2015-05-21: Katsuura, The Place Of Doom

When we were introduced to Jukendo I wondered if it was a cunning plan by a dastardly Frenchman to get revenge for the slurs I have spread about the Smelly French over the years.

Bacon! This is awesome!

I may have also contemplated that I had inadvertently invited the Japanese military to line up and have a bit of stabby practice on my bloated carcase.

Not sure if this is her War Face

We have been allowed to join a 3 day Jukendo seminar in Chiba. Much of the work organising our attendance was performed by Baptiste and I know he is busy organising the Kendo World Championships at the moment so for him to take time out for us is pretty good proof that I am not paranoid.

That can't be a warface

Chiba is a little ways from Nagoya so we get to have another train picnic which is great. Katsuura is right out on the beach on a slower train but we had the Japanese version of Skymall magazine to peruse.

My brother had this robot when we were young. I was always jealous. Now I have moved on in my life and need not these trappings for my happiness. Plus I can't read the order form.

Tired of pesky birds pooping on your laundry? Get a Bird Kill Neo! She should have been flipping the bird though.

Hubby stressing you out yelling at the sports on tele? Solve it.

Then get a rubber band facelift and find a better man!

I was so absorbed I missed The Mikado (Ow, that is bad)

 3 days of Jukendo means we will need food. Giant pork schnitzel is the way to do this.

The owner of the restaurant is a falconer. If these are the pigs his bird catches I am worried about the size of the birds. Baptistes car is not pink though so it should still be there afterwards.

He wasn't wearing one of his many pink shirts either. I think I am onto something here...

We weren't the only people celebrating at the restaurant. A group of young guys were there excited because one of them had just graded in Kendo and also passed his first exam for the police force.

The makings of a small army

If he passes the next couple of exams he will have a job for life playing kendo in the police force. It is a career choice and the police are some of the strongest kendoka around.

A bird on my shirt may not have been a tactically safe choice

In a similar way the military are the strongest Jukendo students around. Tomorrow we will meet a lot of them. When Japan doesn't have need of them cleaning up after natural disasters I believe they train all day every day.

2015-05-20: Religious Parties, A Test Run

Buddha was all "That stuff you own like actually owns you maaaaan!" and then made head exploding noises and gestures. We are down with his teachings (and should probably check what he really said rather than trusting the Simpsons) and we try to own few things.

Somehow all of our activities require more things though. I try to remove things I own as I add new things so that my total volume of ownership stays at some kind of equilibrium.. An additional 10kg of stuff. How many T shirts have to be thrown out to balance things?

I am not sure what Buddha thought about food but most of the Buddha's are tubby fellows and look too happy to be avoiding good meals.

I think Jesus said "Bread is the Staff of Life". He should have had better hiring policies. This baguette wouldn't even answer my phone for me.

We have decided to have a Sayonara party at Chez Toto when we leave for the people that have helped us out here. I think this is following Confucian tenets:

• Respecting those that are our teachers
• Sharing what we have with others

Too many seats and I have no disciples, will have to forgo that bit of blasphemy.

I have a feeling someone might have had some thoughts on cows and their applicability for eating. That was probably a secondary aspect to the religion, we'll get to that once we have the first bits of all the religions under control. Most animistic religions had burned offerings to their gods so we'll get steaks.

New Age people are all into salads so we'll grab some of them

Zoroastrianism states that Ahura Mazda said the brewers were good people and you ought to drink beer to support them so we'll make sure there is beer. Jesus was down with wine so we'll get that covered off too.

If the steak is there and you are here then why the sky?

Judaism is into the whole guilt thing. I think they are proud of feeling guilty for stuff more than Catholics. I guess allowing people to commit the Catholic sin of gluttony and then feel Judaic guilt is a nice combo. Plus they can go confess later.

Tuesday. This is not a zen koan yet but I have hopes.

And by wrapping all these religions together I think we have followed the Shinto principle of promoting harmony amongst people and cultures. We are great. We should be priests.

2015-05-19: I always look for future opportunities

Food & Beverage Review: Jelly Coffee

Amongst the many things that Japan does in an interesting way is coffee. Australians and New Zealanders take coffee very seriously. We have a debate about which country invented the Flat White. Starbucks has decided to try and make a flat white. I think this is because they still feel sad that all their places in Australia closed almost immediately due to their coffee being shit. As a dual citizen I feel even more strongly about coffee than many of the single citizens. I don't care who invented it because whomever it was I am one of them.

