Temples and Castles in Gifu and surrounding areas

While in Gifu with our friends we did other things besides eating (more on that later) and playing with all the extremely cute children (more on that later, too). We actually got out and saw some really interesting stuff.

Our first excursion was to a temple in the mountains above Gifu. It was much snowier here than in the city, but very beautiful. Also, although our pictures make it look peaceful and tranquil – because it was – we are also told that New Year’s Eve (the next day) would see 200,000 people there to welcome in the new year. Can you imagine?We were told that the origami cranes were made and brought to the temple to request help for a sick person, probably a child. We hope that the get well wishes are as effective as they are beautiful.

Also, we saw a dog at the temple:Note, if you will, that this dog coat actually includes shoes!

Our second excursion was to Gifu castle. The castle sits high above the city (a very defensible position) and has a wonderful view.Our third excursion was on New Year’s day to a temple associated with success in business. It was extremely crowded. Although there was a fair amount of pushing and shoving, there was very little hostility or impatience. People just waited while squished up against one another. A very un-American scene (you may have to open the first picture to see the crowd in the lower right).

Noooooo!

Two related bits of news, the second made more painful because of the first.

1. The weather. See, I am not just complaining for nothing - it really is cold here!

2. Tully's has replaced the Tiramisu latte with a "honey mik latte." This is not a move that pleases me. Not. at. all.

Mochi

Probably the most famous traditional food for new years in Japan is a mochi soup. Mochi is white rice pounded into cakes. Many families these days buy their mochi cakes, but our friends' family pounds their own. This was a lot of fun.


In addition to being used in soup, Mochi also has a ceremonial purpose for new years that we don't really understand. But here are some mochi cakes at a Buddist temple we visited:

Latkes

This Chanukka, Kate and I could have been the only people in all of Gifu Prefecture making latkes and applesauce. Both went over quite well, especially Kate's applesauce.




I made a simplified version of the potato latkes from the New York Times Jewish Cookbook. My friend's sister wanted the recipe, and here is my Japanese translation:

Latkes (ユダヤ教の伝統的なじゃがいもパンケーキ)

材料
じゃがいも（1k）
たまねぎ（１コ）
レモンジュース（大さじ1）
卵（２コ）
メリケン粉（50ml）
塩（自分のお好みで）
サラダ油

１．じゃがいもを洗います。しかし、皮膚を剥げ落ちません。
２．じゃがいもとたまねぎを本当に小さく切ります。フードプロセッサーがあっ たら、フードプロセッサーで切りますが、なかったら、手で切ります。
３．じゃがいも、たまねぎ、レモンジュース、卵、メリケン粉、塩をミックスし ます。
４．なべを熱して、サラダ油を加えます。なべが暑くなってから、少しずつパン ケーキを作ります。

Akemashite Omedetogozaimasu!

Kate and I thoroughly enjoyed our first Japanese New Years, spent with our friends' family in the countryside. Highlights included pounding rice into traditional sticky mochi cakes with a gigantic hammer, visiting Buddhist and Shinto temples at midnight and drinking sweet sake with ginger, and eating sushi at an amazing restaurant that my friend's father has attended every day for the last thirty years. Serialized accounts of our adventures in the countryside will be posted over the next few days, with lots of pictures.

Reading Rainbow

I have been reading a lot lately, but not really managing to post book reviews. In part, this is because I fear that this really boring for our (three) readers. But, hey, we’ll be gone for a few days, so you just might get bored enough to read this post (or the books therein).

• The Sign of the Book: A Cliff Janeway Bookman Novel [John Dunning]. Sometimes book suggestions tell you a lot about the person who suggested the book. In this case, the book definitely fit the book recommender. That said, I don’t adore mysteries wherein the protagonist/detective is a grizzled solo veteran cop-man facing the demons of his ex-loves (or his love’s ex-demons). Just a little too cliché (In fact, for mysteries wherein the protagonist/detective is far more compelling, I’d recommend the work of Sujata Massey – just received two more of her books for the holidays. Yay!). This mystery was set in Colorado, which was a nice touch, and had the literary thing working for it. I’d say a lot more about how the story develops etc. but I don’t want to spoil the book for some of you who might read it. Overall, I’d say it wasn’t a bad read (and it was compelling in that way that mediocre books can be), but I don’t know that it’s worth a purchase.

