In which I revel in sakura and cultural ambassador the heck out of everybody

Yesterday I went with a bunch of other girls from the dorm to all you can eat pizza, which was exciting because I had exactly one piece of pizza.  It was goat cheese and honey pizza, which was...interesting? It was better than normal pizza, but not something that I would go out of my way to eat again.  BUT there was also all you can eat salad and pasta and dessert so it wasn't like my money went to waste.
And then seven of us crammed into a purikura booth, because unless someone gets an elbow in the eye, it's not an authentic purikura experience.  Also, I ate Kim's head.  It was great.

Today I went out to dinner with Ton-chan, Shou-chan, and Kocchan as a "congrats on entering graduate school/getting a job" party.  We went to a Chinese restaurant (which Shou-chan says is the best Chinese restaurant in Nagoya) because Ton-chan really wanted to eat Peking duck for some reason?

(This is what Peking duck looks like, by the way.  Ton-chan took a picture when it came, which is good, because it vaporized pretty much instantly.)

I think this is the second or third time in my life I have ever eaten duck.  It was pretty good!  But the crazy giant gyoza were better.  They were like GIANT GYOZA POCKETS.  OM NOM NOM.  Also, apparently coconut milk is a totally acceptable adult drink and is also delicious?  I am very okay with this.

Meanwhile, Shou-chan regaled us with tales of graduate student woe (she just entered the master's of Japanese education program at Nanzan).  She is convinced that I will die in September, because if Nanzan's program is this intense, Harvard's must be TWENTY TIMES AS INTENSE.  On the other hand, I'll be spending 8-12 hours a week in class, whereas she's spending 13.5 and has to do research on top of that?  Yeah, I think she's got it worse.  But hopefully she won't die, because it would be super sad if she turned into a graduate zombie!

Then we decided to go to Mizuho Undoujo Higashi (Mizuho Exercise Ground East!), the most unfortunately named subway stop ever (mostly because of how the English announcer on the train pronounces it: MiZUho UnDOUjo HiGAshi ahahaha, awkward).  But we didn't go because of its exceedingly unfortunate name!  Instead we went for SAKURA.  Yes, the sakura (cherry blossoms) have started blooming, which means that it's the season when everyone in Japan suddenly becomes excessively obsessed with flowers!  I can totally see why, since sakura are GORGEOUS and I am a fan of staring at them excessively.  Also, at MiZUho UnDOUjo HiGAshi they had lights along the river, which meant that it looked like this:

(Picture totally stolen from Kocchan.  It was also taken with her phone camera, so it's not too high quality.)

(Stolen from Ton-chan.  Because I am stealing from everyone equally!  There will most likely be more pictures later~)

And then we were talking about how not everyone in America is Christian (apparently this is very surprising to many people; WAY TO GO, AMERICA) and Mormons?*
Then suddenly we started talking about Glee?
"Hey, hey, you're American!  Have you seen Glee?"
"Yeah, I've seen part of it."
"Kurt is super cute, right?  Even though he's gay.  He's my favorite."
"He has a really nice voice."
"Hey, as an American, what do you think of him?"
"Uh...what do you mean?"
"I mean, what do you think of him being gay?"
"Uh...I dunno, I have a number of non-straight friends.**  It doesn't seem particularly unusual to me."
"REALLY?  You have gay friends?  What are they like?"
"Normal human beings?"
And then I wound up explaining about how you can be a normal human being and not be straight and also about what "genderqueer"*** and "asexual" mean and Ton-chan said, "Yeah, it seems like there are a lot more people like that in the States but it's probably just that people in Japan don't want to say anything," and I was like, "YES, YOU GET IT, OKAY, SUCCESS."
CULTURAL AMBASSADOR-ING EVERYWHERE LIKE A BOSS.
It's kind of funny how much time I spend talking to people about gender and sexuality given my research topic.  On the other hand, maybe it's not all that surprising?  I did, after all, go to Brown.  And some of my research is about gender differences.  So.

