Japan Unexpected: Come on a journey with me, #2

By Carrie Riseley

You might know of tea ceremonies, samurai and vending machines, but how about honorific speech, a shrine to carry gods through a neighbourhood, and miso ramen-flavoured ice-cream? Explore some little-known and sometimes surprising elements of one of the most unique countries in the world, as viewed by Carrie, a young Australian teaching in Japanese elementary schools. With in-the-moment detail and light-hearted humour, even those things known about in the outside world are examined in detail by Carrie and unexpected elements brought to light.

In Japan, new things mix with old things through uninhibited creativity to make more unique items of food, technology and culture than you would find anywhere else. It's a culture that must be seen to be believed – and through this book, you can see it too.

 

"Japan from the inside.

I've just spent the last day and a half on a very interesting journey to Japan, in particular Iwaki, north of Tokyo, and what a journey it has been. The author writes in a free flowing and up beat style of her time spent teaching English at primary schools, and of her adventures to many places that not many westerners get the chance to do. That's what makes it such a good read, as she shares not just her escapades, but her feelings and thoughts on the complex, sometimes weird, and wonderful country that is Japan. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who shares a love of Japan, its food and its people."

Felicity Turnbull

 

"Beautiful, informative book

From the moment I heard about it, I was looking forward to reading this book. I had my own experiences in Japan in the late 70s and early 80s, and Japan Unexpected didn't disappoint. From the first page I was hooked - the author's attitude to education is identical to mine; that the most beautiful education is one that teaches about other peoples and cultures. "It builds connections and understanding across distances and time periods". Riseley writes extremely well and gives beautiful, detailed descriptions and explanations of everything from food, history, customs, language, and events. Her affection for Japan and the Japanese is clear without being gushy. The only problem I have with the book is that it has made me pine for Japan. I am now desperate to go back and re-experience it. I would recommend Japan Unexpected to anyone planning a first visit to the country. I highly recommend this book."

Rachel Caldecott

 

"Very interesting foreigner's first witness account of life in Japan

"Japan Unexpected" by Carrie Riseley compiles the experiences of the author during her stay in Japan working as an English teacher. The book comprises thirty-five chapters, written in a journal entry style, that span several months and a multitude of situations: from broadly well-known such as Hanami to Tea Ceremony to Sapporo Snow Festival, passing through 'very special' Japanese specialties - soy sauce KitKat and wasabi ice-cream - to Carol karaoke or takes on Samurai ghosts. Riseley succeeds in crafting everyday life situations, settings, characters, and cultural nuances, into very interesting, captivating and enticing stories offering accurate depictions of Japanese real-life at its best as experienced through the eyes of an Australian ex-pat. Regardless of whether you have any experience with cultural exchange travel, the stories will mean different things to different readers, but will never be meaningless. Some will even find some hidden gems, a very welcomed added bonus, instantly recognizable for any Japanophile, and nevertheless incredible interesting and immensely valuable for those who aren't."

Kath Eyer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carrie Riseley
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215060285

Book preview

Preface

Igrew up in a time when Japanese language education was quite popular in Australia. French and German were still taught also, but Australians had realised it made more sense to learn the languages of our Asian neighbours. For me, this meant I never made a choice to study Japanese. I never – as so many others do – saw the fascinating and fun country that is Japan and thought, I want to know more. But I did choose to continue studying Japanese. I majored in it at university and then went to live and work there, figuring that was the best way to become fluent. It also opened my eyes to more cultural idiosyncrasies than I had thought possible.

This book details the experiences I had and the observations I made as I made them. Most of it was written in journal format whilst I was living there. I’ve done what I can to check facts, but all observations are relative and I could never hope to achieve unassailable anthropological analysis. I have simply recorded what I saw and learned along with my thoughts on it.

Japanese has three writing systems – hiragana, katakana and kanji – but only 50-odd sounds, because the majority of characters contain both a consonant and a vowel. This leaves very little room for vocal flexibility – something that makes European words quite hard for Japanese people to pronounce. It can make it hard to romanise Japanese sounds, too. A handy tip is that all a’s are long, all i’s and e’s are short and o as in show doesn’t exist – it’s always ou as in four or o as in top. I’ve used a lengthener ō to indicate which o’s are long.

I promise you don’t need to understand anything at all about Japanese language or culture to enjoy this book – I just provided the above explanation for general interest purposes. In order to join me in an immersive Japanese adventure, all you have to do is read on....