• The Black Echo [Michael Connelly]. Guess I was on a bit of a mystery kick. A man-mystery kick. Anyway, read this one in one night. Which suggests that it was both compelling and lacking substance (although perhaps it isn’t fair to expect this of mysteries published by Warner Books?). I actually think this mystery was slightly better written and more thought-out than the one above. It was also set in Los Angeles, which was interesting for me, a fellow southern Californian, to read. Mysteries are, indeed, hard to review since you don’t want to give the show away. . . Let’s just say, I had sort of figured this one out about halfway through, but it was complex enough to keep me reading. Another point: I am not the kind of person who needs the mystery to end neatly, wrapped up with a little bow, but I don’t like unresolved questions. Don’t tell me that something “could have been” in an attempt to clean things up: you are the author! Take a stand – readers can accept that suspects might have destroyed evidence, but when you make the detective speculate about missing evidence – it leaves an unsettled feeling and makes you seem lazy (you know, if the details from earlier in the book don’t fit the conclusion you’ve written, that’s okay – you can go back and edit your earlier work).

• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love [Oscar Hijuelos]. Not even sure if it is fair to review this book, as I gave it up after about 100 pages. Giving up on a book is actually pretty rare for me, so you know it has to be a bad fit/book if I won’t even finish it. In this case, I felt that there was just a lot of sex and really not that much plot or character development. I don’t mind reading about sex, and I even think that books with sex in them can find a place in the high school curriculum, but the combination of the sex and totally unsympathetic and uninteresting characters just made this book a non-starter for me. I should add, though, that this book did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1990, so this review likely does not reflect the average response to this book. I also recall some complimentary words from Mitichiko Kakutani on the back of the book. So maybe I just missed the point here. Totally possible.

• The Stone Diaries [Carol Shields]. This was rich little novel, a multi-generational story told through a family of women. It reminded me a bit of one of my favorite books, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Perhaps that’s because they were both concerned with telling the stories of women who went their own way in the world. The Stone Diaries is, I think, less of a book than Angle of Repose. The descriptions weren’t quite as vivid, nor that characters quite as moving. Angle of Repose also has the whole taming-of-the-west thing going for it, whereas The Stone Diaries is mostly set in the Canadian plains and Illinois. I’ll stop with the comparisons now and just focus on The Stone Diaries – but, suffice it to say, if you are only going to read one of the two, it should be the other one. One thing that irked me about the main character in The Stone Diaries was that there had been no clues that we were not to trust her, and then the author suddenly started suggesting that she (the character) had a bit of a problem with hyperbole. So then I read the rest of the story wondering whether it was really the story or not. I have no problem with main characters whose views of the world are not trustworthy – I just like this made clear before the middle of the book. But this is a small quibble in what was a pretty decent book. Interestingly, given my review above, this book also won a Pulitzer Prize (in 1995). Just goes to show you . . .

• The Feast of the Goat [Mario Vargas Llosa]. No magical realism in this book. Rather, the book focuses largely on the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. I likely would have gotten a lot more out of this book if I had known more about the history of the Dominican Republic and its political development in the twentieth century; the book, though fiction, references real characters and real events. I definitely found myself wishing that I knew more than I did about this regime and region, which is, I guess, a sign of an engaging book. A bit like the non-fiction masterpiece Imperium which I did read with a map and history book close at hand, and, consequently, learned much about Russia. Anyway, The Feast of the Goat tells the stories of two different groups of people, both driven to desperation and misery under Trujillo. The two stories/groups of people never really intersect, which was a bit strange, as I kept waiting for fate or an accident to bring them together. The conceit of two stories, plus the setting of a real regime, made for many (perhaps too many) characters to remember and follow. Also, strangely, the two plots are given equal time (alternating chapters) at the beginning of the book, but this fades as the book progresses, for reasons that I couldn’t really figure out. However, the book offers an excellent portrait of the things that individuals will do under such regimes; this book is not an upper, and it was not always easy to read. Vargas Llosa is a gifted writer (whose work is also featured in this, another book I really like), and he makes the vile actions and torturous living conditions incredibly real.

