Japanese Pizza

Last weekend, in a fit of weakness (spent the entire day practicing either yosakoi or tea ceremony), I ordered myself a pizza. I came home exhausted at 8 PM after three missed meals - I suppose you could count a cookie and a single Scotch Dark from Ambiance as at least 1/8 of one meal, but in general I was pretty close to starving. I had another commitment to attend to right away at home and wouldn't be able to cook anything, and I generally avoid keeping processed food in my kitchen, so there was quite literally nothing to eat.

I broke. I got on Pizza Pizza's website and ordered myself a buffalo chicken pizza, and, I'm ashamed to say, polished off most of it without even offering my long-suffering roommate a slice. Since I'm not a huge fan of pizza in general, and this particular chain is one of two that I'll willingly eat, I later lamented to some friends what I had just done. Who promptly reminded me, "But you used to do that in Japan."

Ah, Japan. It's true - the other chain I enjoy is Pizza Hut, though you won't find me ordering a Super Supreme here anytime soon. It is Pizza Hut Japan that I yearn for. I gave Domino's Japan a try, but they didn't satisfy me. Unless we're talking about pasta bowls - I ordered a few of them - but that isn't pizza.

Many people who have at least a passing familiarity with Japanese culture are aware of the fundamental differences - and some might say, travesties - separating Western-style pizza with what you might find abroad. 

Just a few examples of Pizza Hut's fabulous Japan-only menu.
When I talk about Japanese pizza, I always mention the "Idaho Special" - parsley, mayonnaise,
black pepper, corn, diced potatos, bacon and onion.

Personally, as a non-fan of the Western version, I took to Japanese pizza right away, especially when our local Pizza Hut plied me with all those flyers in my mailbox. I looked forward to Pizza Hut's monthly, eager to see what they might try next. The first few times, I called them myself (and you know it's serious if I willingly undertake a phone conversation in Japanese with a stranger!), but sometime around 2008 they set up a wonderful online ordering system that became my go-to method. I didn't buy often, because pizza in Japan is an investment - even a medium pie was in the ¥2,000 range, and if you wanted something fancy, you were looking at ¥2,500, which at today's ridiculous exchange rate is $31. $31! For a single medium pizza! You can get a medium "base" for ¥1,100, but the toppings are ¥300 yen each - hardly cheap. It's notable that prices include the delivery charge (you cannot eat in at most pizza places, including Pizza Hut in Japan) and you'll have your price adjusted if you pick it up yourself.

Pizza Hut warns you to be environmentally-conscious!

So, when I did buy pizza, it was usually with the expectation that I would stretch it over at least three meals. With Pizza Hut, I would almost always get the Mayo Q; barbecued chicken, mayonnaise, corn, mushrooms, onion and strips of nori. It came with little packets of green chili pepper sauce and maple syrup for dipping your crust in. Perhaps it was the off-the-beaten path combo of ingredients that made me a fan of the Mayo Q, but the reaction I usually get is "Ewww! Mayo!?" (Note: Japanese mayo is fantastic, especially when it is served warm, à la okonomiyaki.)

I do think that the reason I like Toronto's Pizza Pizza chain so much as well is because it's also a departure from the traditional - dare I say it, cheap and simple - pizza of my childhood. My brothers, both pizza lovers, frequently pushed for takeout on Fridays, and would get pepperoni, slathered in the cheap Italian seasoning-heavy tomato sauce that I hated from our local pizza place. I'm generally a fan of anything tomato, but it turns out that when it comes to pizza, you can just about leave off the sauce - it's the toppings that make it for me!

Bottom line - no matter how alarming it might seem, if you're in Japan or heading there soon, you really need to think about trying pizza there. I promise having sweet corn on your pizza is a mystical experience, even though the opinions I've gotten about it have been highly polarized. Pizza Hut's a good starting point - the online ordering system has made it a snap, especially with the Hut's very useful English ordering guide. Don't forget to get the cheese-stuffed crust. Try it at least once - it's an experience!

Christmas in October

One of many.

Yesterday, as I went out to my relatives' place for Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October), I found a box from Japan waiting there for me! 

Back when I first left Japan, I tackled that pressing issue that every expat encounters - what to take back to their home country, and how to get it there. My case was more dire than most, as I had replaced my entire wardrobe while living abroad, and I am also a voracious reader. I left Canada with just thirteen books in my suitcase and returned with two hundred. Let's be serious - no true book lover could possibly throw or give away a collection like that. I also knew that since my Board of Education was not taking on a new JET, I wouldn't have a successor to sell or give my household items to. When I handed in my final contract agreement at school, I had already started working out just how I was going to get everything home.

I'm a skilled suitcase packer, but my spacial perception isn't great, so I envisioned - wrongfully so - that I could creatively fit my most important belongings into four, perhaps five, large boxes, and give or throw away the rest. The post office was the best deal at about 14,000 yen for a 30-kilogram box. I would have liked to have used a moving or sea shipping service, as my friends did, but since I was going back to my hometown on the extreme east coast of Canada, that option wasn't available. It was pretty much the post office or nothing. 

I started out trying to be forward-thinking and responsible about my packing. In March, all the books that I wouldn't be reading before I left in July went into a sturdy Kuroneko box that topped out at 29.5 kilos (64 pounds). Then I realized that I wasn't sure how to get this box, which was more than half my weight at the time, to the post office. I strapped it to the back of my mama-chari, and then walked the wobbly five minutes to our local post office. Who told me they did not have the equipment to send via seamail.

