Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time. 

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward. 

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko. 

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers. 

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com. 

 Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery. 

 It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too. 

 Thanks for sticking with me!

It Finally Happened

Something was holding me back for a long time, but you know what? I decided, a ridiculous ten years later, that I was going to put this out there.

Thanks all, for your support!

TOKYO CITY 憶えているかい ホームの片隅で

So I've been fairly busy with a lot of things lately, and while I tried (and will continue) to keep work-related things off the blog, I thought I'd check in and note that I recently finished my job in one local Japan-related field and moved to another. I'm sad to have left my office and the great people there, but my contract was ending, and an opportunity came up that I couldn't refuse. So what this does mean for me...?

Well...!

As it turns out, it means a lot of travel to Japan.

I'm so excited to have already been back to Tokyo (and eventually I want to take a vacation to my true second home Osaka, of course) and the first visit was really and truly surreal. Maybe it sounds really silly, but I think anyone who has had their heart in two countries at once can relate. It's not about Japan itself but the feeling of being immersed again in a place that was once "home" that I missed very much. 

I took the train from Narita out to Azabu-Juuban, and on the long ride, it was hard to do anything but wax nostalgic! It was early, but even on a Saturday at 8 AM, students in uniforms were taking up most of the train car. On their way to their club practices, I'd imagine. One high school-aged boy sat beside me and I immediately recognized his cologne or body spray as a familiar scent from my own classroom at 〇〇 High School. I'd never been on that train line before or seen that scenery, but just being there on that train, sitting with the Saturday shoppers and the schoolkids and breathing the air and seeing the signs fly past the window, I was feeling so natsukashii. 

I wasn't meeting my friend until 9:30, so I strolled through Azabu-Juuban for a time, a little wowed from how it had changed since I last visited, with Ami-chan years before. Ichinohashi Park was completely gone, and a construction site was in its place. Azabu-Juuban's main station entrace, outside the Shotengai, had also been spruced up a bit. Funny, but I never visited Azabu again after taking Ami-chan there, even when I had lots of time to kill in Tokyo in the past. I guess I felt that as a pop-culture location, most of the places I would have liked to see had already been gone for years by the time I moved to Japan. 

It was really nice walking through there though, and after a stunning only-in-Japan Cantaloupe Melon and Cream Frappuccino at Starbucks and a melon pan run, I eventually ended up in Roppongi Hills to meet my friend. We saw the Sailor Moon exhibition and had lunch at CoCo Ichiban, which I really still don't have the recipe nailed down for yet. Then we were out of time, and I had to head to work.

I was trying to pretend that this was a normal Tokyo trip like the many ones I'd taken before, but as on the visit to Japan a year ago, I couldn't shake the sense of "limited-time" urgency. I probably never will be able to manage that totally, given that when you're on a company trip, the clock is ticking. On the bright side, the next trip is already in the calendar.

See you soon.

Photo of the Day - Shinjuku, 1992

Today I was linked to this fantastic HD video on YouTube of Tokyo in 1992. It's so clear! I really dig urban history, so I snapped a few screenshots of my favourite moments. The video includes this nice shot of Shinjuku's Studio ALTA, a look at the Rainbow Bridge during construction (!), and a Shibuya scramble crossing that's so unrecognizable that I didn't even realize right away that I was looking at the entrance to Center Gai. Wow. Check out the video, and for extra credit, have a look at this blog post about Studio ALTA, featuring a photo of the lower half of the building, in 1989!

Hobonichi Techo Life

In 2008 while living in Japan, I was finally able to play MOTHER 3, a recent (at the time) sequel to a cult hit video game that I loved as a teenager. My brothers and I owned a Super Nintendo and a copy of EarthBound, by far the house's "preferred game." Released in 1994, it was a role-playing game set in rural America, starring four "normal" kids (or as normal as spunky psychics, princes and genius teenagers can get, anyway). Years later, the sequel MOTHER 3 got a Japan-only release.

For me, it was perfect timing. Uncertain how to make Japanese-speaking friends, I had been hanging out mostly with fellow JETs and exchange students from the nearby university. I spent a lot of time in my apartment chatting online with people back home and listening to Internet radio. And as it happened, that was where I had the good fortune to meet my first real Japanese friends - not in Japan, but on the Internet.

