Floating Papers on the Sea of Japan by Keith Fenske November and December 2000 Copyright (c) 2000 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.

November 2000: One Pot Spaghetti

I bought this year's cards at my favorite department store in Tsuruoka (that is, Daiei).  Last year, I didn't send any Christmas cards at all.  After newly arriving in Japan and sending over 150 obligatory postcards to family and friends during October and November, I saw no need to repeat the same postal madness with Christmas cards.  This year, my mailing list is much shorter: only 35 people.  If you don't receive a card from me, then either you live in Japan (I'm only sending cards overseas), or you're not on the list.  Each card will include a copy of the school's brochure (nicely printed on our color laser printer) and a sample sheet of my Japan notes with one side in English and the other side in Japanese.  Total cost of one package will be between US$4 and US$5, which is why I'm not eager to enlarge the mailing list to last year's postcard size.

The clerk in the store may have thought that I was crazy as he watched me select the cards.  There are few packages of Christmas cards here, at least not in my city.  Nobody buys enough cards to make packages worthwhile.  (People send postcards for the new year; next year is the year of the snake.)  I bought 35 individually wrapped Christmas cards.  The store had a display with several dozen different cards.  The slots (pockets) in the display held about six cards for each design.  As I found designs that I liked, I emptied the pockets and dropped the cards onto my book bag on the floor.  Wrapped in slippery plastic, the cards soon spilled off my bag.  It looked like a mess.  It was a mess.  The clerk said nothing because he soon guessed that I was buying the mess!  I left behind six empty display slots.

Riding home, I see that the leaves are falling from the trees without much change of color this year.  The temperature is dropping too slowly.

Back home, I can walk to work without crossing any major roads or stopping at any traffic lights -- if you stretch the definitions slightly.  The narrow side streets north of my apartment lead to Kajo Park.  Along the south edge of the park is a quiet road with little traffic.  The southeast corner has a pedestrian crossing on the train tracks.  This crossing does have lights and a moving barricade, but the lights aren't traffic lights since this isn't a road.  (Can you hear the sound of the definitions stretching?)  After the train tracks, go under the new bridge and along the side streets to the train station.  The train station has a pedestrian walkway under the main road.  (That is, if you don't fall and hurt yourself, as I did in February.)  On the other side is our school.  This is a nice walk in the daytime, and a wonderful walk when the cherry trees are blooming, but something to be avoided at night when wearing dark clothing.  The chances of getting run over are too high, and it is safer to stick to the main roads with their streetlights, traffic lights, and crosswalks.

Across from the train station, a demolition crew is tearing down the old Vivre department store, which closed in January.  What was once seven floors of shopping will now be fifteen floors of a new Marble Hotel to compete with an almost finished Washington Hotel in the huge Kajo Central Building beside the train station, the older Hotel Metropolitan Yamagata attached to the train station, the Castle Hotel down the street, and numerous other smaller hotels.  Someone obviously has faith in the future economic health of this city.  The retailers are betting on the suburbs.  Jusco recently opened a second large department store in south Yamagata and expects its parking lots to be as full as their northern location.  As in America, people love their cars and would rather drive than walk or take the bus.  For the few people who don't have cars, Jusco has a free shuttle bus from the downtown and train station areas.

new Kajo Central Building

By Yamagata's standards, the new Kajo Central Building is huge: 24 floors.  The fire department was concerned about the safety of this building, so the developers had to agree to stricter standards for fire equipment and procedures.  There are two more very tall buildings in the Yamagata area.  One is an apartment tower in Kaminoyama that rises high above the surrounding landscape of two- and three-story buildings.  My students call this the "ghost tower" because hardly anyone lives there: poor location and the price is too high.  My guess is that it's nearly 40 floors and, once again, the fire department has its concerns.  I am curious if they say anything about the other tall building, because it is "Kencho", the offices of the prefectural government.