I wobbled back to the nearby train station, parked the bike and hailed a cab to take me to the bigger post office in town. Then I decided I would find some other way to move out the rest of my stuff.

Luckily, I discovered a way, and that means that you (yes you, reading this!), if you ever find yourself moving back overseas from Japan, can do it too! The post office will actually allow you to call and schedule an at-home pickup. I went down there and grabbed a bunch of international shipping labels (for Canada, you must be very detailed in your contents description), and set a date and time a few days before my departure for the post office to come. At the time I was still thinking "Yeah, five boxes ought to do it." When the guy showed up, however, and took my five boxes' measurements, my apartment was still cluttered with stuff, and the packed boxes were overweight! I had to pull things out, and only half the apartment seemed gone. I had started with the things that I wasn't going to need during the month of July - so, of course, I had packed some pretty inconsequential stuff that I probably should have left behind, but I took thinking that I had the space. Well. 

One of those five took a long side-trip, but I'll get to that later. 

The process of sorting an entire apartment into boxes and bags.

We scheduled another pickup for two days later, the day I was supposed to moving out of the place. Needless to say, I had quite a lot on my plate already - between myself, Em and my friend Mitsu, who was going to be taking my couch, we barely got another four boxes packed up, as well as my precious kotatsu, the Gundam model kits Drew had left at my apartment en route to Mount Fuji, and the Fuji climbing stick left behind by Alec. 

When the landlord turned up to pick up the keys, along with my go-between from my school, the place was still a disaster. Embarrassing. I said we were going to need a few more hours. He said I could stay the night - I would be heading out to the airport the following afternoon. So I scheduled another post office pickup, one for after I was going to be long gone, to make sure it was all going to be done and ready. I spent the night hastily sorting tons of papers to avoid shipping home stuff I would never need again, hoping that the electricity wouldn't be cut off any minute (we had tossed an extension cord over the balcony to Emily's apartment, just in case!) and then at 4 AM, as the sun was coming up, I lay down on the bare hardwood floor for a nap. My futons and couch were already gone. When I finally stumbled out of my apartment to take my bike over to school and do a final check on my desk, I was running only on adrenaline. What I wouldn't give to have pushed back my departure just a couple of days!

When I got back from school, it was time to go. Later, Em would pack up the last two boxes and return my keys to the landlord, while I got on the plane and headed back to what I still sometimes call "my past life."

In the weeks after returning to Canada, boxes of my possessions trickled in, though it was impossible to fit an apartment's (even an 1K) worth of things into a small bedroom that already had a lifetime crammed into it. I took most of them with me to Toronto, so even now, when I visit my mother's home, it feels like I've stepped right back into my pre-Japan life. It's very odd. Since I took everything from my Osaka apartment and plopped it into my Toronto apartment, I can look around this room, and at least half my possessions and 90% of my clothes are Japanese-made, even now, a couple of years later! 

Of course, a post office move comes with its own complications, not counting the mistakes made by my poor planning. There was a box that came open in transit and lost a few items, two boxes that had the labels swapped and I opened "books and clothes" to find it full of housewares, a box that had been measured at thirty kilos and charged accordingly when it was only thirty pounds, and finally a box that didn't arrive at all. 

Two months after I left Japan, the missing one turned back up at Emily's apartment, returned to sender. It was labeled "household goods," but it contained books and shoes, and the contents of the utility closet. (Maybe this is why it was returned. Oops.) It weighed thirty kilos - too heavy to drag back to the post office on foot, so it sat there in Emily's apartment in the meantime, until she left Japan for good as well. 

She posted me that last box with a few additions - hence why it's Christmas at my apartment now, despite it being only October. As I went through the contents last night, some of those precious things that I thought were gone forever out of the ripped box and others items I had forgotten I ever owned, let alone packed, I just had this wave of homesickness and nostalgia for Japan. I know they're only things, but they were symbolic. Maybe it's the Japanese tendency to treat objects, especially beautiful or meaningful ones, with such respect. I had to pack it all away again, in preparation for our move to a new apartment at the end of this month, but the first time I drink tea out of those teacups, I'm going to take a little bit of time to really appreciate and admire these items like old friends. 

The Humid Japanese Summer

The Pepsi NEX summer life

Here in Toronto, our heat wave has finally broken, or so my roommate tells me - my response was "what heat wave?" The weather in Toronto, hanging around 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) has never really bothered me, compared to Osaka, which boasts some of the most humid days and nights in the country.

I often really miss summer in Japan. It's true, it was muggy, sticky and came part and parcel with all the bad stuff - I remember when all the maple candy omiyage I had brought from Canada fused into a giant mass, and ruining my first rice cooker by forgetting to clean it out before I left town during the hottest part of the summer. One year, I had kept some chocolate matcha Meltykisses from winter that, well, melted. As much fun as it was to go to festivals, I found yukata really stifling on the hottest summer nights, and distinctly remember undressing in a stall in JR Kyoto Station during Gion Matsuri just to get some of the heat off, before re-tying everything and slogging back out there. It wasn't great, but I detest the cold, so I quickly warmed up (ha ha) to the hot and humid summers and even began to enjoy them.

After Osaka, summers in Canada have been easy as pie. While my friends (raised on the east coast where both summers and winters are mild) suffer through humidity that's completely undetectable to me, I relish actually getting to wear short sleeves. 