So then we ate baked sweet potatoes (because there was a random stand selling them nearby?) and Ton-chan and Kocchan took a million pictures because they actually remembered to bring cameras and Shou-chan and I made awkward sound effects at each other, which is to say that we spoke Japanese, because you can hold a conversation that's 50% sound effects, if you so desire.  Not even kidding.  I will bata bata and kotsu kotsu and bo- to suru all the days.  Well, not so much the last one, because it's the sound you make when you space out.

So, yeah!  It was pretty fun!

On a final and completely unrelated note, have a hilarious quote from the article I was reading this morning:

"Influential men in NAS [National Association of Shrines] are persuaded that the problem [of young people not buying Ise amulets, jingu taima, to enshrine in their home altars] is exacerbated by the homophone taima, which also means marijuana. One priest in Toyama found that intial interest among the young gave way to dismay on learning the taima on offer could not be smoked."

Ahahahahaha, crazy young people.

*"You know those people?  On their bikes?  They are in twos on bikes?  And they wear helmets?  And they want you to join their religion?"

**YAY, UNDERSTATEMENTS.

***If anyone knows the proper Japanese word for this please let me know because I have had two discussions about gender identity in which this has come up now and it's really hard to keep saying, "It's like not being a lady and not being a dude except sometimes it's like being BOTH and sometimes it's like something completely unrelated; it depends on the person."

So many sweets

Oh geez, I haven't written anything in here in a while.  Let's see what interesting things I've been doing the past few days...

Friday was Dutch Food Night, which meant that Louki and Kim made all the Americans Dutch food in repayment for American Food Night.  Apparently you can have pancakes for dinner in the Netherlands?  SO DELICIOUS.  Also, Dutch pancakes are really thin (more like crepes*) and not particularly sweet at all.  And sometimes they have cheese inside, like pancake quesadillas!  MMMMM.  And sometimes you cover them in caramel and powdered sugar and roll them up and eat them like burritos.   P.S. We are totally adults.

On Sunday we went on a big adventure over to Nagoya Station to visit Sweets Paradise, which is an all-you-can-eat sweets and pasta.  Unfortunately, when we signed up slightly before 1 p.m., our slot was for 4:20...and nobody wanted to eat lunch, so we just sort of snacked and tried not to feel hungry.  But in the meantime we went on an adventure and I FOUND A TIGER AND BUNNY KEYCHAIN.  It was a mystery box, which meant that I had no idea what I was getting until after I bought it, which is why I now have Yuri Petrov** hanging from my wallet.  Not who I would have chosen (okay, so I totally would have gone for Saito if I had a choice, because I am totally okay with having an overweight balding nerd hanging from my wallet), but he's a pretty interesting character (and also the character who my favorite episode revolves around), so it's all cool.

Anyway, after that we finally went to Sweets Paradise.  You basically have 70 minutes to eat, which means that you attempt to eat as much as possible as quickly as possible.  I have to say, I liked the real food better than the sweets (they had THE BEST fried potatoes), mostly because I am realizing that I am just not super into Japanese cakes.  Part of the problem is that Japanese cakes seem to consist mostly of air--especially chocolate cakes--so eating a chocolate cake gives me the same amount of chocolate as eating, say, a single square of chocolate from a chocolate bar.  If I wanted to eat a single square of chocolate, I would...wait, what am I saying?  When would I EVER want to eat a single square of chocolate?  Sheesh.
Also, Sweets Paradise appears to be a popular date spot, because, as one of the other girls pointed out, what could possibly more romantic than watching your date stuff his/her face?
So, overall, an interesting experience, but not likely to repeat it, simply because I am not into Japanese cake enough for it to be cost-effective.

Anyway, after that we went to the onsen because we are all about onsens and also it's cheap SO YOU CAN'T STOP US.  And I tried a sauna for the first time ever, and have decided that I am not particularly into saunas.  They have two saunas there, and the steam one made me feel like I was suffocating, and the dry one made me feel like I was suffocating...just more slowly than the steam one.  I would be willing to try Finnish sauna'ing, though.  YEAH, I KNOW I'M CRAZY, but it sounds better than suffocating.