Wednesday, November 15th.  I'm thinking of starting a contest to find the most interesting adaptation of my Japanese web page title.  When you convert the Japanese characters into romaji (the English alphabet), the title is "Nihon Kai No Fudoshi".  In Japanese, one kanji character can have several readings (sounds), and some sounds can be written dozens of different ways.  Hearing someone's name pronounced does not help you to write it; you need their business card for that!  There is no confusion about what my Japanese title means when it is written in kanji.  "Ni-hon" means Japan.  "Kai" means sea.  "No" means belonging to.  "Fu-do" means floating.  "Shi" at the end of a word means book, journal, or papers as in "zasshi" for magazine.  However, once the sounds for those kanji characters are written in romaji, the fun begins.

Shi can also mean poetry or verse.  (Different kanji character but same pronunciation.)  I like the idea of poetry floating over the ocean.  Shi can be history, city, or death.  Anything that sounds like the "shi" in death is bad luck in Japan.  Fudo can be the natural features of a region.  Together they could mean the complete description of an area.  An internet search on "fudoshi" turned up several misspellings of "fundoshi", which is a Japanese loincloth.  Another web page claims that "fudoshi" is a martial art or sport similar to karate or aikido, but this meaning is not found in our office's big Japanese dictionary.

Friday, November 17th.  Snow on the mountain roads.  The bus went through a tunnel.  One side was late autumn; the other side was early winter.  The dividing line can be very sharp in these mountains.  (See also the previous March 29th.)  Another tunnel ended in persistent rain.

Saturday, November 18th.  Today is sunny with rain.  Tonight is dark with light snow.  The weather doesn't have to make much sense when you live on a flat plain between mountain ranges.

Sunday, November 19th.  The snow and the darkness both disappeared with the morning sun.

A traditional recipe for making spaghetti reads something like this: simmer the sauce for hours and hours, using only the freshest of ingredients, and serve over noodles cooked for precisely the right amount of time.  That requires too much effort, along with a kitchen big enough for two stovetop elements, two different pots (one for the sauce and one for the noodles), and numerous utensils.  Here is my revised recipe for tiny apartments with kitchens only big enough for a single pot on a single gas burner.  It tastes best after 10 PM on a long working day.  In advance, buy one of those packages of spaghetti that are pre-measured; mine have five bundles of 100 grams each.  (In Japan, you can choose the diameter of the noodles.  Mine are 1.7 mm.  Why?  I don't know.)  In a large pot at high heat, boil the spaghetti until it is almost cooked.  Turn off the heat.  Drain the spaghetti.  Put the spaghetti back into the pot.  Add a can of pasta sauce.  (That is, the contents of the can, not the can itself!  I buy flavors randomly.)  Simmer at low temperature.  This will heat the sauce and finish cooking the spaghetti.  While waiting, read the directions on the side of the can.  Note where it says that one 295-gram can (about 250 mL) serves two to three people.  Laugh, pour the whole mixture onto one plate, and top with Parmesan cheese.

Saturday, November 25th.  I found a good place to buy cotton pants for work: Uniqlo.  (I hope I spelled that right!)  They have casual clothing in a few basic styles, with lots of sizes and colors, at about half the price of other stores.  Many customers were there, from kids to adults.  Across the street, another store (Casual Land Japan) didn't get this marketing formula right and their parking lot is mostly empty.

Buddhist statue and temple roof

Sunday, November 26th.  I went for a walk and didn't get to where I was going (the train barns).  I got sidetracked by bridge construction.  Inside every big boy is a little boy who still likes to play with construction toys.  Then I stopped at a temple in the Itsuka-machi district.  A temple is a place where you can sit and watch the late afternoon sun slowly creep over the swirls of swept rock, and nobody thinks this is at all strange.  It's not like anyone is in a hurry at a temple.  The priest talked to me briefly on his way to a memorial ceremony.

