Morning Market, and some other things in Murakami

One hot June morning, Flo and I decided that we should go to the asaichi, or morning market, together. At some point between the last post and now, Summer got under way in earnest, and the air coming off of the sea of Japan feels like it was exhaled by some primeval, gargantuan dog, and we were already sweating profusely after just a few steps out her apartment door.

While she was on a hunt for good presents to send home, I was mostly taking in the sights and smells of the market, which both tended to be fishy. The market is a sort of standard farmer's market setup, with temporary booths holding a variety of things lining both sides of a narrow street:



The smell of the place, as I mentioned, is pretty fishy. The street even retains a sort of corpulent eau de poisson up to days after the market has disbanded. I'm sure that the juices dripping off the largely unrefrigerated fish onto the asphalt in 90 degree heat goes a long way towards contributing to the smell, as do things like this (please click to enlarge):



...or this. I thought that this fish looked resigned to his fate in an exhausted kind of way:



Here are various Japanese food offerings, whether to be used for cooking or simply to stuff onigiri:



These too were sitting out without any form of refrigeration that I could see. The Japanese are, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, more comfortable with letting things sit out longer than Americans are. I've never gotten over my fear that I'll be horribly food-poisoned by some flaccid, lukewarm morsel or another, but so far my luck seems to have held out. So has the luck of everyone around me, which probably speaks more to food being safer than I think than it does to anyone's luck. Food poisoning is also doubtless kept at bay by the Japanese tendency to take anything that isn't kickin' fresh and deluge it in salt and/or vinegar, thereby preserving it for future generations to enjoy.

On the way back from the market, also decided to take some pictures of the elegant kamon that decorate many of the houses in Murakami. I liked the design, and even though it's not on topic, I wanted to share it here while I still remembered:




Finally, I leave you with something Flo and I found at the local Jusco. Where someone may someday write an elegant thesis about the strange fusion of technology, mythology, and psychology that goes on in Japan (indeed there is a whole genre devoted to cataloging and explaining the idiosyncrasies of the Japanese), I have decided to present a picture that may be able to sum it up better. Behold: Dinotank (click to enlarge).



That is all for now- as I am ever more engrossed in extracting myself from my life here and packing my possessions, posts will probably be more erratic in both timing and subject matter. Thanks for bearing with me, and look for another post on something Japan in this same space sometime this week.

Day Tripper

Last Saturday, the weather was a balmy 13C (55.4F: not bad, considering it's the lee-ward end of December in a region famous for its snow), so more or less on a lark I decided to go for a drive up the highway into the mountains.

First thing's first, here's my trusty steed-



I chose blue partly because, believe it or not, it's one of the more assertive car colors you'll see driving around Japan (or at least Niigata). It's also a Kei Car, which is nice when trying to negotiate Japan's fun-sized parking spaces. I've yet to name it (accepting submissions now- I haven't even decided on a gender yet!), but for the time being, even nameless, it gets me from A to B, and I love it much. Incidentally, talking on a cellphone while driving is universally illegal in Japan, so periodically there are "moshi-moshi pittu" scattered along the highway (it means "hello pit"). This picture was taken at one such pull-over.

The highway winds through a number of breathtaking vistas more or less right off the bat, none of which I was able to photograph for a lack of space to pull over. The severity of the mountains is such (at least initially) that several times a tunnel will connect immediately to a bridge spanning a gorge, to yet another tunnel. It was arrestingly pretty. I did manage to find one pull-over, however, that offered something like a view. This is a poor representation, but still, have at-



My initial intent was to simply take in the scenery for a while, then turn around, so I arbitrarily chose a town fairly far away on the road signs, called "Nan'yo" as my destination, and pressed onward.

After a while, I got hungry and needed to use the bathroom, so here was my first stop:



Apparently this is what rest-stops are like in Japan. I passed a few more along the way, and they looked (from the outside) pretty comparable- toilet, restaurant, kitschy gift shop, and vending machines. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? One notable difference was that this particular stop was selling a number of seedlings and bonsai of plants endemic to Yamagata, whose boundary I had just crossed. Another thing worthy of note was that this rest-stop sold manju, not unusual in Japan, but always welcome. I bought a pizzaman!



After eating my pizzaman and having a look about, I kept heading into Yamagata. The ragged, fang-like peaks gave way to a more herbivorous terrain, with wide valleys spread between ranges of mountains. the distant view was, I must say, gorgeous. However, (and it's possible December without snow isn't the best time to look), many of the small mountain towns I encountered were, frankly, rather ugly. I was hoping for an experience like many I've had in Colorado, where traveling into the mountains is a good way to avail one's self of the personality eccentricities that tend to migrate to the isolated mountains. What I had forgotten is that Japan is both A) ancient and B) crowded- people have been living in the mountains here for a looooooooong time, and the migrations of oddballs that have taken place in the U.S. don't have a good corollary here. I didn't find much evidence of interesting and unusual shops or cafes- just people living at higher altitude. I did encounter one nice corner in a town called "Shokoku," however- and here it is:



Not breath-taking, but not such a bad little town either.