At one of my old jobs whenever someone took a mouthful of coffee everyone immediately tried to make them laugh for the Coffee/Nose /Spray effect. I suspect it would be horrific with this beverage.

Japan has lots of tins of coffee in vending machines. It is not coffee in a form that I consider acceptable to be called coffee but I enjoy it as "A Drink that is okay if I don't think it will be coffee". With that in mind I kind of like this. Sweet cream and cold coffee flavoured jelly.

Rating: 7.5/10 (-4 if you think it is coffee, still better than starbucks though)

Our apartment is tiny and the bed is only just wide enough for two people. We have taken to throwing the futon on the floor and sleeping there.

If I need a new company I am going to start designing beds with build in ice bins and a speed rack for house spirits.

We then use the bed sans mattress as a handy bar for the evening. On Fridays we often don't even put the futon back on the bed. Those are days we often don't even see the sun.

Cultural Observation: Tans

In Australia anyone driving a Hummer would probably have a tan. Tans are all out-doorsy and healthy and so on. They would also probably be considered a wanker by everyone that saw them because Hummer? Really?

I would love to see the internal memo that approved this in the US

In Japan the Hummers have long glove things to protect your arms from the sun. They also have umbrella mounts on the handlebars. I think this is because tans are regarded as a sign of being a member of a socio economic group that has to work outside. That would be a Lower Socio Economic Group

Rating: 9/10 (I would love to see someone try to drive a real Hummer here, first side street would be just Fuck It, I'm getting out and leaving this steaming pile of shit and getting a bike)

2015-05-18: Egg Fueled Ranting

Japanese class today. One of my favourite bits of Japanese class on Mondays is that we do it in the morning. Morning beverages at coffee places in Nagoya have the option of Breakfast Settu.

Oeuf avec pan nestled in a koszyk (heh)

The Settu is a popular thing here at most Izakaya type places where there will be a set menu and often all you can drink for a fixed period of time for a fixed price. Given how ridiculously drunk some people get, I saw a guy that couldn't find his shoes at 7pm, this is a good thing and probably reduces the volume of Waking up to an Empty Wallet events.

Komeda is on the right side of the picture, left after the first block. But mostly I am intrigued by the Goo logo in the middle. It is the same font as Google but I think it is for second hand cars. The logo next to it looks like TDK to me for some reason.

At Komeda Coffee (a chain which lets you stay all day if you buy one coffee) where we do our Japanese lessons the breakfast set is a boiled egg with a thick bit of buttered toast and is free. Some places have fancier breakfast sets which you have to pay for but they are invariably a tiny price for what you get.

Linguistic Skills: Efficiencies in Communication

I am cobbling together a theory here.

• Japanese largely uses a written language which was borrowed from the Chinese. In keeping with their predilections the Japanese then fixed the characters and meaning. Not sure if there was ever a formal thank you from the Chinese for this fixing of kanji. They should get around to that.
• In keeping with the principle of ikibana and other quintessential Japanese things where superfluous  effort is inelegant the spoken language has, I think, the least number of distinct sounds of any language. "Oh Polish why do you have so many different sounds when you can get away with like half of that number if you are careful". This results in a lot of sounds which have multiple meanings.
• The grammar has a habit of dropping anything which the listener ought to be able to infer from context; "Are you hungry?" can be answered with "eaten". Obviously in the context the reply is "No, I have already eaten". I have a suspicion that using to many words and explaining everything is actually a bit of an insult to the listener as it implies that they are too damn thick to work out the meaning.
• Add to all of that my theory that the Japanese culture thinks it's own stuff is so cool that it uses foreign words for the shabby imitations foreigners present. When the Japanese saw a western bed they, in my mind, went "yeah cool and all and we'll probably use them a bit but we won't call it a bed using our word for bed because our beds are real beds, yours is some kind of big soft fluffy thing for weak people so we'll fix your word by chucking a vowel at the end and call it beddu". If you don't know what a word is in japanese just try and figure out how the japanese would say it if they stole it or how they would say it in their English classes and odds are good many Japanese people that claim not to speak English are going to know exactly what you want.

It is common to see native speakers drawing kanji on their hands because the listener is not 100% sure what meaning the sounds just made should have. The combination of sounds and drawing are required to carry meaning. Because they fixed the kanji the listener doesn't even need to see the "drawing" on the palm of the hand, they can see what it is by the "brushstrokes" the person is making.

I think that these thoughts explain a few things:

Japanese often say to foreigners "I don't speak English" even when the foreigner speaks fluent japanese. This is because the local sees the foreigner and makes the, fair, assumption they don't speak japanese and so the sounds become unintelligible noise.