In Japan I spent a lot of my summer days in the staff room at school, conserving my precious nenkyu (paid vacation days) for the visits of the many friends who stayed with me. I often worked through obon as the only person in the school! Thinking back to that, someone must have unlocked the gate every day, but it was rare to encounter even a single person through the whole 8 hours. I would let myself into the office and take the keys to the staff room, then sit at my desk near the window and write or read. No students, no teachers. It was somewhat eerie, but at the same time, very peaceful. 

The staff room had no air conditioner, but the fan was right behind my desk to provide some relief. Sometimes I'd go down to the womens' lounge and sit there awhile on the warm tatami. Tried not to do that too much, as it was very easy to fall asleep! I just became quite comfortable with the temperature in the school in summer - it reminded me of many summers spent at camp in New Brunswick. When I wasn't at school during summer, I travelled - to Tokyo, mostly, and once to Los Angeles. I traded the humid heat for dry heat, and didn't really care for the switch. Returning to Tokyo was a relief!

Of course, my love of the heat made winters all the worse - doubly worse after returning to Canada! Can't say I'm much looking forward to the temperatures starting to drop over the next few months...

My Love Affair With Uniqlo

The first time I walked into a Uniqlo store, I knew it was over.

I've never been a brand shopper - in fact, my clothing shopping mantra has usually been "get in, get out, I don't have to try it on do I!?" And the cheaper the better. Up until the point where I stepped into Yodobashi Camera's 7th floor Uniqlo store, I didn't care about my clothes or where I bought them. Now, I'm stockpiling money to finance a shopping trip to New York City, specifically so that I can go to Uniqlo.

My students teased me about this sometimes - hard to say whether that was because Uniqlo clothes are inexpensive, or simply because I bought 90% of my summer wardrobe there. (Hey, I didn't really need a summer wardrobe on the East Coast, so why bother spending money for clothes you'll get three weeks' wear out of?) I didn't mind, because I was so thrilled to have found the awesome place that is Uniqlo. Short for "Unique Clothes," this store delivers everything in bright colours at great prices, with an amazing turnover rate for fashions. If I found something I liked but was a bit expensive, I could usually go back six weeks later and get it for 50% off. Their colour range is so dynamic and it was easy to find 'basic' items, which is great when you like layering. The tank tops and legging offerings were fantastically diverse. And the one-piece dresses!

They've been expanding rapidly, so if you're lucky enough to live in any other country but Canada, please get yourself to this store. And take me with you!

Photo - A Little Birdie Told Me

This bird landed on the windowsill right by my desk and hopped around awhile!
Ah, spring...

Japanese High Schools in the Modern Age

The genkan area.

High school in Japan is so very different from Canada, and not just because I graduated more than ten years (!) ago. The two schools I attended as a teenager were technologically on the cutting edge, and we had a beautiful computer lab where I used to check my email at lunch every day (Yes - it was 1999!), a media room and a modern cafeteria, and LCD displays in the halls so students could read the daily school news. As a student, I learned Microsoft PowerPoint by helping my friend with the daily media broadcast. Of course, students of the 2000s would be hardly shocked by such a level of tech, but for those of us who grew up without Internet-connected computers at home or cell phones, it was the height of modernity.

Japan was a bit of a nudge backward after my arrive in the mid-2000s. I remember my dismay when I took the tour of my school and realized there was no public computer lab, and just two general-use Windows XP laptops for the English department to share between 20 teachers. As an expat excited to document her adventures, and soon enough struggling with homesickness, the Internet had become my lifeline. I needed access. (This was after WiFi hotspots became a thing in Japan, but before they were affordable.) Luckily, the department kept one of the general-use computers on the desk next to mine, so I could pull it over and use it whenever I wanted. Which...was a lot, given that there wasn't a lot of prep work for me to do when the students were on vacation. I spent quite a lot of time on Wikipedia, Canadian news websites, and eventually, teaching myself the sport of basketball from the ground up. One day I came to school and, bless whoever in the IT department allowed this, discovered that laptop had moved permanently to my desk, and a new third one sat in its former home on the public desk. My JTE, my lifeline, had arranged for it.

The department's general-use computers, scanner and printer

My neighbours occasionally indicated that they thought I was a little unsociable, and I realize now that this was a gentle hint, but my sanity was spared. Sorry, everyone.

Anyway, at my school, things worked much like they did when I was in elementary and junior high back home. Most of the time, this was just fine by me; it's not a criticism. We used overhead projectors, analog clocks. 

My biggest problem was, bar none, the lack of insulation and heating. Mind you, this was not an issue unique to school; I battled frozen extremities at home, in the train station, and really most other places as well. I was shocked how unaffected my co-workers and students seemed to be by the temperatures that totally immobilized me! To stave off the cold, I had an enormous gas stove in my classroom, which needed to be hooked up to the gas outlet in the wall and turned on a minimum of twenty minutes before the lesson. On days when my prep work took me right to the bell, myself and the students could hardly function for the first half of the lesson, so I often spent entire mornings in my classroom, reading books and breathing gas because I truly felt it was better to tolerate a gas migraine than be so cold. In the staff room, my desk was also by the window, which we kept open year-round so that the air could circulate...even in February, that window was always open. 

