Who designed the “standard” cruise control interface? It’s a horrible overcomplicated mishmash of awkward abbreviations and mysteriously organized functions. I can’t decide if it was put together by an over-precise engineering team or a feature-obsessed middle manager.

Consider:

• Why is the on/off switch separate from the others?¹ Setting the speed requires two button presses when it should only take one.
• What on earth is the practical difference between “off” and “cancel”?²
• Do we really need two extra buttons to make the car go faster or slower? Cars, after all, are already graced with eminently effective and much-used speed controls. Having “accel” and “coast” buttons is like adding a joystick down on the floor so that you can steer using the feet that are left sadly idle by the operation of the cruise control.

Imagine what the cruise control UI would look like as implemented by Apple. It would be like the iPhone without the fancy screen: one button labeled ON. You hit the button, the car keeps going the current speed. Hit it again and it turns off. I can’t believe nobody has done this yet.

Cancel rant. Rant off.

—
¹As a computer guy, I can kind of see the logic in having a separate on/off control. After all, the system is managed by a computer that needs to know whether it should be listening for commands at any given moment. Maybe, back in the dark ages of computers when cruise control was first implemented, the system may have had significant startup time, requiring a few seconds of warning to get everything in order for the “set” command. But that’s certainly not necessary today — the whole car is essentially managed by computers nowadays.

²I understand the technical difference, but it’s a stupid thing to bother the user with.

The first week was in London, where we stayed with Francis, saw the sights (including the wonderfully quirky sport of Bike Polo) and gradually acclimated to life in the big city after three years outside of it.

After that, Frank accompanied us for a weekend in Oxford, where we hung out with Andy, who was coincidentally doing a summer program there as part of his law degree at the Ohio State.

Then it was a week Yorkshire to see Claire, with whom we overlapped during our first year in Japan. This portion of the trip involved visiting the eponymous York, and healthy portions of rambling and croquet. Yorkshire has been described to us as “the Texas of England” in that it has a strong independent streak and resists being characterized as part of a larger country. We are interested to see what Claire, a native Yorkshire girl, has to say about that!

Now we set out on our own to the great repressed nation of Scotland. August is festival month in Edinburgh, wherein the entire city is swamped for the ironically named Fringe Festival (which now dwarfs all the “mainstream” festivals it meant to mock when it started in the 1960s). Edinburgh is a lovely city, managing to feel ancient and modern at the same time. We spent a busy Monday through Friday cramming in as many off-the-wall performances and comedy shows as possible, with about a 50% hit rate for satisfying shows.

We had intended to spend a whole week in Edinburgh, but it was clear that five days were going to be enough. Fortunately, we were able to make a last-minute change in plans by renting a camper van from wickedcampers.com (we had seen tons of these vans in Australia last Christmas and remembered their quirky and very effective self-advertising) for about the same price that we would have been paying anyway for our Edinburgh hostel. So we spent three nights and four days driving ourselves around the Scottish Highlands, pulling off the side of the road to sleep wherever was convenient, and boy are we glad we did. This country is bursting at the seams with gorgeous hills and a truly unbelievable number of waterfalls, and not a few castles as well.

Now we are in Berlin until the end of September, and you can expect a report about that later on!

The most common question, of course, is: Where next?

The short answer is: We don’t know. In fact, Steph came up with a brilliant scheme to postpone that very question: travel around the world until Christmas.

Over the years we have been lucky to befriend many lovely people with penchants for world travel. So now we’re visiting them, in this rough order:

1. UK (August): London, Oxford, Yorkshire, Edinburgh, plus brief highland road trip
2. Europe (September): based in Berlin + side trips to Italy and Spain
3. Moldova (October): to visit my friend all the way back to junior high, Erin!
4. Cambodia (November): to visit our college friend Katherine!

This is a mixed work-play holiday. I called in a “favor” at work (not really, but this is — actually to the day, I think — my tenth anniversary of being hired) and got a couple months off to spread over the rest of this year. The idea is to follow a pattern of a few weeks of travel and vacation, followed by a month of “settling down” somewhere where I will get some work done and Steph will do some volunteering and planning for her own future.

Right now we’re in the UK portion of the trip. We spent a week in London, a weekend in Oxford, and are now in Yorkshire staying with our friend and fellow Noshiro ALT, Claire. Next week it’s off to Edinburgh and after that, a month in Berlin, staying in a lovely cheap apartment found on Craigslist!

In the long term, we’ll be home for Christmas — probably in California, but who knows. After that, the book is completely unwritten. Where we end up is mostly down to Steph’s job prospects, so I’ll let her write about that!

We’ll try to keep you up to date as the trip progresses!

Have I been changed in any permanent, meaningful way by my 3 years abroad? Probably, but whatever. It’s the little things I’m confronted with on a day-to-day basis that fascinate me now. Firstly, you’ll have to forgive me: I am slightly disoriented because the air doesn’t smell like fish. I am embarrassed by the degree to which I am in awe of raspberries. Portion sizes seemed to have quintupled overnight (look, a salad twice as big as your head! Good luck, friend!) Also? Flushing a public toilet by hand seems unspeakably vulgar, now that I’ve become accustomed to flushing squatters by foot.

