While I was reading my past posts, I realized something. I've been here for 3 months now, and I've shown pictures of my workplace, the events and festivals, and some food. However, I have yet to show what my city actually looks like! So, it's about time...
Aomori Prefecture is the northernmost prefecture of Honshu (the main island of Japan) and the second-northernmost prefecture in all of Japan (second only to the island of Hokkaido). It is roughly the same latitude as the northern border of North Korea, so we can expect a pretty frigid winter and 300 inches of snowfall a year. My city is Aomori City, the capitol of the prefecture boasting more than 300,000 residents. It can be described as a 10 mile long strip spanning the southern arc of Aomori Bay, which is a small portion of Mutsu Bay.
The city is by no means small. There are plenty of people and buildings, especially in the downtown area. All the amenities of civilized life are available, even if some may cost more or be harder to come by.
Stock photo of the downtown area.
However, the prefecture itself is regarded as the most backwater prefecture in all of Japan, and relies heavily on the farming, fishing, forestry, and (previously) nuclear power industries. This is easily apparent to me because, while I live in a pretty densely populated neighborhood, the schools I visit are in the outskirts of the city, where farming is prevalent. Here, you can see two of my schools in the middle of rice fields.
The view out the window of Higashi Middle
It's not much longer of a trek until, suddenly, you find yourself lost in the paddies.
Suddenly, rice paddies as far as the eye can see.
It might be one of the lower income areas of Japan, and it might be buried in snow in the winter, but this place can definitely be beautiful. On some of my bike rides home, I just had to stop and take in the breathtaking view around me.
On the way back from my furthest school, Nonai Elementary. Truly glorious.
Another perk about living where I do is that the ocean is less than half a mile away. I live almost across the street from the a famous local park called Gappo Park. The special thing about this park is that it features a sandy beach alongside your typical pine tree recreation area. It's not everywhere that you get to see pine trees growing not even 50 meters from the water's edge. The whole park is also at a very low elevation, and there is almost zero slope leading into the water. Basically, the effect is that, while you're walking towards the ocean, it seems like you're already swimming in it.
I should probably mention that these photos are a few months old, so don't think that it's warm enough right now to go swimming a the beach. It's cold enough right now to require multiple jackets, and it's already worse than the dead of a Los Angeles winter. The nice thing is that the leaves are changing for autumn, so I'll have some pictures of the pretty fall foliage soon.
One of the best things about traveling is the ability to eat different types of food. For the gourmands, this means you can gorge yourself of unfamiliar, but equally delicious, types of local fare. For those who like to live on the wild side, this means you can try the strange delicacies a new land has to offer. For those who like to cook for themselves, this means you can experiment with the flavors and textures of local ingredients. As a self-proclaimed wild gourmand who likes to cook, traveling is awesome.
Let's start with gorging yourself. Since I've come to Japan, I've gone to various restaurants to eat ramen, sushi, Indian food, burgers, and all kinds of different stuff. One of the specialties of Aomori is the miso curry butter milk ramen. As the name suggests, it's a creamy, oily, and salty version of your typical ramen with an interesting curry kick. I wish I had taken a picture myself, but I honestly spend much more time eating and much less time photographing my food, so here is a photo I stole from a friend:
That's great and all, but I think my favorite thing to eat here is at a restaurant called Tai En, which is a Thai Restaurant (note that all foreign food restaurants will be "Japanified" and not quite authentic). It's only a 3 minute walk from my apartment, which will be awesome in winter, and they offer a lunch special of Shinan soba (essentially ramen) and a half portion of red (pork and bamboo shoot) or green (pork and mushroom) curry. It's probably the cheapest lunch for its size (at 700 yen), and I always leave stuffed to the brim. Oh, and did I mention it's delicious? I don't know how they make the soup for the ramen, but it's way tastier than any Japanese ramen I've had so far. Also, the curry is really spicy in my opinion (which is saying a lot, since the Japanese "very hot" is usually somewhere around "mild-medium" in the States, China, or Korea), so don't touch the stuff before you're done with your ramen or your mouth will be on FIRE. Anyways, here's what it looks like:
Now to the weirder stuff. Firstly, I'm sure you all know about sushi and the fact that Japan likes to eat their fish raw. You've probably also had some sushi or sashimi in your life, but it was probably pretty expensive. Sushi can be pretty expensive here too (another ALT has eaten a $400 sushi meal at a famous shop in Tokyo, owned by the guy in the documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi") but since I live in a large fishing area, the stuff is usually easy to find for pretty cheap. There are Kaiten sushi places everywhere (the conveyor belt sushi), and they range in price depending on the quality. One of my favorite places to get raw fish is at a market in the downtown area called the 魚菜センター gyosai center. You can get something called Nokkedon, where you buy a ticket book worth 500 or 1000 yen, and then wander through the fish market spending tickets on stuff to put in your bowl.