Monday was the farmer's market at Kawahara Shrine, and a bunch of the girls from the dorm wanted to know where to get cheap vegetables, so we trooped over there.  I got kinkan, because it's not an addiction and I can stop any time I want.  The guy at the fruit stand gave me extra, which was nice of him, so I got something like 60 kinkan for 300 yen.  (He also give some of the other girls a "gaijin discount.")
Anyway, I had omiyage from Izumo for Itou-san, so I dropped by the shrine office to see if she was in.  She wasn't, but one of the women called her up...and next thing we knew all of us had been invited inside for a chat and some tea, which turned into an expedition into the honden (second group of gaijin ever in the honden? yeah) and Storytime About the Shrine and Its Kami.  As it turns out, two of the kami enshrined at Kawahara are the kami born from Izanami's urine and faeces when she was dying from giving birth to the fire kami.  (Itou-san: Yeah, kids think it's very funny.  "They're the poop and pee kami!")  The more you know!
...and then Itou-san took us out to lunch and a couple of the girls attempted to convince her to let them pay for themselves but she would have none of it.
...also, somewhere in the course of lunch Itou-san totally made a joke about Kim and Louki being lesbian lovers because they were the only members of the group who didn't have boyfriends.  FIRST TIME I have ever heard anyone joke about homosexuality in Japan.  It was...weirdly refreshing, given how incredibly uncomfortable it seems to make pretty much everyone else.
So, anyway, what was supposed to be a short trip took up a huge chunk of the morning and afternoon, and Itou-san has been voted the nicest lady ever.  This coming from the girls who were terrified when they were invited inside the shrine office, because they didn't know how to talk to priests.

Monday night was the dorm's Valentine's Day potluck.  The boys were supposed to make real food while the girls were supposed to make desserts and sweets.  I was thinking about rebelling and making real food ('cause we have so few boys in the dorm, and also because I CAN), but then Hi-chan told me that our microwave can be used as an oven????  Why didn't anyone think to tell me this before?  Anyway, I decided to make a chocolate decadence cake instead (Louki and Hi-chan helped), which was a hit and made Kim attempt to convince me to make another one.  (First she told me it was her birthday and then she said actually it wasn't and I said it was going to be my brother's birthday very soon, and she said, "You should make a cake for your brother and then send him pictures of us eating it!"  What do you think, bro?)  There was also this AMAZING pasta dish which I really want to learn how to make.  I am going to have to track down the guy who made it and ask for the recipe.

Today was Valentine's Day, and I avoided all the Valentine's Day-related things, because if you think Valentine's Day makes single people feel like garbage in the States, you should really not come to Japan.  I'm not really into making anyone feel like garbage, especially not people who don't buy Ghana chocolate.  There are literally advertisements saying, "If you really love him, you'll buy him Ghana chocolate."  Um, WHAT.  What if my hypothetical he is allergic to chocolate?  What if he doesn't like chocolate?  What if I don't feel like giving him Ghana and want to give him Meiji instead?  Sheesh.  And, yes, I know it's an advertising ploy, but seriously, it rubs me the wrong way.
Bah, heteronormativity and chocophilinormativity.***  Bah.
I feel like such a Brown student.

*SURVEY: Do you say "crape" (rhyming with "scrape") or "crep" (rhyming with "step")?  Merriam-Webster says the first pronunciation is correct, but I'm meeting a surprising number of people who go for the second...

**If you haven't seen the anime, DO NOT LOOK HIM UP, 'cause SPOILERS.  He looks like this, though.

***Totally made this word up, but everybody should use it.  All the time.  That's so chocophilinormative!  Let's make this a THING.

In which I am half of a Brown alumni reunion

Today was the Chubu* Fulbright Alumni Association's lecture/reception thing, so I went over to Aichi University to join one other current Fulbrighter and about 20 former Fulbrighters.  There were two lectures, one in English and one in Japanese (although it seemed that everyone except for one guy was bilingual).  The one in Japanese was about Japanese American oral histories (specifically those having to do with the WWII internment camps) and the one in English was about the 2007-2009 financial crisis.  Both were good, although the English one definitely won on the nerd index by comparing American banks to Lois Lane.