I have found dozens of temples and shrines in the Yamagata area.  Temples are Buddhist and shrines are for the Shinto religion.  Otherwise, they pretty much look the same.  Some are well taken care of; others are in a state of disrepair.  One of the more prosperous temples in my neighborhood is doing a complete renovation, possibly even a reconstruction.  Money comes from donations: when you receive services from the priest, you are expected to donate according to your income.  In that way, the temple is denied to no one.  However, wealthy patrons are obviously greatly appreciated....

Yes, there really are train barns.  While trains are designed to run in any kind of weather, they can't be serviced properly outside.  The cars in a freight train are routinely detached and sent in different directions, so these cars and engines are normally serviced separately.  The cars in a passenger train can be detached, but passenger trains normally remain intact and repeat the same route many times each day.  Since all cars in a passenger train require routine maintenance at the same time, it makes more sense to service each train as a unit.  This is done inside long industrial buildings that would be called "train barns" in America because they are too big to be called "train garages"!

Well, it's getting toward the end of the month and it's time to wrap up this month's story.  If you look back over the previous months, you will see that there are not a lot of dated comments at the beginning of a month.  Some general comments, maybe, but no detailed diary-like entries.  That is because I am too busy getting the web page assembled for posting on the internet.  After the text is finished, I must still scan the photos and add the links.  My camera doesn't automatically finish a roll of film at the end of each month, so I often have to wait a week or so before all the pictures are available.  This month, there won't be many pictures.  Next month?  I don't know.  Starting in December, I will have 25 megabytes of space for my home page, as compared to my previous 2 MB, so there will be a comfortable amount of extra space.

December 2000: Safe Japan

clamp for balcony door tracks

An apartment on the second floor was broken into.  Maybe they left their door unlocked, and theirs was the screen door that I heard opening.

car alarm: dachshund on dashboard

I put a pressure clamp inside the tracks to stop the doors from moving even if the regular latch is forced.  Now if someone wants to break into my apartment through the balcony doors, they will have to smash the glass.  That would be very meshy [pun] and make a lot of noise since the windows have wire mesh inside the glass.  Another option is to borrow the services of a car alarm that I saw the other day: a dachshund on the dashboard.

Sunday, December 10th.  We hosted a Christmas party at a community center for 30 children from another school.  We send teachers to this school as part of a contract.  Of their 17 English classes, I teach three and my boss teaches zero.  Yet somehow we became responsible for organizing the party and my boss became the emcee.  The kids sang a song or two in English to show their mothers.  We made Christmas decorations and played games.  My boss did a good job, the kids enjoyed themselves, and I acted helpful.

The "bonenkai" (forget the year) parties with my adult students are a lot more fun: eat, drink, and talk until the restaurant sends you out the door.  There are three parties this year: Friday, December 1st in Tendo; and Wednesday the 13th and Saturday the 16th in Yamagata.  I could only stay for an hour at the Tendo party because I had to catch the last train back to Yamagata.  Otherwise, the price of a taxi would equal the cost of the next party: about Y5000 (US$50) each.  Considering that you are eating and drinking for several hours at a good restaurant, the price is reasonable.  A detailed explanation of the costs and planning was given to me by Mr. Oba in Tendo, who was also very creative in estimating my share on Friday the 1st.

Tuesday, December 12th.  Today is one of those days where I can almost walk to work faster than the cars.  About 18 cm (7 inches) of heavy wet snow overnight left the roads covered in a slippery mixture of snow, ice, and water.  The horserace track in Kaminoyama had to apologize on the radio to all the enthusiasts who were anxiously awaiting the last event of the year, now postponed until Thursday.  The snow is melting quickly.  Will it be fast enough for the horses?

Wednesday, December 13th.  All of the Christmas cards are in the mail.  Delivery time will vary greatly, from 5 days to 2 weeks, because the cards are in brown envelopes marked "printed matter".  According to Japanese postal regulations, Christmas cards are printed matter so long as you write on the card itself, and don't enclose a separate letter.  That saved a lot of money in postage.

