"In Defense of Food" and simple cooking

I've often said that cooking is enjoyable. Taking time to focus on slicing, chopping, and preparing the food can be a very relaxing activity. Of course, I'm also guilty of ordering too many pizzas, eating burgers at McDonald's and even scoffing down a 7-Eleven burrito in the car. I tried some healthy(ish) cooking last night, complete with my Japanese apron (and of course a good glass of red wine!).



Cooking "real food" is definitely the healthier option, and the book I'm now reading, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), further substantiates this. It's actually a good read - Pollan, a journalist for the New York Times, writes clearly and with humour. He talks about "the American paradox"- Americans (and, by default, I'm assuming Canadians) are obsessed with healthy eating, yet they are the fattest, least healthy, nation. This is, Pollan asserts, a disease called orthorexia, which is "an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating". Pollan also makes a distinction between "real food" and "edible food-like substances". The 7-Eleven burrito would definitely fall into the latter category!

So what, according to Pollan, should we eat? Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Check out this talk (on YouTube) that he gave at Google. He pretty much summarizes the book, and you can get a sense of his style. It's about an hour long, including a question period.

Shopping for Food in Japan

For newcomers to Japan with little Japanese speaking ability and no expertise in preparing Japanese dishes, tackling the local supermarket can prove a daunting task. A few books that I still refer to regularly are:

A Guide to Food Buying in Japan by Carolyn Grouse
This had been out of print for a few years, but is happily available again with the newest edition being from 2003. I'm only familiar with the 1987 ed, but find it a very useful guide.

A Dictionary of Japanese Food: Ingredients & Culture by Richard Hosking
A great dictionary specific to food. The food is listed in romaji but also includes the kanji, so you can figure what the mystery package in the fish-aisle actually contains.

100 Recipes from Japanese Cooking (Kodansha Bilingual Books)
I love bilingual cook-books. Just browse through in English, pick out a recipe, then take the book with you to the supermarket. If you're not sure what the ingredient is in English, show the Japanese word to one of the clerks, who can point you in the right direction.

Though there is no better teacher than experience, these books will also provide some basic knowledge needed to navigate the supermarket.

However fabulous these books are, tough, sometimes, whether you're new to Japan, or a long-term resident, you get cravings for something a little different. Maybe it's comfort food from “home”, or something a little spicier than typical Japanese fare such as Thai curry. Unless you live in Tokyo (or, “The Big Toe” as a colleague has dubbed it), these non-Japanese ingredients can be tough to find. Years ago, getting specialty food and ingredients would have required a (fairly expensive) trip to Tokyo or another big city. Now, though, getting such items is just a few clicks away. And the choices are even wider if you can read and navigate the web a little in Japanese.

Some top websites for foreign food, delivered right to your door, are:

The Foreign Buyer's Club (http://www.fbcusa.com/eng/)

In English. You can get most anything “from home” here, from Alpen granola bars in The Deli section to Diet Snapple in The General Store. I've never used them since they generally take too long to deliver (sometimes up to a month) and I'm all about immediate gratification, but I know many people who have shopped here and who have been satisfied with the service.

The Flying Pig (http://www.theflyingpig.com)

In English. One of my personal favourites for finding some specialty items, The Flying Pig is a Costco shop-and-deliver service. Though their prices have been creeping (and sometimes leaping) up over the years, I still frequently order things like bagels and cream cheese, cans of black beans in bulk, and large sacks of Basmati rice. Delivery is usually within five days.

Now, of course, if you've got a little Japanese language ability, you have more choice – the world is your escargot!

For Thai food (a particular favourite of ours):

Allied Thai (http://www.allied-thai.co.jp/)

Japanese only. Good, wide selection of curry pastes, coconut milk, and chili peppers. I used to shop here exclusively for my Thai ingredients, but recently found a new source:

Isara Store (http://www.isarastore.com/)

Japanese only. Not as wide a selection of curry pastes as Allied Thai, but the prices are, somehow, much cheaper for some items (such as the 400g tub of curry paste). Delivery only took two days, and included a lovely, handwritten thank-you note for placing my order.

