plaza, which shone light onto some aspects of Japanese cuisine and lots of new words to get acquainted with.

Revision

〜そうです (when reporting something you’ve heard of):

Essentially, you keep the word before 〜そうです in its dictionary form. So for 脱ぐ, if you heard someone took off his shoes, then it will be 靴を脱んだ（past tense )そうです。Other examples:

探す（さがす）：探すそうです
きれい：きれいだそうです
おいしい：おいしいそうです
先生：先生だそうです

〜って (when changing そうです to a more casual form):

You eliminate そうです, and add an 〜って behind.

探す：探すって
きれい：きれいだって

〜たら(if)

The sentence structure remains the same, yet there are varying degrees of subtleties. The general meaning remains: “If A happens, then B will happen”, ”Aたら, B”

The method of conjugations are as follows: First, convert to the past tense. Then use the following conversions

Example:

For なーadjectives:きれいーきれいだったら
For nouns: 猫ー猫だったら
For いーadjectives: おいしい：おいしいたら
For うーverbs: 買う：買ったら
For るーverbs: 食べる：食べたら

Now here are the differing degrees of subtleties:

First, the clause before たら describes something that could possibly happen, and the one after it describes a consequence which then follows.

But second, if there are two events that are very likely to happen, and the second event takes place right after the first event, then たら is an arranging of the two sentences in chronological order.

Example: 今晩、うちに帰ったら、電話します。
Tonight, when I come home, I’ll use the phone.

Lastly, if something is impossible, but just expressing a wish for it to happen, you use たら too.

Example: 猫だったら、一日中寝ているでしょう。
If I were a cat, I would sleep the whole day long.

Conversations

I spoke to two Japanese students at the Japan plaza, who said that nattō, 納豆(なっとう) or Japanese traditional fermented beans, is part of their daily meals. Some really great tasting food include mixing (混ぜる) kimchi and nattō together with tofu (豆腐) and some pork. Add some rice and you have a cheap and tasty お弁当 (obentō).

Another tasty combination? Japanese mushrooms (茸：きのこ) together with beansprouts (もやし).  Add a bit of shoyu, garlic and onions, and you’re set. So gonna try this out tomorrow. Bought some shimeji and enoki mushrooms, fingers crossed.

It is really easy to make katsu apparently, just mix flour (小麦粉：こむぎこ) and eggs, mix the meat in, coat it with bread crumbs, and finally put it in oil (油：あぶら).
(I’ll try my hand at translating: カツの作り方が簡単です。まず、卵と小麦粉を混ぜて、肉を入れて、肉の衣を付ける。最後、油にいれる。)

Apparently for shopping, you can go to the grocery stores at night and they have really good discounts of up to 40%. I bought a long strip of unagi for 500円, which could probably last me two meals. I was so so happy! So if you go to this shop called tachiya (たちや) at sunset (夕方), you can get really cheap ingredients for cooking. And if you go to the supermarket at around 9pm, they start slashing prices (価格：かかく) to get people to take them off the shelves.

We also talked about diet, specifically the grapefruit diet. So if you eat grapefruits, you feel less hungry (お腹が少しすいている). Regarding this sentence, I just spoke to my Japanese dorm mate and I found out that すいている comes from 空く(which means empty). Now this phrase makes so much sense.

The last thing that I found so useful? 易い X 難しい and 安い X 高い (The X represents two terms that are opposites of each other). Now I know how to represent something that is easy to do, like 宿題が易いですね (the homework is easy to do you know). I had never known how to express this besides using “kantan” or 簡単. There’s always a catharsis when you’re able to dispel some nagging words that you’ve always wanted to know but forgot when you opened the dictionary.

Meanwhile, in the Aichi-ken travel book, I found some really really cool factories that I wanna make a trip down to. There’s a Pocari sweat factory, miso factory, piano factory, nattō factory and a milk factory. Best thing? They are all free! I am gonna be making a trip down soon I hope, so watch out for pictures 🙂

Many thanks to this group of students at the Japan Plaza for introducing me to such interesting stuff, being patient with my struggles in Japanese, and having a cool conversation.

Many thanks to Ikue and Nao! ありがとう〜

 

Nagoya Day 11: Foods of Japan

This has been on my backlog for a long time so I’m gonna feature some of the stuff I’ve eaten and made over the past 2 weeks in Japan:

Food I made:

Saba Shio with asparagus, yakisoba and jellyfish.

Takoyaki

Okonomiyaki

Yaki Soba 焼きそば with Beef strips

Teriyaki eggplants with lemon chicken and zaru soba

Gyoza Goodness

Muffins at my host’s house

Salmon with Onion and Dill 🙂

Japanese Curry

Baked bananas with chocolate

Fried Omelette with Tomatoes and Toast

Food I didn’t make / bought from a restaurant:

Soba at my host’s house

Omelette Rice!