Thursday, December 14th.  Only 11 more shopping days until Christmas ... and I just received a 1.9 kilogram (4 pound) box of taco chips from back home marked, "Do not open until December 25th or else Santa Claus will be really, really angry."  Okay, so I made part of that up.  How can the folks expect me to wait eleven days when I know what's in the box?  It's not like I can leave the box in safekeeping with anyone else in the office: they are as bad as I am when it comes to good corn chips.

Another trip to Tsuruoka with every kind of precipitation known to mankind: snow, rain, hail, sleet, that funny pelletized snow, and the occasional massive lightning discharge across skies that don't look dark enough for a thunderstorm.  One of my students is a radio equipment engineer for the telephone company and says that the Shonai (Tsuruoka-Sakata) area has some of the most severe electrical storms in Japan.

the infamous Japanese squat toilet

It also has one of the funniest toilets.  Falling off a toilet is not a laughing matter, but does become funny when the cause is a loose toilet seat and you are sitting (or trying to sit!) in the washroom of Komeri, a big home improvement center.  Of all places, you would think that a hardware store would have the wherewithal (skill and determination) to repair a toilet seat!  Then again, who really uses a sit-down toilet in Japan?  Most places offer only squat toilets, except when as a convenience to foreigners or the handicapped.  Not many foreigners wander around hardware stores in this area (which happens to be the other Keith's hobby since childhood), and very few handicapped people could use that toilet because it's a regular-sized stall with additional grab bars and no space for maneuvering.  The walls are too narrow, the fixtures are too crowded, and I could barely squeeze in there myself.  I can't imagine anyone in a wheelchair doing the same.  If nobody ever uses that toilet, Komeri may not have known that the seat was loose.  And, a loose seat makes it easier for the cleaning staff....

Watanabe Hardware store near my apartment

Saturday, December 16th.  Ooooh.  Curtains that actually open and close.  I thought the big news of the day would be heavy rain, thunder, and lightning -- but that's just another winter's morning in Yamagata.  The curtains are a longer story.  Whoever installed the original curtain rails in my apartment had pushed big screws through the rails with power tools, dimpling (bending) the rails at every screw hole.  As a result, the curtains could not slide over the dimples.  When I first came to Yamagata, I tried repairing this with (believe it or not) a spoon.  I was partially successful.  Now, after 14 months, I finally went to Joy Home Center and bought new rails.  According to the package directions, they install with only a screwdriver.  Ha, ha.  Add one Makita cordless drill, borrowed from Watanabe Hardware near my home, drill bits, and a box of screws.  (The two rails had seven screw holes each, but the package contained only eight screws.  A few screw heads always get damaged during installation, and those screws must be removed and thrown away.)  Now the question is, what kind of curtains should I buy?  The old curtains are about 30 cm (one foot) too short.  I don't think my neighbors spy on my feet, but this gap lets in a lot of unwanted light from the cars in the parking lot next door.

Wednesday, December 20th.  I picked up garbage on the walkway outside my balcony doors.  This time it wasn't anybody's fault unless you can blame the weather.  Yesterday, we had sudden strong gusts of wind, the usual heavy rain, thunder, lightning, hail, delayed trains, and floating web pages.

Have I told you how much work it is to do a web page?  Yes, I have: in April, May, August, and November.  Lately, I'm doing the work of two web pages.  I write my regular web page in English, one tiny piece at a time, and edit the Japanese translation, one huge piece at a time.  My boss does the real work of the translation.  I give her a floppy disk by sneaker net, that is, I copy the English text to a floppy disk and carry the floppy from this computer to the computer on her desk -- a distance of almost 3 meters (10 feet).  As she finishes segments, she sends me the Japanese text by e-mail.  Think about that for a while.  She connects to her local internet server and sends an e-mail message with an attachment to my server in Canada.  Later, I call up the same local internet server, go out over the internet to my webmail server, download the attached file through the local server, and save it on this computer.  That sounds awfully inconvenient: the e-mail travels around the world to arrive at a desk only ten feet away....  In actual fact, it's no trouble at all since we both do a lot of e-mail every day.