Anything else:

My most useful tool for buying anything I want in Japan is www.yahoo.co.jp;
In the search engine, using my Japanese (IME) input, I simply type ショッピング　(shopping), and then the name of whatever I'm looking for. I get lots of hits, and usually find a shop selling my desired item.

Strange Smells that I Like

Our olfactory sense is totally subtle, and brutally strong. Some of the strongest "memory joggers" are delivered to us via olfactory stimuli.

We might not know why we suddenly feel euphoric, or why tense. We might not directly associate a smell with a specific event. And yet, smell plays a great role in our daily lives. I've begun to think about this as I realize there are some smells that I like which are perhaps considered strange.

The "strange" smells that I like are:

• Sunscreen. I love the smell of sunscreen emanating from warm skin.
• Bug spray. Again, it should be in combination with a hot body - and what a good smell!
  
• Wet dog. Come on, you know the smell, right? And, yep, that's another smell I really like.
• Wet soil - as in, spring thaw. I don't get this here in the mild climate of Shizuoka, Japan, but every April/May in Montreal (sometimes not until July or August...okay, I exaggerate!), just when the weather starts to break, when warmth seems to find its way, finally, into your bones, the earth, too, feels it, and the snows melt and the earth heats up.... this is a good smell!
• Hockey rink. Unless you've visited (frequently) indoor hockey rinks, you won't know this smell - but it's distinctive and wonderful. The smell of sweat, cold, heat, and fervor...
  
• Candle wax. You have to close your eyes, and just breathe deeply, and imagine the scent...
• Nail polish. Strong and toxic. Nobody loves this scent....Yet I do.
  
• hot, wet concrete. This is along the same lines as the wet soil, but sooo different. On a hot, humid summer day, with a storm finally having broken, the smell of wet concrete makes the soul feel good.
• A snuffed-out match. The smell lingers in the air...
  

These are odd, and probably "icky" smells, and yet, these induce euphoria for me. Mostly they deal with extremes of hot and cold, emphasizing the short victory of summer over winter for me....

What smells do you like/love? Hate? Why? Please post in comments.... I'm just curious.

OH,of course, here is a link to a Britannica article on the sense of smell. Please watch the video (it's better (though just barely) than the article).

Hardy Heron, Final Release

Wow - hard to believe that I'm already in my fourth version of Ubuntu. I'd been waiting for a while for the final release of Ubuntu 8.04, a.k.a. Hardy Heron. I started with Edgy Eft, graduated to Feisty Fawn, moved up to Gutsy Gibbon and now, finally, I'm running Hardy Heron.

I did not want to install the Beta releases, and certainly not the Alpha releases because I'm really still just playing around with Linux. So I waited patiently for the official release, and I installed it as soon as was possible on April 24th (the day it was released), and am not-too-sorry to say that I was one of the many who contributed to Ubuntu's servers being so severely taxed!

I've been up and running for a week or so now, and am happy with Heron. Only one problem occurred, and it was my own fault. Some new kernels appeared at start-up, and I accidentally started up in the wrong kernel. I didn't realize that I was in the wrong kernel, and when I saw that my screen resolution was way out of wack, I (stupidly, without thought, un-fore-thinkingly), just went ahead and tried to uninstall some of my NVidia drivers and reinstall new ones. Well, this messed me up. A LOT! However....I'm back to normal with my dual-monitor display without problems...what I did was, finally, download this little tool, the IFS for Windows (found at http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html), which allowed me to navigate to my Ubuntu disk from my XP side (I'm dual booting with XP), and from XP I then saved a back-up copy (which Ubuntu had somehow been creating) of my xorg.conf file over the main xorg.conf file, thus in effect "rolling back" my display properties. Thankfully, this worked. I was about to become frustrated....