Carrie Riseley

Hobart, Tasmania

April 2022

Arrival

26 th July, 6:25pm:

Education is a beautiful thing. I’m sitting in a restaurant in Shinjuku listening to the song Anata by Akiko Kosaka, which was the first Japanese song I ever heard. Mrs Hutchinson played it to our class when we were in grade nine or ten, going through it one bit at a time so we could slowly translate it. I don’t recall much of the words except for the powerful refrain, Anata! Anata! Anata ga ite hoshii! which means, You! You! I want you to be there!

I remember writing exactly that in my notebook at the time.

Hearing it playing in a Shinjuku restaurant, heart beating fast as I ordered my first Japanese meal, almost made me cry. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that classroom, that teacher and that beautiful thing we call education. I am not embarking on the journey of a lifetime now; I embarked on it years, almost decades ago, in school.

You can’t beat education. Especially education about other peoples and cultures – that’s the most beautiful kind of education, because it builds connections and understanding across distances and time periods. I do not feel at home here, but nor do I feel alone, because I have known these people for almost all of my life. I feel like my whole life, because of the Japanese I learned at school, has been leading to this point. The ball is in my court now... but I will never forget or cease to appreciate what led me here.

Let me tell you what’s happened so far. I arrived at Melbourne Airport yesterday afternoon – extra early, as stipulated by the Japanese consulate who’d recruited me and my fellow JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching) Programme participants – to attend a departure function at the airport hotel to see us on our way. Then our flight was delayed and five staff (five!) waited at the departure gate with us for an extra hour until we could board. By the time we got to Sydney, we only just had time to transfer to the international terminal, clear customs and go to the gate. People were already queueing for the flight, and the number of JET participants seemed huge. We took up eight rows of a jumbo jet...

I chatted to my brother on the phone between clearing immigration and boarding the plane. I was chatting to him right up until they scanned my boarding pass. It was really nice. But that was the last time my phone worked. Global roaming, global schroming – most international phones don’t work in Japan.

We touched down at 6:22 this morning. The sun had risen more than two hours earlier, because Japan doesn’t do daylight savings. I pushed my baggage trolley through the sliding doors and out into a hot and humid Japanese summer day.

Boarding the bus, I sat down next to Mel. Mel is going to be my next-door neighbour in Iwaki. I first met her last Monday week. We didn't talk much on the bus because we both fell asleep.

When I woke up, I was on the set of a Russian futuristic movie. 

Seriously. My friend Vlad showed us a Russian futuristic movie filmed during the Cold War, and he said the cityscapes for the movie were filmed in Tōkyō because, to the Russians on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Japanese freeways looked as futuristic as you could get.

You don’t have to be a Cold War Russian to think Tōkyō’s freeways are from the future. They are out of this world/time period. The roads are stacked three high. We were travelling on a one-lane raised freeway which weaved its way between buildings and many other one-lane raised freeways. None of them were straight: all gently undulating up and down, left and right, over and under and through. The bus moved smoothly through this curving maze as if it were flying, gliding softly between the tall city buildings. I could see the streets below, at ground level, and all the other freeways weaving around us. The traffic was gliding: it was smooth, and we were moving at a constant speed. It was Sunday morning, but still. It seemed to be such effortless movement.

It’d be hell if you didn't know where you were going! How do you turn around when every lane is on a raised platform going in a different direction?

We arrived at Keiō Plaza Hotel, Shinjuku, at around 9am. It was too early to check in, so we dumped our bags and went in search of food (breakfast was a LONG time ago). I was with Mel and two other Tasmanians, Mike and Oisin (pronounced O-sheen – it's Irish).

I excitedly bought an onigiri from a combini and gulped it down, completely forgetting that in Japan you're not supposed to eat while walking. I suppose I should explain that sentence to you, in case you’re a Japan virgin. Onigiri is often translated as rice ball, but it’s not a ball. It’s a triangle of rice about half the size of a sandwich, and you can get different kinds but the most popular kind you get from a convenience store is this. It’s white sushi-style rice with a filling inside – popular fillings include tuna mayo, meat or sometimes a pickled plum (umeboshi). It’s surrounded by nori, which is the thin seaweed you get on sushi, but the nori hasn’t touched the rice yet. Complicated plastic packaging surrounds the onigiri which separates the nori from the rice until you are ready to eat it. There are numbered instructions on the outside – most foreigners fail initially, but I’ve been here before so I’m a veteran. You pull this tab, then that half and then the other half. The plastic slides out, and your onigiri is surrounded by nori that is crisp, because it’s only just touched the rice. The resultant crackle as you then chomp into it is delicious.