The school was built in the 1960s, and had a definite 60s feel to it that I loved. There was a staff photo pinned to the cabinet behind where I sat that was dated the year Heisei 6 or so (1994: 2012 is Heisei 24) and showed the school exterior painted a vibrant hospital green. We had a chalkboard in the English department that had the names and addresses of JETs long, long gone written there - I wish I had taken a photo of this before I left. My phone number was written there for years, and might even still be, since it had been handed down year after year with the apartment. I was always on the lookout for 'vintage' things at home and away, and school occasionally delivered. I loved the sign in our lounge citing the rules, dated 1984, that hadn't faded or yellowed a bit.

I thought much of the charm in my school lay in its history and when I visited Emily's OO N High School on multiple occasions, a building not even 5 years old, I knew I preferred ours, even though she had air conditioning and heat in the staff room!

A familiar hallway

This entry has turned into a bit of a ramble, but when I think about how high school here in Canada must have evolved since I graduated (I hear my alma mater now auto-emails parents whose children have not shown up for school, and all papers submitted must be typed rather than handwritten) I'm glad that Japan wasn't a shock for me in this way. My students didn't work up any fancy Photoshop projects, and they handed all their homework in hand-written. I kept my grades in a register book, not on my computer. The kids all had cell phones, but rarely did I see any other technology in class - sometimes someone would have an iPod tucked into their blazer as they left, and there was a huge hubbub over a student who got an iPhone when it first launched, but lunchtime was usually for socializing with friends! I knew by name the only girl who brought her Nintendo DS with her to school every day, because she once asked me to bring mine so that we could play together.

Maybe the reason was because the prefecture couldn't afford fancy computers and LCD screens, but I prefer to think they were subscribing to the "we got along perfectly well without those things up until now, so why does it matter?" logic. I'm no technophobe, but I found it refreshing that my school was so down to earth. Even though we have had all these great advancements in tech that have become ubiquitous in the west, they are sometimes still seen as distractions in Japan. In my school, and I suspect this was true of many Japanese schools, we kept things simple. We had rocks, and we liked 'em! 

And when I was your age, I walked 4876234 miles in the snow to school, barefoot and uphill both ways...

Tanabata

Tanabata lanterns in Katano City, Osaka

One of the exciting things about living in another country is discovering its holidays. I don't necessarily mean all holidays, as it's tough to get too into, say, Louis Riel Day. Still, Japan offers a good number of cultural and religious holidays that can be a lot of fun for newcomers to celebrate. You may not believe in oni, but there's something gratifying about throwing around beans and eating 7-ingredient sushi on February 3. Even better is that fact that holidays really are a huge deal in Japan - commercialization is a threat just like here in the west, but the attention that holidays like Girls' Day and Setsubun get helps make them accessible to visitors.

My personal favourite Japanese holiday is July 7, Tanabata.

Orihime and Hikoboshi, the weaver and the herder

Tanabata (七夕, meaning "Evening of the seventh") is a Japanese star festival, originating from the Chinese Qixi Festival. It celebrates the meeting of the deities Orihime and Hikoboshi (represented by the stars Vega and Altair respectively). According to legend, the Milky Way separates these lovers, and they are allowed to meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month of the lunisolar calendar.

Katano City in northeast Osaka was said to be quite famous in the prefecture for its Tanabata celebrations, so I attended every year.  Originally, Marisa and I thought this was a perfect opportunity to buy and get suited up in yukata, the traditional summer kimono, and attend a real festival. Katano's festival features 14,000 candles laid out in intricate patterns. One of my students was a resident of Katano and on the planning committee, and she spent many long hours helping to organize the festival.

Katano's beautiful candlelights

Besides the main attraction, the lights, the festival also featured a small collection of stalls along the walking path, with the usual festival food, shaved ice, chocolate bananas, goldfish-scooping and other games. There was a stamp rally at one point, and more star-themed food than you can imagine. That first year, we brought home a bagful of festival goldfish that died within a week. The gentleman at the stall gave us way more than we needed after we utterly failed at catching even a single goldfish on our own.

Keihan Railways, as one of two train lines servicing Katano City, heavily promotes the city's Tanabata festival and likely brings in most of the festivalgoers coming from out of town. Two of the commuter trains on the Keihan Main Line/Katano Line are named Hikoboshi and Orihime, after the deities, and they come to and  from Katano and Osaka City in the morning (Orihime) and evening (Hikoboshi), never meeting. On July 7th, however, both trains are docked in Kisaichi Station, finally in the same place at the same time. It's one of the local events Keihan sponsors, and no surprise that they'd want to capitalize on the popular "romantic" holiday - every year, the Katano Line is packed with festival-goers in yukata on their way to and from Kisaichi Station.

Yukata on the Katano Line

Another year, I went with my co-worker S, her young daughter, and her friend Katsue. This was a lot of fun as Katsue knew a lot about the culture of the holiday, and I had a few wishes I wanted to make, so the four of us tied up our wishes written on tanzaku in the trees. 

These decorations, including Orihime and Hikoboshi, hung over the river in Katano

We ate star-shaped okonomiyaki and S's daughter had her photo taken with people dressed up as Orihime and Hikoboshi. The city was really shining that year, even though it had rained in the morning, with so many beautiful candlelit designs on the riverbanks. My Japanese friends also designed our own tanzaku, but lacking any trees near my low-rise apartment, I hung it up on my balcony...shhh!  