This could turn into a much longer story (and my social life isn't actually what the post is about!) so to keep it short, I'll just say that I got involved with a certain well-known EarthBound community and encountered a Japanese fan of the game within it, Mana. She was about my age and lived in Gunma-ken, a prefecture north of Tokyo. The two of us arranged a meeting during one of my visits to Tokyo and hit it off, and from then on, whenever I was in the area, I made an effort to see her and her friends that I had gotten to know. All were fans of the MOTHER series, so I went from a fairly small amount of fandom involvement to quite a lot, very quickly. 

Japan was a good place to be at the time for fans of this 20-year-old series - aside from MOTHER 3's relatively recent release, there had actually been brand-new merchandise released in arcades (Game Centers), The King of Games was selling official t-shirts out of a shop in Kyoto's Teramachi, thirty minutes from my apartment, and you could still buy the special MOTHER 3 Game Boy Micro in stores - I still regret not owning one of these! I struggled through reading the blog of MOTHER creator and copywriter Itoi Shigesato, and I went to LOFT on not one but two separate Januarys to buy his well-known Hobonichi Techo, a day planner with customizable covers and thoughtful quotes. I did not make the purchase on either occasion - after all, every year CLAIR sent us a compact, designed-for-JETs planner in the mail that I was quite fond of, and I also received a small calendar book from my school. While I wanted a techo because of the Itoi connection, I couldn't validate the expense when CLAIR's version was smaller, printed in English, and had subway maps and unit conversions on the back pages. None of the covers interested me enough to drop ¥3,500 on one, so I settled for simply looking them over whenever I visited Kyoto. There were other ways to show my MOTHER love, like this fancy colour-changing Ultimate Chimera shirt that cost an absolutely astronomical amount of money at the time.

At one point Mana-chan and friends, myself included, attended a MOTHER event in Tokyo where I even ran into into two other English-speaking members of that community, one of whom was an expat JET like me - though a CIR, not an ALT - from a few prefectures away. We hadn't really known each other at the time, certainly not enough for me to recognize them offhand, but I was completely gobsmacked to spot someone in the subway station wearing a Ness t-shirt, and rushed up to them immediately to say hello.

It's been some years since that event, and though MOTHER influences my life to this day, my active involvement has waned pretty considerably since leaving Japan. Not so of the JET I met at the event in Tokyo, Lindsay - she now translates and localizes for the company belonging to the creator of the MOTHER series, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun!

I can't tell you how awesome it is to see a fan succeed not only at entering the industry professionally, but to have the incredible good fortune (not to mention the moxie to go after it in the first place!) to work with Itoi himself. So when word got out that Hobonichi was releasing an English version of the techo, translated and localized by Lindsay, I decided it was finally my year, despite having converted over pretty thoroughly to Android's convenient Google Calendar access.

Typically, I have never been great with keeping up planners. Not since high school have I used an agenda on a regular basis. But my techo's design and ease of use (can't bring my phone into company meetings!) and stylishness and POCKETS has driven it home.

(No, I don't always save my TTC transfers!)

I use it for writing fiction ideas, dates and times and details for stories, copying the office calendar down so I can see it at home, collecting movie and concert ticket stubs, noting what foods I liked at restaurants and how much I spent, and more recently tracking Bitcoin gains and losses. I also get to use stickers I brought home from Japan and my immense Muji pen collection, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that two of the other staff in my office also have Hobonichi techos!

It's been a bit tough carrying around a book all the time when I cart around plenty of heavy things in my purse, not to mention switching from digital back to analogue again, but I'm already dreaming about putting my techo on the shelf at the end of the year and having this record of 2014 to flip through again someday...it's much more personal than reading back through Twitter logs!

I guess I can't possibly be shocked that MOTHER continues to exert that subtle influence over my days. I might even have to pull out the big guns and use some of my carefully hoarded Mr. Saturn stickers.

What are you waiting for!? Start your techo life!

Writing About Tokyo

Commemorating the 1964 Olympics at Jingu Bashi

I don't think I've ever mentioned on Tadaimatte before that I had written a novel - it's true! 