A combini is a convenience store. You’re never far from a combini in Japan. The food they carry is healthy, cheap and delicious. Onigiri, sushi, bentō, katsu, noodles – all sorts, and other convenience store stuff like drinks and chocolate. Combinis are great.

The boys wanted something more substantial, so we ended up in a small restaurant where you order and pay by pressing a button on a vending machine. That was an experience too.

Tōkyō is a very loud, bright and bustling city. It’s pretty easy to get lost, but if you do you just find other things to see and do – there are buildings, lights and sounds everywhere. The subway is a spider’s web of convenient access to everywhere – although it can take a while. If you’re changing trains, you can walk for ages underground. I felt like I walked a whole kilometre in an underground tunnel once just to change platforms.

And then there’s the mass of tunnels, escalators and stairways outside the ticket gates to get you to the subway station exits. I first visited Tōkyō with my friend Kav, arriving off a night bus from Kanazawa, where we were studying. We checked in at our hotel in Jimbōchō and took great care to memorise landmarks around the subway station entrance so that we could find said hotel when we came out of it again in the evening. We navigated the subway spider’s web all day, saw many interesting things, and then rode back to Jimbōchō.

When we left the platform we realised that our careful memorising of landmarks had been useless, because our station had at least ten different exits, through which you could end up almost anywhere. We walked the dark streets for ages before we found our hotel. Ten exits is nothing, though – Jimbōchō was a tiny station, really. Shinjuku Station is apparently the busiest in the world, and it has more than two hundred exits.  It’s a good thing, therefore, that for the JET Programme Orientation, we were based in Shinjuku and didn’t have to travel much.

Orientation began at 9am on Monday morning in an enormous conference room filled with 900 new JETs in suits, myself included. We were seated according to the prefecture we will be working in, so I got to meet some others who will be living near me in Fukushima Prefecture. Mel and I sat next to Don from Tacoma, Washington. Proceedings started with a funny Kiwi ex-JET teaching us how to bow and various other explanations, before the opening ceremony began. This was something they had to explain to us, because apparently the Japanese are obsessed with ceremonies. I'd noticed that in my dealings with the Melbourne Japanese Consulate – they booked a conference room at the airport hotel just so they could have a ceremony to see us off. Apparently the Japanese have opening and closing ceremonies for everything. An American ex-JET presenter said one of the schools he taught at had only two students, and yet they still had ceremonies for everything.

Things got serious briefly while we had the ceremony and some important Japanese guys made speeches, and then it got relaxed again as an ex-JET called Steve gave a talk on culture shock that was amusingly-delivered and incredibly eye-opening. The first thing Steve described was feeling overwhelmed soon after arriving in another country, simply because everything is so different to what you're used to. Then Steve said, That's not culture shock. He went on to describe four stages of cultural adjustment – stage 1 being excitement and happiness to be somewhere new and interesting; stage 2 occurring usually a month or two in (later for some, earlier for some) when the novelty wears off and you can become depressed and angry at the culture you are in. Its differences, which used to be novel and fascinating to you, instead become annoying. Stage 3 is when you get over yourself, accept the country for what it is and start having a good time again, and stage 4 is when you go a bit too far and become almost completely integrated into the new country. This is great at the time, but can be problematic when you return home and get reverse culture shock.

Stage 1 I have obviously experienced many times, and I'm experiencing now. The Stage 2 explanation fascinated me because, though I’d never heard of it before, I realised that both I and my travel companion, Ruby, had experienced it when we were backpacking in the Mediterranean. The symptoms Steve listed included anger at small things that happen and other emotional reactions out of all proportion to what you're facing. We were both doing that a lot in Italy, which was around the middle of the trip. For example, in Palermo Ruby got really angry because she couldn't find a bottle of water, and in Agrigento I cracked it because I couldn't get the hot water to work for the shower. I got so angry I wanted to refuse to pay for the hotel!