Once I receive the Japanese text, I match it to the English text.  Both versions have the same paragraphs, sections, pictures, and links.  Often the sentences inside each paragraph also correspond.  Our students want to read the English text, but sometimes don't understand, and rely on the Japanese text for an explanation.  After both languages agree, I start to convert the Japanese text into a web page.  This is fairly mechanical.  Japanese fonts have two different ways of encoding the English alphabet, numbers, and punctuation.  The normal way is what we now call "plain text" but is also known as "half width forms" in Japanese.  The second way has "full width forms".  The width of the characters and the spacing are different.  Internet pages work better with plain text, so I convert most full width forms into plain text.  I have told Microsoft Word to use wildly different fonts for the English and Japanese text, making any "full width forms" highly visible.  The converted text is reformatted in Netscape Composer.  (I don't use Microsoft Word for making web pages because it produces pages that are overly complicated.)  Links are added by copying from the English web page.  To help me find the correct Japanese words, my boss highlights links in blue in the MS Word file.  (I underline links in the English text, but you can't see underlining well in Japanese text.)  I check the web pages with both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.  Then we upload them to my server, print one copy, and do final proofreading.  Mistakes are corrected and if you find any more mistakes that we missed, please tell me!

Yesterday for fun, sitting on a train that wasn't moving, I pulled the Japanese text out of my book bag and pretended to read it.  Sometimes I find a few punctuation errors or a misspelled word in katakana.  Most of the time, I just check the formatting.

The train wasn't moving because the tracks were slippery.  Steel wheels don't get much traction on steel rails that are wet.  When the rain slowed down, the train crawled into Yonezawa at a speed similar to a person walking!  Extreme blasts of wind rocked the train at times.  At one of the stations, when the doors opened to let people in and out, the wind howled through the inside of the train.

Today I am thinking about the film in my fridge.  I have eight rolls of Fuji NS 160 portrait film waiting, and waiting, and waiting.  Those rolls have been in my fridge for over a year.  There hasn't been any occasion to use them.  Each roll cost more than twice the price of regular film.  Sad to say, but it looks like I will soon be using up this fancy film simply to get rid of it, when I really should be using it for people pictures.

Outside, I am listening to the sound of noise trucks: cars and vans with loudspeakers on the roof.  In America, you would expect to see the National Guard doing civil defense exercises.  In Japan, it's just another election.  I can clearly hear those damn things from over two blocks away.  If I were voting, I would vote for the candidate who is quiet and doesn't bombard me with so much noise pollution.

Friday, December 22nd.  Tsuruoka, again.  No matter what I do, I always come back in a bad mood.  It's not the classes -- the students are good, and the company is good -- it's the overnight road trip.

A bottle of wine was on my desk, an early Christmas present from my boss.

Saturday, December 23rd.  Sunny and 7 degrees today.  For Americans who haven't learned to deal with the metric system yet, that's 45 degrees Fahrenheit.  Pop quiz: what's minus 40 degrees in Fahrenheit?

Now, to answer complaints that I don't put enough juicy detail into these Japan notes....

The new curtains are up in my apartment.  They are a bluish "rose valley" pattern.  The color is lighter than the old curtains, while overall the new curtains are darker because they let through less of the outside light.  The width is 100 cm and the length is 200 cm.  They hang 8 cm above the floor.  (Divide by 2.54 if you want inches.)  The pattern is pleasant enough, given that there isn't much choice in the 200 cm length.  Standard lengths in Japan are 105, 135, 178, 200, and 230 cm but most prefinished curtains are sold in the 135 and 178 cm lengths.  (My old curtains were 178 cm.)  Standard widths are 100, 150, and 200 cm.  Width was not a concern since my curtain rails are 182 cm wide and the two curtains overlap when they are closed.  The length limited my selection: I don't have a sewing machine and I am not willing to pay someone to finish the curtains.

