I’ve always been a fan of monarchies. Well, I mean, I like having a royal family. Of course it’s good that they aren’t actually in charge of anything. It’s just kinda cool. I especially like the monarchy (Emperorship?) in Japan, since they have historically been more of a figurehead than a ruler. (You can even see this a bit in The Last Samurai… there’s a bit of a civil war going on in Japan, but both sides are loyal to the Emperor…) But I’m having a hard time understanding how the whole system works in Japan…

The Imperial Family of Japan is, I’ve heard, the longest continuously rulling family in the world, dating back as much as 2665 years ago (although that’s pretty controversial). Eight woman have been Emperor in the past, but they can’t any more under the current imperial house law. (Yes, it is “Emperor” even for women, not Empress. It’s sort of like how the husband of the ruling Queen is just a Prince but the wife of a King is a Queen.) There are efforts to change this, considering that there hasn’t been a male heir born to the family in over 40 years, but this is fiercy opposedy by conservatives because they say this would break the line of succession. I don’t really get the reasoning behind this. It has something to do with the fact that succession has only gone through the male lineage. So even if you’re a boy, if the Emperor was your maternal grandfather, you can’t be Emperor. It has to go to one of your cousins instead. I guess woman would become Emperor, but their heir would be their brother’s children? Something like that. Still though, if you’re the daughter of the daughter of the Emperor, why isn’t there continuity of the royal bloodline between you? It seems a bit stupid. Maybe I should read the huge section on the subject on wikipedia…

The other thing that I don’t get is that any member of the Royal family can’t wed a commoner, and if they do they loose their status. This happened recently to Princess Sayako. But who can they marry then? I guess they must have knights and lords and whatnot in Japan too…

Actually, I just read that the current Empress (correct now, since it’s the wife of the ruling Emperor) was a commoner… I guess it’s only women who get the boot for marrying outside the royal family. That doesn’t seem very fair now does it…

Finally, I hate how in English we always refer to the Emperor by their given names. Emperor Hirohito, Emperor Akihito… Although I suppose they hated it when I refered to the latter as Emperor Heisei. Major faux pas that one, as I just learned recently. That is the name he’ll be refered to only posthumously. It’s not my fault I didn’t know how to say “His Majesty the Emperor” properly.

The internet was down for much of this evening, so I had to find something new to entertain myself… I spent about an hour setting up some galleries to be uploaded (I got everything from 1996 to the end of 1999 done, but there are many more to go before I upload). Making these galleries always gets me a little nostalgic, and I start just browsing through all my image files aimlessly. It’s amazing how many photos I find that I didn’t even know I had. This has got to be one of my new favourites.

I know I must have told this story to everybody by now, but it has to be one of the best. I’m at a birthday party for one of the relatives of my host family here (The Irie family, for those keeping track). This is a very high class place. I think it might be a restaurant, but they seem to cater more towards these banquet type events. This was a small event no more than a dozen people, but you can see we have a large tatami room to ourselves.

This place (I wish I knew the name of it) is located further south than Nagasaki, I think in Sanwa Cho, right on a cliff face. The view, I remember, was amazing. Because it’s so close to the ocean, it’s become renouned for its fresh fish. I know first hand, in fact, how fresh the fish is. The white bowl on the left is actually about half full of water, and those little pink things are called odori-ebi. Live shrimp. So live, you crack them open yourself, pop them into your mouth, and feel them dancing all the way down. You can see on that plate in the middle, there’s a large fish. The body has been cut up into sashimi, but the proof is in the head and the tail. I wish I had a video, but you’ll just have to believe me that the damn thing is still moving. It was probably one of the same fish that we walked by on the way into the hall.

Now that’s fresh.

Holy crap, Google is good. A month ago, a vague blob of Japan didn’t even register, and now, THIS! Downtown Nagasaki! I’ve been able to find all four of the houses I lived in, my high school (Kaisei Koukou), the school where I learned Japanese (Junshin Koukou), Hamanomachi and Chuoubashi, Amyu Plaza, Yumesaito, the train station, the university, Peace Park, the hospital where I had mono, the pool I swam at, and more. Even Mos Burger has a little icon! I’ll never go hungry again!