Tanabata wishes written on tanzaku

My final year in Japan was the first time I actually saw a Tanabata rained out. What a tragedy for the volunteers in Katano after preparing those 14,000 lights! Of course, in the legend, if the weather is foul then Orihime and Hikoboshi aren't able to meet, so it stands to reason that no festival of celebration would be necessary...

The rain petered out in the late afternoon, however, so we thought the festivities might go ahead as they had the year before, but there just hadn't been enough time. When we got to Katano, the decorations were up but the festival absent. We settled for dinner in our yukata at Ganko Sanjo in Kyoto, but it wasn't the same as my regular Tanabata festival. 

This year, I'll be writing out a wish again, though my yukata will probably stay in the closet until the JCCC's natsumaturi next Saturday. So, what are you wishing for? Take a little time to think about it tomorrow!

Crazy About Takoyaki

Takoyaki and other delights in the foodcourt of the Hanshin Umeda building

As someone who called Osaka home and considers themselves to be as Osakan as a foreigner can get both in manner and speech, I have of course been instilled with a love of takoyaki, those delectable fried doughy balls filled with octopus and topped with shaved bonito flakes. (Not everyone gets it - ex-boyfriend referred to this favourite as "tako-yucky.") It didn't help much that there was a tiny mom-and-pop shop 15 seconds from my front door, and the very first thing my co-workers did when they brought me to my apartment was set me up with ice cream and takoyaki from this place.

Luckily, there are decent octopi offerings to be had here in Toronto, but I know I'm very lucky to have it.  I'll almost always buy fresh takoyaki made from a restaurant before making it myself, since it's a lot of work! Just in case, though, I brought home my own takoyaki and okonomiyaki kits when I left Osaka, including picks, spatulas, mayonnaise container and even the electric grill. 

The Tako King is famous in Amemura, "American Village" in Osaka.

Not everyone is so fortunate, of course, and at some point I'll have to replace some of my supplies. Locally, you can buy takoyaki and taiyaki grills and the flour at J-Town, but with none of the frills, of course. For those wanting something more high-tech, or living outside of the city, you may want to check out J-List's products for making affordable at-home takoyaki. Seriously, everyone - takoyaki party. You won't regret it.

Melon Pan

There used to be a truck that came by each Friday and parked by our local train station, offering dozens of varieties of my favourite baked treat - melon pan. This combination of cookie + bread was created in the image of a rock melon, and ever so occasionally even have a melon taste! Melon pan are pretty old hat, but the Beikudo truck - which makes its rounds along various cities in northeast Osaka - was really something special. They would have the bread warming in the ovens in there, for one thing, and the selection was amazing.

My friend S and I routinely picked up half a dozen or more from Beikudo to bring home for the weekend - it was our "TGIF" ritual.

I would die for one of these right now

I had never seen anything quite like Beikudo. The bakery nearest my home station stocked a fairly boring lineup of plain melon pan, and a chocolate-chip variety. Occasionally they'd have a "theme" month where you might be lucky enough to get something like cocoa, but mostly, it was just the regular fare. Beikudo, however, had some flavours that were incredibly off the beaten path. I could be here all day listing them - sadly, they don't feature a full list on their website. Here are a few I can remember, including a couple of favourites: 

Plain
Black tea
Green tea
Caramel
Chocolate
Chocolate cookie
Chocolate cream cookie
Chocolate orange
Melon cream
Strawberry
Coconut
Pumpkin
Apple & Spinach

If it was seasonal, there would be a melon pan flavour for it. How I miss Beikudo!

Three "specialty" flavours: Spinach & Apple, Pumpkin, and Coconut

Now that I'm home, melon pan is very tough to find in Toronto. I've never seen any variety except plain, and they also dry out so fast that if you arrive at J-Town's Nakamura Bakery by day's end (if there are even any left), they aren't half as good. Melon pan are meant to be soft, and while I sometimes kept my Beikudo purchases to last through the weekend - and even mailed a boxful packed in Tupperware to a friend in Canada! - I find Nakamura's have reached their life by the next morning. Very unfortunate.

If you're interested in trying to make your own (and I fear this might be me tonight), you can find a recipe over here at Japan Chan!

A Biking Story

For a long time, I had my eye on a particular chair at the local department store. It was small, fairly light and by far the most comfortable thing I'd sat in since arriving in the country, including the leather sofas on the second floor of the home furnishing store. I know comfy chairs when I see them.

Looks good, right?

The problem being that the chair in question was green, and the last one they had. It was actually one of the few greens I kind of like, a subdued limey colour. However, my living room contained 438576 shades of pink. So, I held off for a long while, probably two months, before finally I said "well, fine," and went to go buy the chair, rent a movie and sack out on my tatami rug for the rest of the evening.

When I got to the department store, though - FOILED.

The green chair had been sold. 

I hailed an employee and strung together a very ugly sentence that, translated, amounted to something like, "over there...green chair...last week...do you have?" She got the picture though and said it was gone, sorry. So I tried "more store...somewhere in Osaka...is there?"

How she figured out what I meant, I'll never know, but she brought out a store listing and told me that there was a branch of their store in Kyoto and one in Ibaraki. Well, someone on the JET Facebook group had said that her town, Ibaraki, was "a stone's throw" away from mine so I Google Mapped it up. At the 3rd or 4th zoom level, my apartment was on one side of the screen and the store was on the other. I couldn't calculate biking distance for some reason. It was far, yeah, but I figured I could do it, or rather, had to, as now I had to have that chair. It was on, now.