Ruby and I discussed this since returning home and decided it must have been caused by the general stress of traveling, which may have contributed too, but I don't recall any of the incidents being related to traveling per se. There was no Argh I hate this backpack! or Waaa I've run out of clean underwear! The hot water in the hotel didn't work because there was a switch on the wall you had to turn on first, but I had to go to reception twice to find this out. Why do they have a switch on the wall? I raged. Why can't they have the hot water on all the time like we do in Australia? We also got angry at restaurant service charges which didn’t exist in our home countries. These things were specific to the country we were in and not to the experience of traveling, which we enjoyed very much – the sightseeing was awesome...

I found the culture shock seminar fascinating, and filed the information away in my knowledge banks, as I’m sure I will experience it again. In the afternoon we had some speakers from Japanese schools and the Ministry of Education telling us that it was all up to us to improve the standards of English education in this country; then workshops and then a welcome dinner. Here, and at the Fukushima night out which followed, we were told to adhere to the Japanese custom of not eating or drinking anything until someone announces, Kanpai! The trouble is, kanpai means cheers, and you can't do cheers without preparation – i.e. everyone in the room having a drink at the ready. I can't tell you how hard it is to hold a glass of beer in your hand and not be able to drink it. Not just beer; tea, water, anything – if it's in my hand, I should be drinking it! Which may cause me to cause some offence. At the Fukushima event, when kanpai came around I looked down and realised that half my beer was already gone, without me even knowing it! It was subconscious! I was trying not to!

The Fukushima night out was great. There are 23 new JETs going to Fukushima Prefecture, and three or four older JETs (called TOAs) came down to chaperone us and answer our questions. We went to an izakaya, which is a kind of traditional pub which serves quite substantial snacks and does all-you-can-drink (nomihōdai) deals for which you pay by the hour. After leaving the izakaya we did karaoke, which is the traditional, erm, well, the modern traditional thing to do on a night out in Japan. It’s usually done in karaoke boxes, which are so much better than karaoke bars. Karaoke is a Japanese word meaning empty orchestra – it’s from Japan – but for some reason when karaoke reached the West, we wrecked it by making untalented people perform for others in bars. In a karaoke box, by contrast, you’re in a small room with a group of friends, and you all sing together. It’s not a performance – it’s a singalong. It’s so much fun!

The next day had less speeches and more workshops. In the evening, there were functions at our various embassies. We were told to meet in the lobby at 6pm and look for a TOA carrying our country's flag. Me and Mel were there early because we'd nipped out with Don to buy adapters. By 5 to 6 most of the country groups were already there, with one notable exception: Australia. As the minutes ticked by, we kept looking around the room. I mistook the New Zealand flag for the Australian flag three times, but the actual Australian flag was nowhere to be seen.

Then it occurred to me. Hang on, I said, "this is an Australian embassy function – of course everyone's gonna be late!" And so the Australians, on the same day as they had been told that punctuality is very important in Japan: that if a party starts at 7 that means kanpai is at 7; that if someone is picking you up at 9 that means they intend to be hitting the accelerator and pulling away at 9; that we need to always be early for work or our Japanese colleagues will form a very bad impression of us... On the day when we were supposed to meet at 6, which in Japanese circles would probably mean leaving the lobby at 6, the Australians rocked up at about 5 past. And that was the early group. There were two TOAs, so one took us to the embassy while the other waited for the stragglers. The stragglers, who arrived half an hour later, trebled our number!

The embassy staff didn't mind a bit. So what if we started late? Hooray for Australia! 

My stomach regretted it though, because they didn't let us eat until after the speeches. The last speech was particularly trying: a lady from AusTrade telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we should spend our time in Japan promoting Australia. They gave us showbags with Study in Australia emblazoned on them, and the AusTrade lady said we should use those bags when we're grocery shopping so that Japanese people will see them and think about studying in Australia, and that we should exclaim loudly at the Australian beef in the supermarket and buy lots of it and have parties to introduce Japanese people to Australian products. We were all annoyed by this and, as we hungrily tucked into the food we were finally allowed to eat, we told each other that we certainly wouldn’t do that.

The food was a little funny... The Australian embassy served Australian beer and Australian wine, and... Australian food? No, Japanese Australian food! There was yakisoba with eggs and ham in it! There was sushi with luncheon meat in it! In fact, everywhere I looked there was processed meat – what do they think of us? I think that Australian beef promotion isn't doing so well...