There are lots of choices in raw fish and shellfish, but if you're not a fan of raw meat, there are lots of cooked dishes, vegetables and pickles, and even barbecued beef! Anyways, you can get a lot of raw fish for a good price if you don't get anything extravagant. Here's what my bowl looked like when I was finished using all my tickets:
All the fish was really fresh and amazingly tasty. The shark was especially delicious, but the whale was a bit tough and had a strange flavor (like something between beef and fish). I don't think I'll be getting that again, but that's all the better for the over-hunted whales anyways.
For more weird stuff, there's always the infamous natto. If you didn't know, natto is a fermented soybean dish that has a very gooey and sticky consistency and a pungent smell and taste. It's very hard to describe in words, so I suggest you just try it for yourself someday. I tried natto for the first time at a ramen shop in San Diego, and I was under the impression that you were supposed to eat it by itself. It tasted pretty awful, and it was overall a bad experience. What I found out when I got here was that natto is usually eaten with sauce mixed in, like soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, mustard, or other things. Natto packs usually come with a pre-made sauce packet (called "tare") and some mustard ("karashi") for you to just dump in. Everyone puts different stuff in it to suit their preference, and very few people actually eat natto by itself. The first few times I ate natto in Japan, the sauce didn't do much to help the taste. After a few months of avoiding it, I finally decided to try it again because it's healthy and cheap. To my surprise, I actually started liking it, and now I have it almost every morning. My favorite things to put in it are minced scallions, soy sauce, and a little bit of sugar (along with the tare packet). The only annoying thing about it is the texture; it makes all your saliva gooey and sticky, and it's hard to eat it without getting the stringy goo all over the edge of your bowl and your face. Here's me enjoying some of the breakfast of champions:
Finally, let's talk about the local ingredients around here. Here's the lowdown on meat: pork and chicken are about the same as their American counterparts, but possibly a little more
expensive. You can't quite find the variety of American supermarkets (for example, I can't buy a whole chicken, a rack of ribs, or a whole pork loin). Beef is MUCH more expensive, so don't expect to be eating
lots of the stuff. Even though beef is expensive, dairy products are
still comparable in price to their American counterparts. I guess they'd
just rather milk their cows instead of slaughtering them. Now to the good part: fish is much cheaper than in the States, and there's a ton of variety. The seafood section in the supermarket is probably as large if not larger than the section for the rest of the meat. You can find whole fish, fillets and steaks, fish eggs (from all kinds of fish), mollusks (like clams and Aomori's regional specialty, scallops), crustaceans (like shrimp, prawns, and crab), cephalopods (squid and octopus), eel, weird stuff like sea cucumber and sea pineapple, and of course sashimi. Not only is it cheaper and easier to get, it tastes SO much better than what I'm used to. I had no idea salmon could have this amount of flavor!
Sea Pineapple, whatever the hell it is (Spongebob's house?).
Fruits are more expensive in Japan, especially when it comes to peaches, grapes, and melons. For example, a normal cantaloup can cost you well over $20. The selection of vegetables is smaller, and stuff like tomatoes and potatoes cost more than I'd like. Corn especially can get pretty expensive (usually more than $1 an ear). However, you can always go for the stuff that is common and cheap. For example, cabbage is readily available and usually very inexpensive. Green bell peppers, while much smaller than I'm used, are usually very cheap (about 10 cents a piece). Mushrooms come is an impressive variety, and although they can get quite expensive, they go on sale often. Local farmers markets will sell their fruits and veggies for much cheaper than grocery stores, so that's where I usually get my produce.