We’re only here in the US for 3 days before we leave the country again, so I feel little need to acclimate to my homeland. Instead, I spend my time obsessing over every odd little detail. Everyone gets a menu when eating in restaurants, revolutionary! Soap and paper towels in public restrooms, brilliant! I can explain nuances clearly and competently to my doctor, fantastic!

But a more sinister side of America has started to manifest. Isn’t it unsanitary to wear one’s shoes into the bathroom? Why are you prescribing me medicine I can totally do without for $400 that I clearly can’t afford? Why, in a country fighting an epic battle with obesity, does it cost $15 to go to the gym for the day? And when I arrived in LA, I witnessed a street so clogged with traffic that a fire engine literally could not get through to its destination. How is that a workable plan? Why has this city not yet burnt down to the ground in a puff of smoke? And why does the main topic of conversation seem to be about all the stuff people have bought and how they can buy more?

It’s a novelty to be able to buy nearly anything I need with a credit card, but living in a country with tips means I can’t get rid of the spare change which increasingly weighs down my wallet. The frenzied rush of the LA freeway system, which functions on a totally different level from the equally crazy landscape of Japanese driving, also takes some getting used to.

The California public schools, I am surprised to note, are gorgeous! No prison block educational facilities here to insult the eye. Small community parks are green and luscious instead of bare patches of dirt. The backwardness of this confuses me though: it is a desert here in LA. Shouldn’t we have the parks made of dirt, and Japan have the lush green grassy expanses for kids to play on…?

And then there’s that weird SoCal phenomenon: the perfect 72-degree day with cloudless skies that stretch blue and flawless to the horizon. The first day of this weather was glorious, but after 3 days I began to get twitchy; it seemed unnatural after coming from Japan where I felt I’d been living under a little grey raincloud for 3 years. It only adds insult to injury to Noshiro, which was still probably drying out from the flood less than a week before (the second flood to hit that tiny town in two years).

Where, may I ask, are the cats on leashes? The onsens to soothe the aches and pains from lugging 80kg of luggage by hand across the Pacific? Where are the grannies bent over nearly in half with their pushcarts, elbowing people in the ribs as they plow through a crowd or brazenly stopping traffic as they meander out into the road? Where are the ubiquitous vending machines (they seem to have been replaced with an ample sprinkling of trash cans, a fair trade in my mind). And then of course, there is the soul-crushing smog, which brings us to the Californian existential question: Is it possible to fully enjoy perfect weather if you can’t see the horizon?

And not to belabor the point, but where’s my cashmoney, America? My bank seems to have vaporized sometime in the last year when I wasn’t looking. Washington Mutual, where are you? I thought you were going to meet me with flowers at the airport? I can only hope that the remnants of my life savings are floating around in the aether somewhere waiting for me to reclaim them when I return home this winter, ready to exchange cash for goods and services for my loved ones this holiday season.

A few more words on:

CELL PHONES
When I arrived in Japan, I grudgingly got the cheapest cell phone and payment plan possible. I’d never had a cell phone before, but I quickly grew to love it (you most of all, emoji!). Sadly, J-phones aren’t really designed to outlast the attention span of the average consumer (which is like 3 days), and at the end of my 3-year tenure, my phone was rebelling. The battery refused to remain charged. It also developed a rather suspicious-looking bulge which was getting bigger by the day, leaving me to nervously wonder when it was going to burst in a shower of battery acid.

Now that I’ve canceled my phone service abroad and gone through this exact process again in the states and I have to say, my new American cell phone… it sucks beans. Like an old friend I just can’t say goodbye to, my old J-phone is tucked away safely in storage. In the ruckus of repatriation however, I forgot to remove and dispose of the suspect battery. The worrisome bulge is probably still growing in my absence like some kind of space alien baby.

FOOD
In Japan, there were some hoops to jump through regarding food, for sure. Everyone deals with the scarcity of non-processed cheese, for one. And zucchini can only be procured during an obscenely short interval at the end of summer (pumpkin and daikon are, of course, available at any time). Some foreign foods, like Thai and Mexican are pretty much non-existent. So when I stepped into a Trader Joe’s a few days ago, I nearly wept with joy at the diversity I saw on the shelves. However, trolling the supermarket aisles later I was overwhelmed by the mind-numbing variety: do we really need Flamin’ Hot Cheetos con Limon and Cheddar Jalapeno Cheetos? Would America be any less complete if we did away with the whole aisle in the grocery store dedicated to Oreos and perhaps replaced it with only a pack or two? The variety of edible products really seems to have proliferated to an absurd degree in our absence.

WORDS
When I first moved to Japan, I found the new language overwhelming. My brain overloaded as it tried to sift through all the text seen and sentences heard and come out with something sensical. And it would grind to a screeching halt every time. After 3 years in northern Tohoku, I’ve learned to filter efficiently: focus on the pertinent, and ignore the rest. But upon arriving in LA, I find that I’m experiencing the same phenomenon all over again, only in reverse. I’m compelled to read everything, listen to everything just because I can. Advertisements for real estate. Strangers’ conversations. Sensationalist TV shows on FOX. And this effortless and immediate ability to comprehend everything is, frankly, wearing me out.