My road had considerably fewer sidewalks
Or buildings, for that matter

So the next afternoon I set out for adventure. I biked alongside the river and through a million back roads, cursing Ibaraki for having little or no sidewalk. The beginning of the city was all rice paddies and overgrown fields, until eventually I hit pachinko parlours. After about 45 minutes I stopped at a Lawson to make sure I was actually going the right way.

With all the stops, the trip was roughly an hour and a half.

Fortunately for me, the department store had the chair in stock in many colours. Unfortunately, it was a full 2,000 yen more expensive than the one at the other store!?  Well, I'd come more than ten kilometres for the thing and I wasn't leaving without it. (Technically I did leave without it, though; I paid them 400 yen to deliver it to my apartment on Monday after school! It was a little bigger than I remembered.) Since my bicycle basket was empty still, I got a duvet from Muji, two fluffy floor cushions a few other small things.

Around five, I headed back out and strapped my purchases to my bicycle. The ride home was actually rougher; this time I was on the opposite side of the street in order to move with the traffic during those times that the sidewalks randomly DISAPPEARED. Unfortunately, during one of those times, I hit a pothole that could have given someone whiplash at the right angle. All seemed well, until about two minutes later when my tire started making rubbery noises.

There'd been a gas station about fifty metres back, so after confirming that my tire was indeed flat as a pancake, I walked my bicycle back to it and had them put more air in. The guy there said that I should take my bike to a jitenshaya-san (lit. "Mr. Bike," meaning a shop) to have it checked. I said OK and started keeping a close eye on the stores as I passed them, watching for jitenshaya-sans and gas stations, just in case, as well as bus stops. I'd seen buses pass me multiple times.

Five minutes later the tire was flat again.

I was near a bus stop so I attempted to board the next one after explaining that my bicycle was "broken" and I needed to get it back home. Unfortunately, the driver would not allow me to take it on the bus. I had a panic moment - it was now quite dark and I was rougly halfway back, with an irritating rice paddy/barren field combo still lying between myself and home. Stepped back off the bus frustrated and thinking about how guilty that guy was going to feel if I got hit by a car or murdered on the way back. Not that there's much danger of that in this country, but I do worry when stranded in the middle of nowhere! 

I decided to try and find a shop, and if not, park my bicycle in a well-lit spot and take the next bus home, then retrieve the bike on foot the next day. Luckily, there WAS a jitenshaya-san very closeby who was totally nice and had my tire patched perfectly and tested and reattached within ten minutes, for 800 yen. He was really nice and tried to chat as he worked while I did my best to respond using only nouns. When he finished and I was back on the road, I took it veeeeery slow (sometimes no sidewalks/opposite side of the road from last time/NO STREET LIGHTS, WHAT THE) and was incredibly relieved when I made it to the next town. Not home, but close enough that I was comfortable...but more mishaps awaited me. I forgot to change to the other side of the road before crossing the bridge. So when I reached the other side (and this is a loooooong bridge) I found that there was no stoplight or crosswalk, and 6 lanes of traffic. Cool. So I had to go the opposite direction from home, down over the stairs with the bike and take the pedestrian tunnel back. I stumbled into my apartment at 7:40, having lost six hours of my life, 400 yen in shipping, 800 yen for a bike tire patch, and 2,000 extra yen for the non-floor-model chair, making this a very costly venture. I learned two things:

1) I should buy things I like immediately to save myself later hassle (!!)

2) Ibaraki is not a bikable destination and I should have just taken the bus in the first place. (!!!)

That'll teach me to try to save money.

Doubling on a Bicycle

Image shared with permission via Quirky Japan Blog

So you're in Japan. You constantly see your students "doubling" on their bicycles to get home. There's even a nice little rack on the back of many Japanese bicycles that is more than sturdy enough to hold a person. You know they're not supposed to, but everybody does it anyway.

The one time you try it yourself, just to see what it's like to ride with someone, in the dark on a side street at 11 at night, you still get pulled over by police after less than two minutes and asked for your alien registration card.

Embarrassing. Don't try it. Also, riding with an extra person's weight was tougher than it looked, and not a whole lot of fun besides. So much for schoolyard romance.

Tsuyu, the Rainy Season

Yosakoi performance in Kyobashi

Rainy here again, today.

The rainy season in Japan is about to start now that it's June, and funnily enough, we're having our own "rainy season" here in Toronto. (Kicked off by the inconvenient, yet fantastically funny, Union Station flood last week.) The rainy season is one of the things that I don't miss about Japan. While I actually love rain and  there's a ton of charm in going for a stroll in it (plus, it always fell straight down, unlike the sideways rain of my hometown on the East Coast), the long rainy season was pretty awful. Laundry never dried right, and I hated going to school by bicycle in the wet, and when I woke up on a rainy tsuyu day I would have to quickly get ready and head out to the train station a full 20 minutes earlier than normal to avoid having to bike. On the bright side, this gave me lots of opportunities to walk back after school with my students or with my co-workers - S and I enjoyed many Friday melon pan runs like this. I also was able to own a contingent of adorable umbrellas that I was forced to leave behind when I returned to Canada. Had I known how expensive umbrellas were here (again, sideways rain, so there was no point in owning one before I came to Toronto), I would have brought them all home.