There's a lot of produce I'm not used to using, like Japanese ginger, sesame leaves, burdock root, or nagaimo (I have no idea how to translate this), but I've been slowly trying to incorporate them into my cooking. Here's what they look like:
Japanese ginger: myouga
Sesame leaf: aojiso
Burdock root: gobou
nagaimo
There is one thing I must mention about food in Japan, and it is about kimchi. Here, they sell something called "Kimchi", but it is entirely not kimchi. It's red and spicy and is made of napa cabbage like the Korean kimchi, but it tastes very different. Firstly, it's really salty and somewhat sweet, so it's got a savory thing going on. Secondly, it's not actually fermented at all, so it doesn't have any of the sour flavor that real kimchi has. Back in the states, I didn't like kimchi very much, but after having the Japanese style stuff, I can't seem to get enough of it now! However, it's not the cheapest stuff in the world. This has prompted me to start making my own kimchi. It's hard to come by fish sauce in Japan, so I've taken a note out of the Japanese style kimchi book and use miso to get the savory flavor. The kimchi I make, however, is entirely fermented, and so actually qualifies as real "kimchi". Essentially, I now make something in between Japanese and Korean kimchi, and I'm loving the stuff.
Well, that's enough about food for now! I successfully made myself extremely hungry while typing this, so I'm going to go have a bite to eat. See you all next time for a new and exciting post!
My teachers are very amused every time I burst out laughing at my desk. Honestly, if you were me, you'd be unable to hold back as well. Some of the crap these students write...
In this case, the students were given a picture (of van Gogh, no less) and asked to write a few sentences of what he was thinking. Giving these students this kind of liberty can only bring bad things. Here's what I mean:
What's not shown is the giant red =( I wrote in the margin.
I'm impressed they know what "a whim" is. But still, NO.
I'm sure that would make anyone exciting.
I don't even...
"was"?
Anyways, I'll be sure to post more crazy junk I see on stuff I'm supposed to grade. Stay tuned for the next post, which will be about what you probably care about most: FOOD!!
The last few weeks have been relatively uneventful, so I apologize for not having anything interesting to post. Yesterday, however, something rather interesting happened.
On Monday night (during a long weekend), I boarded an overnight bus from Tokyo to Aomori after visiting Kristin in Komagane-shi in Nagano-ken. The bus left Tokyo at 8:30 pm and arrived in Aomori at 6:50 am the next day. As you can imagine, these bus rides are not the most comfortable methods of transportation in the world, so I didn't get much sleep. I also needed to be at Toyama Middle School at 8:20 am to teach, so I didn't have any time in between getting off the bus, going back home, taking a shower, and heading to school to have a nap. This was an extraordinarily tiring Tuesday.
I, however, have been having a much better time communicating with the students. All my choice napping spots were being used (like the judo mats in the gym), so I had no choice but to stay awake. In between classes and during breaks, I tried my best to have as much conversation time with the kids as possible, even if it had to be in Japanese. After I finished my only class for the day, the students were preparing to practice their performances for the upcoming school festival. I took this as an opportunity to sneak into the music room and have a nap on a makeshift bed of 4 lined up chairs.
I was, of course, caught 15 minutes into my slumber by the two piano playing girls who came up to work on their piece. I woke up as they tried to open one of the locked doors, and I went and opened it for them. They asked if I was sleeping, and I sheepishly said yes. Then I sat with them and watched as they practiced their piece, and then we had a fun episode when a bee (wasp?) and a grasshopper flew in through one of the open windows. I got the grasshopper out easily, but the bees here in Japan are humongous, so I was not quite as manly while trying to shoo that one away.
