Hello everyone!
Thursday morning was pretty pleasant (I just typed “present” for some reason, and it took me awhile to figure out what was odd about it). Since I don’t have a first hour class on Thursday, I arranged a long-awaited coffee date with my friend Tomoka, who was an exchange student at my college last year. Now I’m an exchange student at hers! Oddly, though, we’re both quite busy and attend drastically different classes, so we don’t often get the chance to see one another. It was really lovely spending time with her, even though both the coffee shop and the school cafeteria on campus were closed down, meaning we had to get drinks from a jidouhanbaiki (vending machine). It was good catching up with her, and she invited me to a nomikai (a kind of Japanese get-together, typically at a stylish sort of restaurant, that involves drinking and small courses of food) on Friday.
Thursday afternoon we visited a courthouse in Kyoto for my Law and Politics course. It was pretty interesting, to be honest. To start off, the guide gave us all nice fabric tote bags with the courthouse’s logo on them. Inside the bags were more advertising goods, including some informational brochures about the judicial process and courtroom layout in Japan, a pen, and a pad of paper. Then we got to sit in on some actual court proceedings. I found this pretty cool, even though I didn’t understand everything. First we saw a witness testifying, and it was difficult to make everything out, but there were some interesting parts that I did understand, including a wad of money hidden in a futon and that the witness missed an important event in the case because she was in the toilet. The layout of the courtroom was different than an American court. The judge sat on a tall podium, with the stenographer lower down in front of him. The person questioning the witness sat to the right at a very large desk covered with papers. On the left was another man at a desk covered with even more papers, and all he seemed to do was clarify the witnesses’ testimony after it had been made. The witness sat in a chair facing only the judge; the audience could not see her face at all, and it was difficult to hear the testimony. A man in handcuffs and two guards sat behind the witness. After her testimony, we also heard the testimony of another man, but I don’t really remember what it was about.
After the courthouse excursion, I had a major peanut butter and jelly craving, so I bought peanut butter, strawberry jam, and a loaf of bread at my grocery store before heading home. It was extremely decadent, since I have been adhering pretty strictly to very fresh and simple traditional Japanese vegetable foods. On the recommendation of my Australian friends, I also tried a peanut butter and Vegemite sandwich, which was all right, but not wonderful.
On Friday, everyone in class got to present the results of their interview project. Mine went unexpectedly smoothly. I felt very confident speaking in front of everyone, and then answering the various questions that they asked. Much better than the last time I had to do a presentation in front of the class in Japanese!
After speech class on Friday, I got to participate in a Japanese cooking class taught by the teacher of my Japanese Culture class. Strangely enough, I think she decided to hold the cooking classes because of me, but I’m not sure. All I know is I asked a lot of questions during our first cultures class, which was sort of about food and cooking, and she seemed really happy that I was interested in traditional food. Almost every subsequent out-of-class conversation with her revolved around the concept of food, until finally one day she said she was thinking about holding cooking classes. I expressed my keen enthusiasm, and before I knew it, she had set up six or seven special cooking classes. The last one, which is the one I attended, was “cooking Japanese vegetable foods,” and seemed wholly based around vegetables and types of foods that I had told her earlier that I wished I knew how to cook.
We started out by making rice with kelp broth and chopped daikon (giant Japanese radish). Then we made shira-ae, a salad from cooked spinach, ground toasted sesame mixed with tofu into a paste, soy sauce, and zest from a yuzu fruit (a kind of small, yellow-greenish citrus fruit that has a tart, vaguely grapefruit-orangey taste). We also made fried Japanese eggplant with a sauce made from mirin (sweet Japanese cooking wine), soy sauce, yuzu juice, tougarashi (a type of dried red pepper), and ginger. The main dish was crispy tofu with grated daikon and a kind of ginger sauce. It was excellent fun learning how to make everything, and to learn about general cooking skills and knowledge useful for Japanese cooking. I was especially interested in the teacher’s tips on ways to live by the traditional Japanese philosophy of “mottainai” (“too good to waste”) where you use as much of the ingredients as you can, trying to minimize edible parts of plants, etc. being thrown out. For example, we used daikon in several of the recipes. The outer layer of the daikon is slightly greenish, and it has a bitter sort of bite to it that is unpleasant in most foods. The teacher carefully peeled this off, but said she’d take it home, chop it up, and put it in a press to make tsukemono, or Japanese-style pickles. Likewise, the leaves and steams of the daikon root were chopped up and put into our rice dish, but they could also be used to color and flavor pickles. Similarly, we used all of the yuzu fruit, having the peel in the shira-ae and the juice in the sauce for the eggplant. I think this concept is really nice, and I’d like to live by it more. It was pretty funny… at the end of the cooking class when we were cleaning up, someone picked up the plate on which the daikon had been grated for the tofu’s sauce, and saw that it still had a film of bitter daikon juice on it. Someone else laughed and said jokingly, “Oh, don’t pour that down the drain. Mottainai, mottainai!” And the teacher looked up and said, “Oh, actually, please don’t! Daikon juice is very good for the body, and I was hoping to drink that.” I thought it was a joke, but then she took the plate, poured the daikon juice into a china cup, and drank it as gracefully as she might drink a cup of green tea. Keep in mind that it was radish juice! I was impressed. After we were completely done cleaning up, she gave us all little parcels of Japanese spices, and even gave me the rest of the bag of sesame seeds, along with some spinach to take home. I picked up a yuzu fruit on my way home and made some goma-ae (the same as shira-ae but without the tofu) as soon as I got back.
