Things that make me glad I live in Japan

500-yen ramen in flavors like tomato, curry, lemon shio and kimchi. Onsen. Words like "虫めがね" (magnifying glass, literally "bug glasses") and "爆発" (explosion). Tiny green frogs. Shiba inu. 100-yen stores. Bento boxes. Cell phone straps. Stumbling upon stone gods in hidden shrines. My students' faces. Yoneyama. Freshly planted rice fields reflecting the snow-covered mountains like mirrors. Ginkgo trees in the fall. Kotatsu. Nabe. Vending machines. Unsweetened iced green and jasmine tea. The ladies in my English conversation group. The moment of silence right after finishing a taiko song. Salmon onigiri, bibimbap onigiri, and yaki onigiri. The coast between Naoetsu and Nadachi. Tea ceremony. Trees right out of a Miyazaki film. Morning glories. Hydrangeas in colors I never even imagined. Crepe paper flowers on posters at school. The goofy pictures on city and ward signs. Sports day. Chorus festival. Military-style school uniforms. My apartment. Cheap tofu. The gnarled black branches of persimmon trees blooming with startling orange fruit. Pineapple chu-hi. Summer storms.

I'm WINNING!

Sunday was a day of trying new things. The list, in order:

1. Snowboarding
If you know me, you're probably thinking "WTF?" I am not athletic, I am not outdoorsy, I am scared of everything to the point where I won't go on most roller coasters, and before this year I had never lived in a place that gets snow. Well, Joetsu, as you might have heard, gets a LOT of it, and everyone here does winter sports as a way to make it bearable. It took me a while to hop on the bandwagon but I went for the first time on Sunday and it was AMAZING. I'm pretty sure they release some sort of chemical in the air at Ikenotaira to make you feel this way. Going up the ski lift and feeling the fear was amazing, getting it right and zooming down the slope was amazing, falling down was amazing, going 3 feet and then faceplanting again was amazing. Snowboarding is something I would never in a million years have considered doing back home. I was so proud of myself just for going, and then to actually have a great time doing it was the icing on the cake! I'm almost disappointed that I got into it so late in the season, but I think this was something I needed right now.

2. Onsen
Onsen are public baths fueled by natural hot springs. They're everywhere in Japan (there's one within a few miles of my house) and I really should have been to one already by now. But man, it was the perfect way to relax after snowboarding.

3. Kimchi ramen!

Enough said.

Setsubun and Chinese New Year

The road home at sunset. I didn't actually have this landscape in mind when I named my blog Sunset in Snow Country; I meant for it to refer to the Sunset District in San Francisco, where I lived for five years. I miss the pastel-colored houses and the dim sum shops and the ocean in constant view, and I feel as if I still carry it with me wherever I go. My life is a little piece of the Sunset in snow country, hence the name. So the picture doesn't have much to do with anything, but I still pulled over on the shoulder and jumped out of the car to take it. We don't see the sun much these days.

For the past two weekends I've been going to cooking classes sponsored by the international exchange network, which has ended up being really great. The first one was for a Japanese holiday called Setsubun. When I was a kid I had a book of Japanese holidays and traditions, and over the years I got to experience most of them in some altered form (the mall in Japantown does Tanabata trees every year, I went to an Oshogatsu event at the Japanese American National Museum last year, and of course there's the Cherry-Blossom Festival), but Setsubun was the one that never made an appearance in the U.S., and so going to the event had the weird effect of yanking me out of the commute-work-home cycle and reminding me that I am, right now, doing something that I've dreamed of since childhood. I'd say this happens about once every two weeks these days, and it's an amazing feeling.

Setsubun isn't really a major holiday; it's supposed to be the last day of winter (ha!), and the traditional ritual is to cast out demons by throwing beans. Apparently the Setsubun food we made, ehommaki (a long sushi roll), originated in Western Japan and has only made it to Niigata in recent years. But hey! I was in the newspaper!

If you can't read that, feel free to imagine that I am quoted saying something really cool and insightful and not "HURF DURF MAKING TAMAGOYAKI IS HARRRRDDDD."

Also, despite reading that Japan book over and over, I somehow failed to internalize the fact that people don't just toss beans around randomly on Setsubun. So I was completely surprised when the lights suddenly went out and Suzuki, the university student who did the presentation at the beginning, rushed in wearing a demon costume and roared at the kids, who screamed and pelted him with beans and candy.

Apparently someone in the household (usually Dad) will dress up as the demon and everyone else throws the beans at him. Most of the schools also did bean-throwing, and more than one of my ALT friends actually had to dress up as the demon and get mobbed by bean-throwing 12-year-olds. We just had do-it-yourself ehommaki for lunch:

You take the nori (at the back) and put the rice (it was sushi rice!) inside with whatever you want and roll it up. The choices are tamagoyaki, cucumber, cheese and a cold sausage. There's also miso soup with meatballs, tuna and corn salad, and milk. Believe it or not, this is about as good as it gets.