Drinking soup

The next morning, the 900 new JETs boarded buses, trains and planes headed for every corner of the country. Fukushima Prefecture is only 250km from Tōkyō, so we got on a charter bus bound for Kōriyama. Our new bosses were waiting there, and we had (what else) a ceremony to introduce us all to them individually. There was no more nerve-wracking way they could have possibly done it...

Mel and I were met by Mr Takahama (Takahama-Sensei) from the Iwaki Board of Education. After some awkward regulated conversation, we were released from the ceremony to get our things from the bus and then go off into the unknown. I fell asleep in the car. Fortunately, this is perfectly polite in Japan.

Arriving in Iwaki an hour and a half later, we first went to the Board of Education (BOE) office, where we were asked to give very awkward jikoshōkai (self-introductions) in Japanese to the boss and then the office at large. Then we were introduced to two JETs, Sarah from Ireland and Tandy from South Africa, and to our other supervisor, Kodama-Sensei, before being whisked off in a hired large station wagon to our new apartments.

We drove for a long time. Despite having a population of only 350,000, Iwaki is one of the biggest cities, area-wise, in Japan. In it, we live pretty far out. I am relieved, though, because when I heard it was so large I pictured horrible urban sprawl, but actually it’s only that big because it’s not really a city: it’s a bunch of towns that only decided to band together and call themselves a city in the 1960s. The city centre, Taira, looks like a city, but on the half hour train ride between here and there we’re mostly passing bright green rice paddies and small mountains thick with foliage.

Eventually we came off the freeway and into a typical narrow Japanese street, and then into the car park of a swish yellow apartment building, almost European in style. It has two storeys, with eight doors at ground level, four balconies on the upper floor and four on the lower floor. Sitting on the stoop in front of the apartment farthest from the road was a young Canadian called Matt: our new neighbour and colleague. Matt and Takahama-Sensei took me up to my apartment, number 203, while Kodama-Sensei took Mel into hers.

My new address is FLOWER 203 (lol – and yes, flower is in capital letters in English), 5-1, Icchōme, Minami-machi, Ueda-machi, Iwaki-shi, Fukushima-ken. Although if you were writing that in Japanese, it would all be backwards: the prefecture, then the city, suburb, district etc. Chōme (two syllables: chō-meh) is a section of a grid. Japanese streets don’t have names (apart from really big roads) – addresses use a grid system. Suburban streets are really narrow and houses and buildings are right next to each other, and right next to the road, too – there are very few front yards. Most houses look the same: two storeys and narrow, with chunky dark roof tiles.

We are in a small apartment building, which is known as a mansion. There are many English words that have entered Japanese over the years, some of them losing their English meaning entirely. That said, my apartment is quite spacious. Most Japanese apartments are tiny, but this one has two bedrooms. Mansions are a classier kind of apartment – so some of the original meaning stuck! There’s also a wonderful bottom-washing toilet (very common here). The bathroom is two rooms: one with the vanity unit and washing machine, and the other room is a big wet area (also very common) housing the shower and bath and lined with off-white plastic. In Japan you shower before you get in the bath, the bath being the main event, so there are no shower cubicles: hence the whole room being one big wet area.

There's a thermostat on the wall in the kitchen and shower room where you can set the temperature of the water and/or run the bath electronically. Mine is set at 42°C, which is the perfect temperature (who knew?)[1] and means that I don’t have to add any cold water when I shower! Just turn the hot tap on and I’m good to go!

I’m excited about that, and also about the bottom-washing toilet. My host parents in Kanazawa had one, and they’re brilliant. There’s an electronic control pad, so all you have to do is push a button and a little wand comes out of the back of the toilet into exactly the right position to squirt your arse. Even someone with no Japanese comprehension can use one, because the button that controls it has a cute picture of two buttocks with a fountain of water in between them.

My Kanazawa host parents’ toilet also had a drying fan in it! I gave up on that pretty quickly because I found it didn’t work, in much the same way as pre-Airblade hand dryers didn’t work. They did if you stood there with your hands under them for ten minutes, but... I’d rather just dry my bum with toilet paper and get out of there. I think bottom-washing-toilet consumers overall must have felt the same, as the ones with dryers in them are quite rare now.

Ahem! Back to my description of my mansion apartment. In the kitchen, there is a rice cooker and a gas stove/grill combo which looks more like an oversized camp stove, and the fridge is quite small. The awesome thing, though, is the microwave. It uses a sensor to determine the temperature of the food, calculates how long it will take to get the food warm, and then it does it! I don’t have to do anything!