As you might have guessed, story writing is an outlet for me, and in 2008 while living in Osaka, I devoted quite a lot of effort to penning my first book. At the time, I was enamoured with Tokyo, and deeply interested in studying the evolution of popular culture in The Big Mikan. I went to the library in Hikarigaoka and thumbed through photos of the area from the 60s, I penned thoughtful poems about umbrellas and imagined the lives of the people bobbing through Hachiko Square, watched Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, traced the steps of Shiki and Beat and Neku from The World Ends With You, read vintage Tezuka manga, attended Comiket, visited all the shops Shigesato Itoi recommended in interviews about MOTHER, sat on the bridge at Harajuku, visited Tokyo 1964 Olympic sites, trolled Jimbocho bookstores in hopes of finding the original 1983 English translation of The Rose of Versailles, and generally fell in love with the way the city had been depicted in works of fiction. I used words like hokoten (short for hokousha tengoku) and expected people around me to actually know what they meant.

In reality, Tokyo - particularly the long trip I took alone in 2008 - was a fairly private experience, simply because I didn't know anyone else who got excited over things like Olympic plaques, croquette rolls and showa retro. I spent something like twelve days wandering the city mostly alone, with no plan, eating curry and rice balls and occasionally having only the vaguest idea of where I was going to spend the night (!). I visited Yokohama and Hakone during this memorable vacation, but spent most of it in Shibuya and Odaiba, having real "down time" in Tokyo for the first time.

One post couldn't possibly sum up how I feel about the capital...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book. I sent it around to just a couple of publishers, as it was such a specialized topic that I couldn't imagine a big company picking it up. I've sat on it long enough now, though, that I've begun to think that self-publishing is the way to go - as intimidating as that is!

So, over the next weeks and months, I'll be continuing to work on this project with the help of my good friend Zippo, and maybe soon you'll be able to download the book right here!

*edit*

And now, you can! Whoa! Check out Meet You By Hachiko on Amazon!

Photo of the Day - Final Fantasy VI

Halloween is just past, so why not a costuming photo!?
These Final Fantasy VI cosplayers at Tokyo Game Show 2007 were so adorable!

Capsule Hotels

I've always been comfortable enough in small spaces, so the concept of capsule hotels really intrigued me when I first prepared to move to Japan. I looked up information on the Internet about where I might be able to find capsule hotels around Osaka and Tokyo for my (envisioned) many nights out on the town! As it so happened, I was too much of a cheapskate to stay out overnight often when I could make the last train home, but I did have the chance to try out a few capsules while in Japan.

If you don't know what a capsule hotel is, nothing sums it up quite like a visual:

Interior of a capsule

A capsule hotel is just a place to lay your head - you're trading space and amenities for the price, which is usually in the $30 USD/CAD range. I often stayed at the above hotel (Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza Shinsaibashi) in Osaka during the nights between the JET Mid-Year Seminar, a training session held over three days more than an hour away from my apartment. The cost of the hotel (¥2,900) was more than worth saving the 3 hours of travel time heading home after a long day and then back to Abiko first thing in the morning - not to mention the ¥600+ yen each way in train fare.

Most capsule hotels do not accept women, and this was one of two that I was aware of in Osaka that did. In fact, I'm told that the womens' floor (sealed off with a lock to prevent intrusion) at Asahiplaza Shinsaibashi was much nicer than the mens', and with less snoring. The beds you see in the photo above are stacked two units high and luggage is kept in a separate locker. In the womens' area, there was a public bath, sauna, television room and reading lounge. Guests are provided with pajamas and towels, and the bathing area has toothbrushes, brushes and combs kept in a sterilizer, hair dryers, lotions, Q-tips, make-up sponges and a few other disposables. Most hotels have a few mainstays built into their capsules - usually a television, radio and alarm clock are standard; the Shinsaibashi hotel also had an interior fan and some shelves. 

Each time I visited, I made sure to take advantage of the beautiful baths at this hotel. I wasn't sure I could manage it for the first time if someone else was in the bathing room, since it was still very early on in my stay and I was nervous at being the only foreigner there. I was alone when I stowed my clothes in the bathing room lockers and managed to almost finish washing my hair before another guest, a lady in her mid-40s, came in and started to shower. She didn't even give me a second look. so after a moment my awkward feeling passed and that was that. 

That first bath was amazing. I hadn't yet experienced Spa World, and this was a whole different beast anyway; it was more of a sento (neighbourhood bath) environment. The shampoo, rinse and soap from the showers smelled gorgeous, too, and after relaxing in the bath (made of black marble) I went to the sauna to dry off. They had everything I needed to make myself comfortable for the night and the nervousness entirely passed. That evening's sleep was very, very comfortable.