Onegaishimasu and Kudesai. In theory both mean please but Onegaishimasu is more polite. This is obviously a theoretical answer rather than an observable reality. When you first go to a pub you ask for "two beers, kudesai". Once the staff know what you want you can just say "Onegaishimasu" and they will get you two beers. To an English speaker the first would be more polite and the latter informal, therefore the translated theory doesn't stack up. I think the difference is that kudesai is used when people don't already know what you want. Onegaishimasu is used when the listener already knows what the entire sentence would be.

Rating 9/10 (or it could be 1/10, I still don't know)

Anyway when we get the breakfast settu with the boiled egg we both now sprinkle salt on the bread as well as the egg. I think this must be a good indication that we are training hard and sweating a lot.

Maybe the dissolved salt ions in my blood supply are reducing electrical resistance and making my brain work faster!

Or maybe I am getting hit in the head more than usual.

2015-05-17: Keepin' It Old School

They say "There are many ways to skin a cat". I figure they must mean lots of different types of sharp things can be used to get the fur off the nasty little beast. So we will learn some new sharp thing skills.

Ewa was descended on by the other Ladies in the changing room. Apparently her clothing was not up to scratch. Now she has a knot in her hakama that will inspire fear in felines everywhere.

Tendo Ryu, the old school of naginata I mentioned previously, is holding a seminar at a town just by Kyoto called Ibaraki. The town shares it's name with a much more famous province up near Tokyo. Fortunately we had the name of the town in Japanese when buying train tickets.

Little sickle and a ball on a string. This will take me a long time to get confident with.

At the seminar they had a theory section which we avoided due to our incredible depth of knowledge of the art (none) and language skills (slightly more than none) and instead spent time learning some of the kata with the more advanced weapons.

If it was a real steel ball I would have many more bones than before and they would all be shorter than my current set.

Like many of the other old schools Tendo Ryu starts with learning the naginata, once you have that under control you learn the sword. This means you go from winning every time to losing every time. Once you have learned that simply looking at a sword on a battlefield will get you killed by a naginata wielding old lady you are ready for the true knowledge of the school. This true knowledge is that you can pick up almost anything handy and use it to kill a guy with a sword.

Despite my skills we agreed that the sword guy should look more resigned to his fate. The laughter at me was not in keeping with his destiny.

Sucks to be a guy with a sword I guess.

As is our tradition our return to Nagoya was marked with a stop at Tiger Bar for cabbage with dipping sauce and Tebasaki (chicken wings). The Tigers had played that evening and lost and a bunch of fans were there. At first we thought that maybe one of the players was there as well because he looked quite a bit like the photo of the guy matching the number on the uniform.

And the girls all had clip on ears

If I ever become an actual fan of a sport I am going to base it on choosing a player that looks a bit like me so I can cause that kind of confusion.

Arguable the similarity is more evident when you have had a few beers after a day of training.

I also wonder what happens when two friends like the same player. Do they toss a coin for who gets the same number shirt? Do they just get a new friend?

2015-05-16: Drawings of my Thoughts

 All countries have pizza. This may not be true but a country that doesn't have pizza is a country I suspect will soon have pizza. It's a pretty basic idea: some bread, sauce, melty bits are good. Pretty hard to see anyone hating it.

Deepite looking the worst I think this is the best pizza we have had in Japan. Basic Cheese.

Which is not to say that the pizza you love and hold dear to your sweaty heart is a pizza that will exist in the country you find yourself in.

Despite looking the best this is the worst. The crust reminded me of The Young Ones: "You know it is amazing what you can make with just flour and water" "Yeah..... glue!"

The Poles love mayonnaise and sweet corn on their pizza, the idea of not adding tomato sauce from a squeezy bottle offends them.
Italians take it all too seriously and think the idea of hot bread with stuff on it is theirs to determine the validity of.

I always have a backup plan.

Norwegians, when I was there, loved thin frozen pizza that you heat in the oven for a late night snack which can also be liberally sprayed with tomato sauce.
I have heard Japan has decided to, as usual, try and outdo everybody else at the thing they claim to have invented. Unfortunately it seems the Japanese are trying to outdo Polish Pizza rather than, say, Italian.

Plastic pizzas to entice you in. They actually looked okay but I was on a mission for something else at the time.

We tried to order pizza from a place which promised to have a dedicated line for English speakers to use. Unfortunately it had an announcement on it which, whilst being a series of English words, made no sense at all and I think was trying to get at the idea that they were closed or didn't like me or something.

