Lunch a la Japonaise

Bento (lunch) prepared and waiting for a very hungry customer.

Let's see. In this lunch I see pickled vegetables, shrimp croquette, smoked salmon over shredded raw diakon radish, mini quiche, prosciutto or raw ham, tuna sashimi with a yummy-looking melange of sauce, sesame seeds, and chopped greens (probably onion), Vietnamese summer roll, and one or two other things I can no longer see well enough to identify. For the record, at the center-top square of the bento on the left is a funny herb that is very much like a shallot, but also very different, called Myoga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoga). I have never found it in the U.S., but I would very much like to.

Sliced pork, called char shu (as closely as I can transliterate).

Sarada (salads).

If I'm not mistaken about this one, it is a box of fish cakes. The kana on the label indicate "surimi", which is the pollock-type fish that is used in imitation seafood here, and which the Japanese have used to make their own fishcakes for far longer than we've known about it.

A variety of bento, the more expensive of which appears to be over $10.00, and the least expensive about $7.00.

Close-up of more salads, some containing meat and seafood.

For all you caviar lovers out there, I think this would be salmon. And the next photo is of a variety of caviars. Of course, the Japanese palate appreciates this item in a different context than a western appetite would. Rice, often vinegared, is the preferred medium in Japan, while in the west, of course, breads or blini would be chosen.

And last, but not least, good old sandwiches. Though you will likely find it a bit odd at first to bit into a potato salad sandwich, it is actually quite tasty. It is not uncommon to find two and three layers of filling in a sandwich, along the lines of a double or triple decker, but the fillings will be familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time. Always good, though. I don't remember ever having had a bad sandwich.


So, that will wrap up lunch at the Sogo Department store. I'll have to look back through my photos and see what strikes me as a good post for the next go round. Sayonara for now.

I Know I Promised Furniture, but . . .

Food is pretty important. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it's a good deal more important than furniture, I'd say. So, with that in mind, I thought I would torment all of us with just plain food photos from Japan.

Zaru soba with mountain vegetables. The sauce is a soy-based sauce to which sugar, mirin, and dashi have been added. Mirin is cooking rice wine, and dashi is a dried and smoked fish stock. There is no fishy taste to it, however. Not in my opinion, anyway.

A bit blurry, but this teishoku (lunch set) is Tonkatsu—pork cutlet breaded in Panko, then deep-fried, served, usually, with shredded cabbage, white rice, pickles, and miso soup.

For all you food lovers out there, you have never seen anything until you've shopped in the basement floor(s) of major department stores in Japan. Above is just one sliver of the offerings available in the sweets section of Sogo department ("depaato", in Japanese) store in Yokohama. I think I'll show a few more before moving on to savories.

Isu-kuremu (ice cream).

Chokoreto (chocolate).

More sweets . . .

Including a green tea torte

and a selection of green teas to go with your sweets

Unless you would prefer to have a ko-hi (coffee) instead.

I believe that rather than make this post as long as the great wall of China, I shall save the savories for another post. It is after lunchtime by now, and all these sweets should be making people look forward to teatime, which, by the way, is observed in Japan.

Back to Basics

Well, my own personal basics, anyway.

I've been meaning to get around to posting photos of our Japan trip, which seems years ago now, and I just haven't got round to it. So please bear with me while I make my first attempt.

Hmm. Not too bad. That was pretty easy, actually.

I'm taking these photos out of the chronological order of our actual trip, but the first place that come to mind when I thought about our summer trip to Japan was Takayama. A popular, though out-of-the way, tourist destination in Japan is a small mountain town called Takayama (where I snapped the above photo). The streets there are a bit like a working museum, and the town looks much like it would have a few centuries ago—think a Japanese Colonial Williamsburg. Though you can certainly find modern products to buy in the shops, there a quite a few that still sell foods and other goods that are made using the same processes that would have been in use during the time period. Unlike a museum, however, many of the shops are still owned and operated by the same families who have lived and worked there for generations.

See this? It's a cedar ball suspended above the entrance to a sake brewery. A family-style one, that is. We were told that everywhere we saw a cedar ball like this, we were looking at a sake brewery. It's basically the same thing as hanging the tradesman's shingle out front. The ball is actually made of cedar, which grows everywhere and is used everywhere as well.

The breweries look pretty much like any other type of shop on the street, and if you walk inside, you will be greeted by a family member or employee. At a small bar inside, patrons can participate in a Japanese style wine tasting (sake in lieu of wine), and I was disappointed on our trip not to have had more time there with my husband. It would have been so much fun to just belly up to the bar and hang out tasting sake for a while. But our children, unlike horses, couldn't just be hitched up to the post outside, quietly to graze on oats while we took our time in the sake saloon, so we had to move on . . .

This photo was taken from the train window on the way to Takayama, and since my poor little camera is very basic and not at all brand new, this was about the clearest shot I could get of what I guessed (correctly) were small green tea plantations. For more thorough info, you might check out http://www.obubutea.com/ . I'm not recommending this site for any particular reason other than for the photos of what a tea plantation looks like, though it does appear to be an incredibly dense site that I will be looking at more closely myself. Most of us, I'm guessing, only see the dried tea, and many only see it through the gauzy paper sachets that come in boxes of twenty, so I thought you might find it interesting.

Just enough time for one more, I think . . .