Soon it was Friday evening, and I had to get ready to go to Tomoka’s nomikai. I took a shower, dressed in something stylish, and then headed for the subway station to catch a ride to the Shijo area where we’d be eating. As I was about to buy my ticket, a Japanese woman stopped me. “Excuse me,” she said in Japanese, “Where are you headed to?” “I’m going to Shijo,” I stammered, wondering why on earth a Japanese person was approaching me (it doesn’t really happen that much typically, perhaps because many Japanese fear they won’t be able to understand a foreigner or that the foreigner might not be able to understand them… so when an old lady approached me confidently and addressed me in Japanese, it seemed strange for me, since I’m so used to having to start conversations, etc.). “Well,” she said, “I bought this all-day pass for the subway lines, but I’m going home now, and, well, it seems… mottainai.” There it was, the concept of “mottainai” again, that I had learned in cooking class just earlier that day. I thanked her profusely for her kindness, and she seemed very happy to have helped me. Not only did it save me the subway fares all evening, but just the simple thoughtfulness of her random act of kindness brightened my spirits. This was officially the first time since arriving here in September that I had received a random act of kindness from a complete stranger. It was very strange, and so very satisfying.
The nomikai was really amusing. After finally finding the group (Tomoka had drawn me a flawed map, but I managed to find the meeting place after a short discussion with a hawker in the area), we headed to a swanky restaurant that seemed specially made for nomikai. It was very dimly lit, with black lacquer furniture, black walls, and floors. Besides the tables, which were lit up, the walls had a sort of strange cracked effect in places, with colored light in electric hues seeping through. It was a very artistic look that kind of reminded me of a posh, exclusive nightclub. The purpose of the nomikai was to bring together Japanese students interested in study abroad and foreign students who would be able to give them advice about it. Consequently, Tom and Hikaru, a couple of friends from my same program (from England and Luxembourg, respectively) were also in attendance. At first I just tentatively conversed with Tomoka and Hikaru, but then I began also speaking in Japanese to the German exchange students there, and then we all switched seats and I met the Japanese students. By the end of the nomikai I had spoken with everyone, had downed several gin and tonics as well as a few screwdrivers, and had eaten some light, tasty dishes (thanks to Tomoka, who helped me order some special vegan courses… I was very much indebted to her). In case you’re curious, I had a salad of mixed greens and seaweeds with a vinegar-citrus (maybe yuzu) dressing, and some sweet potato French fries with a spicy pepper ketchup.
After the nomikai, I went with Tom, Hikaru, and another guy from Australia to get some more substantial food. We ate at a Japanese fast food chain called “Izuya” or something like that, and I had a big bowl of white rice, nattou (fermented soybeans), and tea. After that, Tom invited me to “round three” with some of our mutual friends at a bar near our place (he lives in the same complex as I). We met Derek, Ewan, and Greta there, and enjoyed ourselves very thoroughly. I drank quite a bit, I think. The bike ride home felt all right, I was safe and steady. But somewhere between parking my bike in the garage and climbing the four flights of stairs to my apartment door, the alcohol hit me with full force. Derek, Ewan, and Greta, who had parted ways with me at the garage, had gone out to get snacks, and upon arriving back at Matsumi Corpo, my apartment complex, found me sprawled out sleeping in front of my apartment door. The next thing I remember is all three of them fussing about me in my apartment, drunkenly forcing me to drink water, and setting up a barricade of various receptacles all around the perimeter of my bed, apparently in fear that I’d become sick during the night. However, I woke up and felt just fine.
Saturday morning was just lazing about. I took a hot bath to wash the stench of cigarettes from my hair (the local bar we had attended was a mite smoky) and pottered about my apartment, doing dishes and sorting papers, etc. That afternoon I had choir practice, which was pretty sad, because it was the last choir practice with the fourth-year students, who are to graduate sometime in the beginning of February. It ended up being somewhat happy, too, however, because we got to re-sing all of the songs from our last concert together, and ended the rehearsal by linking hands and singing the Doushisha College Song and doing the Doushisha cheer together (a practice which, after doing it many times with my choir, is referred to as the “Doushisha Friendship Circle,” I finally learned).
Choir practice took all afternoon, so when I arrived home, it was already time to start thinking about the pancake party that my neighbor Ewan had invited me to earlier in the week. I went next door to his apartment and we experimented with making some special vegan pancakes for me, and thanks to his amazing skills with a skillet, they turned out perfectly. Oh, by the bye, this pancake party was with European pancakes, which are what Americans would call “crepes.” Ewan made mounds and mounds of these kind of very thin, light pancakes, with the intent that people could put whatever they fancied in them and then roll them up to eat them. There were perhaps ten guests in Ewan’s small apartment, and they were almost all friends from my program here, so it was a really nice and convivial mood. We started off with savory toppings for the pancakes, including peppery pumpkin mash, a sort of vegetable and basil reduction, and fresh tomatoes with high-quality balsamic vinegar. Then we moved onto sweet toppings for dessert, such as lemon and sugar (the “quintessential pancake topping,” according to the Brits), strawberry, blueberry, and pear jam, and two flavors of ice cream (from which I abstained, of course). There was also some wine and gin and other spirits involved in this gathering, so I was pretty tipsy by the end of it.
For some reason, we decided to go to the same local bar that we had gone to on Friday again as a big group, and I chose to go just so I could socialize and have fun, under the condition that everyone would watch me and make sure I had no alcohol. I ended up having one glass of orange juice and about a hundred or so glasses of water, so I became more and more sober (well, sort of) and everyone else around me became more and more inebriated. That made conversation fun. We talked about all sorts of taboo things that I wouldn’t have spoken of if it weren’t for my state. Oh, also, along the way two Japanese friends had joined us, so I did converse in Japanese quite a bit, steeled by the drinks I had enjoyed... well, and the drinks I was enjoying. To be frank, while my friends weren't watching me, I may in fact have stolen the occasional sip of alcohol from bottom of glasses that they had set aside.
My defense? "Mottainai."
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