Rice and Ramen

Here's the next round, of sorts, of articles that I've written: one was the interview of the minor-league pitcher, the next is an article on the Gion Matsuri I went to, and the last on is on the kagayuzen kimono dyer I went to visit. I've also been requested to provide a translation of one of the articles, so I'm going to translate this last one for you here, albeit very roughly: [The one thing I like most about Japan is its "harmonious contradictions." Traditional and modern things are often mixed together in interesting ways. In Kanazawa's 3-choume, I went to visit Mr. Masanobu Ota's studio, Bunan, where he spoke to me about his work combining the traditional "kagayuzen" dying technique with his own modern twist. Kagayuzen is very difficult and requires a lot of time. First, a base design is drawn in a blue, washable ink made naturally from flowers. Then, on top of that design, a paste made from rice is squeezed out from a tiny...

Sorry I haven't posted in a while (or a week...). To be perfectly honest, the past few days haven't been the most interesting--and most mornings I've just spent putzing around on the internet and making myself hungry by reading the Restaurant and/or Dining section of the Chicago Tribune online. But from here on out the weekend is setting up to be pretty interesting. Three brief events of note this week: 1. PII (or half of them anyways) visited the top high school in Kanazawa for a cultural exchange-conversation practice thing. I attended (and participated), but the topic this year was food culture and food manipulation issues (think GMOs) which is difficult to talk about in one's primary language--let alone when half the participants are struggling in a second one! Half the discussion took place in Japanese and the other half was in English so it wasn't a one-sided struggle, but I still noticed conversation lagging--or turning to tangents--in many of the small gr...

So today both my job and my free time were centered around the consumption of food. I went to one event this morning, at the shinto shrine, Kanazawa Jinya, located inside of Kenrokuen. There was going to be a blessing at the shrine of this year's humuro-manju, which are a kind of Japanese sweet (think a sweet bun filled with red bean) and are eaten on July 1st in Kanazawa. The manju are a little hard to see in this photo, but on the black tray there are pink, green, and white blobs... And that was the only event I attended today. Around one I took the reporter who was sorta just assigned to keep me occupied in the afternoon, Mr Shimizu, to a cafe called Cafe Dumbo which was right behind the office building (but he'd never heard of it, surprisingly). I had a really solid pastrami sandwich and a heavenly chai tea latte. According to Shimizu, I suit this kind of cafe and he took this photo to illustrate how I look like a painting... The heavenly latte in questi...

Continuing with the theme of sports, today I went with Ms Kitamura to the rehearsal of Fantasy on Ice 2015, an ice skating exhibition/show-thing that's being held in four cities across Japan. The list of stars is actually...really good. Shoma Uno- winner of the 2015 Junior World Championships Javier Fernandez- winner of the 2015 World Championships Yuzuru Hanyu- gold medal winner in men's singles at Sochi Evgeni Plushenko- speaks for himself Johnny Weir- two-time Olympian who also speaks for himself... (And there were more, these were just the names I recognized!) Gave me an idea of how professional figure skaters support themselves though...and retired skaters... We were actually at this rink for a really long time. Each group of skaters had practices of 50 minutes each and there were...five groups. And of course the athlete that Ms Nishimura wanted to interview was in the last group, which didn't finish until 3pm. One of the younger Japanese skaters...Ma...

So yesterday, while productive, was actually rather dull--I went to two events, neither of which were terribly inspiring and hence no post (one was about these little weird fried fish that some school children ate for lunch if that gives you an idea of the strength of the news that day...) Today was more interesting and just to change up the format of my posts I'm going to give you a time-specific blow-by-blow. 10am: I arrive promptly at the office. It is mostly deserted as usual. I sit down at my desk and putz about 11am: Still putzing. I have since printed out a recipe for pound cake I might make for my host family and gotten online access to the Chicago Tribune from my mom. 11:40am: Decided to start looking at courses for next fall instead. Frontiers and Controversies in Modern Astrophysics, The Young Adult Dystopian Novel, and Bioethics and Law sound interesting. I make a note on my calendar and also realize that 8am breakfast feels like a long time ago. 12pm: I (fin...