If anybody has these songs… give them to me!

????-?????
JUICE - ???????????
??????-?Off you go
FOREVER LOVE
Dragon Ash - Freedom of Expression
SOUL’d OUT - FLYTETIME

I realized yesterday afternoon while watching a movie in my room that watching a movie in Japanese, to me, is a lot like watching a movie in English but with the volume just a little too low. You can see all the visual effects and the tones of voices, but you can only identify the actual words being spoken about half the time.

My favourite movie to date, at least most of the time, is one such movie. It’s called GO, and I’ve never seen it in English. I don’t know what the characters are saying exactly most of the time, and I certaintly can’t quote any part of it, except for two lines:

“Hiroi sekai o miro. Soshite, jibun de kimero.”

and

“Namae tte nani? Bara to yondeiru hana o, betsu no namae ni shite mite mo, utsukushii kaori wa sono mama.”

But even then, the first one doesn’t really count because I can’t translate it very well (”Look at the wide world, then, decide for yourself”… or something) and the second one is cheating because it’s actually Shakespeare.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Regardless, there’s something about this movie that I love. I tend to like movies with injustices like sexism, racism, homophobia, etc, because they usually speak to something deeper than Bond movies or XXX. Plus, not only is this a movie about racism, but it’s a kind of racism that I’ve experienced myself. At least, to some small degree. (Even though, time and time again, we are reminded that GO is actually a love story.)

I also saw the movie Crash just recently. In structure it’s a lot like another movie I enjoyed, Love Actually, in that it seems to be telling the many unconnected stories of many unconnected people before everything comes together. (That in itself is a reason why I liked this movie, I guess… I’m always a fan of anything with an “everything is connected” theme, a la i ? huckabees)

Meghan and I were both, by the way, very happy to have discovered what we believe to be an important piece of symbolism in the movie. We feel Mrs. Farren would be proud.

One last thing to think about - Aside from both being about racism, Crash and GO both end with a light snow storm. What is it about racism and snow? What is the connection here? I feel like there’s a deeper meaning here and everywhere…

1. Unbelievable news! Our prayers have been answered:
Muppet Central Forum - It’s Official: Fraggle Rock Season 1 Box Set

2. Chiaman had the biggest birthday dinner ever today. Seriously, like, 30 people, all crammed around one table. I also won at bowling. Good times.

3. One of the most confusing things about Japanese is that the words “un” and “uun” are two different things and have completely opposite meaning. Specifically, “un” means yes and “uun” means no. It’s very tricky, but luckily since I was never really good at voicing the difference myself (although I could hear it easily) the Japanese people I was speaking too always asked me to repeat myself.

4. Once, my host mother offered me a piece of chocolate cake, so I said “ii” which, at the time, I thought was equivalent to saying “yes please” but it turns out it actually means “no thanks”. I didn’t get any cake and was sad and confused all at once.

5. And to further the confusion even more, “iya” which sounds like “yeah” actually means “no”.

6. I had coffee with my friend Laura in a window seat at a Starbucks in Nagasaki one afternoon. The next day my friends Kura and Ryouta asked me who that blonde was I was on a date with, not because they had seen me there, but because they had heard from some people that went to a different high school on the other side of the city and whom I have never even met. That’s what being white in small-town Japan is like.

7. By the way; Albe albe albe!

Well, I have a Linear Algebra midterm tomorrow, so naturally I thought I’d come online and post my list of strange things I ate for the first time while living in Japan. And none of is was in a “I dare you to eat…” kind of context. So here it is:

- Raw fish (obviously)
- Baby bamboo shoots (really good in stir fry)
- Octopus (whole/deep fried/takoyaki)
- Squid (raw/fried/on a stick)
- Sea urchin (yellow and gooey but not bad)
- Shark fin (stringy but good)
- Duck (both raw and cooked)
- Whale blubber (both solid and paste forms)
- Whale sashimi (raw)
- Horse stomach soup (a Kumamoto specialty)
- Raw egg (sukiyaki)
- Cow tongue (”What type of meat is this?” “Cow tongue.” “Really? I’ve never had that before.” “Yes you have. We had it for supper last night.”)
- Eel (oooh so good… best donburi ever)
- Leaves from a sakura tree (with sweet rice)
- Live shrimp
- Sashimi served from a fish that was still flapping
- Sheep intestine
And finally, from good old Arimori Shuntarou,
- “I think, maybe, it’s chicken.” “Maybe?” “Maybe.”