A family of umbrellas

Another positive to the rainy season was that, with that predictable weather, the underground shopping complexes and shōtengai, covered shopping streets, became a big draw for me - of course, and for hundreds  of thousands of other Osakans! It's likely that tsuyu is one of the reasons that we have such an extensive network of covered areas. There was something pretty fantastic about being able to stroll for kilometres without having to face the elements, but still being outside, in the case of the covered shopping streets. As for the underground, I know I would never have been able to explore the tunnels of Umeda and Namba nearly as thoroughly if the draw of a sunny day was just outside. I wish the PATH system here was even 1/10th as efficient and exciting as the shōtengai of Osaka!

Namba NanNan, one of Osaka's first underground complexes.

Mama-Chari

Bikes lined up in the student parking lot at school...this is probably about 1/3 of the school bike population.

My first big purchase in Japan - my trusty mama-chari.

I wouldn't be exaggerating to say that 90% of junior high and high-school-age students in my town got around by bicycle. Plenty of adults did, too. My students teased me a few times because I rode what they some would call a "mommy bike" - a mama-chari, its name coming from "Mama" and the sound of a ringing bell. I kitted out my mama-chari bike with two baskets, a front basket cover, umbrella and PET bottle holders, bungee cables for carrying heavy items and elastic netting to keep my groceries from bouncing out onto the road. The chain was completely covered so that it was safe to ride in a medium-length skirt, and it stood upright rather than on a kickstand. I frequently saw these bikes in use by mothers who had one child in a front basket seat and another on the back. (Full House, anyone?) After a disastrous flat tire while biking home from a town 45 minutes away with a floor chair strapped in my basket, I started carrying a can of instant air in my basket at all times.

Circle lock with key

One of the best things was never having to lock my bike to a physical object. There is a circle lock built into the bike that loops around the back wheel, and you just leave the bike standing wherever. Supposedly, bicycles are "frequently" stolen in Japan, but in three years of daily riding I never had any trouble. Someone took my raincoat out of my zippered basket cover once, but my bike was always right where I left it.

Emily

She made my entire year with this Kuririn cake

I couldn't give you a proper introduction to my life in Japan without talking about Emily, my lifesaver. She lived a floor below me in an apartment identical to mine. She arrived in Japan with the Group A JETs, about a week before I did, and introduced herself to me the day I arrived - our predecessors had been good friends. The girl who used to teach at 〇〇 High School had previously occupied my apartment, while the girl who taught at 〇〇 N High School had occupied hers. Convenient!

Emily is American, from Pennsylvania, and she has an amazing range of hobbies, from cooking to sewing to crafting jewellery. I didn't realize, when we met, that we had so much in common; I was just happy there was another JET in my apartment complex. We didn't really hang out much until she invited me to go to the Tokyo Game Show that September (I definitely had an allergy to fun at times), but from then on, we were inseparable. Between carrying 30 pounds of food home in a duffel bag to make Christmas dinner, a week-long hot spring vacation in Kyushu, seeing Phoenix Wright: The Musical performed by Takarazuka, attending a party in formal wear in a torrential rainstorm- most of my best memories in Japan involved Em. She was very good at having a good time and excellent at prying me out of my apartment when I didn't really feel up to facing the world. I could not have asked for a better friend.

Emily is still in Osaka - she's finishing her final contract year in Japan and coming back to the States this summer. We are....really bad at keeping regular contact. Between being busy and the time difference, it can be tough, and it's still crazy sometimes to think that she's been there all that time while I've been here. (What was I thinking!?) But Pennsylvania and Toronto are not so far apart, so I'm hoping to see her again soon. You're the best, Emily! I miss you! ♥

Zen Living

Space is a premium in Japan. Most Japanese are pretty taken aback by the size of ranch-style homes in North America, and it's quite common for any single - not just students - to rent a 1DK or an LDK until they are ready to start a family.

Apartments are measured by the number of rooms and the number of tatami, traditional straw mats, that fit in each room. I lived in a 1K apartment, with the 1 meaning 1 room, and the K standing for kitchen. A 1DK would add a dining area; an L (LDK, 2LDK, etc) brings a living room into the picture. While I didn't have tatami in my apartment (a crushing disappointment - it was one of the uniquely Japanese things I was really looking forward to!), my space measured about rokujo, or 6 mats' worth. (According to Wikipedia, 6 mats = 2.73 m × 3.64 m ≈ 9 ft × 12 ft.) I had a kitchen that was a hair larger than a kitchenette, as well as a toilet room and a bath room, separated, each with its own little door.

My charming living room

My charming kitchen

At first glance I was Not Impressed. My predecessor had warned me that the apartment was on the small side, commenting that she had "enjoyed learning how to maximize [her] use of space." Still, in her photos (which I sadly no longer have - curse you Kodak Gallery Online!) it looked spacious enough! She used the oshiire, the closet for storing futon, as an in-wall desk and had hung poles inside for her clothes. She could just close off that space by shutting the door. And honestly, looking at the circa-2007 photos above, it does look spacious. The problem is that I'm a packrat, and a packrat who wanted tons of adorable Japanese furniture and accessories.

A pretty typical Japanese living room.

Didn't last.

I was prepared to roll with the whole thing, with a few conditions.