Afterwards we got free dinner, which was delicious but I don't know what 75% of what I was eating was.  OH WELL.  It's probably a bad sign when you're pleased that your food has a face because at least then you know what it is.

I also met lots of interesting people, including a gentleman who studied at Brown University as an exchange student!  We swapped tales of College Hill, and he wanted to know what had changed and what was still the same.  "When I was there, they called the cafeteria...they called it the Ratty."
"Yep, it's still the Ratty."
"Is the food still," he searched for the right word, "Ratty?"
"It definitely is."
Also, he described Brown as "really wild."  And he went there before SPG.**

Also, I'm supposed to present at their next meeting, which will be in May.  Given how long the lectures went today, that means I have FORTY MINUTES in which I have a room full of people at my mercy mwahahaha.  I mean, OH NO, I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT MY RESEARCH FOR FORTY MINUTES; WHAT TO DO?  (Although, I realized that I haven't given a presentation that long since the Tea Ceremony Presentation Epic.  You mean I don't have to condense a year's worth of research into 10 minutes?  THANK GOODNESS.)

Also, I find it interesting how many Japanese people try to convince me that Japanese religion isn't "normal" because it isn't exclusive.  How are you defining "normal" anyway?  Chinese religion is the same way, so it's not as though Japan is the only country in the world in which you can worship more than one religious tradition.  (There's actually a saying in Japanese, "Born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist.")  But a gentleman I was talking to today was insisting that non-exclusive religious practices weren't "normal."  I tried to get him to explain what he meant by "normal" (and subtly hint that maybe he was applying Western norms to very non-Western ideas), but he was not convinced.  "Normal" people are religiously exclusive, like Americans.  (Of course, when I explained that I have celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas and the winter solstice, sometimes all in a single year, he got very flustered and tried to get me to admit that I was secretly Baptist...?  I don't know.  It was kind of odd.)
Oh well.  I will have FORTY MINUTES in May in which to convince him.  BWAHAHAHA.

In completely unrelated news, this song is SO CUTE.  It's about capybara in an ONSEN (hot spring, for the uninitiated).  C'MON, you'd have to be HEARTLESS to not find this EXCESSIVELY ADORABLE.  It also makes me really want to visit an onsen.  Hmmmmm, onsens.

It's almost midnight here so I should sleep.  G'night!

*Chubu (中部) is the region of Japan in which Aichi Prefecture is located.

**Sex Power God.  It's a party.  Don't look it up with small children around.

Japanese academic writing, sexual minorities, and curry

The reading for my advisor's seminar has really driven home two points for me:

1. If I lived in ancient Japan (or ancient China, for that matter), I would be a really lousy literatus.*  Most of the reading has to do with looking at references to shrines in ancient Japanese poetry, and there will be a fifteen character poem followed by a five sentence explanation of the "general meaning" of the poem.  Given my overwhelming failure at producing poetry (ha ha ha ha, let's not even talk about it), if I had to write a super meaningful poem while following the incredibly strict poetry format, I would probably fail so badly I would spontaneously combust.**  And don't even get me started on ancient Chinese poetry.***

2. Japanese academic writing and I don't really get along.  I enjoy a certain amount of straight-forwardness in my non-fiction, it is true.  When I have a point to make, I make it.  I don't meander down a gravel path, stopping to smell flowers occasionally while chatting about the weather and subtly dropping hints that maybe at some point I will talk about what I am actually getting at here.  I also don't feel the need to spend every sixth sentence recapping what I said in the last five sentences.  YES, I GET THAT YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO WALK INTO THE OFF-LIMITS AREAS OF SHRINES.  YOU TELL ME THIS AT LEAST ONCE A PARAGRAPH.

So, yes.  That is what I have learned.

In other news, in Japanese class today we read an article about a program to help sexual minorities who were victims of the 3/11 earthquake.  (You can read the article here, but unfortunately it's in Japanese only.)

Sensei: Can anyone name any sexual minorities?

Class: *silence*

Sensei: Any at all?

Girl: [slangy word for male transvestites]

Class: *laughs*

(This was the point at which I gave up and raised my hand.)

Sensei: Dana-san?

Me: Homosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals--

Sensei: Sorry?