Most capsules are really pretty standard, though some, like Kyoto's 9 hours, really take it to the next level. Over the next few years I tried out a few capsule hotels in Tokyo as well, including some off-the-beaten-path choices like the womens'-only VIVI Roppongi one weekend when I had taken the Seishun 18 to Tokyo on a whim and didn't have a single toiletry with me except the contents of my purse. I still regret not taking good photos of that place, since it was really fantastic.

Awful photo of the bunks at the fabulous VIVI Roppongi

It was my first time going to Roppongi, and I was rather disappointed with the area, sadly. VIVI was great, especially the rock sauna, but the next few times I visited Tokyo on a whim back I ended up back in Shibuya instead. I also stayed at the Green Plaza Shinjuku once, but their facilities weren't worth the price in comparison. It just wasn't as nice as my capsule hotel in Osaka or as the capsule beds at Khaosan in Asakusa. 

I still regret not getting to stay in a tatami capsule at Capsule Ryokan Kyoto. Next time, Japan!!

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 Darling is a Foreigner

The first two volumes of My Darling is a Foreigner

I have a tough time with reading in Japanese. It's unfortunate, but I've never been a patient person - this is primarily why I fail at baking, drawing, and other hobbies that require the simple skill of waiting. I have a tendency to rush - and it makes language-learning particularly hard.

For a time, I tried reading manga in Japanese to help encourage my reading skills. I tend to like the kind of manga that comes chock-full of big, complicated words and no furigana at all, though (Tezuka Osamu, I'm looking at you!) so this quickly became a failed effort. The amount of dictionary lookups it took to get through a chapter of Detective Conan made the pace mind-numbingly slow. At some point, I found Chi's Sweet Home, an adorable cat manga targeted at a younger age group, but found that not quite challenging enough. I was enjoying, but not really learning anything new when I read.

Recently, though, I've found a happy medium in「ダーリンは外国人」; My Darling is a Foreigner. I bought the two first volumes of My Darling is a Foreigner from Honto back in June, as my 'test' purchase from them to gauge the shipping costs. (Came to ¥800 - fantastic!) It's the story of a mixed married couple; she Japanese, he American with Italian-Hungarian heritage. It is a very nice departure from the usual "Japanese girl meets foreign man" plot, as the leading man, Tony, is a linguist who's very interested in wordplay and the leading lady and artist of the story, Saori, is a manga artist. They are not, by any stretch, your typical mixed couple living in Japan! There was even a comedy movie a few years back based on the franchise (it wasn't bad at all, though it also wasn't quite in line with the books) and I used to see animations based on Tony on the Yamanote Line media monitors. Natsukashii, ne!

The main draw of My Darling is a Foreigner for me, right now, is the level and pace of the comics as a study tool. The short illustrated stories in the books are usually just long enough to get in some good reading practice, and often address things that are funny to me as a linguist and student of Japanese, which makes it a perfect choice for aspiring JLPT test-takers.

The first volume, I had actually already read in the form of a translation - a bilingual version of the book was published while I was in Japan. The alternate title of one of the English prints, which was offered for a time on Amazon, was "Is He Turning Japanese?" It's still in print in the bilingual format in Japan, but much tougher to find on Amazon, so I'd recommend using the Honto.jp link I provided above if you'd like to pick it up.

Reading it in its native Japanese has been much more of a challenge than reading the bilingual version, and I can stop myself more easily from peeking at the English now, though that would certainly be a help when I'm stuck! It's good that you can enjoy these books on either level, in any case - with the English text, or without. When I finish this set, I'm definitely going to pick up the next one!

Krispy Kreme Japan

One of my first impressions of Tokyo was courtesy of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Rather, it was the Krispy Kreme doughnut frenzy personally witnessed at the Shinjuku Southern Terrace.

These people waited about 45-60 minutes for their doughnuts - in the rain!

When I arrived in Japan, there was only one Krispy Kreme, and it was incredibly popular, as you might expect - the Japanese have an appreciation for trying new things, particularly when they are famous, particularly when it comes to food. They also have an affinity for standing in line - I'm told that after waiting in a long line to try something, you are more likely to be appreciative of your purchase by the time you reach the head. By the time I reach the head of a long line, especially an outdoor one, I'm usually murderous, but I'm not Japanese, so I can't claim to understand this one.