The most recent cooking class was making Chinese-style gyozas for Chinese New Year, which was great for several reasons. The first, obviously, is that I now know how to make and properly fold gyoza!

It turns out that most of the people there were Chinese exchange students at the local university. Japanese was the only language we had in common, so that's what we used. I got a lot of practice and met some cool people!

Now I'm looking at my notes for what I wanted to write about and wondering if I was on a food high from eating all those gyoza, but what the hell, I'll try. Since being in Japan, I've met people from Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Korea, and most recently Italy and China. Now, I'm from a very culturally diverse city, and at home I also met people of all national origins. But I recently read somewhere (I think it was a comment on Metafilter, of all places) that "Americans see all foreigners as potential Americans," and that really hit home. When I think about people back at home, particularly with my Asian friends, I sometimes have to think pretty hard to remember whether they were actually born in the U.S. or another country, just because everyone was sort of in various stages in the process of becoming American and it didn't really make much of a difference anyway. The most conspicuous foreigners I ever met were two white British guys in my newswriting class who, when we had an assignment to write about somewhere out of our comfort zone and the teacher nixed their plan to go to Hooters, moaned in their posh accents, "But we would NEVAAAHHH go to HOOTERS! It's so TACKY!" (Second place goes to all the French tourists who would pitch a fit because we didn't sell sweatshirts with the GAP logo on them. Seriously, get a life.) Here, though, most of my friends have never been to the U.S., and of course we're all on neutral ground, and living in Japan has suddenly thrust me into the realization that other countries are not just America with some history and funny customs tacked on as an afterthought. Because of these things I'm finding that I'm learning a lot more from them than I ever would have at home. 

Anyway, LONG POST IS LONG. Sunday deserves its own entry, so I think I shall end there.

This post puts the HELLA in HELLA ANGELENO

My graduation ceremony was on Sunday, so I got to spend a couple days in the city with Ray and Vy this week. Half off pizza night at Pizza Orgasmica and dim sum at Golden River were on the top of my to-do list.

Counterclockwise from top left: ha gow (shrimp dumplings), chive dumplings (on Vy's plate; they are very garlicky and my new favorite dim sum dish), chashu bao, noh mai gai (lotus leaf-wrapped sticky rice with chicken and Chinese sausage), hahm seui go (the dish that unfortunately has no English name, so they'll call it "meat dumpling" or "meat turnover" but then half the time you order the meat dumpling and it's a DIFFERENT meat dumpling and then you're like DAMMIT I WANTED CRISPY GOOEY GOODNESS), and... a different kind of shrimp dumpling, can't remember what it was called. The ones in the middle are yet another shrimp dumpling. Apparently Ryan asked a friend of ours who lives in LA Chinatown where to get good dim sum and he said there wasn't any (!!!), so I had to stuff myself in preparation for my return to the godless south.

After lunch we headed to Vital Tea Leaf in Chinatown to be screamed at and served tea by Uncle Gee (no relation to the other Gee we all know and love). As we approached the store he was busy trying to convince some tourists that his tea would make them sexy, so I walked up and said "We don't NEED to be any sexier, but can we have some tea?" which I'm pretty sure made me a prime target for his teasing the rest of the time we were there since I eventually ended up in a chokehold. This time there were some elderly tourists from Arkansas next to us, and seeing him play to them kind of ruined the effect, like when you're taken in by a magic trick but then the magician shows the trick to someone else and you see right through it. But I'd still recommend this place to anyone hitting up Chinatown--it's a comedy routine that comes with a sampler of 10-12 gourmet teas, free of charge.

(A note on photo quality: As we strolled around taking pictures Ray said he was thinking of buying a real camera so he wouldn't have to use his cell phone, and asked how many megapixels mine was. I looked at the sticker on the camera and said "Uh, 2.0?" He laughed and said his PHONE was 8 megapixels. I got this camera for my 17th birthday. I have no plans to upgrade. Deal with it.)

One of my favorite things about San Francisco is the views down side streets--everything is so packed together that there are unexpected glimpses of things wherever you go. Sometimes it's the Bay Bridge:

Other times the Transamerica Building or the Ferry Building:

One of the dangers of living in a place like this is that you start to think you're the center of the world. Even when I lived four blocks from the Pacific Ocean and would walk down there every day to bask in its immensity, I still knew that the city was at my back, beautiful and funky and free and alive at all hours of the day and night. I can't even begin to explain it--I was a little person in a big city, but I was so connected to it that I felt like I was the city, and nothing outside of it mattered. (Ever seen this New Yorker cover?) But I'm moving on again, and this time I want to feel small.