Mapo-dofu: Because it's delicious

Mapo-dofu is delicious, and surprisingly easy to make. It's a shame that tofu gets passed off so often as a meat substitute back in the States, pressed and formed into all sort of unappealing shapes and textures. It's tasty in its own right, and compliments meat quite nicely, as this dish shows. I will mail-order Sichuan peppers next time I make it, but Blair's After Death Hot Sauce works well in a pinch ;)

Recipe here, lifted from the very useful blog appetiteforchina.com .

The Saidaiji Naked Man Festival Part 1: Into the Fray

First, a warning - There are no pictures of me in a loincloth in this post.  If I can procure one from a friend of acquaintance, I will post it posthaste.  I barely had time to snap the one above upon re-clothing myself after the main festivities had ended - a Japanese fundoshi loincloth provides NO extra room for accoutrements like wallets or cameras.  But I get ahead of myself. Before we don our loincloths and begin the semi-nude sprint around the temple, some background information is in order. 

The Saidaiji hadaka matsuri ("Naked Festival") is considered one of Japan's 3 most eccentric big festivals (seriously). Every year about 9000 loincloth-clad men descend upon Saidaiji Temple 45 minutes outside the little city of Okayama to participate. Most get very very drunk, and all assemble into teams to participate in a centuries old purification ritual that entails running laps around the temple arm-in-arm, including a brief dip into a sacred pond, and, most importantly, competing for auspicious little wooden artifacts called shingi thrown into the crowd by priests.  Many Japanese know it as a "fighting festival," in which the synergy of alcohol, testosterone, and a general carnival atmosphere unleashes the belligerent side of otherwise peace-loving participants. People have been trampled to death over the years in the ensuing free-for-all at Saidaiji, but most escape with little more than scraped knees and slight chill. (More information available here for those interested)

When I received word that Okayama JETs were organizing a foreigner contingent for the festival, something stirred deep within the dark, animalistic recesses of my mind: "I want a shingi," it said, "I must go." 

Though I could not convince any other male Wakayama JETs to risk serious bodily injury for a "sacred stick," the lovely Rachel and JC accompanied me to Okayama despite the temple custom prohibiting women from participating. We feasted on tasty ramen outside the station and saw the major sights of the little city (the Koraku-en garden is considered one of the three prettiest in Japan) before I joined my fifty-odd fellow participants on a bus to Saidaiji. Among them was Bear, my roommate from the JET orientation in Tokyo six months earlier (and one of the two most ursine men I've had the privilege of knowing). When we arrived at the staging area, Bear generously introduced me his contingent of JETs from Kochi, who welcomed me into their group for the next few hours as we descended into a vital, oft-repressed part of the Japanese, no, human psyche.... 

Alas, it's bedtime for me. To be continued..... 

Humorous dialogue with elementary school students # 23 : "Are there zombies in America?"

Dearest blog, I have neglected you so. Not for lack of material - there have been adventures aplenty over the past few weeks - but for want of time. (In addition to said adventures, I recently decided to hop back on the preprofessional treadmill and apply to law school, which for now entails studying LSAT books for a few hours daily.) I promise I will get around to the Saidaiji Naked Man Festival and Japan's largest bath house later this week. In the meantime, I'd like to share with you a reminiscence from last October:

Pudgy, Precocious 4th Grade Boy: Carter-sensei! Carter-sensei!! Have you seen Biohazard?! (Known in the USA as Resident Evil)


Carter: Yes I have. The movie about zombies, right?

PP4GB: Yeah!! (credulously) Are there zombies in America?

C: Nope. No zombies.

 PP4GB: (disappointedly) Really?..... oh.....

C: Well, there was that one time....

PP4GB: What?! What?!

C: (feigns pent-up sadness).... No..... It's too sad....

PP4GB: Tell me! Say it!!

C: My sister.... she.... she was eaten by a zombie!

PP4GB: No way!!! But wait.... doesn't that mean that she's a zombie now?

C: (frowns, nods grimly) I'm afraid so.

PP4GB: (seriously) Anyone who gets bitten turns into a zombie. I'm glad we don't have zombies here in Japan.

C: I guess you're right.... wait. Just before I got on the plane to come here, she.... she.... BLAWRRRRR!!!!   (cocks head to side, contorts face to lopsided grimace, advances towards PP4G in jerky, limping gait) BRAINS!!! I WANT BRAINS!!!!

PP4GB: AHHHHH!!!!! (flees up stairs, does a double take, faces C with hands folded together, index fingers in the shape of a pistol barrel) POW POW!!! POW POW POW!!!!


C advances towards PP4GB arms outstretched, receives imaginary bullet to the face, slumps against the stairwell wall. The chime rings and PP4G runs to class.  
  

Humorous dialogue with elementary school students # 187

Heard this past Friday at Minato Elementary School, at the tail end of my self introduction to the fourth grade class:

(In Japanese)

Carter: .... well, that's all I have to say for now. Any questions, kids?

4th graders: Do you have a wife?

C: (Smiles) nope. Not married.

4th graders: What about a special someone that you like?