Miso Kara Age Ramen

梅酒（うめしゅ）

エビフライ

Chinese food in Japan is pretty legit

Matcha Ice-Cream

Shoyu Ramen

Roast beef cubes with lettuce 🙂

On Cooking:

Cooking is the best gift you could give to yourself. Regardless of what ingredient you use, you can make something really good out of it. Best thing of all?  You surprise yourself at how good something can turn out, get high, and feed on that high. You start searching grocery stores for new ingredients to play with. Some of them turn out well, some not so, but the memory of that one high still keeps you going. You go to restaurants that make stuff you won’t be able to make at home, and wish you could make it, only to find that the recipe is on the web, and it is easy peasy. Dayum.

You stick to the recipe, and follow it to the bone, only to find out that your efforts go against your own instinct. Your instinct is to add some pepper, some herbs, and you do it in the end, even though it is not in the recipe.

I’m gonna keep innovating, keep trying out new stuff. The supermarket is an awesome playground ^^

Nagoya Day 7: Ikebana, Settling into Rhythm

Phrases of the Day:

私は一日中日本語が勉強してと思っています。
I am thinking of studying Japanese for the whole day.

去年の誕生日に母が時計をくれました。
My mother gave me a watch on my birthday last year.

Tidbit #8: Studying Technique

Study cards. Time to go for it.

Nothing beats simple effective word cards that you can bring around in your pocket and commit to memory. Along the road to the supermarket, I was constantly reading them out loud and trying to conjugate them along the way. For example:

お金を下ろす：to withdraw money
お金を下ろせます：can withdraw money
お金を下ろしましょう：go to withdraw money

It definitely helped a lot cause I was able to cleanly memorize all the vocabulary including the kanji so I’m happy ^^

Homemade Food

Yaki Soba 焼きそば、おいしかった！

Every Tuesday, there is a huge sale at the supermarket, where they sell fresh food at much cheaper prices. I bought some pre-seasoned beef (seasoned with soya sauce and onions), yaki soba noodles, codfish, mackerel, jellyfish, asparagus, and shimeji mushrooms. These will last a week for sure! ^^ Today, I made some yaki soba, really easy to make.

1) Cook the main ingredients first
2) add the yaki soba
3) add 30ml of water
4) add any other ingredients you wish to add

I added yakitori sauce and it tasted so good. I’m gonna be cooking a lot more for sure over here. And it’s a lot cheaper too. For my stash, I spent 1920円, which is around SGD$25. For 7 days worth of food, I think I got my money’s worth.

Ikebana (Flower Arrangement)

Today we had an ikebana (いけばな、生け花) class, which was a rather soothing experience on the soul. It is a disciplined way of arranging flowers that merges nature and the human imagination. Influenced by Buddhist philosophy, ikebana plays on the nature of space and of asymmetric relations to create an aesthetically appealing look.

The background: For this lesson, we learnt from the Ohara school, founded in the Meiji period, as it gives the most creativity to the arranger within the limits of the rules it imposes.

The two most important forms we needed to know was first the rising form, and then the inclining form. For this lesson, we learnt the rising form. This is what happened:

We were given 5 stalks of flowers, wrapped in a newspaper and not trimmed at all, in its original state. We were also given an elliptical ceramic pot, half filled with water, and a base with spiky nails poking out from it. We trimmed the flowers to their appropriate length, before sticking them into the base. This is what we got:

生け花（いけばな）

There is a lot of discipline required when handling the flowers, and it’s also a “follow the instructions policy”. Seems to come from the school of thought where if you follow the rules, you’ll get the point sooner or later. I wanted to ask lots of questions, but the teacher wasn’t so smooth with English, and also, I think it is much better to master the basics of form and composition before trying to ask any questions about further development.

I enjoyed 生け花 thoroughly cause it was soothing to the soul and nice on the eye. After days of grey, it was relaxing to be in contact with some nature. It also slows down your mind when you put your entire focus to making the arrangement look as satisfactory as possible. The pre-requisite to a good arrangement, is to do many iterations of it. This is an interesting philosophy, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the designs will develop from there.

Tomorrow, I will be visiting the Nagoya Castle, and having a takoyaki たこ焼きcooking party. Excited!

Days 3-4: Snapshots of Tokyo

After 2 days of blogging about Tokyo, I couchsurfed at a Japanese family’s house where I was cut off from wi-fi for 2 days and at the same time, I’ve got a case of the hives. So instead of doing a day-to-day account, here are some snapshots of thoughts that came to my mind.

Tidbit #1: When you get the hives, just rest. Nothing is worse than itching all over the body and having an uncomfortable day.

Groceries:

Supermarkets remain the best way to figure out a city. Prices tell you plenty of information. For example, really cheap prices of plums tell you that the season for making your own plum wine 梅酒(うめしゅ) is here.  Prices also serve as comparisons to your own country’s goods, and you know which types of foods or goods can you get cheaper. Usually these indicate a larger culture at work.