Today I had a relatively calm workday, if such a thing exists. I spent the morning editing--again!--that dang coffee article. Blech. But I think after one more final final round of cleaning it up the whole process will be done and it can go to print for the day after tomorrow's paper. But in the afternoon I got to go to a pretty cool story. There's a Japanese office for international cultural exchange, and for five years now there's been an exchange with a group of traditional dancers from Zimbabwe, of all places. They come to Japan for a few weeks and tour around, performing at schools etc. Today they were at an elementary school in Kanazawa called Fudoujishou, which also has a requirement that all its students take lessons in traditional art like the shamisen. All the students were set up on chairs in their gymnasium: There were five Zimbabweans, four students and their teacher. They were all pretty young--between the ages of 12 and 15. They performed a variety o...

All hail the end of the work week! TGIF. All that jazz. All in all I can't complain too much about today though since my morning turned into a slight crafting bonanza. This morning I went to the annual Kanazawa Paper Show, which was an expo of paper products, specialty paper, and paper crafts. It was half museum, half store, half craft workhop and half other. (Sorry, I know that's too many halves.) Art wise there were a bunch of specialty books and paper things. There was even an entire wedding dress made of washi (Japanese paper).  Ties made of paper! Not that I would ever wear a dress made of paper...imagine it ripping, or raining! There were also various paper-craft stations set up around the expo. Since we ended up with some extra time, the reporter I was with was kind enough to humor me and let me try a few. So I made some paper of my own: And then at another station I got to marble paper (this sheet has my name on it; before dipping the paper in ...

Today I went to Nishi Chaya (just like the other popular tea district, Higashi Chaya but in the West instead of the East) to watch geisha and meiko at their dance practice for an upcoming performance. That's Nishi Chaya with it's traditional wooden-latticed teahouses. We went inside a building which had a large tatami practice room on the second floor with a raised wooden stage. They were already at work when we arrived: some meiko (geisha in training) brought us tea and a snack before sitting gracefully, seiza style, with their legs tucked beneath them. It's the polite way to sit but your ankles and legs fall asleep and start to ache within a few minutes. The teacher was an old Japanese man. He was very nice when he talked to me, albeit briefly, but when the dance practice resumed he turned into a nit-picking, fan-slapping fiend. Here he is doing the motions along with them. Despite his age he was very agile. The longest dance was a duet, story dance with a...

Nothing much happened today in the way of work. Went to the curio coffee shop to ask some follow up questions and then edited the article I had previously written (we shall see what Ms Morita has to say about it). Accompanied another reporter to a supermarket where the company president was giving a presentation to some university students (he talked for an hour about the competition of convenience stores and the company's policies and then got sidetracked into the 90s bubble economy and economics...it was a long time to wait). Got out early. Dinner was much more interesting. A Russian woman named Diana had stayed with my host family two years ago and since she and her boyfriend were in Japan again, they stopped over for dinner. I found myself doing a lot of translating: Diana's Japanese was much worse than my own, and her boyfriend spoke no Japanese but DID speak French, so the meal (which was extravagant--tempura, yakitori, and sushi!) turned into a pleasant review session ...

After a very restful two days off, it was back to work. Dark clouds were looming, so I brought an umbrella and crossed my fingers that it wouldn't rain. Today turned out to be quite busy, which was a welcome change of pace from my usual hour-long sitting respites. First thing in the morning (literally two or three minutes after I arrived at the office) it was off to the 21st Century Museum again with a young reporter named Mr. Serizawa. There were two new, temporary exhibits that we were examining: one on clocks, and one on a contemporary group of artists who were doing paintings of the Kanazawa area et. al. The clock exhibit was rather eclectic. It had a mix of antique, vintage, and modern clocks. Many of the old ones had interesting mechanical movements: one was a dog whose eyes rolled individually to tell the hour and the minute, another was a vertical clock that had a mouse gradually hoisted up it until it reached 1 and then it fell back down (Hickory Dickory Dock, anyone?)...

This has been one of the most dizzying, confusing, exciting, and intimidating days of my time in Japan. I thought that reading manga or watching anime or even talking to other adults about their jobs had given me some idea of what the working company world in Japan is like, and I did have an idea to a small extent, but the full-on company inundation was rather overwhelming. Let me start at the beginning. I had a late start today so I wasn't expected in the office until noon. I took the time to admire the very offical-looking office building: This is the third largest building in Kanazawa and houses the Hokkoku newspaper, a hospital, a performance hall, and a golf club, among other things. At noon I was met by my liason, Mr. Yasuda who took me around the building and generally put me at ease. At two we drove to the Ishikawa prefectural government building where Zoey and I had a very formal meeting with the head of the government. I had a three minute speech, mostl...