I drove a good ways more, but didn't see or photograph anything worthy of reporting beyond what I've already said here, so let's jump to Nan'yo. Nan'yo is an unimposing, unimpressive little community that probably spends most of it's time in Yamagata-shi's economic and cultural orbit. Consequently, there's not much there. All the same, here are some pics-




For those of you that can read Katakana- the sign that says "ramen" was also where I had dinner. I felt like I was in a scene from a movie about the lonely every-man at Christmas time- stepping into an unremarkable ramen shop in a small, twilit, chilly town, far from home. Nostalgic Christmas music was playing over the speakers (including, unless I am mistaken, "I'll be Home for Christmas"). However, there were (it being a ramen-ya aside) some distinctly Japanese touches: the Christmas decorations looked like they had been subcontracted out to a flying squirrel with a staple gun, and immediately after "White Christmas" or some such song, seizure-inducing J-pop started playing again. Ah, Japan.

The other thing this restaurant had going for it was that every entree came with a monstrous mound of shredded cabbage. The cabbage here was particularly fresh and wholesome-tasting, and I wondered for a minute whether I had finally found a bit of "local flavor" for which I had been searching. Maybe Yamagata grew a lot of cabbage in the cooler mountain elevations! Chatting with the server on the way out, however (itself an unusual behavior- customers don't really mingle with service staff here like they can in America- a Japanese cultural convention I blithely and frequently ignore) I discovered that cabbage is heavily grown all over Japan, and that my katsu-kare (pork curry) experience here had been, in almost every regard, unremarkable. C'est la vie.

When I came out of the restaurant, I did see one more thing worth noting, which almost made the whole trip worth it-



This didn't turn out very well, because of the dim light, but if you'll look down and to the left, you'll see a largish gorilla. It was holding a strobing electric torch. The building it was advertising is a karaoke place, with architecture that's bizarre enough to easily distinguish it from the surrounding town. It looks vaguely, I don't know what. Mongolian? Anyhow, I thought it was pretty cool.

That does it for the day trip- I drove back, obviously, but past the same places and in the dark, so what's more to say?

On another note- today is Christmas Day here, so Merry Christmas everyone! I'm at work (mwa mwa) typing this up on my trusty yellow lap-top, and exchanging Christmas stories with the other ALTs (also at work) via Google chat. I hope everyone's well, and enjoying the holiday!

Nacht und Nibble

The one thing that seemed to make any sense today was lunch- straightforward- grab your food, and eat it with a spoon. Classes also somewhat made sense, although the question-asking activity for the 2nd grade (American 8th grade) bred a degree of chaos that is proving difficult to cope with in correcting and grading papers. I will just have to wing it I suppose. The middle school is, as I mentioned before, more formal and also just generally bigger than my other schools. I miss a lot of what is going on, and between that and having fewer classes I often find myself wondering what I am supposed to be doing with myself. No doubt this will correct itself as time goes by, but for the time being I really need to be on the ball to find out anything.

The Shiibata fighting festival was more tame than I expected (several people we asked said it was different from other years), and that, coupled with not being able to understand the announcements in Japanese, made for a bewildering night of wondering around Shiibata. I missed out on the fighting action (such as there was), but had a good time getting to know some other JETs from the region. Also, we went and checked out this sweet Jinja (Shinto shrine) which was all lit up for the occassion.



Also, here are some pictures of the Arakawa area that I snapped whilst out on my bike- during the morning on my way to work at Kanaya Elementary school. I love the mornings here, because the sheer amount of moisture in the air causes even the smaller rises in the terrain to be capped with opaque fog. Also, if you have not figured it out already- rice fields are ubiquitous in Niigata, as these pics will testify.




Finally here is a small shrine that I encountered, also on my bike. It was very little: big enough to house a medium dog or a small Kami. Any reading of the big writing on the pictured stone translates to something like Big Black Heaven, as near as I can tell (Cilla feel free to correct me), which has a nice ominous ring to it. The figures in the shrine, on the other hand, are not quite so intimidating.




One final note- Cilla, I keep forgetting to photograph that stuff in my fridge. I will try to get that up here in a bit. I still have no idea what it is, but I know that I will never drink it again if it can be helped.

A word about the food...

I thought I would do a quick blurb about some of the food here while I had the images fresh on my camera. Obviously this is just a sliver of my experience in the comestible wonderland that is Japan, but I always find stuff like this interesting when reading about other people's experiences abroad. If you don't, then skip this one and move up to the next post, which will have general Japan and Murakami pics.

This is a typical breakfast for me: coffee (with milk- the quick-brew stuff they sell in the markets here needs a little help), a banana (product of the Philippines!), and a big bowl of rice and natto.
To the uninitiated, natto presents itself like soy beans that were left in a warm container for a week, then sneezed upon several times, and finally garnished with window cleaner to add that characteristic scent. If you can overcome all of these barriers, however, natto winds up tasting not half-bad, and it contains a slew of super-healthy compounds, to say nothing of being high in protein and fiber while containing virtually zero calories. Some mornings I'm not up to it and I eat cereal, but I find that I generally feel better for the rest of the day if I can suck it up and shovel down some natto.




Here's a closer look at the natto... (click to enlarge!)




This is "Boss" brand canned coffee, available in vending machines and convenience stores all over the place- I don't think there's any place in Japan where you're more than 100 yards from a can of Boss coffee. There are several varieties, but it's usually creamy and sweet. I would usually turn my nose up at canned coffee, but I think they put crack in it too. In any event, its swiftly becoming a staple of my diet.




This is my order of a burger and fries at a burger joint in Jusco Plaza, Murakami. Jusco is basically the local mall. I have no idea what "Sante Ole" has to do with anything: if it's a chain, I've yet to see another. The burger came with a special sauce that was double plus awesome.




On an ending note, I love the bottled water here...



Thus endeth the first food post (more to follow eventually). Stay tuned for Murakami and matsuri pics- I'll upload them today as time allows.