Me: Asexuals.

Sensei: I don't know what that means.****

Me: People who don't have sexual desire.

Sensei: Oh, yes, them too!  All of them are sexual minorities!
My Brown education has served me well.

I still can't believe no one else could come up with any other sexual minorities, especially since the article we were reading had at least two or three in the first paragraph.

And on a final note, it's time for...

More Misadventures in Cooking!

So despite this being my third visit to Japan, and despite making Japanese food while at home/school, I have never tackled the ubiquitous Golden Curry.

Yes, it needed to be bolded, because that's how ubiquitous it is.

Don't try to follow my logic there.

Anyway.

I decided to make a bunch of curry so I could eat it for lunch and dinner today and lunch tomorrow as well.  And curry's not that hard, right?  I mean, I've seen people who can't even boil a pot of water properly make Golden Curry...so it can't be that hard, right?

ALL THESE MEASUREMENTS.  WHAT DO THEY MEAN?????  What does "makes 11 plates" mean?  How big is a plate?  Isn't that a weirdly specific measurement?  WHY 11???  Who looks at an onion and says, "Hmm, I bet this is 150 grams of onion"?

Oh well, I guess it's time to fall back on the classic technique...

Make stuff up!

Yay, ingredients!
1 onion
1 carrot
more ginger than you deem strictly necessary
3 cloves of garlic
3 (tiny) potatoes
half a steak (at least, the cut of meat is called a steak but, uh, I don't think it's actually a steak 'cause it was 300 yen...)*****

Now to find a pot!

Meet Sketchy-chan!  He's a sketchy pot.  Some of those blotches might be bloodstains.  I don't know.  But he's what I've got, so better use him (after scrubbing him vigorously)!

So the package said to cook all the vegetables and meat in a little bit of oil, so I did that.  So far so good!  Nothing on fire yet!

Okay, so I'm supposed to add water next...do we have a measuring cup?

Well, no, we don't, but we do have this Hello Kitty mug!  Um, I guess I can use that?

So then I added about 1 1/2 Hello Kitty mugs worth of water.  And still nothing had caught on fire!

...but the box said that it would take about 20 minutes to cook, and I was hungry, so I used Secret Cooking Technique #2: Everything Cooks Faster If You Turn the Stove Up All the Way.

There, much better.

After the vegetables were done cooking, I had to deal with THIS.  This is the curry...stuff you're supposed to put in right at the end.

It said that one package (each box comes with two packages) makes 5-6 plates of curry, but I had no idea how much a plate was, so I just dumped the whole package in.

And then I stirred.

...actually, this looks kinda gross now.  Um...

Add more water!

That seems to have done the trick.

At this point, Hi-chan was leaving for class, saw that I was making lunch, and said, "Oh, hey, you're making curry!  I love curry!" which I took as a good sign.  If she could recognize it as curry, it had to be at least marginally edible, right?

So this is the finished product.  It's a little bit more gelatinous than regular curry (I probably screwed up the water-to-curry-stuff ratio), and, despite being marketed as spicy, is probably a 3 out of 10 on the spiciness scale.  But it's still pretty tasty!

And thus concludes today's misadventure in cooking.

*Literatus: yet another word that spell check says doesn't exist!  Whoo, spell check.

**So spell check tells me that "combust" isn't a world either.  Are we having problems with English today, spell check?

***For an account of not-so-ancient poetesses in China, I suggest The Talented Women of the Zhang Family by Susan Mann.  It reads like a novel, so even if you are totally turned off by non-fiction writing (or if you don't have the vocabulary to get through super academic works), I would recommend trying it.

****That's understandable, because the Japanese word for asexual is Aセクシュアル (A-sekushuaru) whereas the words for "homosexual" and "bisexual" are 同性愛者 (literally "person who loves same sex of people") and 両性愛者 (literally "person who loves both sexes of people") respectively.  You'd think that 無性愛 (literally "love of no sex") would be a reasonable word to use for asexuality, but I guess people might think it means love of amoebas...?

*****Before everyone starts sending me articles about how Japanese beef is (maybe) contaminated with radiation, I bought American beef for exactly this reason.