ALCOHOL
I felt the old puritanical attitudes toward alcohol come flooding back as I sat in my favorite brewery, void of ID. Imagine my embarrassment when at 32, I had to ask my dad to order beer for me. I then covertly sipped said beer from a straw because I know how fierce California establishments are about monitoring underage drinking. I’d grown complacent after all those izakaya visits and forgotten to bring either my passport or my drivers’ license. At 32, why can I not just order beer in this country? You’d think the grey hairs on my head would be proof enough (although now that I think about it, some of my 12-year-old students in Japan sport more grey than I).

RELATIVE SIZE
For the first time in my life, I felt average-sized in Japan, as I’m only slightly below average in height and slightly above average in other bodily dimensions there. In America, I feel categorically small again. I’m not sure how to feel about this. I can easily find clothes that fit me again (yay!) but I am no longer the bustiest girl in the room by default (boo). I’m no longer comparing myself to the stick-thin girls I was surrounded by in Japan (yay!) but I have zero visibility now when in a crowd (boo).

You may be tempted at this point to ask: Where next? All of this culture-comparing is nice and all, but where are you going to live, girl? To which my response is: Run away! Yes, I’m avoiding such weighty questions by going on the gap year adventure that I was too serious and focused to take when I was actually 22. We’ll be gone for 4-5 months (I promised the fam I’d be home this Christmas) while we visit our friends living far and wide. Hopefully, whatever comes next in life will sort itself out in the meantime.

Wish us luck, stay in touch, and see you on the other side!

So here’s the stuff I’ll miss when I go.

Shinto

Shinto is Japan’s home-grown polytheistic/animist belief system, which I would loosely describe as a cosmology representing nature and our place in it. In day-to-day life, Shinto manifests itself by marking places of beauty, celebrating life events, and throwing really cool festivals.

The iconic red Shinto gate is one of Japan’s best-known symbols. These shrines are so pervasive in Japanese culture that their bright red-orange color has its own kanji, 朱, translated as “vermillion” in English. Indeed, the ubiquitous presence of Shinto shrines fully makes up for the country’s otherwise ugly construction practices. Nothing spruces up a wall of concrete like a bright and cheery shrine where you least expect it. The arches themselves aren’t always beautiful — sometimes they’re made out of concrete or even metal tubes — but the very fact that they’re there means someone thought this place deserved to be commemorated, and that makes life just a little bit brighter. And shrines only get better with age: a shabby arch is just as cheering as one meticulously maintained.

And Shinto festivals are simply fabulous. The priestly costumes are out of this world. The festivals themselves usually consist of huge groups of people getting together to do something useless but entertaining, like carrying heavy shrines across town and back, or into a waterfall. Followed, of course, by drinking (see Non-Puritanism below).

Some (probably not many) may wonder why I haven’t mentioned Buddhism along with Shinto. Indeed, the boundaries between the two are essentially indistinguishable in Japan — many Buddhist temple complexes contain Shinto shrines and vice versa. But as it was wonderfully described to us by Johnnie Hillwalker in Kyoto, Buddhism deals with death, while Shinto deals with life. Buddhism is much more of an organized religion: centralized temples, cemeteries, services, chants; whereas Shinto is more about appreciating nature and and our place in it. And while I love Buddhist temples too, it’s the Shinto shrines I’m going to miss when we leave.

Effortlessly Healthy Food

Japanese people live forever, and they always seem to look about ¾ their actual age. Some of that is genetic, but it doesn’t hurt that it’s extremely easy to get good, healthy, locally-grown food in this country.

Traditional Japanese food is known for its tiny portions and intricate preparation. Just the other day, in fact, Steph’s adult English class threw a going-away party for us, which involved of one of these 和風 meals. It consisted mainly of small bits of fresh, mostly unprocessed ingredients — by which I mean not fried, or sweetened, or greased. There was raw fish and shrimp, broiled salted fish, delightfully presented veggies, a squid stuffed with rice. (I have to admit, the latter tasted alarmingly like cat food.) With this as a traditional meal, you can see how modern Japanese cuisine would still tend toward the small and simple.

We’ve got it doubly good where we are, because the food only has to travel a couple of miles from farm to plate. Every supermarket has a section devoted to local produce: mushrooms, carrots, corn, eggplants, onions, potatoes, and various leafy things. If you go to a local restaurant, your meal is likely to be made by hand from fresh ingredients (seasonal, of course), not from a package. Even Mos Burger, Japan’s home-grown McDonald’s equivalent, exhaustively lists the farms where all its vegetables are sourced.

When we moved to Japan, I immediately lost 15 pounds — 10 of them in the first month. And my weight has remained around the same since then (ignoring the spike caused by going back to America for three weeks!) with no particular effort. So while I don’t always like Japanese food, I will definitely miss the effortless healthfulness of it.