The first thing I wanted was a kotatsu. Step off plane; buy kotatsu was my plan. That didn't work out - I arrived in August, after all. (I'll save the kotatsu for another, more seasonally-appropriate post.) Instead, I bought a Super Famicom, the Japanese original version of the Super Nintendo. I imagined myself amused for hours in my zenlike little apartment with a SuFami and the twelve books I had carefully packed to make sure each suitcase was 70 lbs, no more, no less. In my apartment with no chairs and no bed, I was living the minimalist lifestyle. I congratulated myself on leaving most of my worldly possessions behind - one suitcase was clothes, one was omiyage and my computer monitor and keyboard, and my books. Fantastic. Beautiful. Who needed chairs, anyway!?

...I needed chairs. Sort of. Well, we had this wonderful department store nearby, Vivre, and they had these really cute legless chairs for sitting at kotatsu and other low tables. Then I found a legless lounging chair I thought would be perfect for those long SuFami afternoons. I biked to a department store 90 minutes away to buy this item, and blew a tire on my way home with a bunch of stuff strapped to my bike.

Soon I had deemed the couch (it was a Western-style futon that folded into an uncomfortable bed) inherited from my pred a waste of space, and pushed it upright against the wall where it would stay out of my way. We nicknamed this the "death trap" after it fell on me one night as I slept. Sofas = wood frames. I bought a super-length laundry pole, floor to ceiling, to prop it up where it couldn't fall and kill anyone. Great conversation starter, and in a pinch, I even took it down and slept on it.

I bought two Japanese-style futons to save space, got my kotatsu in autumn, and inherited four portable tatami squares from a JET who left the following August, working my way up to the "traditional" room I'd wanted when I first planned to go to Japan. I kept a dresser in the oshiire as well as the poles my predecessor had left. At one point I kept the TV in there until it was clear I was running out of space. I had two sets of plastic drawers in there, as well as my spare futon, the box from my kotatsu (so I could ship it back to Canada one day), and tons of misc clothes and small electronics and cardboardy things. Soon I was storing things on the balcony like a native, though I still didn't think I was doing too badly. After all, I hadn't succumbed and gotten a bed, or a clothes dryer, or a dishwasher or even a chair with legs. I congratulated myself on not buying an adorable legless red loveseat I'd seen at a furniture store in Neyagawa. Even so, my possessions began to stack on top of themselves, and I had run out of storage space. I wasn't psychologically capable of zen living - I hardly even played my SuFami.

My book collection doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, then I stopped counting. Curse you, 100-yen bookstores!

I acquired a fan and a vacuum cleaner and two folding tables, and in the kitchen a microwave and a bigger fridge and an electric kettle, and I hardly need to tell you that it went all downhill from there...

When I left Japan, I had 12 full 30-kilo (66-pound) boxes to mail to Canada, even after throwing away everything I could bear to part with. For most things, the cost of replacing them here would have been the same or more than the cost of shipping it. But even now I'll suddenly stop and think "Whatever happened to my ____________? Why didn't I take that home? I wish I had taken that home."

Osaka, My Town

The view from my apartment building

I spent the tenure of my JET years in Osaka prefecture in a small city northeast of the prefectural capital. Since this blog is going to be quite personal, out of respect for everyone's privacy, I'm not going to make it easy to discover the name of my town or my school - I taught at, let's say OO High School, a high-level school with a specialized English stream to help students get into a good university.

My city was a beautiful little spot, and although I complained from time to time about how far it was from things I wanted to do in Osaka city itself (frequent trips to Minoo, one of the nicer hot springs in Osaka, were out of the question), it really was a wonderful place. I lived less than 5 minutes from a train station, a grocery store, 4 convenience stores, a park, my bank and a fantastic takoyaki shop. School was 12 minutes' bike ride away.

OO City had a population not too far off from my own hometown, so the size was comfortable for me, and living close to the station was great. Both Osaka and Kyoto were easily reachable. We had a grocery store in town that sold passable import food, and while my apartment was smaller than I initially imagined, it was clean and bright. I also had a JET neighbour who moved in a week before I did and almost instantly became the best friend I could ever have asked for in Japan. In fact, she's still there, but I'm looking forward to welcoming her back to the West this summer.

I struggled with homesickness and heartbreak during my time abroad and it was this difficult period that made me realize that I was not, in fact, destined to spend my life there. There are so many ways things could have gone differently; if I had studied more, or if I had visited home more, perhaps I would still be there now too. I quickly found that my homesickness for Japan was worse than my homesickness for Canada - that of course was how this blog came about. Most "lifers" would probably laugh at my short experience, too - many of the NETs working for the Osaka Board of Education had been there a decade or more. I think my biggest problem was that I wanted so badly to stay - but the combination of things on my mind was so much that I knew I had to leave, for my own health.

Still, I'll always consider Osaka my second home - were it not for those few crucial factors here, I would go back in a heartbeat.

Welcome

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new blog - Tadaimatte. As a bit of background, I returned from living abroad in Japan a little more than a year ago, and have found the adjustment back to life in Canada a little difficult. I think everyone thought me to be a "lifer" once I got over there, but there are important people here whom I hated being so far away from!

I've been looking for ways to connect with my life in Japan and put some of the reverse culture shock and homesickness to rest. I volunteer with exchange students and write for JapanTourist, and from time to time I write as well. I thought, why not share some of these struggles, and document some of my memories from Japan? Thus the creation of this blog. I hope everyone - ex-expats and Japan hopefuls alike - will find something close to home in my writings.

ただいま。。。って。