At Tokyo Orientation, we received some information about the area around our hotel, including a map with a legend. Krispy Kreme was marked there, with a warning "First K.K. in Japan, very popular, expect a line." (They now have 27 locations, and counting!) Krispy Kreme had left Toronto some years before, and it had been a long time since I'd been able to have my favourite K.K. doughnut, the Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled, so I decided to head over there. I'd even read up on it on Wikipedia when I was trying to check out things to do in Tokyo - the store had been built almost a year before, so I figured the long lineups had probably petered out by now. 

Hot and fresh!

Well...they hadn't. Even though it was already eight o'clock in the evening, when I found the place, the queue had fifty or more people in it. We were handed menus and free doughnuts in line, at least, and the doughnut creation process was just inside the window for us to watch while we waited. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was very fortunate to have gotten inside the store within thirty minutes of joining the line. Unfortunately, the cream-filled chocolate iced variety are not available in Japan, but I got a half-dozen other exciting new kinds, including a most excellent lime-filled powdered dougnut.

The interesting Japan-only flavours are what kept me coming back each time I was in Shinjuku. Krispy Kreme Japan offers a fantastic seasonal menu that is always changing and is usually themed. (I couldn't get behind the coffee theme. Sorry, K.K.) Though I hated the fake-tasting fruit-filled doughnuts that used to come in a dozen from Tim Hortons, Krispy Kreme did these powdery little delights perfectly. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in Japan when Cassis or Lime flavours are on the rotation, don't miss them!

The bounty: four dozen doughnuts that we
divided up between us for omiyage

The next time I was in Tokyo, for Tokyo Game Show 2007, I thought I would bring back Krispy Kreme as omiyage (souveniers) for my co-workers back in Osaka. However, this time the line was four times as long. When we came back later that night, we were lucky to get away with an hour-long wait.

The funny thing is, every time I passed the Shinjuku Southern Terrace over the next three years, the queue was out the door - and sometimes stretching halfway back to the Takashimaya building. Yet when we visited their brand-new Shibuya location less than a month after its grand opening, there was almost no lineup at all - at ten a.m. on a Saturday! 

I suppose that even now, doughnuts are just not acceptable breakfast food in Japan!

Taiyou no Tomato Ramen Recipe

I developed an affinity for a particular ramen shop in Shinjuku; a type that is quite difficult to find elsewhere - tomato ramen.

Tomato Cheese Ramen

You may have heard of tomato nabe, but ramen is a much rarer thing.

The restaurant in question is called Taiyou no Tomato Men (Men meaning 'noodles'), and it's located on the food court floor of the Mylord building in Shinjuku, part of Shinjuku Station. After just one taste I knew I had to recreate this at home, lest I leave Tokyo and never be able to eat it again. Well, as it turned out, it's a small chain and they have an Osaka location - in fact, a huge number of shops have opened since then! - but I still returned to Shinjuku with my friend Gen-chan to get her help in figuring out the ingredients (and also to hook another person on Taiyou no Tomato, natch).

Between the two of us and the Taiyou website for some ingredient tips, we came up with the following easy recipe that you can use to make your own tomato ramen at home!

Taiyou no Tomato Ramen

Serves 4 

Ingredients
4 portions fresh/frozen ramen noodles (cooked, 3-5 minutes)
(please avoid freeze-dried 'Mr. Noodle'-types here; if you must use pantry noodles, use Chinese chow mein noodles or angel hair pasta)
1 tsp olive oil
1 large (28 oz) can crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce*
2 cloves garlic
Handful of baby spinach leaves or mizuna, if available
3 cups chicken stock*
2 chicken thighs, cubed or sliced
1 celery stalk or small amount of bok choy (if desired)**

1 tsp basil
1 tbsp onion powder/dried onion

Toppings
8 tbsp fresh grated parmesan (if no fresh is available, substitute shredded mozzarella cheese - you want it to melt)
chili oil, to taste
red pepper flakes, to taste (optional)**
salt & pepper, to taste (optional)**

Directions
Sautee garlic, tomatoes and spinach in olive oil. Add the stock, chicken and greens, then seasonings, and simmer for 20 minutes. If you prefer your soup a little thinner, add more chicken stock or water.
Cook the noodles in a separate pot and serve into 4 bowls. Add soup, then cheese on top and allow cheese to melt into the soup. Eat with chopsticks and a ramen spoon if available.