It's hard to resist including a photo of a certain familiar face surrounded by the image of "sarubobo". The sarubobo (meaning literally "monkey baby") has a long history. Of course, the origin is most likely very simple: scraps of fabric were used by mothers and grandmothers to make dolls for children. Along the way, however, greater symbolism became attached to the dolls. There are many, many charms for luck in Japan, and this is one of them. This blog has some really great photos: http://hidatakayama.blogspot.com/2010/04/sarubobo-luck-made-of-plush.html

Well, that's all the time we have for today, boys and girls. Perhaps tomorrow I'll put up photos of a wood furniture factory we visited while in Takayama. No, really, it was pretty interesting, and I won't write a book, I promise. For now, if you're interested in more information than I have included here, this is a fantastic site: http://www.hida.jp/english/index.htm

A New Day

Gosh, I seem to have fallen off the face of the planet! Best to give a quick update, I guess.

I'm

• too busy.
• finally finished reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. Look for the movie out next year by the look of things. By the way, the protagonist in the novel is named Dagny, which means "new day."
• not looking forward to being cold this winter. Maybe I will be able to embrace my inner polar bear, but I'm not so sure about that. Maybe just a bunch of good books.

• looking forward to seeing the play my eldest has spent so much of her last two months helping to put on.
• looking for a place to sell and/or refine my old silver. I love the stuff, but it's such a pain to take care of.
• trying to decide if it is more cost effective to sell or donate clothes I just don't wear. Probably the latter.
• thinking that my life's mission really and truly, once and for all, is to make sure that the first 18+ years of each of my children's lives are well-spent and that I would be a fool to think public school can come close to accomplishing that.

• another year more advanced as a human being as of last month. Don't laugh, you know what I mean.
• drowning in the minutiae of life.
• imagining what life, full-time, in the Caribbean might be like.
• remembering that once I upon a time, not so long ago, I used to be into the whole writing thing.
• remembering that there are a great many things besides writing that I actually also enjoy doing. Hence the big gap in my writing . . . "Oh, bother," as my old friend Pooh is wont to say.

There. that feels better already. Now to go upload a few photos somewhere so someone(thing) besides my computer can view them . . .

A New Era Here at Home

Our youngest is now in school, albeit only three mornings per week, and I do sometimes hear some variation of that commonly asked question, "What are you doing with "all that 'free' time now?"

A few appropriate answers might be that

I catch up on all the things I've been neglecting to do around the house for all these years.

I get together on occasion for coffee with some of my friends that I don't see often enough.

I eat bonbons. I had to throw that one in there. I only eat bonbons occasionally, and always when I'm multi-tasking anyway, so it doesn't really count as eating bonbons, does it?

I get in touch with myself. I'm not kidding—time for artistic endeavors, including writing, suffers tremendously under the strict regimen of daily administrative details that modern life seems to require.

I run errands. Sadly, it's true. There are some things better left for when the kids just aren't in the car and asking for every other toy/candy/treat/fill-in-the-blank that commercial enterprises choose to display at a child's eye level.

On occasion, I even read.

I blog. Or will do when I can find time in between all the other things on this list.

And speaking of which, there are a number of other items from the list calling out to me even as I type. It's good to be back and toying with words again, but I shall bid adieu with the intention of returning very soon.

Until next time . . .

Long Time, No Write

Wow. Well that was quite a hiatus. I think I'll quickly post this just to tell myself that I'm back. Anyone still out there? I hope to be blogging a bit about Japan, though we've been back for quite some time now.

Japan, Finally

Where to start? I've had to share my computer with a number of family members on this trip, and time and access to the laptop have been in short supply, it seems. Good thing I'm not expecting to get paid for these blog entries.

Q: Why has the U.S. still not discovered the convenience of simple syrup in a single-serve size for iced coffee and tea in restaurants? We had them when we lived here 20 years ago, and we in the U.S. still live without them in 2010 for Pete's sake!

Fact (from here on noted by the letter "F", followed by a colon): My four-year-old officially learned how to spell her own and her sister's name while on this trip. She also learned how to use the room-to-room phone.

Q: Why do I find better bread products, including croissants, in Tokyo than I can find anywhere in the States?

F: Money in currencies other than one's own always feels like play money and is so easy to spend because it doesn't feel real.

Q: Why does Starbucks offer Short, in addition to Tall, Grande, and Venti in Japan, but not in the U.S.? (Anyone reading this post, I challenge you to walk into a Stateside Starbucks and ask for a "Short." Go ahead, you know you want to!)

F: I forgot how melted I get halfway through a summer day in Japan without my air-conditioned automobile. The trains are a great convenience, but in 98 degree weather, it's hard to arrive looking and feeling fresh and ready to party. It's more like wilted and ready for a dip in the pool followed by a nap. sigh.

Q: Why do Japanese look so much taller now than they did when I lived here twenty years ago? Now I'm just as diminutive here as I am anywhere else in the world.

F: Fashion in Japan has taken a decidedly casual turn since we were here eight years ago. The world's (and Japan's) economic slump has taken a toll on high fashion here. No more suits and heels. Now all we see are leggings, cropped pants, sun dresses, hawaiian shirts and sandals on both the men and the women—well, except for the sundresses. And lots of surfer hair in all shades. Kinda cool, though, because it's easier for a yank to fit in these days. A little bit, anyway.

I've had so many thoughts on our trip that I did not write down because we were in a hurry to go to one place or another. I'll try to be better about it since we leave Tokyo tomorrow morning for presumably slower-paced destinations. I just hope that connecting to the internet is easy.

Here's to posting more enlightening observations, with a bit more depth and analysis.