Non-Puritanism

It’s a cliché that living in a foreign country teaches you things about yourself that you never knew. We all grow up immersed in our native cultures, not noticing all the biases and assumptions that surround us every day. Viewing America from the other side of the world has really brought home the degree to which the country’s social mores are descended from the Puritanism of the original settlers. Even after the astonishing social progress of the 20th century, American values still show their conservative roots, which I would describe roughly as: the body is sinful (so nudity and various bodily functions are considered embarrassing or obscene), and anything pleasurable (sex, alcohol, drugs) should be banned whenever possible… or at least done behind closed doors and never mentioned in public. I’m a pretty socially liberal guy, but even so, these priorities always seemed “natural” to me, though of course I was always aware of other cultures who weren’t as uptight about certain things — for example France with sex, or Amsterdam with drugs.

If I had to distill all of America’s social norms into one basic pattern, it would be that everything is treated as a moral issue. If you offend me, you are a Bad Person. In Japan, on the other hand, things tend to be treated as issues of etiquette. If you offend me, you’re a Bad Public Citizen. Most cultural norms here seem to come down to how your actions affect the group: If you’re not hurting anybody, usually you won’t be bothered about it.

And I love it that way.

Take alcohol. Japan is just as buttoned down as America when it comes to drugs like marijuana or anything “harder,” but alcohol is a completely different story. By American standards, most Japanese men would be considered raging alcoholics. (In my experience, women tend to drink much less than their male counterparts.) But whereas in America drinking a lot would be considered a sign of moral depravity, or at least weak will, here it seems to function mostly as a tool for relaxation — a temporary release from the more formal day-to-day strictures of Japanese society. The lack of moral judgmentalism really hits home when you see how casually alcohol is discussed in the public sphere. A few weeks ago we were doing a taiko performance at a retirement home, when our good friend Mr. Bean, who was serving as MC of the event, happily announced to the crowd of wheelchair-bound octogenarians, “Sorry I’m a bit spacey today… I drank way too much last night!” And Steph regularly encounters elementary school classes where “Do you like beer?” is one of the lesson-plan dialogs for practicing English.

Then there’s nudity. Showing body parts is just not a particularly big deal. Public baths are a societal fixture; everyone has seen a million naked strangers by the time they’re old enough to even think about it. Parents bathe with their children at home. Japanese sporting events don’t have streakers, because nobody would care.

If anything, Japan goes a bit off the deep end when it comes to their love of one piece of anatomy: the rear end. Indeed, Japan’s “butt culture” is a head-scratcher. Store windows will have cartoon blobs of poo advertising products. NHK (that’s right, the PBS of Japan) created a cartoon character called oshiri kajiri mushi (”butt-biting bug”) who has his own catchy song. One of our friends in Noshiro has a plush poo-doll sitting on her living room bookshelf. Steph’s theory on the fascination with poo is that it comes from the traditional squat toilets — in which your poo greets you, up close and personal, when you’re done.

When I set out to write this, I didn’t intend to pen a big meandering philosophical treatise on Japanese vs. American culture! And poo. Nor do I mean to imply that America is repressive or not a good place to live. Every country has its hangups, and America and Japan certainly both have them in spades. But I have found Japan’s general lack of holier-than-thou moralizing to be refreshing. I’ll remember the feeling fondly.

In the spirit of leaving the best for last, I’m going to start with the negative stuff. Some of this may come across as a snarky self-superior bitchfest; if so, that’s certainly not my intent! Indeed, my aim is to attain an Obama-like state, wherein I float serenely above mere human opinion and see all sides of an issue. Only funnier.

And so, these are the things I won’t miss about Japan, in no particular order.

Bureaucratic Culture

Imagine the most formal, structured kind of event that you possibly can. Graduation, wedding, funeral… that kind of thing. Every Japanese event is like that. Public events of any kind are invariably kicked off and concluded with interminable strings of boring, monotonic, content-free speeches. God help you if there’s a politician present.

And that’s just day to day events. Doing anything that you’d actually expect to require bureaucracy, like getting a driver’s license, is taken to an absurd degree. I was going to go into great detail here, but I can’t do it justice compared to the actual getting-a-license document prepared by and for Akita JETs, which is actually pretty entertaining reading in its absurdity — especially if you don’t have to go through the process yourself.

There’s not much more to say about this topic. It’s one of those paradoxical experiences that’s endless and annoying to live through but quick and easy to explain.

Loudspeakers

What’s that sound I hear outside? Window repairman? Fruit hawker? Opera singer? Electronics recycler? Politician running for office? All these and more have shouted at me from their cars as I try to get work done in my house during the day.

Election season is easily the worst, because every candidate will have cars out yelling his name and thank you! at top volume, all day, every day. Japanese elections are notorious for being completely content-free. You think American elections are nothing but meaningless sound bites? Japanese political campaigns usually consist of – literally – nothing more than “vote for me!” (On this subject, I’ve been wanting to watch the Japanese documentary Campaign, about a no-name guy running for office in Japan based purely on the party name, as filmed by his friend.)

And it’s not just the mobile speakermobiles. Any remotely popular destination will be thoroughly laced with loudspeakers: tourist attractions, parking lots, gas stations, stores, sometimes entire towns. It’s common, especially in small towns, for important hours (typically 9am, noon, and 5pm) to be marked by playing horribly creepy and depressing synthesized jingles throughout the town. I am extremely glad that Noshiro doesn’t do this (we just have noon air-raid-style sirens!); if they did, I don’t think we could have lasted three years.