If there are leftovers, you can use the soup stock, cheese and some bread crumbs over rice in a buttered dish, and bake it for a delicious rice casserole!

This recipe was adapted from a tomato nabe recipe to closely resemble Taiyo no Tomato’s Tomato Cheese Ramen dish. Marked differences are:
*Taiyo Tomato broth uses a stock made of a pork/chicken/salt mixture
*Taiyo uses tomato sauce rather than diced tomatoes
*Taiyo does not use the ingredients marked by double asterisks
*The website cites 小松菜 (mizuna) but the leafy vegetable at the restaurant appeared to be spinach

Taiyou no Tomato menu selection

Taiyou's Cheese Ramen Official Ingredient List:
原材料： ナチュラルチーズ (natural cheese), 鶏もも肉 (chicken thigh), 小松菜 (mizuna)
【国産】  ：無農薬サラダ油 (organic salad oil), にんにく (garlic), バジル (basil), 塩タレ (salt dripping?), 鶏のパイタンスープ (chicken ‘paitan soup’), トマトソース (tomato sauce), チャーシューのタレ (char-siu [roast pork] drippings), 豆乳麺 (soy noodles)

Eggplant Variation (remove basil, cheese and mizuna):
なす (eggplant, sliced), 江戸菜 (edona - Japanese mustard spinach) 根深ねぎ (green onion, finely chopped)

Egg Variation (remove basil & cheese)
鶏卵 (raw egg, scrambled and stirred into the soup at the very end), 江戸菜 (edona), 黒こしょう (black pepper)


The restaurant also sells a make-at-home version of their dish, Eggplant & Vegetable Ramen. It includes some extra ingredients you may want to try with the recipe above. Translation is mine, so if you have any corrections, please leave a comment:

Sautee garlic, eggplant, green pepper and zucchini in olive oil, add a dash of salt & pepper. Add the soup broth and bring to a boil, then simmer 10 minutes before adding noodles and chopped scallions.太陽のなす野菜麺
    オリーブオイルでにんじん、なす、ピーマン、ズッキーニを炒め、塩・コショウで少々。十分に火が通ったら、スープの素とお湯を加える。ひと煮立ちさせたら、ゆでた麺と合わせ、きざんだ長ネギを添えてできあがり！

Smartphones

When I left Canada, nobody had a smartphone. The very first iPhone had launched the month before, and as this was a time before the App Store existed, only the most cutting-edge of the Apple fans and Blackberry deserters actually owned one. Myself, I only had a Samsung A660 that I was very proud could play Kefka's Theme from Final Fantasy VI when it sensed someone I didn't like coming in on my Caller ID.

The Softbank 812SH in its natural habitat

On my first full day in Osaka, I bought a Softbank 812SH from Yodobashi Camera in Umeda. As an upgrade to my Samsung, it was dynamite. It could smoothly and quickly browse the extensive Japanese Mobile Web, had adorable emoticons, was quite slim and had a big colour screen twice the size of the one I was leaving behind. I sang the praises of Japanese phones to anyone who would listen. Sure, some of my students had televisions on their phones - I was content with just having mobile web. By the time I left Japan, two of my students had iPhones (this was a really big deal, especially for the girl who had the "first" iPhone in the school - 2009!) but the rest used the good old flip style.

When I landed back in the West, I thought I had walked from 2007 right into 2017. Almost everyone I knew had a smartphone - my brother had gone through two of them. It was going to be tough to cope with not being able to efficiently email from my cell (Japan uses email based messaging, not SMS, so in order to send a text message you must send to and from a phone email, not a phone number) so I decided to jump on that bandwagon. Now I own a HTC Desire, and grumble to myself at least weekly about how fantastic it would have been to have had a smartphone in Japan. Yes, I got along just fine without, but I would have been on any of these apps (linked to the Android versions for you, but there are Apple and other equivalents for most!) in a heartbeat:

HYPERDIA(Lite) JapanRailSearch - Train schedules. I used the mobile web version on my Japanese phone. I cannot stress how many times I would have been (a) stranded somewhere or (b) lost, if I didn't have Hyperdia. So efficient.

Twitter - Likewise, used the mobile version. I loved being able to microblog about something, then go back and research it later on my computer. Tweets are short, too, so I was comfortable tweeting in Japanese and reading what my Japanese friends were posting なう.