(Convert 182 cm to feet, and you will see a lasting effect of the British imperial system of weights and measures.)

A couple of my students suggested that I get slightly longer curtains (in the 210 to 230 cm range) and let the curtains touch the floor.  The idea was to trap the cold air against the balcony doors.  At first, this sounds good.  The spoiler is condensation.  With no air circulation under or around the curtains, moisture will collect between the curtains and the windows until the bottom of the curtains is resting in a puddle of water.  The curtains will rot and mold will grow.

While in Daiei to buy the curtains, I also bought a new pillow and two matching pillowcases for the old and new pillows.  The new pillow has polyester fill; the old pillow has chicken feathers and sometimes loses enough feathers to make my room look like the remains of a barnyard fight.  The pillowcases are blue with a herringbone weave.  Now I wonder, how many wild polyesters had to die to make just one pillow?

This domestic spending was long overdue but frequently postponed because all these things will be abandoned when I leave Japan.  I went ahead simply to make myself feel more comfortable.

Monday, December 25th.  I haven't opened the presents from my family yet because it doesn't feel like Christmas.  The calendar may say December 25th but something is missing.  Keeping with last year's Christmas tradition, I went to see an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called "The Sixth Day".  As for Christmas dinner, Kentucky Fried Chicken is now too far away, ever since their downtown location closed and reappeared as a drive-through in the suburbs near south Jusco.

Thursday, December 28th.  No trip to Tsuruoka today.  Factory companies don't like to shut down their production lines during a working week, so they save all the little holidays and add them to the next big holiday.  The Tsuruoka company will be closed for about 10 days until the new year.

the last sunset of this year's millennium

Friday, December 29th.  Get ready to celebrate the new millennium.  Again.  It's only been a year since the last millennium party.  I'm so old: I've been alive in three millenniums (millennia)!  This year, we are being reminded that the Gregorian calendar began with the year A.D. 1 and hence the next 1000-year cycle begins in A.D. 2001.  Last year, this fact was ignored in our desire to celebrate the number 2000.  Now for a trivia question: why do we write 720 B.C. but A.D. 231?  That is, why does "B.C." come after the number but "A.D." goes before the number?  The first person to correctly answer this question gets another free millennium.

Sunday, December 31st.  Mr. Yoneta at Yoneta Pharmacy was very helpful today.  I woke up late with nothing better to do than to stare at my toes.  Everyone needs a day like that now and then.  However, not everyone wants to find that a presumed callus on their little toe is showing the distinctive cauliflower shape of a planter's wart, or in my case, three tightly intertwined warts.  I couldn't find the word "wart" in my translation dictionaries, so I drew a picture of a toe with a wart in three stages of growth, went to Yoneta Pharmacy, and showed the picture to Mr. Yoneta.  Mr. Yoneta doesn't speak much English.  (He says that he doesn't speak any English -- but he says that in English!)  I don't speak enough Japanese.  He understood that this wasn't my previous mizumushi or athlete's foot problem, so he looked at my little toe with a big magnifying glass and told me that I had "ibo".  From his shelf, he brought two packages.  Neither had English instructions, but I recognized the second one immediately.  It's a nasty but effective liquid treatment with a distinctive smell that I remember well, even though I haven't needed it in over ten years.

taiko drummer

I don't want this year to end on a wart -- last year's dental floss was gross enough -- so tonight I will be going to the New Year's Eve countdown celebration sponsored to mark the opening of Kajo Central Building.  With a temperature slightly below freezing, and the event outdoors, I wonder how many brave souls will join me?

(The show was good.  Many people came.  The best way to test out new facilities: throw a free party for thousands of people!  Everything went smoothly except for one escalator that didn't go at all.)

Copyright (c) 2000 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.
 

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