Anyway, if not for my own goof-up, Heron would have posed no problems at all, and even better, my Firefox 3 Beta 5 for Linux is allowing me to play flash videos in full screen. Another benefit, the Gnome Nautilus file browser now lets me see thumbnails of pics when I'm browsing to upload to Blogger. Like this here screenshot of my new Heron desktop (click on image for a larger view!):




You can see how uncluttered my desktop is. I love the simplicity offered by Ubuntu's clean desktop and system. I've got easy access to a few of my favourite programs whose icons you can see in the upper left: Firefox, Swiftweasel (both web browsers), F-Spot (photo managing software), and Evolution (for email). All open-source, all awesome.

Kamoshika, Gorillapods and other camping pics

So, as mentioned in my last post, we got away for a few days to do some camping and decompressing (we do work, of course - just not this week!)

While wending our way ever higher into the mountains in Brian's rugged Pajero, getting closer to a possible camping destination, we came around a corner to spot a kamoshika. The kamoshika is frequently described as being a deer-goat; some say it is more of a goat-antelope sort of animal. Whatever it was, we were fortunate enough to spot a few. These mammals only live at higher altitudes, and though we saw many of them when we camped in Ishikawa-ken a few years ago in spring, we hadn't seen any since. Now in the mountains of Tokyo-to, we managed two more sightings.

Here's a shot that I got as we rounded a bend in the road (it's not very clear, but you maybe get the idea):



After a few days of camping, at our second site, we decided to go for a hike in the early afternoon. As we rounded a bend, on foot, we caught site of another Japanese deer. Though the animal bolted and took cover in the woods, Brian got a decent shot with his D40X:



Other than deer sightings, we also took simple camping shots, such as this one of Brian:



And one of us together, 1718.3 meters above sea level, at the peak of Toritani (酉谷山）:




And, of course, since we'd brought along our Gorillapod, we had to get creative with the camera setup:

Time Un-Obsession in Golden Week

Golden Week is a typical peak holiday season in Japan. Our company doesn't have a week off as some do, but as work would be fairly quiet this week, we decided to take a few days off ourselves and head into the mountains for some rough-style camping. Strangely enough, we ended up camping in Tokyo.

Before you wonder too hard,we camped in the mountains of Tokyo-to, which is sort of like "Tokyo State" rather than Tokyo, the city. The outer reaches, which border Saitama and Yamanashi prefectures are quite wild, beautiful and rustic.

Here is a (possibly less-than-helpful) map of the general area in which we camped:

View Larger Map

We camped out for four nights, in two different areas. The second area afforded more hiking opportunities, but was somewhat less scenic.

However, both areas were devoid of: 7-Elevens, shops, vending machines, cars, paved roads, cell-phone reception and people.

Being so "out of touch" was refreshing; I couldn't receive phone calls or even check messages. I didn't wear a watch, and was unconcerned about even what day it was. This sense of timelessness, though artificially constructed by existing in the absence of artificial time, provided a wonderful respite.

However, it is also good to be back. We have a day of work, then a few days off again due to national holidays. We luckily got a few photos, including a couple of a kamoshika (a Japanese deer), which we'll be posting in a day or two...

(NOTE:somehow, this post didn't get published when I thought it had...anyway, more pics etc...coming soon)

Samurai William

Anyone who has even a passing interest in Japan is familiar with the book Shogun but James Clavell, a historical fiction novel. But probably far fewer know of Samurai William, a non-fiction account, by Giles Milton.

The central character in both books is the same: William Adams, an English navigator who, in 1600, became the first Englishman to set foot on the shores of Japan. Milton's account is well-researched, and he spends time establishing the context and history of trade with Japan by the Portuguese and Spanish prior to Adams' arrival aboard a Dutch merchant ship.

The book picks up pace after Adams' arrival, when he meets with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate who is widely credited with bringing unity to Japan. (You can read all about Tokugawa Ieyasu here at Encyclopedia Britannica.)