The moral of the story is don’t ask what is until after you’ve eaten it, because you never know what it’s going to be and there’s a good chance you won’t want to try it after you find out. You might just love it. (This is making me hungry…)

Ah, everybody’s favourite part of Japanese culture - Engrish. (Or as we also tended to call it in Japan - Japanglish.) Browse around Engrish.com to see tons of real examples. Here are a few choice favourites:

I was wandering aimless around the internet, as I often do, when was I was very surprised to stumble accross a quick and easy recipie guide at McGill. Who’d have thought that they really care about us? They want us to eat well!

I’ve decided that I’d like to learn more crazy ways of cooking. Like, raamen (real stuff, not dirty ass 99 cent crap that everybody calls raamen), that ginger fried pork Mom #1, Kumazawa-san, used to make, sara udon, pad thai, and a whole host of other crazy stuff. A lot of it requires very specific ingredients though. Yasaka gave me a couple sara udon kits, but it just has the noodles and sauce, which is good because I wouldn’t be able to make those for sure, but of course you can’t have things like octopus and squid in a prepackaged kit. Where am I going to get octopus and squid? Maybe the IGA will have some… See, I would just go wandering around in various asian stores, but more often than not I just wouldn’t know what to do with all the stuff. There are little green lettucy type things that I know are really good (and, I think, actually go in sara udon) but I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I can’t improvise asian food yet… I’d take a class or something if I could.

There’s a funny story behind my discovery of delicious sara udon. While, before moving to Japan I didn’t know much about Japanese food, but I developed a taste for it very quickly. I tried just about everything and always avoided ordering the same thing twice (In fact, I have a very good list written down somewhere called “Strange things I ate in Japan”). There was one thing, though, that was reluctant to try. At the various festivals I went to, a few restaurants, and even at my own school cafeteria I kept seeing signs for something called “chi udon“.

I knew that udon was a type of thick noodle soup, but I didn’t want to find out why they added chi to it. The translation in my head was “blood noodles“. It wasn’t until six months into my stay there that I asked my host mom (#3 at this point, Irie-san) “What’s this chi-udon I keep seeing around?”.

She looked at me with this puzzled look and said “Chi-udon?” She pondered it for a few more seconds then this mischeivious grin started across her face. It wasn’t long before she was full out laughing at something pretty good.

“What!? What’s so funny?” I ask.

“Chi-udon!? Blood?” followed by more laughing.

“WHAT!?”

“It’s not CHI-udon. It’s SARA-udon! It means ‘udon on a plate’! You’ve just been getting the letters confused!”

Turns out I had been afraid to try this food all year because I had been mistaking the character for sara, meaning “plate”, for the one for chi, meaning blood. The very next day my host mom had made a huge batch of the stuff for dinner, making sure I noticed that it wasn’t red at all.

Just so you can all compare, chi-udon, which I thought I had been seeing all along, actually looks like this:

And no, this one is not available in any restaurants in Japan that I know of. Compare this to the one above for sara-udon to see that I’m not as big an idiot as you might have thought. But it sure did make for a funny afternoon.

Just browsing around through some old favourites of mine, I came across a picture of myself in a Japanese newspaper from a year and a half ago:

Isn’t that something? I’m not sure I had seen this picture before, or at least that I had noticed I was in it. Right in the middle too. I wish I could do that sort of thing here in Montreal, but it was such a local culture thing in Nagasaki that its not a very well known thing. Even the dragon dancing in Chinese culture is a lot different from what I did. Maybe when I get back to Nagasaki I’ll be able to see it again, at the annual Okunchi festival or maybe even just my old team practicing at Kaisei High.

If you want to see more, check out the website where I found this: Kaisei Koukou Jaodori Houzonkai