Guacamole served like a tub of ice cream is great.

I am told Japanese delivery chain pizza is a spectacle few would choose to encounter more than once. Unfortunately it appears we will have to wait until our next stay here before we have the opportunity to try it and swear it off forever.

Linguistic Skills: Kanji

I thought I had learned my first kanji the other day. However I do actually know a couple of them sort of by accident. I know "West" and "Gate" as they are two kanji which can be pronounced as "Sai" and "Mon" which is close enough to my name that I have it on some of my armour. Of course the kanji for West an also be pronounced Nishi and I think is used more often that way so Conrad calls me Nishi Mon.
So let's say I deliberately learned my first actually useful kanji the other day.

To me it looks like a drunk guy with a hat listening to me ranting about something.

They say kanji started as pictograms of the idea. I have decided to only learn kanji which have pictures in them which make sense to me and are useful to me.
So I learned the kanji for "Alcohol"

Rating: 8/10 (+1 because now I see it everywhere)

2015-05-15: Oh, Shiny!

More training! More I says! I like going to training because it means afterwards I can eat crazy volumes of tasty tasty food and know that it is all good in the cosmic balance. Or maybe in the cosmetic balance.
Either way we stopped at what I used to think was Meat Bye but is actually Meatble for lunch. They do small tasty steaks. I like them. I do not like the name though. Meatble makes even less sense than Meat Bye.

Beans and Braised meat. At times one of my favourite things. Not today.

Apparently they only do them for dinner. At lunch time there is soup and a plated lunch. The plated lunch admittedly had some meat and was nice but was not the carnivorous delight I was expecting.

Soup. One of her favourite things. Not Today.

Food & Beverage Review: That Spanish Place Up The Road Should Have Meat

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No Website, it's called Bar En Plancha. As with all tapas places you can run up a pretty hefty bill if you aren't paying attention. I rarely pay attention. They have one of those hams mounted on a board for thin thin slices. They are usually crazy expensive, I did my best not to order that whilst in a Volumes Of Meat mood.

Olives ordered because they are sure to arrive quick.

Possibly because of this congenital Lack Of Attention Paying attribute I also get hit in the head a fair bit.

Deep fried spaghetti. A new thing for me. Pretty cool actually.

I am going to say that the head hitting is the reason I figured the fancy little cellophane twists were purely decoration.

Chicken, artfully drizzled. Art stands not in the way of The Destroyer

I suspect that the manner in which I addressed the meats as they arrived made the staff a little cautious about getting close enough to advise me the cellophane twists were actually the seasoning for the meats. I guess they were nervous about losing a finger or two in the melee.

The background shows we did manage some actual tapas size dishes as well. We are not philistines.

The relentless grind of training followed by lots of meat took its toll on Ewa and she wandered home for a snooze. Conrad and I bravely forged on because we all know that a healthy body needs a lot of clean fuel. Plus they have pretty quick service with beer.

And I will dance in the blood of mine enemies and power shall be laid upon me

The cellophane idea is actually a pretty good idea. By the time we got to the last plate of meat the staff were brave enough to tell us it wasn't just a shiny decoration. They never got brave enough to tell us to leave though. So either we were polite or they were. Either way a plus point for their rating.

Rating: 7.5/10 (I am pretty sure it was them that was polite)

2015-05-14: Jukendo with Panache

Jukendo training again today.
One of the things with not really speaking a lot of the language and also not knowing much about the martial art is that we have little idea how well we are doing.

The Surprise Cup. I would put my money on the guy in the bottom left but I am saving my gambling money for the Spit-Take cup.

Our sensei is 8th dan Hanshi. For all intents and purposes this is as high rank as you can get. He has won the All Japan Championships often enough that he doesn't remember exactly how often (although that could be my understanding of Japanese rather than his memory).
The other "Student" we train with is 7th dan.
Keep in mind that many martial arts clubs outside of Japan are run by 2nd or 3rd dan people. I am 4th in Naginata (and quite proud of that achievement).

Just like Silverware etiquette I think you start from the outside and work your way in

This means we have completely unrealistic baselines to work with, the only comparisons we can make are to people that are so insanely good we are unlikely to ever reach their levels.
We have each other for moral support so at least we don't cry ourselves to sleep in fits of despair (that often).