Samurai William is an easy, fast-paced read (though non-fiction, it's not at all dry), and for those who have spent a fair amount of time living in Japan, it is interesting to see how many things have stayed the same: cleanliness, love of baths, appreciation of the brevity of life.

Free Subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica

As most of you know by now, in addition to all the other things I like to do, I love to net surf. I spend hours sifting through tons of information, most of it meaningless and serving only to further shorten my attention span.

However, luckily not lost in the dross, was this Techcrunch article, through which I found out about free access for "web publishers" to Encyclopedia Britannica online.

Web publishers is fairly loosely defined, but bloggers definitely count. So, I cruised over to http://britannicanet.com/ where I registered the Japanrider blog. Of course, I had to wait for someone to approve the registration - and they did!

If you have a blog, I really think you should apply for access too!

I'm delighted to say that I now have a one-year free subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica online. I can link to articles, and this will give anyone who visits the article complete access to that article (but not to the rest of the site). I can also, apparently, embed cool widgets into my posts, but that I will have to try later.
For now, here is a "test" article on Zen

Mono no aware 物のあわれ

Another weekend has gone by - disappeared in a cloud of hiking, biking, and shopping. Now that it's over, and tomorrow is Monday, I realize too late that I didn't fully appreciate it. I lacked （もののあわれ） mono-no-aware.

Mono-no-aware can be translated as a "sensitivity to things", to appreciate every thing in its present moment, feeling the pathos of the brevity of existence. The term was applied to an artistic movement during the Tokugawa shogunate (the Edo period), but captures the essence of the Japanese outlook or culture. To appreciate what is, while it is; to savour the last vestiges of beauty in the autumn flower, the last living moment of life.

Again, mono-no-aware is very much a concept that, even before the term was coined (supposedly by Motoori Norinaga), was part of the way of the Buddha, and especially in Zen Buddhism. Appreciate the people and the time that is now, and understand that it will be gone.

We all too often live in the future, weighed down by our pasts. Where, then, is our present?

Zazen and Purple Chains

The title of this post makes one wonder - what can possibly connect zazen meditation and a purple chain? Allow me to ramble and perhaps the connection will become clear.

On Saturday, me and a few friends and colleagues ventured to my nihongo sensei's home, near Daiba station in Mishima. She lives on the grounds of Denshuji, a zen temple, which is overseen by the monk Kiku-san.

On Saturday, Kiku-san conducted a small zazen-kai (sitting meditation) for we visitors to his temple. As we assumed our seats on the zabuton (floor cushions), Kiku-san told a story (which I translate from the Japanese); the story went like this:

Long ago, in ancient Rome, there was a beautiful woman. A young man was in love with her, and proposed over and over, but she always rejected his proposals. Finally, one day as they were watching the lions in the lions' den at the Colosseum, he proposed yet again, and this time, the woman tossed her handkerchief into the ring and said, "if you bring that back to me, I'll marry you." The young man bravely leapt into the ring and returned with lady's handkerchief. Impressed with the young man's courage, the woman said she would marry him, that she was his. But the young man replied, "I'm sorry. But I can't marry you. I've found something that is more important to me now." Sitting quietly in the temple, about to begin our meditation, that was our task - to search, inside ourselves, for that which was more important than anything else.

Kiku-san and we meditators. Interesting to note: the monk must always be to the furthest left.




After the session, Kiku-san, who hails from Kyoto and has been the Denshuji monk for 20 years, admitted that he still hasn't found that "most important" thing yet. And so, the search for enlightenment continues.



After meditating, we (without the monk) proceeded to have a few glasses of wine and a fine lunch at my teacher's house before heading home - none the more enlightened.

So why, then, the reference to purple chains? That is a reference to my Rig and single-speeding.

Single-speeding is the embodiment of simplicity in mountain biking. The sheer absence of clutter, the clean design, make the single-speed ride the ride of Zen. At least, that's my take on it. And, while I was away trying to find the greater meaning of life, Brian generously put my new purple chain on my purple Rig!





All in all, it made for a great weekend!