• Four Spirits [Sena Jeter Naslund]. This is the second of Naslund’s books that I’ve read. At first, I thought this one was less masterful, less epic than Ahab’s Wife. However, I was drawn into the beautifully scripted story and the rich characters. Naslund offers an excellent portrait of the way in which racial and sexual hierarchies were maintained with violence and the way in which individuals sought to over-turn these hierarchies, sometimes using violence, sometimes not. The book is definitely less of an epic than Ahab’s Wife in that it has a much more narrow scope and setting, it is not, however, less masterful. In part, this is because Naslund writes from her own experience as a white southerner seeking racial justice in the 1960s. I find this period in American history absolutely compelling (and thus was delighted to receive McAdam’s Freedom Summer for the holidays) and liked the way that this book built on actual events with fictionalized (and slightly archetypal) characters. If one could only read one Naslund book, I’m not sure which I’d suggest. Ahab’s Wife was a beautiful story, and, unlike Four Spirits, one could not really predict the outcome, yet the latter offers an important window into an era that profoundly changed America, plus some pretty interesting characters.

I’m currently reading A Brief History of Central America, as well as still working my way (slowly) through A History of the Jews. I also just received many books as holiday gifts, so I’ll be starting some of those soon, too.

Dispatches from the trenches

Of the war on Christmas.

I’ve been here for a few months now, embedded with the six hundred and fifty-twelfth battalion.

I have to tell our readers back home that it was as if people here didn’t even celebrate Christmas. As if it were a romantic holiday, with quests for “Christmas dates” and the like.

On Christmas Eve, I went on a sortie to a bar not far from here. The bar was packed. Not a person was stirring from tables that had been acquired. Frustrated with the table situation, several members of our brigade went on a small search and reconnaissance mission and reported the same situation in several other bars. A shocking situation, friends, a shocking situation.

On Christmas day, we awoke early, but, alas, no snow. Really, yet another example of how not even the weather here can conform to our narrow expectations of a Courrier and Ives Christmas. Lacking snow, we did not go dashing over fields in our one-horse open sleigh. No bells on bobtails rang.

Rather, we took the hummer out to patrol the shopping center in search of some Christmas spirit. We did manage to find a Tully’s that served Tiramisu lattes (and, friends, if you can get these at home – run [don’t walk!] to the nearest Tully’s). Let me tell you something: it didn’t even look like a single one of the five employees behind the counter were getting paid time-and-a-half. Not. A. Single. One!

Moreover, throughout the shopping center, not a single store was closed. It was as if these people were celebrating Christmas the same way we celebrate every holiday in the States: by shopping. Folks, people really are the same the world over.

We went out for a lunch of Italian food (Italian = Pope, ya’ know). Not a single server wished us a “Merry Christmas” or even a “Happy Holidays.” We were, however, told that we had “chosen wisely” when we ordered our food. Indeed, indeed.

For dinner, it was sushi. Again, not a single “Merry Christmas.” Many couples were out, enjoying the date night, ladies dressed to nines. We saw not a single present exchanged over dinner. We didn’t even hear any wishes expressed for one’s two front teeth or even a Red Ranger model air rifle.

Merry Christmas!

Recent Knitting

In the past few days, I’ve finished two hats.

The hat on the left is a gift for my friend Christine. It is similar to the “Official Kittyville Hat” from the Stitch and Bitch book.The earflaps and bottom are done in seed/moss stitch (a new skill for me!) and the yarn used was, well, uh, gray wool and red cashmere (maybe it was cashmere since it’s very soft and not too shed-y or itchy – since I can’t read the labels, who knows?), single strands of each held together using size 9 needles. Since this was, obviously, different yarn from the pattern in the book, I ended up using the universal hat pattern for directions.

