|
 |
 |
|
| |
Broadcasting to an audience of three (and a goldfish)...
Comment, ramblings and musings... life through the eyes of a Japanologist...
 |
Monday, December 2, 2002 |
This evening, I went to Gokurakutombo with the members of one of my JMSDF classes. Gokurakutombo is always good for drinking in a large group (there were fifteen or so of us), because there are long tables where everyone can sit together, and (perhaps more importantly) because there's a 4000-yen course: all you can eat and drink, with no time limit...
We drank from 6 o'clock until 10.30, and in this time we talked about many things, serious and frivolous; it was a fun evening. Having taught these officers for eight weeks, I knew them fairly well, but I'd only seen them in the Naval Base, and it was good, therefore, to be able to see another side to them.
|
|
Deciding on the crafts for the International Club's Christmas event was easy; working out how to make a cone stiff enough to glue pasta to is less easy. When I used to make these pasta Christmas trees, we always used some sort of ready-made cone (I seem to remember that it was from a skein of wool), which made things simple, but here there don't seem to be such cones. In Tokyu Hands in Hiroshima there are polystyrene cones, which would be perfect, but (1) they're 200 yen each, and (2) we'd have to order them before we knew how many children were coming. Therefore the only option seems to be to make the cones ourselves; but from what? The best material at the minute seems to be thick sheets of bendy plastic we found in Nafco...
|
|
 Web articles worthy of mention...
Ice-cream exhibition
Who'd ever have imagined that there'd be so many flavours of ice-cream in Japan? (Actually, thinking about it, perhaps it's not that surprising after all...)
|
|
Christmas lessons are always difficult in Japan, because religion is not supposed to be taught in schools. To be honest, the things I introduce about Christmas are cultural rather than religious, but nevertheless, I always have to be slightly careful. In addition, while most of the children enjoy Christmas lessons- I got a round of applause when I told the children in Tsukumo that we'd be folding Santa Claus- I once had a problem with a child whose parents were Jehovah's Witnesses, so now I always check with the school that there won't be problems like this.
|
|
Final lessons of the term in Tsukumo Elementary School. With the first- to third-years, we made the origami Santa Claus I'd found after searching the internet for most of the morning. Most of the children were very neat folders, and their origami came out excellently, but a few children had no clue whatsoever. If I said 'fold along this line', for example, they'd fold to the line, or to a point somewhere close to the line, or even just on a random tangent completely unconnected with the line; anything other than what they were supposed to be doing! This class- whatever we do- always has a large proportion of children who seem incapable of listening. They'll ask their friends what they're supposed to be doing after I've explained and shown them examples, but it never occurs to them that just listening to me in the first place would be both easier and more likely to be correct. I had intended to make snowflakes as well, but in the end just folding two pieces of origami paper took the whole forty-five minutes.
The fourth-years and above, meanwhile, made Christmas trees. They had to cut out two tree shapes from a pattern I'd made, make a slit from the top in one and from the bottom in another, and slot them together to make a stand-up tree. I then got them to decorate the tree. Obviously my idea of decorating trees is different to these children's, though, because- although I'd gone through all the different things we use for tree decorations- most of the children seemed to want just to colour their trees blue, or purple, without any decorations. One girl, though, drew three tiny little angels to stick on her tree- they were really good, too. Anyway, nobody finished their tree, so I look forward to seeing how they all turn out in the end, if the children haven't taken them home before the next time I visit.
|
|
 J-List
10 flavours of Japanese ramen
To commemorate the introduction of ramen for dogs, a (non-exhaustive) list of 10 other flavours of ramen (for humans):
- Shoyu ramen (ramen flavoured with soy-sauce)
- Shio ramen (ramen flavoured with salt)
- Miso ramen (ramen flavoured with soybean paste)
- Tonkotsu ramen (ramen flavoured with pork)
- Chashu-men (ramen topped with slice of barbecued pork)
- Gyunyu ramen (milky ramen with cheese)
- Tomato ramen (ramen flavoured with tomato, oddly enough)
- Hiyashi ramen (ramen with cold soup, served during summer)
- Chanpon-men (Nagasaki-style ramen with assorted ingredients in soup)
- Gomoku ramen (ramen with five ingredients such as assorted vegetables, seafood and pork or chicken in soup)
|
|
Web articles worthy of mention...
According to this article, a new kind of ramen has been introduced. It's not just any old ramen, though, but... ramen for dogs! It's called wanko-men, apparently. Whatever next?
|
|
Today was my hatsu-kaki day. (Hatsu-kaki won't appear in Japanese dictionaries, I'm sure, but it's a word most Japanese would understand...) It means 'first oysters', and in my coinage, it is used to signify the first oysters eaten in the season.
Anyway, this lunch I had kaki-furai- fried breadcrumbed oysters- and damn good they were too! It's always a shame to give up eating oysters in the spring when the season finishes, but in a way I suppose the summer break is a good thing. At least it means that you can't become so used to oysters that you no longer appreciate them...
|
|
 Web sites worthy of mention...
Paperfolding
In my cruise (more a trudge!) around the internet for origami Father Christmases, I recalled how much I used to enjoy origami when I was in England. Oddly enough, since coming to Japan I've done almost no origami, but seeing some of the diagrams on the internet, I think I might start again. This site has a great page of origami diagrams that really whetted my appetite; I think it'll be an excellent starting point and resource.
|
|
It's amazing how frustrating the internet can be sometimes. I wanted instructions for a simple origami Santa Claus for my visit to Tsukumo in the afternoon, but could I find one? Of course not! I found photographs galore of simple origami Santas, but no folding instructions. I found tens of complicated (nine-hundred-or-so-steps sort of complicated) Santas- with folding instructions, of course- but no simple Santas. Eventually, after nearly three hours of searching, I found a satisfactory Santa and the instructions for folding it... but why did it have to be so difficult? The internet is great in that the information is almost always there, but it falls down badly in the fact that that information can be so difficult to dig out.
|
|
Everyone's in a muddle about the new arrangements for rubbish this morning. Does the plastic wrapping from a box of cakes go in the burnable rubbish, or the non-burnable rubbish, or even the recyclable rubbish? And what about jars? Where do they go?
I have to say, though, that once we all get used to this new way of separating rubbish, it should be easier than the previous rules. Whereas before in the office we had bins for burnable rubbish, plastic and cans/glass, now the plastic can go straight into the burnable rubbish, which means that the third bin can be set aside for PET bottles. This looks like a far simpler system than before, and in any case the previous split between burnable and non-burnable always seemed ill-conceived, since the burnable rubbish could be put out in bags which themselves would be non-burnable. This contradiction, though, is no longer a problem under the new way of doing things.
|
|
© Copyright 2003 Nathan Duckworth.
Updated: 20/1/03; 2:08:26 pm.
|
|
|
|
The Breakfast Show
Weather...
FastCounter by bCentral
|
|