Anyways, after they were done, I left with them and headed back to where the other (less musically talented) students were working on their performance. The group of girls leading the performance (but who don't actually perform themselves) were idling about in the hallway while the rest of the kids did their thing in the main area. I started up a little conversation with 4 of them, and they noticed my name tag. The students here get a little confused by the way my name is spelled, so they want to call me RAI-AN (ライアン) even though my name is pronounced more like RAI-EN (ライエン), which is how I spell it in Japanese. The girls realized that they've been pronouncing my name wrong this whole time, and tried their best to get it right. They also noticed my last name RIN リン and asked me about it. I told them casually, "It's written like the Japanese [Hayashi]," or 「林と書くんだよ。」
The girls looked at each other blankly for a second and then burst out laughing. I wasn't sure why at first, but one of the girls turned to me with her thumbs up and exclaimed, "Very cute!" Then I remembered something. I talk like an anime character. Especially when I'm tired and easily suggestible, I tend to speak without thinking very much. This means that my Japanese language skills return to where they came from: anime.
For those on you who don't know me, I studied Japanese for 3 years in high school and less than 2 years in college. In high school, I hadn't ever heard Japanese spoken before, and I only decided to learn
Japanese because foreign language was a requirement and the other
options were less attractive. I also had very little motivation and enthusiasm. The teacher was pretty terrible, so I spent 3 years learning very little and speaking hardly anything. Honestly, I was horrible, and listening to my old cassette tapes of oral tests makes me cringe.
When I started college, I found out that my unwillingness to consume alcoholic beverages left me very bored and with a lot of free time. This is when I picked up a truckload of hobbies, one of which included watching anime. My first year in college, I watched a massive amount of anime in between learning martial arts and archery, teaching myself to become a mountain/road cyclist and inline/freeline skater, and of course, engineering.
Because I watched so much anime, I decided to re-learn Japanese in my second college year. I took the classes for fun, and the teachers were so much better than in high school. In 3 months, we learned the same amount I was taught for 3 years in high school, and we learned it better. What I noticed this time is that I practically breathed in the language. I went to every class and participated heavily in every lesson, but I never studied. Even so, I was still one of the top students in the class and definitely the most natural sounding speaker. Why? Anime. Not only had I heard the language enough to replicate the sounds almost perfectly, I was now motivated to use what I heard from anime in class and learn more about it.
Over the year and two-thirds I studied Japanese in college, I honed my colloquial Japanese into a more proper form of the language. However, when I'm trying to produce language quickly and naturally, I still return to where I originally learned certain words and phrases. This unfortunately means that I talk like an anime character. Even worse, I tend to talk like an anime GIRL.
In anime, the characters speak Japanese, and Japanese has a masculine and feminine way of speaking (besides the standard unisex talking style). Anime Japanese is entirely sensible and understandable, but much of it is not used in real life. For example, anime girls like to add cute feminine endings to their sentences, like NANO なの, N ん, or WA わ, or extend the sentence with a long SUUU す～. They also tend to use long matter-of-fact or affirmation endings like DAYO だよ～ or DAYONE だよね～ much more than boys. Meanwhile, anime boys tend to speak very standard normal Japanese, even though the more masculine boys will end sentences with ZE ぜ or cut short the more polite DESU ending into a SSU っす.
Since anime tends to be rather female-heavy, I am more used to hearing the way girls talk in anime instead of boys. The unfortunate side effect of this is that I have also started talking like an anime girl. When I've got nothing else to go by, I like to use lexical phrases I learned in the way that I've heard, so they come straight out of lines in an anime. Lots of times, it's standard Japanese. Sometimes, it comes out masculine, which is perfectly normal since I'm a boy. A lot more times than is socially normal, it comes out feminine.
The girls I was talking to found my way of speaking hilarious because that's not the way a male would usually talk. If anything, I used 2 feminine modifications consecutively, so they almost thought that I misspoke before they put 2 and 2 together. When they realized that I in fact said what I did, the overall cuteness of it was too much for them to handle.
Even if I wanted, there isn't much I can do to fix my problem, since it lies at the very root of where I learned the language. I supposed I will just need to continue living my life speaking cutely, which I am perfectly fine with.