The hat on the right is a hostess gift. I used size 10 needles and Noro yarn for this – I think in English this yarn is called Kumeyon – it’s 100% wool, but not super-scratchy. I’m not thrilled with the color combo in this hat, though this is all one skein of yarn. I think if I were to make a similar hat again, I’d pay much more attention to the colors and try to engineer a hat whose colors I like better using several skeins of yarn.

My next projects are three more hats . . .

Why Kate is a fantastic wife

On a recent trip to the Tokyu Hands store in Shibuya, I was mesmerized by a flying Doraemon toy. This clerk was doing a demonstration, and I very much enjoyed it. Doraemon is, as this page explains:

a cat-like robot from the 22nd century of the future. His favorite food is dorayaki, a sweet bean paste filled bun, and his birthday is 2112-9-3 he is also know by the name 'Ding-dong'. He weighs 129.3 kg, is 129.3 cm tall, can leap 129.3 cms in the air and can run 129.3 km per hour. He is afraid of mice and hates rats, his ears were eaten off by rats. He has a fourth-dimensional pocket on his abdomen from which he can take out many amazing tools.

Kate noticed, and got me the toy for Chanukka. Here are some pictures of me flying it in our back yard (It only takes 9 batteries!).

A Wish for the Season

(taken at a temple in Kyoto)

Solstice

Last night we had a little Solstice party with the friends I’ve made from my Japanese classes.

There was a little holiday décor, made by Daniella, who takes Ikebana.

Each of us contributed something. Daniella made one of her amazing soups and a delicious salad (complete with her typically yummy dressing). Fanny made fondue

And salmon crepesAnd I made roasted sweet potato cheesecake (without the aid of a springform pan). The recipe (two links there – first for subscribers, second [identical] for others, but try the first one first, it just might work . . .) came from the November 2005 issue of Sunset magazine. This was the first cheesecake I’ve ever made, so I didn’t even know how it should look during the cooking and baking process. What I did know was that the things I bought that really, really looked like sweet potatoes weren’t sweet potatoes at all (note how this is a common theme in my cooking here). They were some kind of sweet, starchy tuber, but without the yellow flesh of sweet potatoes. They were actually sort of more like plantains (without the seeds). I roasted them all the same and just proceeded with the recipe. And it actually turned to be pretty good, if I do say so myself!

On another note, here's what it was supposed to look like!

Also, today it has been very windy here - with gusts up 45mph!

The Animals

Finally on my way to feeling better, I returned to art volunteering this week.

This was our week to paint the clay animals that Jen Em had made with the students. In preparation for this (and following the amazing lesson plans left for me by Jen Em), two weeks ago we all did a lesson on color. We made color wheels, and talked about what happens when you mix colors together.

So, this week, we began with a review of color mixing, a discussion about how to make colors lighter and darker, talked about how to paint our animals so they look like the animals we intended them to, and had a review about the rules associated with painting with acrylic (permanent) paints.

The animals turned out wonderfully!

Sumo Fan Appreciation Day

Today Kate and I attended Sumo Fan Appreciation Day festivities at the Tokyo Sumo stadium. It was a very strange and fun experience, and it definitely had an "only in Japan" feel. Here are some pictures:



There were some special ceremonies that happened in regards to the only current grand champion, Asashoryu (He's Mongolian). We didn't exactly understand what was going on, but here is a picture:

There was also much made of Koto-Oshu, the newest Ozeki (Ozeki is a very prestigious rank, right below Grand Champion). Koto-Oshu is from Bulgaria, but he sure can sumo:


In both the most delightful and strangest part of the day, boys were allowed to dress in sumo costumes and compete against actual high ranking sumo wrestlers. The smallest boys were allowed to compete two against one, and the sumo wrestlers had fun with it, frequently "losing" the matches, and taking care never to hurt the boys:

Tokyo is really, really

BIG.

I’ve been pretty sick for the last few days (since before Izu, really), so I haven’t been doing much (blog-worthy or otherwise). I didn’t make to either Japanese class or art volunteering this week. But I did make it in to Tokyo to attend a holiday party with Mike. I even won a door prize: a polo shirt. Which really means Mike won a door prize; let’s be honest here . . . .