What is it with all the public announcements? In America, we tend to view these pervasive public-announcement regimes as a distopic totalitarian-state mind-control kind of thing (e.g., Big Brother addressing the people of 1984), whereas it seems to be pretty normal for Asian cultures. Japan is as TV-addicted as any upstanding Western nation; I’m surprised they still go for the old-fashioned loudspeaker-in-the-street approach when just about every establishment you visit will have a TV on in the corner anyway.

Ugly Urbanity

Japan exports an image of ancient temples, flashy neon Tokyo skyscrapers, fast trains and Mount Fuji. While all these things do exist, the vast majority of Japanese construction consists of ugly piles of concrete held together with an unbelievable tangle of aerial wires. When they try to imitate other cultures’ architecture, it’s often an exercise in painfully cheap-looking mockery. Home interior lighting more often than not consists of a single fluorescent light hanging in the middle of each room. I’m not the only person who has noticed this. This Japan Times article from last year laments the same phenomenon.

I’m not a keen enough student of history to know exactly when Japan started to slide from traditional beauty to unfortunate modernity. But I’m guessing it was around the time the new parliamentary government was established after the war. The Japanese government often appears to exist for no other reason than to hand out useless projects to the construction industry. They’re particularly good at expressways and airports. Our nearest airport, Odate-Noshiro, built just a few years before we arrived, handles a load of — wait for it — two round-trip flights a day. One to Tokyo, one to Osaka. We like this airport because it has free parking and is so empty that you can get from your car to the gate in about 10 minutes. But it certainly doesn’t make any economic sense. But that’s still better than the new Ibaraki airport which is scheduled to open next year. No airlines will agree to fly to it.

So, I blame Japan’s “constructionocracy” for the ugly predominance of concrete throughout the country. We are fortunate to live in a sparsely populated corner of the country, an area filled mostly with rice fields. But I’m happy to say that beautiful scenery is never far away, even in the extremely densely-populated southern half of the country. This spring we took the train from Hiroshima to Tokyo, a four-hour ride through a region that is home to 50 million people — almost twice the population of California! And throughout that ride, I was repeatedly amazed at the procession of lovely little fields and valleys going by the window. People will plant rice fields absolutely anywhere they will fit. You can find them if you step around the cinder-block walls and the tobacco vending machines, and follow those little back alleys toward the flashes of green glimpsed between buildings.

There’s No “No” There

This is one of those common stereotypes about Japanese etiquette that happens to be completely true: they won’t say “no.”

In many instances, there’s no real harm in this. You’ll ask a question, and instead of receiving “no” as an answer, you’ll get the famous “teeth-sucking” reaction, which consists of:

1. Grit teeth
2. Cast eyes downward
3. Incline head slightly downward and to the side
4. Inhale slowly through your teeth so as to make a hissing sound

You can’t go through a day in Japan without getting this a few times. It’s never a reaction you want to see, but you can just translate it to “sorry, no” in your head and get on with life.

Where the no-”no” phenomenon really gets evil in the service sector. It’s a bit of a paradox, because Japanese service is rightfully renowned the world over for its obsequious treatment of the customer. (We’ve certainly missed that kind of customer service when visiting other countries on holidays these last few years.) But the great service has a sinister side, which comes out in certain not-uncommon situations: when you’re the customer who wants something, and the service-person doesn’t have it. The cynical translation of the resulting process is: “We know we can’t help you, but we have to pretend to try for as long as possible, so that you can see we did our absolute best to help you, the customer, who is most important.”

This was more of a problem in the beginning, before we figured out the pattern. Our first real experience with this issue was trying to get cell phones a few days after arriving in Noshiro. We went to the phone shop and started the ball rolling, merrily filling out forms and all that other stuff you have to do to get a phone contract. We were helped by an absolutely delightful young woman who assured us that we’d be out of there in no time.

Three hours later, we left the store tired, annoyed, and phoneless. You see, you can’t get a phone contract unless you have a foreigner-ID card. And we didn’t have those yet, since they take a few weeks to be issued. The shop clerks probably knew this the second we walked in the door. And if they didn’t (which is possible, because there’s a decent chance they’d never signed up a foreigner before), then the two or three different English-speaking national reps they put me on the phone with most certainly did. But to simply state that fact up front, when it became clear we didn’t have the necessary documents, would have been too direct.

That was certainly the most time-wasting incidence of the “pretend to help” pattern. But it can rear its head even in situations so simple that you’d never expect there could be any confusion. Like when we were grocery shopping and asked a clerk if they had salsa. He ended up leading us around the store for 10 minutes, going up and down every aisle with us before sadly declaring that apparently they don’t have salsa.

This pattern can get almost farcical when combined with Japan’s extreme commercial seasonality. Japanese products are insanely seasonal, often only being on shelves for a number of weeks before being retired to make way for the next big temporary thing. The trouble is, you never know if the wonderful morsel you’ve just discovered is one of these seasonal products, or if it’s a mainstay you’d just never noticed before. This kind of quick product turnover happens even in restaurants, where we’re occasionally hit by a favorite item disappearing off the menu without warning. Invariably this happens right when we’ve gotten comfortable enough at the restaurant to stop looking at the menu, leading to the slightly embarrassing (for all sides) situation:

1. Customer: I’ll have X
2. Waiter: Certainly! I’ll just write that down here.
3. C: That’s all, thanks!
4. W: Oh wait! I’ve just realized I don’t know what you ordered.
5. C: It’s the same thing I’ve been ordering for months!
6. W: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
7. C: It’s right here in the menu… <flip flip flip>
8. C: Expletive deleted, it’s gone.
9. W: Oh, that! Yeah, we stopped selling that yesterday.
10. C: <grumble>

(I must admit the exchange above was influenced by this piece by Thomas Dillon in the Japan Times.)