I also have to tell you about the kotatsu, which forms the centre of my living room and, indeed, most Japanese living rooms. To the untrained eye – particularly at this time of year when its special heating power is not in use – it looks like a coffee table. Similar size and shape to a large coffee table, but a little shorter because it is designed for people to sit around on the floor. The Japanese have traditionally always sat on the floor, and the fact that legless chairs were recently invented doesn’t make that any different. There are four legless chairs around my kotatsu, allowing up to four people to sit with their legs under the table and eat dinner, drink coffee, play games – whatever you like.

But when I studied in Kanazawa, it was winter time. Then, I got to experience what makes a kotatsu so much more than a table – and in a more authentic way too, because there were no legless chairs around my Kanazawa host parents’ kotatsu. For a full explanation of this, I’m going to hand over to my 18-year-old self and the first travel journal entry I ever made ever:

So I’m here in Japan kneeling (not yet uncomfortably, though I will become so in around two minutes’ time) at a lounge room table with a heater under it at my host parents’ house in Kanazawa. Oops, the kneeling just became uncomfortable. Hang on a tic while I change position...

OK, so now I’m here in Japan sitting on the floor with my legs splayed out to my right side at this lounge room table with a heater under it... Seriously, there are about three thick blankets laid over the table, beneath an upper table top, like table cloths. You pull them over your legs to keep warm, and for extra warmth there is a heater attached to the bottom of the table to keep the whole under table area cosy. Only problem is that, coming from the couch and armchair land of Australia, sitting on the floor for long periods doesn’t augur well with me. I was always the squirmiest kid on the mat in assembly.

Anyway, now that I’m sitting here with my legs now splayed to my left side under the warm table grotto, I will tell you a bit about my adventures so far...

On our first night in Iwaki, Matt took us to a ramen restaurant with his girlfriend Lisa. The next day, Matt and Sarah took us to explore Ueda, and then Sarah took Mel and I into Taira, which is central Iwaki, on the train. We had workshops at the BOE led by Tandy, Sarah and other JETs. There are lots of them but my favourites are Carmen from Adelaide and Alma from New York.

On Friday we went to register for our gaijin cards. That’s not what they’re really called because gaijin is a derogatory term meaning foreigner, but we gaijins love to claim it back! The technical definition for the card would be foreigner registration card. It’s a form of ID that all foreigners who live in Japan must register for.

Then we went to get bank accounts, and Kodama-Sensei presented us with hankos! A hanko is a unique red stamp which Japanese people use instead of signatures for important things like bank accounts. In fact, you have to have one for bank-related matters. It seems a bit unsafe to me, because someone could steal your signature – not forge it, steal it! But Japan's crime rate is so low, they never seem to worry about things like that. For example, when we were filling out the forms for the bank account, we got to choose our own PIN by writing it on the form! Not inputting it into a machine; not getting a temporary one and changing it later; not even discreetly writing it – we had to do it right there at the counter, and even though it was the second page of the form, the teller carefully folded the first page back and looked at the PIN intently, with me, Mel and Kodama-Sensei looking on, the PIN in full view of all three of us! Consequently I think I know Mel’s PIN now, even though I was very much trying not to see it...

On Friday night I cooked a traditional Japanese meal for the first time. I kind of missed out the main dish, and I served my food in two receptacles instead of seven, but still. I thought it was a good meal. I made miso soup by eye. I was in the supermarket thinking, Hmm, what does miso soup look like? Soft tofu, wakame seaweed, maybe some spring onion... miso, obviously... I couldn’t find stock powder though, so my miso soup was a bit bland, but it still tasted alright and it really looked the part!

The rice I completely stuffed up, though. I haven't got the proportions of rice and water right – I had to run the rice cooker about five times before all the rice was cooked, and it ended up as sticky rice porridge... it was awful... but that was OK because I had yukari! Yukari is delicious salty sour purple granules made from a delicious herb called shiso, which my Kanazawa host mother (Okaa-san) used to give me to put on my rice at breakfast. In Japanese, Mother is Okaa-san and Father is Otou-san. We students were encouraged to call our host parents that, which was funny when we were speaking about them in English to each other – My otou-san said this and, My okaa-san gave me that – but it was lovely to use those terms, so I still do.

Japanese food is awesome. So easy