C: Well, that's a secret....

4th Grader: What type of girls do you like?!

C: Uhhhh.... I like... girls who are kind people.

4th Grader: That it? Even if she's ugly?

C:(Smiles)


4th Grader: What if she's REALLY UGLY?!?! 

Precocious Nine-year-old: What about [co-teacher] Sakamoto-sensei? She's pretty!

(Sakamoto-sensei smiles embarrassedly)

C: Well, she's a very nice lady... Any other questions?

(five minutes later)

PN: (Whispers conspiratorially) Carter-sensei! Do you like Sakamoto-sensei?

C: (Smiles) She's very nice.

PN: And pretty!

C: Yes, and pretty too.

(PN scurries to Sakamoto-sensei, exchanges whispers, scurries back to C)


PN: The feeling's mutual!

C: (Smiles embarrassedly)

PN: (Bows deeply) Congratulations on your marriage! Yay!!!!!

Chorus of Fourth Graders: Yay!!!! Congratulations!!!! (applause)

(Sakamoto-sensei (who has a long-term boyfriend) blushes, C attempts in vain to distract kids with flashcards....) 

Re-contracting, Egypt, and Daikon Curry (cont.)

One of the secrets of Japanese curry - grated apple

Apologies for the political turn with the last post - I try to refrain from the excessively political on Stinky Soybeans, not because it's not interesting or important (indeed, these are things we should talk about more often) , but because I personally get annoyed when others suddenly break into sententious rant mode out of the blue. But sometimes ideas build up with such force within oneself that they escape without warning through the nearest outlet. In that vein.....

....I'm encouraged that President Obama seems to be doing the right thing and pressuring Egypt's President Mubarak to step down. Even if bleeding liberals like myself occasionally feel frustrated at his tactics - his acquiescence towards tax cuts for rich people, his general tack of conciliation in the face of lies (google "birthers")  and bigotry from his opponents - Obama does seem to have his heart in the right place. For most of the United States' history, our presidents have usually embraced the view encapsulated in FDR's famous quote about a Nicaraguan dictator: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." God knows our government still endorses sons-of-bitches besides Mubarak, but at least Obama is setting a good precedent. Of course, one could always be cynical and...

.... but enough of such foolishness. Food awaits!

This is a daikon. (Alas, I peeled and chopped it before realizing how photogenic it was...) "Daikon"(大根) translates directly as "big root," a very apt description of the vegetable.  My good friend T received a bundle of these beautiful tubers from a grateful farmer who attends his English conversation class, and he was kind enough to share the bounty. The major difficulty of daikon consumption, naturally, lies in its size. What do you do with that much plant matter? Typical uses include shredding it to garnish sushi and grating it to top steak, but there was no way I was going to eat enough sushi or steak to use even a small fraction of the root before it became a giant petri dish. The solution? Curry! 

The Roux!

The delightful food blog http://justhungry.com/ , my most dependable source for Japanese food wisdom, had a tasty recipe for Japanese style curry stew. This should not be confused with curries of the Thai or Indian persuasion, to which it bears only a passing resemblance. Unlike Koreans or people from the Hunan and Sichuan regions of China, the Japanese in general have an extremely underdeveloped appreciation of the broad and beautiful palette of spicy flavors available to mankind. Whereas I love a good, scorching vindaloo or green curry for the little inferno it ignites on the taste buds, the chief appeal of Japanese curry lies in the pleasing textural combination of savory, viscous stew and warm rice. Many supermarkets contain an entire aisle devoted to curry in its various incarnations, from ready-to-eat metallic pouches to little brown bricks of roux for the soup base to spice blends for those who opt for the purist approach. As Just Hungry points out, the roux (composed of butter, flour, and curry powder), is actually very easy to whip up and contains none of the dubious industrially engineered fats that give most pre-made mixes their appealing mouth feel.   

Voila!

 Besides daikon, water, and that roux, I added carrots, shiitake mushrooms, a half kilo of beef tendon, 8 onions, spices, and, of course, a heaping spoonful of Blair's After Death Hot Sauce. 3 fellow ALT's and I managed to polish off the entire pot that night, save a little tupperware-full. It was the second time I've hosted a curry party in my little apartment (alas, no photos). How wonderful to live in a century when it's socially permissible for a man to cook a big pot of stew and share it with friends.

More food pictures, because I have too much free time:

Sesame Fried Spinach a la Mark Bittman

Bok Choy in garlic and white wine sauce

This here is a takoyaki, the bready fried octopus balls that are a specialty here in the Kansai region. A wonderful, adorable local family (relations of a teacher I know) invited me over for a takoyaki fry-out last Monday. As with many of the best Japanese meals, the cooking apparatus sat in the middle of the table as the entire family took part in the meal's preparation. In the case of takoyaki, that apparatus is a griddle indented with little 1-inch hemispheres for shaping the balls of fried goodness. Besides octopus, we added spring onions, pickled ginger, bits of fried tempura batter ("tenkasu"), and american cheese to the mix. They were delicious.

Fried Rice two ways: Shiitake sesame, red pepper and pork.