Experiences like these have essentially taught us never to ask for help from anyone who looks like their job is to be able to help you, unless we know for 110% sure that they know the answer to our question.

Of course, me being a stereotypical guy, I almost never ask for help or directions anyway, so the whole thing is really just reinforcing my existing instincts.

End of Rant

Stay tuned for a high-sucrose summary of more pleasant things in the next few weeks!

*Successfully explaining the rules of Sharks and Minnows to a group of elementary school kids, each of whom has the attention span of a small kitten surrounded by fluff and balls of string.

*Figuring out who that random guy at the pool was. I had one of those awkward moments where I was greeted warmly by some dude I swear I’d never met before. After a brief conspiratorial conference with the poolside manager, I was able to divine that he was in fact my old salsa teacher (who’s also, incidentally, the nation-wide champion of Japan. And a hair dresser.) In my defense, I haven’t been to class for about a year, and he was wearing a swim cap.

*Conversing with a saleschick. Mildly curious about the GAP that materialized recently in Akita, I cautiously entered this new store but was skeptical about trying anything on. As I explained to the overly-eager sales staff, I’d been through this masochistic pas-de-deux with Japan-based GAPs before in Tokyo. Theoretically, the GAP is supposed to carry western sizes that don’t exist in the boondocks of Akita, but instead I found to my dismay clothing that had been tailored to fit the Japanese frame, and thus, not my own. After hearing my tale of woe and betrayal, I was assured that THIS store (GAP*USA!) was different, because everything is directly imported from America, and as such I was encouraged to approach shopping with renewed optimism and vigor.

I don’t know if any of that’s going to be on the JLPT, but it’s nice to know that I can increasingly say what I want to say on the spur of the mo’.

New Year’s Day is, of course, a huge deal here but unfortunately I have no idea what it’s like, as I’m always off exploring some other country for winter break. The first holiday that hits me when I return to Japan from abroad is Coming of Age Day, which marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone who’s turned 20 within the last year gets dressed up for fancy photo shoots in anticipation of all the drinking, voting, and smoking that they are now allowed to partake in. Considering I can probably count on one hand the number of people who qualify for this rite of passage in Noshiro, I rarely witness this spectacle first hand.

Instead of reveling in the glory of being 20 (a distant memory for me), I spent the day honoring the deliciousness of unagi. A friend in Tokyo took us to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that specializes in eel, complete with front row seats where you can watch the chef carry out the following process with alarming speed and precision:

Step 1: Place live squirming eel on chopping block
Step 2: Deftly drive metal spike through brain in one stroke
Step 3: Split eel down the middle, removing the internal organs and spine with a few subtle flicks of the wrist

For me, this scene resulted in a complex emotional landscape; my reactions morphed from horror to fascination to scientific detachment as I witnessed the raw ingredients behind the counter go from eel to meal over and over again.

Noting that innards were on the menu, it seemed a shame not to give them a go (they’re certainly not going to get any fresher), so we chucked our hat into the ring and tried a few. I’m certainly no stranger to organs on the table… I’ve gamely eaten my share since moving to Japan, including chicken hearts, raw horse liver, and intestines from anonymous sources. And while I don’t want to be “innardsist” by declaring all offal as, well, awful, I am definitely seeing a clear pattern emerge with repeated culinary experimentation.

A few weeks after this squirmy encounter came Setsubun. This holiday is supposed to be the day before spring, but I don’t really get how this works, as it’s on February 3rd, and still damn cold. Maybe it’s a lunar calendar thing. While you don’t get the day off for Setsubun, you do get the opportunity to toss toasted soybeans from the front door of your house while yelling “Demons out, luck in!” while wearing a kicky paper demon mask. I made sure to throw my beans this year right when Chris was leaving the house… just to cover all my bases.

Inhabitants of western Japan also traditionally celebrate Setsubun by eating a huge uncut sushi roll in one go that’s only slightly smaller than your forearm. I live in eastern Japan, but thanks to the glory of capitalism, conbinis all over the country have taken to selling these seasonal rolls, and now you can find them in Tohoku as well. Chris and I gamely shared one of these humongous rolls between the two of us while facing this year’s lucky direction (N by NE). Only afterward did we learn that you’re supposed to remain silent while you eat it, and eat the whole roll yourself. Double fail on our part. Perhaps two wrongs make a right, and we’ll have a lucky year anyway…

I was still pondering the ramifications of my festive faux pax when Foundation Day rolled around. When I asked my colleagues how they usually celebrate the foundation of their country, I failed to get a satisfying answer. Most people just shrugged and went back to whatever they were doing. This ambivalence was kind of a mystery to someone who’s used to celebrating her own country’s Independence Day with fireworks and BBQs.