Path or Foursquare -  I really liked Gowalla and it seemed like it had big support among Japanese users, but it was eaten up by Facebook. A check-in service would have been my number-one want in Japan. In a new country, everything is a big deal and it's tough to remember later all the things you saw and did, and tougher still to share them with friends back home. How cool would it have been to have been able to post a check-in from Tokyo Tower?

Instagram - I'm on the bandwagon now. This photo-sharing social media site would have been perfect for visiting temples, shrines, statues, skylines, anything!

WWWJDIC For Android - This is THE app for anyone struggling with Japanese. Can't read what's in front of you? Draw it into your phone and WWWJDIC will give you a translation.

Saora's JLPT Practice - Studying your Japanese while abroad? I hope so! This app is a great study tool that keeps you on pace for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

Kanji Draw 29% - There are a few kanji-drawing apps out there, but this is my favourite. Good interface and customization, and the app really makes sure you didn't just fluke into the right stroke order!

Google Translate - Straight up. Google's translate tools are very effective.

Barcode Scanner - QR codes are super popular in Japan and you can find them pretty much everywhere!

Japanese Traffic - I never drove, but this could be pretty indispensable to someone who did. The app real time traffic conditions in Japan, in Japanese and English.

Japanese Hot Spring Heaven - Searchable directory of over 4000 hot springs. Don't even care that there's no English version - I would manage.

Tokyo City Guide - By TripAdvisor. Tokyo Art Beat also has great reviews! There are tons and tons of city guide apps out there that would have been much easier to work with on those weekend trips than carrying a book would have been. Check out GoodLuckTripKANSAI for the Kansai area, or search the Internet for your destination!

Tokyo Emergency - Can't vouch for how well it works, but this guide has emergency numbers for if you're travelling in the Tokyo area, including consulate and embassy info. And I lost my passport in Tokyo once, so thumbs up for carrying this sort of helpful info around!

As they say...."there's an app for that." If you are visiting or living in Japan, and you have a smartphone, don't let it go to waste!

Orientation in Tokyo

One of the things about the JET programme that separates it from other teach-abroad organizations is that when you go, you go very well prepared. Each consulate handles its own departure guidelines, but I understand that most of them hold a number of events to help you prepare. Toronto JETs had the luxury of multiple Q&A sessions, a Japanese crash course, a 3-day pre-departure seminar, and a final pre-departure orientation, all before leaving Toronto! I lost out, as my hometown was more than three hours flight from Toronto, and I couldn't possibly hope to take advantage of anything but the final orientation. Luckily for me, on arrival, we spent three days in Tokyo doing yet more seminars, lectures and being fed more information than we could possibly hope to retain.

The Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku

The Keio Plaza Hotel is a gorgeous, high-class hotel in the heart of Shinjuku. I'd like to tell you that I had the time of my life at Tokyo Orientation, which is regarded by many JETs as a free vacation in the capital. Not so much for me - I was so jet-lagged I barely remember a thing. I can't sleep sitting up, so the 13 hours from Toronto to Tokyo was pretty difficult. 

In Tokyo I roomed with a girl who was on her way to Chiba prefecture, but we hardly saw each other. I couldn't sleep on arrival, so I fell asleep in the assembly the following morning (!), got permission to skip afternoon lectures to return to bed (!!), where, of course, I still could not sleep. My first true experience with jet lag. I went for a walk before dinner and got thoroughly lost in Shinjuku. That night, I passed on a nomihoudai (all you can drink) with the other Osaka JETs so I could rest....but, of course, I couldn't...guess who ended up nodding off in lectures the following day as well. I think my combined total for the entire weekend up until then was less than five hours of sleep. My internal clock just could not get in sync with Tokyo's. 

I had to pass on a Canadian embassy welcoming event that evening. I caught an hour's nap, decided to cut my losses and went to Krispy Kreme. This was clearly the best idea I could have ever had - I got a full night's rest for the first time since I'd arrived in Japan.

So when I think back to my memory of Tokyo Orientation - it's just not there. All I remember is the zombie haze of wearing a suit and sitting in a conference room, then laying in bed, then buying a power strip at Yodobashi Camera so I could plug in my grounded laptop. Then suddenly I was on the bullet train, off to Osaka.

I think I missed out...!