Tip: Get a local or someone who’s been there for long. He’ll tell you what’s good. We bought Udon うどん, salmon, yoghurt (which Japan doesn’t really have good ones), and dill. There was a sore lack of baking equipment in Japan though. And ovens are really rare in Japanese households.

Ohi Racetrack Flea Market

I get the hype behind this: 600 stalls, selling almost any kind of item you can think of. I was really surprised to find a telescope, brass instruments and wheelchairs!

 

Tidbit #2: This is a side of Tokyo one wouldn’t normally see. I was on a hunt for yukatas, because I heard they go really cheap here, and I found one at the corner of an intersection. I asked, すみません、これはいくらですか, which meant ”excuse me, how much does it cost?” It was 4000 yen. I was a little disappointed, but then this old lady comes along and asks, and he says 1000 yen. That got me puzzled. So I unfold the yukatas and try to look at it, but I can’t fold it back properly. That’s where the vendor knew I definitely wasn’t a local and started speaking to me in a coarse tone. He then tried to chase me away. Here’s a hidden part of the story. Before I unfolded the yukatas, I spoke to the lady for a bit, because she knew my Japanese wasn’t fluent and asked if I was from China. Well, I naturally spoke to her in Chinese that I wasn’t, but that probably got the vendor suspicious. Maybe, maybe it was the Mandarin Chinese that got me kicked out. But I also saw a few disgruntled-looking tourists (they were white and black) walking out of the flea market empty handed so maybe they felt a disconnect with the place.

Food brings people together

 

Last Saturday (31 May), I arrived at my Couchsurfing host’s place which was near Shinkoiwa 新小岩 (しんこいわ). G, our host, made some wonderful eggplant teriyaki with spaghetti and that became our talking point. The eggplant must be cooked to perfection – getting the temperature, time, and the amount of spices just right. It took many different trials and errors to get there. Then, G knew that I baked cause of my couchsurfing profile, and we went to get the ingredients at a shopping mall. This is a Japan where baking isn’t the norm. You can’t find ovens in a typical household. There simply isn’t the environment to bake. Only Costco, which is American, sells these equipment and ingredients at really low prices, but it is way out of Tokyo.

 

The conversation naturally shifted to working hours. Working in Japan sounds tough, especially when a majority of the population does 60-hour work weeks. That’s really unheard of in most parts of the world. G’s wife, N, does 80-hour work weeks. Sometimes I wonder how these people can cope, and then I realise that there is a sizeable number who don’t. Suicide rates are high here. Hotlines are available throughout the city to discourage people from committing suicide, and on train stations where suicide is more common, you have 8 wardens patrolling the platform to keep people away from the rail tracks. When you need to resort to physical intervention, you know the situation is becoming dire.

Of course, most Japanese people don’t commit suicide, but instead, the weekends are there to relax. G & N watch dramas, host couchsurfing events, hosts couchsurfers like me, go on day trips (though that is at a premium now), or just relax or lounge about at home. Usually N is really tired and won’t do much. (Interjection: I am now at my airbnb’s host place and he gives a different account – The Japanese spend 12 hours working, but most of that is bull. They spend most of their time doing nothing, or packaging folders or doing really menial tasks. I’ll check this out later on).

But now I have to bake, and we get these glorious muffins out on a rack:

 

From here, we talked about Couchsurfing, and the warm hospitality that people showed to us, and that’s why we were here in the first place. Couchsurfing is about sincerity, about giving without thinking of being given, and also about graciousness. When a host lets you into his/her house, he is letting you into his world for those few days. There is a degree of vulnerability that make words inadequate. You see tensions between couples, slight irritation, a sense of routine and monotony after a while. All these are seen behind a façade of initial hi-s and bye-s. There is no substitute for seeing them in their normal daily life and noticing little quirks between them. From my host, I managed to gain a view of Japan through the lens of an expat, and at the same time, contrasted with the lens of a Shizuoka-native who moved to Tokyo. There are subtle differences in the way they approach life, and also the way they present themselves to others.

For example, the biking culture in Japan is terrible and ironic. The Japanese government seeks to promote environmentally friendly practices, but they remove bike lanes from the streets. They cordon off previously approved bicycle parking slots before removing them. As a result, many cyclists in Tokyo cycle on the walkways but that disrupts the flow of pedestrians and makes it unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists alike. The environmentally friendly habits in Tokyo are also not so strictly enforced. Households don’t recycle as frequently as you think they do. Many types of plastics are still thrown away. Reason being that these agencies don’t keep a close watch on the rubbish anymore. Has complacency crept in?

I can go on and on, but the stories will have to end here for now.

Works in Progress: Foods of Japan | Insider/Outsider perspectives on travel | Day 5: Miraikan & Sushi