A bit of wikipedia research revealed that the low key nature of Foundation Day might have something to do with the history of nationalism in Japan. This holiday (formerly known as Empire Day) used to be all about uniting the country by paying homage to the emperor, and used to be a really big deal. However after WWII, nationalism became a bit of a touchy subject, and this particular celebration was abolished. The current incarnation of this holiday was only reinstated in 1966, and was re-branded to avoid evoking the nationalistic sentiments that are associated with pre-WWII Japan.

In addition to being a bit awkward thematically, Foundation Day is also one of those uncooperative holidays that refuses to stay put on either a Friday or a Monday. In fact, this year, it landed smack dab in the middle of the week. What to do mid-winter with a free Wednesday at your disposal? We tried to make a go of it by hiking through Juniko despite the bleak weather. However after driving for 45 minutes to get to this set of small lakes, we discovered that the park was closed for maintenance. As a fallback plan, we explored the hills nearby, where we discovered a waterfall shrine and a plethora of monkeys. All things considered, I guess monkeys and shrines are as good a way to spend Japan’s Independence Day as any.

Mid-February, of course, is the most exciting wintery time in Tohoku, when snow festivals abound. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we’ve had very little snow this year, which has detracted from the ambiance a bit. Additionally, winter festivals in Akita are pesky in that they all seem to fall on the same day, making it difficult to see everything unless you live in the prefecture for multiple years. With a few exceptions, we were finally able to see the remaining festivals that had, up until this point, fallen through the cracks. This year’s festival bonanza included:

• Hiburi fire swinging festival in Kakunodate, Feb. 13-14
  Hiburi’s been a surprisingly elusive festival for the last few years. Kakunodate is several hours away from us by car, and the festival is often inconveniently held mid-week. Last year, we even contemplated driving down on a Wednesday for the festivities, but a snow storm and slippery roads made this trek next to impossible. This year, several events aligned nicely which permitted us to attend. The festival fell on a weekend, and, thanks to a mild winter, ice and snow were not an issue this year.

  The festival is pretty straightforward: anyone wanting to work out their pyromania issues can light a bundle of hay (ok, rice fibers) on fire and swing it around until it explodes in a shower of embers. The fire-swinging was mesmerizing, and on occasion, comic, as old men and little boys almost lit each other’s hair on fire. While it all looked like good fun, I held back for some reason. Maybe the lack of snow and the ample drizzle dampened my ambitions a tad. Or perhaps I felt constrained by the work clothes I was still wearing. Even though this was my last opportunity to see such a festival, for some reason I didn’t seize the moment and participate, a small regret which I carried home with me that night.

• Amekko Candy Market in Odate, mid Feb
  The gimmick here is that if you eat some candy from the market (which apparently grows on trees), then you will remain healthy for the rest of the year. As someone who consumed a piece of said candy who is now sitting sick in bed, I can assure you that this was NOT a sufficient prophylactic for the common cold.

  From the promotional materials for this festival, I was expecting some kind of tangential activities, like parades or dancing children. However, the little bit of Amekko that I saw was kind of a let down as a) it was just a bunch of people selling stuff and b) the weather was miserable (although, to be fair, the word for “candy” in Japanese is a homophone for “rain”, so I can hardly complain if I got both). But I didn’t mind too much because I was with a bunch of fantastic people, on our way to an even MORE disappointing festival. Which leads us to…

• The Not-So-Frozen Waterfall Non-Existent Festival, Part II: When Chlorofluorocarbons Attack, third Sunday in Feb. (in theory)
  Last year by some fluke, I had heard about a frozen waterfall just across the border in Aomori. I somehow convinced all my friends that it was a good idea to squeeze into a car and plunge into the snowy depths of the countryside looking for this mythic specimen.

  Not only did we find it, but we happened to arrive on the one day of the year when the shrine members strap on their drums, dust off their flutes, and honor the god of the waterfall. We were treated to a beautiful little procession which snaked its way up an icy path to a shrine cradled against the rock behind the waterfall. The waterfall, which had become a column of ice, was awesome to behold. Despite my burgeoning jaded expat exterior, I had to admit that the day had a kind of magical air about it. I made a mental note to bring more people back to experience it themselves the following year.

  I followed through and returned with new friends in tow but nature, alas, did not hold up her end of the bargain. Due to an abnormally warm winter, the waterfall this year was nowhere close to frozen. And to add insult to injury, there was no processional to speak of this year.

  Our disappointment was palpable, but we made the best of it by taking silly pictures that would immortalize our sadness and act as a warning for generations to come: global warming means no more fun winter festivals, kids.

• Tazawako Alpine Festival 3rd weekend in Feb. (21,22)
  Unlike the “Fire Swinging Festival” or the “Candy Market Festival”, you never quite know what you’re going to get with festivals named after places. As such, the Tazawako Festival has never been high on my list. It’s just too far away and doesn’t spark the imagination. However, with this being Our Last Winter in Japan, with little else to to, we made the long trek through the snowy mountains to Tazawako to see what all the fuss was about.To my delight, this proved to be one of Akita’s smorgasbord festivals, and featured scaled-down versions of events I’d been to in the past, including hot air balloons, snow sculptures, and holy-cow, Hiburi fire swinging.

