Friday, November 28, 2008

Not Japan, But Worthy of Note

We interrupt my vacation stories to bring you two relatively unrelated items of news.

Muslim Scientist Leaves US Over Security Clearance


How often do you get to invoke Cartman's catch phrase to describe a serious news story? Basically this guy, a physicist and a naturalized US citizen, suddenly lost his security clearance and his job because the acting deputy energy secretary decided he was a security risk. The evidence was never presented and he never had a chance to refute it. 

Here's the story:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08333/931314-82.stm

He has appeals pending, but he also has a new academic job in Egypt. Too bad "home" is probably actually Pittsburgh, where he's lived for 28 years (longer than he lived anywhere else).

Awesome Glass Sale Next Weekend


Riverside Design Group, which makes many awesome things, is having its annual warehouse sale. We went last year and bought many beautiful glass things (and some metal ones, I think). Some are seconds or discontinued, but lots of stuff is quite fine. The sale is a benefit for Persad Center, which is a counseling center specializing in queer issues (sexual orientation, gender expression, HIV disease). Some other artists are selling things too. The sale is at Riverside's studio in Lawrenceville. Details here: http://www.persadcenter.org/events3.htm

One hint, though; if you buy gifts at the sale you might want to re-wrap them if you don't want your mother wondering why the newspaper on her dishes is advertising mens' dating services. (Though she thought the photos were scenic.) (No, this was not my mother, who I think went to the sale too and would have known why.)

Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Amazing Onigiri Wrapper Trick

Onigiri (rice balls) are a staple convenience food in Japan. You can find them in all the convenience stores and they're relatively cheap ($1 to $1.50, depending on the filling). When I told my beau that we could eat out of the convenience stores for lunch he was thinking microwave burritos, but these are much better. Most shops have a pretty good selection of noodle bowls and ready-to-eat food; a lot of stores have actual cooked food too (hot tofu balls and korroke and those cakes with bean inside) though it didn't look that great....

When you can't read a lot of Japanese it's sometimes a gamble as to what's inside the rice ball, but we did okay.

The trick about prepackaged onigiri is that you want the nori (seaweed wrapper) to stay crisp. If you wrap it around the rice it absorbs moisture and gets gummy after an hour or so. (Personally I don't mind it gummy, but crisp is the ideal.) So they wrap the nori in its own layer of plastic wrap. When I was in Japan in 1995, only some companies packed the nori separately, and if they did you had to wrap it up yourself. But now there's this great packaging innovation that wraps up the rice automatically when you open it.

Here's how it works:



P.S. Ebi = shrimp.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

On Slurping


Udon Man
Originally uploaded by erink
Japanese slurp their noodles. On the trip we ate a lot of noodles (I think it's a stereotype that tourists eat nothing but udon, soba, and ramen - but they are good!) and I think I finally got the hang of it.

As a good American kid, I grew up eating spaghetti without slurping. At least in polite company. I also learned that if you did suck the spaghetti into your mouth the fun way, the end of the noodle whips around and spatters sauce on your shirt. So that fear of staining had also influenced my attempts to slurp in the past.

Turns out I was missing a key point. In Japan, all became clear. And here's why:
When Japanese serve things hot, they are really, really hot.
The tea is really, really hot; the soup is really, really hot; the bath is really, really hot.

You have to slurp the noodles to cool them down. Otherwise you'd be there for hours.

To cool the noodles, you have to slurp them with your mouth open. If you close your lips around them, your lips get burned.

This explains the sound, too. The sound is close to that aeration gurgle you use for wine tasting. It's a lot louder than that squeaky little slurp you'd get at the end of a spaghetti strand.

The other advantage of slurping with your mouth open is that the noodles don't spatter.

The disadvantage is that it's a little gross hanging your mouth over the bowl and shoveling stuff in, but if you control the amount of noodle you pick up you can pretty much get one mouthful in without a lot of back and forth. Though, in my experience, you will have to bite. Some noodles are very long.

So, that's my journeyman take on noodle slurping. I've probably got lots of things wrong still, so don't take this as the high authority on Japanese table manners.

I think more field work is necessary.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Following the Election from Afar

We were out of the country during the presidential election, and time-shifted enough that we couldn't easily get the results as they happened. When we left on vacation Obama was definitely leading, but his winning wasn't something you could feel really confident about.

On the other hand, I was a little annoyed that before I left, _two_ of my relatives sent me that funny customized video about how I didn't vote and cost the democrats the election - when I was, in fact, the only member of my family who had already voted! But it was amusing, at least the first time.


McCain Makeru

So we woke up on - was it Wednesday? - in Japan and got on the internet at our hotel to find out what had happened. Obama won. Yay. We looked a bit at the state-by-state reports and news coverage, but we didn't get the speeches or anything. I even forgot to get a newspaper that day (I hear they were hot commodities elsewhere).

And then we got dressed and got food and went out to tour Tokyo.

But later that day, we were in a Japanese government building to use the free observation towers. A man stopped us in the lobby and asked the stereotypical Japanese-to-foreigner question "where from?" (though he was a bit more sophisticated and I think he actually asked what country we were from). We said America*, and he said something about Obama's win. I told him we were happy about that. He seemed happy too.

At this point I'll say that he didn't look like a government worker - not only was he not wearing a black suit and white shirt, he wasn't wearing a suit at all, I think he had a khaki green canvas blazer. And he had a slightly wild beard. Perhaps an academic.

And then he told us this story. In Japanese, McCain gets transliterated as ma-ke-in. There's another word in Japanese, makeru, which means, as he delicately put it, "to not win." So ma-ke-in, ma-ke-ru was a popular slogan in his circle during the campaign.

We actually saw him again that day, on a subway platform at rush hour, but we were on the train and couldn't say hi.


* Actually I would normally answer "United States," since that's more precise (Canada and Mexico and all those southern countries are in America too) but you have to say "America" in Japan because that's the word they expect.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

America is Weird

Back from 15 days vacation in Japan. One of the interesting things about foreign travel is how strange your home country looks when you get back. So before that fades completely, you get this post.

Americans are big. Really, really big. Fat, yes, but tall too.

And we're sloppy-looking. I was really struck by how few people tuck in their shirts here (hey, I never do myself). And we wear oversized shirts and sweatshirts, and unfashionably faded jeans. (Japan has a high population of thin men in black business suits and white shirts at all times, so they really bring the neatness factor up on average. The Japanese men in suits on the plane to San Francisco with us didn't take their jackets off the whole flight - though I saw that one of the younger ones had loosened his necktie. Slacker.)

We eat everywhere. And we eat really big sandwiches, with lots of meat on them. At the Chicago airport the beau and I ordered a "large" soda to share, and it was like a liter and a half of root beer in a giant plastic cup.

We have lots of different color hair. We have no cell phone charms. We drink really big coffees.

Welcome home.