Anyway, I had some extra time before the holiday party, and I found myself in Roppongi. This was my first time ever in this part of Tokyo. In part, I’d always stayed away because it had seemed sort of sleazy and slimy, filled with lots of clubs that feature dancing women and the like. Also, the American Embassy sends out these newsletters and they frequently mention that Americans should stay away from Roppongi because of late-night nightclub shootings and drugged drinks and such.

Roppongi during the day didn’t seem half bad at all. I also learned that Goldman Sachs is located there, making the American Embassy’s advice seem a little challenging, at least for the Americans working there.

Roppongi Hills had this museum which featured a photography exhibit by Hiroshi Sugimoto (be bold: follow the link! The pictures are really cool!). I really like photography, and I knew that I’d seen some of his work before, so I paid and went in.

Imagine my surprise to discover that this museum was really on the 52^nd floor of the building! (I suppose if I’d been able to read Japanese, I probably wouldn’t have been all that surprised)

The view from the 52^nd floor was pretty amazing. Tokyo is really, really BIG.

Nixon's legacy?

Found, while shopping in Tokyo the other day:


(you may need to click on the images to enlarge)

Jacket SOS!

The zipper pull on Mike's jacket broke a few days ago. He is actually quite proud of this fix, noting that "the paper clip is green, so it matches."

In the land of Izu

Our Izu trip was a lot of fun. It took about three hours to get there from Tokyo (an hour on the bullet train, and the rest on a local train).

The part of Izu where we were was a bit like the Oregon coast, or maybe the Maine coast. Very rocky and craggy (and lighthouses to boot!), but also very, very beautiful. On Saturday morning we took a little hike along the coast.

The hotel (as promised) was very cute and cozy. There was a gorgeous outdoor private/reservable onsen. We sat outside and marveled at the stars both nights. We were far enough down the peninsula to be away from the lights of Tokyo, so the stars were truly amazing. The second night it was much windier, and thus, less welcoming to sit outside in the onsen, but it was still gorgeous. There was also an indoor onsen, which was a nice break from the cold outdoors, but (obviously) lacked the starry view.

Izu is also a big Japanese tourist zone. There were many hotels/inns/pensions/auberges scattered throughout the hills. There were also many museums: the cat museum, the doll museum, the museum for discovering Paris, the kaleidoscope museum, and the teddy bear museum, just to name a few. These aren’t museums like you’d find in a big city – more like people’s private collections on display. Apparently this is a common thing for Japanese tourist areas.

We actually visited the teddy bear museum. Well, sort of. I mean, we went to the gift shop which is, of course, fundamental to museum experience (are you sure you’ve been there is you haven’t shopped there?). And we bought a little teddy bear to commemorate our trip.

We also visited one of those only-in-Japan places (although I’m told that Manhattan has some places like this, too): a dog rental park. It was actually called “The Izu Dog Forest.” After you paid your admission fee, there was a place where you could walk around and see A LOT of puppies, including some very young ones. They were so sweet when they cuddled with their mothers and siblings. Then, there was a place where you could pet some older dogs. And, last, there was a place that bordered a little park where you rent a dog and take it for a walk in that park. We didn’t rent a dog, though. In fact, the dogs seemed a little bored with human affection – perhaps they’d already overdosed on backscratches and bellyrubs from dog-deprived Tokyoites?

We also ate well. The hotel gave us breakfast and dinner each day (although they struggled a little with the vegetarian meals – they had no problem withholding the meat at dinner and giving us extra fish, but each morning we got ham and sausage with breakfast). On Saturday, we ate lunch at a kaiten-sushi place (where the sushi moves along on a belt in front of you). The sushi was amazing, which was perhaps not shocking, given that we were, like, four feet from the ocean. The sushi place also had these GIANT shrimp going around. We didn’t eat them, but I was sort of fascinated by them:Sorry about the picture quality, but, hey, they were moving, after all. On Sunday, we ate at this traditional Japanese restaurant. We ordered the grilled fish set meal, and this is what we got:It was a lot of work to separate the fish from the bones, but it was a most delicious lunch.