  If I’d ever been presented with a bona fide second chance, this was it. Conditions were perfect: the air was icy. Snow was delicately floating down. So despite my continued misgivings about lighting my hair on fire (it would grow back, yes?), I stepped up to give fire swinging a go. After watching fire-swingers in Kakunodate and hearing their plaintive cries (「おも〜い！あっちぇ！」), I was a little concerned about trapping myself in a fiery inferno of my own making. But once I donned the fire-resistant happi and stepped out into the snow-covered clearing, all my worries dropped away. Nothing was too heavy or too hot. At the center of my own universe of fire, it was captivating. I was shocked at how quickly it was over, and giddy from the experience for hours. Swinging fire was without a doubt the highlight of this year’s winter festival season. Learn from my mistakes: given the chance, don’t hesitate to play with fire.

• Garou Waterfall Light-up in Fujisato, 3rd week of February
  I’m kind of at a loss for words for this one. Not a festival per se, the waterfall light-up in the tiny town of Fujisato would struggle to qualify as an event. As explained in the local newspaper, the Garou waterfall is bathed in an eerie blue light for a few days, and then, in a shocking turn of events, the light is changed to a festive green for the final two days of the light-up. There was also a rather nice snow dome nearby, which was made, if the adjacent obnoxiously green sign is to be believed, by monkeys. Such is small town life in the winter, I suppose. Lest you think me ridiculous for driving half an hour to view this modern miracle, I’d like to inform you that there was also a photographer with a tripod from Akita City in attendance, which means he drove at least 3 times as far as me to capture this moment on film.

After the festival madness comes a big fat girlie fiesta called Hina Matsuri, on March 3. This is essentially an excuse to set up untouchably expensive displays of dolls to honor your young daughters. People in other parts of Japan float dolls made of straw out to sea to get rid of bad spirits. In Tohoku, however, the tradition seems to involve grabbing the nearest female foreigner, slapping a kimono on her, and making her husband serve you green tea.

And then, of course, the ultimate sign that spring is right around the corner: High School Graduation. For my school, this falls without fail on March 3rd every year, regardless of the day of the week.

The morning of graduation we all huddled resolutely in our chairs, shivering in a cold and unforgiving gym that was still icy despite the industrial strength heaters scattered about. After long and lofty speeches by the Principal, the Mayor, the head of the Board of Education, the PTA President, an underclassman, and a graduating student, there wasn’t much left to say. The ceremony closed with my former students filing of the gym, looking either somber, bored, or bewildered at their new status as high school graduates. You can see for yourself below: for such a happy occasion, there seemed to be a lot of crying going on. Perhaps these are the students who weren’t hi-fived by the basketball coach? You’ll have to watch closely and draw your own conclusions:

This year, however, I was relocated to a bunch of new schools, and I now no longer teach any of my taiko kids. This has had some unexpectedly delightful side effects, as I’m now free to act more like a sister and less like an authority figure.

Last weekend we all attended a 2-day taiko workshop. At the evening’s enkai,  I finally felt the taiko kids fully embrace the title of おねえさん and all of the responsibilities that it entails. All you older siblings out there know the drill, but I’ll break down my role for the rest of you.

Being おねえさん means:

• issuing orders and having them carried out. In this case it meant getting an unusually bossy 10-year old to go and fetch a rag to clean up my drink, which she spilled while exhibiting excessive exuberance. The miracle is that she complied immediately and without complaint.
• allowing fingers to be dipped in beer foam. Foam swiping is all good fun (who doesn’t like a finger or two in their drink?), but the problem was that this then escalated to whining and pleading for beer. When I looked to their usually no-nonsense mother for help, we found her curled up in a corner next to a friend giving us a hopeful and encouraging “thumbs up” sign.
• making sure that one of the kids keeps my glass full of beer at all times during the enkai. I left this somber and sacred duty to the 14-year old to my left.
• wiping up spilled alcohol with the children’s socks that litter the floor. This is an excellent alternative which is readily at hand, in case those rags are just too far away.

and, of course, just generally inciting them to silliness.

Other pieces of information gleaned from the taiko workshop include:

• A time-tested method for finding an enkai’s after-party, which is this: Wander the halls of the hotel which houses all of you, listen for the loudest room, and burst in with a full bottle of JINRO to join the party. I know this because that’s how the TWO roving bands of drunken Japanese taiko players found my modest post-party. By the end of the night, my small two person room contained 9 drunken men (some of whom had to be extricated by force) and one set of bongo drums.
• How to drum for two days straight with a broken rib, as demonstrated by one participant from Kamikoani. Taiko people are hard core.
• The first hard evidence I’ve seen in Japan of the global meltdown: enrollment in the workshop was visibly down from last year.

And, lest you think that taiko workshops are all about drinking beer and mistreating children, here’s the new piece we learned in 8 hours:

Feb 15, 2009

For reference, the previous four earthquakes were:

• Iwate, July 24 2008
• Iwate/Miyagi, June 14 2008
• Niigata, July 16 2007
• Noto Peninsula, March 25 2007 (visiting Kyoto at the time)