Re-contracting, Egypt, and Daikon Curry

Hello friends,

I'm afraid I've neglected this here blog since the auspicious start of 2011. Perhaps its the sheer quantity of New Year's resolutions I've been trying to keep (I jotted down 8 during a lull at school), ranging from the mundane "keep apartment clean" to the more edifying "learn to read music/play the harmonica" and "take concrete steps to realize secret plans for world domination."  But perhaps it's poor form to bring up New Year's resolutions in February, when many of us are just coming to terms all sorts of persistent flaws in ourselves. Entropy will remain a major force in my apartment, no matter the earnestness of my resolutions, and world domination will have to wait until I get sick of my new kindle (a godsend in a town where the nearest English bookstore in 2 hours away).

Anyways, here's the latest dispatch from Arida:

I've officially signed up to stay here for one more year! Another year of skewing the dodgeball teams of Arida playgrounds, of bags of free citrus and compliments from cackling old ladies, of talking world politics with inebriated and wind-burned fishermen. And of course, helping the wee ones distinguish their R's from their L's, always tactfully deflecting questions about the meaning of "sekkusu" and "fakku you!"

I could ramble for a very long time about my warm feelings towards this place, but I have something else on my mind at the moment, as do many millions of news-watching people the world over. Egypt's revolution-in-progress rivets us for many reasons - it's geopolitical implications, the flood of striking photos from Cairo, the hope and optimism undergirding such spontaneous, collective action, the menace (and recently, reality) of brutal government reprisals. I'm not a religious man, but I suppose that in my own way, I'm praying that those hundreds of thousand of people in Tahrir Square succeed.

Two things have irked me persistently since I started paying attention to the story a few days ago. The first is the inevitable reaction against the wide-eyed wonder and admiration in much of the reportage from Cairo. "It threatens to destabilize the entire region!" "The Islamic Brotherhood could take over the country!" "Egypt's alliance with Israel/America is jeopardized!" "Economic consequences!" etc. etc.  All these caveats certainly articulate possible, even likely outcomes of the uprising. But just how scared, how jaded does one have to be to not feel a pang of awe and inspiration at the idea of millions of people organically rising up against three decades of repression and stagnation at the hands of a brutal autocrat? Seriously!

But perhaps that's enough political ranting for now. God knows there's plenty of self-righteous bloggers and reporters churning our pages by the minute on this story (I recommend looking up the stuff Nicholas Kristof has written from Cairo for the New York Times if you're interested).  Now it's time for bed - I'll finish up with the rant and get to the daikon curry soon. Sweet dreams to us all.

cold cold cold

Memories of warmer times: The Kumano pilgrimage road in early Autumn.

Today I will use this blog as a forum to practice one of the most important staples of social interaction here in Japan (or anywhere, for that matter): Complaining about the weather. From the from the atsui, na? ("hot, isn't it?") of summer to the samui, na? ("cold, isn't it?") of winter, at least half of all polite conversation here in Arida begins with some sort of sympathetic bemoaning of the sadistic weather gods.  While the temperature here in Wakayama rarely dips beneath freezing, several factors contribute to making winters here frigid and miserable.

1)For some unfathomable reason, few Japanese apartments have decent insulation, so any heat built within a living room soon dissipates. A friend from Hawai'i recently discovered the source of a persistent draft in her apartment: After checking every conceivable window and door opening, she was shocked to feel a faint but unmistakable winter breeze coming though her wall.  

2) Neither home nor school has central heating. Presumably this stems from a desire to conserve resources on a crowded archipelago, a worthy goal, I must admit. It also has the side benefit of building a certain camaraderie in suffering, in those millions of cups of hot tea, coffee, and cocoa offered in solidarity to shivering coworkers.

3) The wind. Arida, like many Japanese towns, lies on the Pacific Ocean. Cold landward winds buffet the town at all hours, at times so strong that peddling at anything less than full force will only keep one's bike in place, leaving rider with a comical and confused look of exertion on his face.

In response to this state of affairs, there are two schools of thought. The first, advocated by my neighbor T, entails puttering around one's apartment in full winter wear, warmed only by the thought of yen accumulating in his bank account, unmolested by seasonal heating bills. The second entails sitting beneath air conditioner or kotatsu, worshipping these sources of electronic warmth with monthly offerings of hard-earned cash. (A kotatsu, by the way, is a low table equipped with a small heat lamp and and bedecked with an oversized blanket - the traditional Japanese solution to blustery winter days.) I've attempted to split the difference between the two, bundling up in sweatshirts and setting the AC to the lowest warm setting possible for minutes at a time.

Behind my shattering teeth, I comfort myself with the thought that my shivering somehow brings me closer to nature, that there is perhaps something unnatural about the excessive warmth of my Amherst College dorms in the depths of winter (which led many student to open windows to let heat out). Bears hibernate, amphibians even freeze through - winter is a time to conserve motion and heat. Perhaps one should shiver a bit in winter in humble acknowledgment of elemental forces greater than ourselves. With that in mind, I now click off my AC and put another cup of water on for tea...