Izu was definitely not foreigner-friendly. Not in the sense that people were unkind to us (which they were most definitely not, even when we *really* tested that patience of the innkeeper by getting lost on the bus system trying to find the place the first night [he had to drive out and get us at some random bus stop] and by not having enough cash to cover our bill – we thought they took credit cards, since they took a credit card for the deposit [he drove us to a convenience store that had an ATM]), but in the sense that there is very, very little English. For many reasons, it was definitely great to have Mike along; I’m not sure that one could easily do this trip without some Japanese knowledge.

Big Day at School

Yesterday was a big day at the international school.

First, we did a painting project. When Jen Em was here, the kids made animals out of modeling clay. The animals have now dried and are ready to be painted. I wanted to give the kids a little lesson on colors and mixing colors first, though. So that was what we did yesterday. We used the paints that we’ll be using to paint the animals. The animals can’t be painted with (washable) poster-paint or tempera (not even tempura, for that matter!), since if they got wet, the paint would all run off. So we were using acrylic, permanent paints.

This was a little stressful, since the acrylic paint WILL NOT come off clothing, desks, chairs, backpacks, etc once it dries. Before we began, I gave the kids a big speech about how I needed to see that they were being responsible painters and not walking around with their brushes, not waving them in the air, not rocking in their chairs, etc or they would get a horrible punishment (so horrible I couldn’t even tell them any more about it, except to tell them that they did not want to have to find out more about it). That worked, and for the most part, the kids seemed to follow these rules.

The one rule I forgot to articulate? When you are done painting, DO NOT pour the water you were using to rinse your paintbrush into your paint palette, swoosh it all around, and create a big, sloshy, wet, dark mess of paint-water. Permanent paint-water. So, yeah, clean-up time was fun as the kids attempted to carry their paint palettes to the sink.

Also, here’s a funny story from the school: a parent each gave the two teachers advent calendars. Teacher A opens hers up on the first day and it has a picture of a little angel flying sweetly through the sky. Teacher B opens hers up on the first day and sees the word “DIE.” Turns out it is a German advent calendar and the calendar is going to make some sort of sentence.

After school ended yesterday, I hustled over to the performing arts center here in Tsukuba, since the school was putting on a fundraiser to buy new computers. The school hosted the Austrian Ballet Company, Tokyo for short selections from Don Quixote and A Christmas Carol. It was pretty fun, and afterwards the kids from the school got to go up on stage and hand flowers to the dancers and have their pictures taken with them. Very cute.

Kate's Birthday

Well, the Days of Power have come to a close. Kate's birthday celebration began with a toast at a Tsukuba bar last night (and a free ice cream sundae), and ended with a small party at our house tonight, complete with the werewolf game.

This morning I made "challah" french toast for brunch (we have found a soft, eggy, raisin bread that is similar to challah), and for dinner we had sushi at our favorite place in Tsukuba.

Kate's main present from me is a trip to the beautiful Izu peninsula next weekend. I went to the Izu peninsula in 2002 with several students from my program and my friend Zim, and there are some pictures of that trip here. We will be staying at the same place that I stayed at in 2002, and when I called to make the reservation, they remembered me and our group (apparently we made an impression).

Here is a picture of Kate's birthday cake:The Japanese writing says "shin-okachimachi," which is the name of Kate's favorite stop on the Tsukuba Express, the train that takes us into Tokyo. When I was ordering the cake, they asked if I wanted anything written on it. I told them what I wanted, and they asked no questions.

Here is a picture from the birthday party of Kate with her friends from her Japanese class, Daniella and Fanny:

Various events

1. Apparently the wine spa-bath thing is all the rage, or so says the NYT. [Also, please note that we wore bathingsuits when we went, and we didn't look so, uh, relaxed]

2. I completed my second hat. This one I actually like for what it is - a hat for a two year-old girl who likes all colors, but especially yellow. My next project is a hat for my friend Christine, who is going to Hokkaido for Christmas. The hat will have earflaps.