And Kitty Chan provides moral support too

I also suspect that our baseline for Duration Of Training is not quite correct. We aren't allowed on the military bases which is where most Jukendo training occurs and so we train at a small kendo dojo which has been kind enough to let us use it when they aren't.
I don't know if Sensei has decided that we should therefore use it for the whole period that they aren't using it in some kind of Waste Not Want Not theory but our training is rarely less than 4 hours.
Keep in mind Jukendo is probably the most physically taxing thing I have done in my life. I think it is because the movements are so small and subtle they can be learned (badly) quite quickly.

The clothes look so pretty at the beginning of training. Less so on the way home.

By contrast Naginata movements are quite complex and so it is harder as a beginner to put all of your energy into them; if you are off balance in Naginata and try to go balls to the wall energy wise you'll just fall over (I still fall over a lot - but I am special).
Boxing is the same; complex movements and hard to use all of your energy up (oh and I fall over there often enough to have the trainer no longer worry too much - I like to think it adds happiness to the world - I am generous).

I think the white outfit would soak up less sweat and therefore weigh less on the long trek home. Ewa claims my keikogi weighed a couple of kilos more on the way back.

Jukendo on the other hand seems to be easy enough to learn the basic movements (badly) that you can absolutely drain your entire body of energy within 5 minutes without falling over (although I think I have a couple of times). Fortunately we seem to be developing reasonable recovery skills and after a minutes break we are ready to go again. Well, maybe a 5 minute break. I can also now drink half a litre of Pocari Sweat and sweat it all out within 5 minutes later. I wonder if they give gradings in Fluid Metabolic Conversion Rates. I could finally find something I am a natural at.

2015-05-13: Vegetables for the brain or something

The Spell of the Turtle has hit again! Turtle Ramen 

Prawns are Ebi. Train Stations are Eki. We have not had Eki Ebi yet but this will now be something I look for.

This time we attempted to ask for Gyoza (fried dumplings) with the sauce that the fried shrimp come with. Ewa loves the shrimp but mostly because of the sauce. This was far beyond our linguistic skills. We are creative people however and the mayonnaise that we did get we mixed with the standard chilli oil on each table and created something pretty close.

Cultural Observation: Smoking

Smoking is not encouraged but it isn't stupidly banned either.
There are lots of rules around where you can smoke and when. Most of the larger streets, especially in Fancy Suburbs like Sakae are smoke free ($20 fine).  Many other streets smoking is supposed to be done in designated areas, I don't know if this is by custom or by rules.

Ewa planned to mix the sauce and then dunk the gyoza

At Turtle Noodles, as with many other places open at lunchtime, smoking is not allowed during Sararimen lunchtime (about 12:00 to 15:00). Beer is still served of course but if you go back to the office reeking of beer at least it is your own fault. Going back reeking of smoke could just be because you were unfortunately seated next to some gaijin bum (probably me). After 15:00 it is a free for all; the Izakaya we have been to all allow smoking.

Which worked well

I guess if you go home to your wife late Reeking of Smoke is probably low down the list of things she is going to complain about. She'd probably be happy to hear you were sitting with a gaijin bum such as myself as I don't lead people astray... Well not much I don't... look, any Astray Leading that may occur is almost guaranteed to be something the wholesome person wanted to do anyway and I am just enough of a reprobate that they felt free to choose to go astray.
In general Japanese policy seems to be Don't Incovenience Others If You Can Avoid It. But if you choose to go to, say, an Izakaya full of smokers then You Chose So Don't Complain (and definitely don't try to ban the stuff they like doing).

I went for the industrial Do Them All at Once plan. I like shelling a handful of pistachios before starting eating.

A similar thing can be seen with regard to drinking in public. There are times and places where being ludicrously drunk is just normal. The rest of the time no one cares much whether you are having a beer or a coke. On the subway back from Jukendo we usually have a Lemon Highball (6% abv, $1.80, Not full of sugar) the rule seems to be Don't Be A Dick And No One Will Care. I have still seen just the one physical confrontation between drunk people, and they might not have even been drunk.

Making sauces on top of gyoza is harder than shelling pistachios. Not sure where to go from here. Scrap eit off and remove gyoza then mix in chilli?

The majority of people smoking also have personal ashtrays which cost $1 and are in every convenience store.
I like this kind of policy. Bit of personal responsibility, bit of tolerance of others and generally everyone is pretty happy.

Rating: 10/10 (This is not to say that everyone here is an angel)

Fortunately I had backup ramen coming in case I made mistakes in the gyoza saucing process.

We also discovered that the teeny tiny pictures of something we couldn't figure out are salads. And actually not bad salads either.

Almost a Polish Style Salad.