Last day in Tokyo. Laying in bed this morning and hear commotion in the hall. Sounds like a room service cart is careening through the hallway. Then I realize I’m vaguely giddy. Then I hear my bathroom door slamming back-and-forth. Then I realize, “oooh, an earthquake.”

I hung around the room for a while. I was on the 49th floor of the Ritz Carlton — a thoroughly modern building, so it is well-built against these things. After a while though, I thought, “screw this; just walk outside and get a coffee anyway.”

I packed up my newspaper and sunglasses and went out to the lift. An American women joined me. She had the look of serious grippedness. As the lift goes down I small-talker her, “were you shaken awake too?” “Yes,” she said, “what’s going on?” “It’s an earthquake,” I answered, and at this point the filial son in me broke out, and I started laughing hysterically. What the hell did she think it was? I don’t think my eye-watering laughter made her feel especially comforted, but I couldn’t help myself. She says, “why are you laughing?” All I could say was, “nothing to be done about it–go downstairs and have a coffee.”

This is my second noticeable earthquake in Tokyo. Each time I am surprised by how it lasts much longer than I’d expect, and it’s much more of a vague swaying/falling feeling than any kind of industrial shaking or vibration.

UPDATE:  Here’s a brief and bad capture I took with my camera.  For a moment when i pan to the window, you can sort of make out the swaying.   I have no idea what the terrible noise on the audio is.

 

Strong earthquake hits Japan

6 minutes ago

TOKYO (AFP) — A powerful earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale struck northern Japan Saturday, the meteorological agency said.

The earthquake hit in Iwate prefecture, some 500 kilometres (300 miles) north of Tokyo, and rattled buildings in the capital.

Television footage showed buildings also shaking in northern cities of Japan. Bullet trains were automatically shut down as a precaution.

The quake had a depth of 10 kilometres (six miles), the agency said.

There was no immediate word on potential damage or casualties, and the agency did not issue a tsunami warning.

A new earthquake warning system kicked in for the quake, with public broadcaster NHK flashing an alert moments before it struck.

Japan endures some 20 percent of the world’s powerful earthquakes. It has built an infrastructure intended to withstand tremors.

Ron Carter

Originally uploaded by fstop45.

…assuming no mass-murderers or suicide bombers attack the Tokyo Blue Note, I’ll be enjoying a night of Ron Carter, master bassist.

The Truck

Originally uploaded by karavshin.
This afternoon went to Akihabara ‘Electric Town’ in Tokyo, looking for an amateur radio store I’d been to years ago (Rocket Radio — defunct as far as I can tell).

Anyway, there had been some sort of traffic accident, but the police cordon was massive, there were dozens of investigators and detectives, and there was apparently evidence all over the street.

Had no idea what had happened till I checked Google News and found out that a lunatic had gone on a killing rampage an hour before I arrived. (I had spent the morning buying art supplies at Tokyo Hands and Seikaido). He rented a truck (shown here), drove it down a street, plowing into people, before coming to stop, jumping out, and stabbing a lot of other people before being subdued!

It’s 4:00pm in Tokyo. Just landed from Seattle. Sick to my gills of American/Western food, so even the skankiest noodle diner in the Narita airport sounds good*. Rapidly passed by the airport’s McDonald’s, but on my dash I noticed what looked to be a western girl manning one of the cash registers. She was as brashly and energetically calling for the next customer as any of the others, except she wasn’t Japanese. Sure I’ve seen lots of Japanese-speaking Westerners working in Japan, but generally in skilled, professional jobs. Never in Japanese service industry. I can’t even begin to imagine what a culture shock that would be. Japanese service culture is about as far removed from any service I’ve received in any country, anywhere. Kudos to her. Might not be much salary, but the anecdotes must be amazing.

*Ended up having a Japanese vegetable curry that had outstanding sauce

Quick update.

Luke and Ling got back from Perth this afternoon.  Don’t know whether it’s an illusion or not, but Luke looks bigger. I’ve only seen him a few hours total in the last ten days.  One thing is for certain, however, and that is he’s trying to talk much much more.  Lots of long extended babbling repeats of things we say.  Matt comes over next month and I’m guessing by then he will be making some serious noise.

Okonomiyaki is sometimes called Japanese pizza. Tonight we had both Okonomiyaki and italian pizza.  I used the end of the pizza dough from the other day (I didn’t achieve as fluffy a crust as I wanted. I think because I blind-baked the crust in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom element) and used up left over batters from a kimchi okonomiyaki and a seafood okonomiyaki.  I bought several liters of sake, some umeshu, and two cases of Japanese beer for the party sunday. Still to arrange is the sashimi and spare okonomiyaki parts.

My green coffee beans are ready for collection tomorrow. Looking forward to playing with my iRoast 2 roaster.  I used some mocha java recently and it made decent espresso, bit darker than sumatran stuff I’ve been using.

Downloaded several Bruce Sterling and William Gibson books onto my n73 today. It appears that MobiReader only will read its own books purchased from its store. Death Penalty.  QReader appears to read .txt (but not .rtf) and refuses to read .pdfs, so I need to convert the rtf and pdfs to text before copying them over.

Still bumbling along with Japanese.  I’ve been having my teacher come over and give me private lessons instead of the class. I fell behind when I was travelling, so am racing to catch up. Actually I’m not even racing. The class is a giant grammar-cram and I don’t get a chance to practice my speaking. With a tutor, I can practice and work over stuff a lot more, so I am happy with that arrangement.

And I think that is about it.

Bought all the ingredients for authentic Okonomiyaki at Meidi-Ya today and we tried it for dinner. It came out quite well I think. Putting on the right otafuku brown sauce and some japanese mayo definitely goes a long way to making it taste ‘right’.

I followed a recipe of:

1) pour on batter mixture

2) cook uncovered for 3 minutes.

3) add any toppings (like bacon or mochi) and cover

4) cook for another five minutes

5) flip, re-cover, and cook for another five minutes

6) cover with otafuku, ao nori, bonito flakes, and mayonnaise

• Remarks? More batter, less cabbage, otherwise it is a too-loosely bonded coleslaw.
• Don’t try to make massive okonomiyakis, they are too hard to flip.
• Cook on the lower end of medium heat. If it’s not browned sufficiently, add two minutes to a phase time.
• If you add sakura ebi (tiny, dried prawns) grind them up before you use them, otherwise you get too many stray antennae and things in your mouth while eating, and it feels like you’re eating grasshopper pie.
• Kim-Chi Okonomiyaky? Yes, but add a lot of kimchi and replace the cabbage on a 1:1 basis.
• If in doubt, lower heat, don’t rush it.

If you are curious how it looks, there are endless okonomiyaki videos on youtube.

Have  been nursing a terrible hangover all day.  The only solution is to drink lots of water, but for some reason water tastes really, really bad to me when I’ve got a hangover, so it’s quite a vicious cycle.  I tried to sneak around the problem by making an ice drink (it’s really hot here today).  I was sort of lazy, sort of stupid.  I peeled the hide off of three oranges and two grapefruits and liquidified them with my hand-blender, pith and all, and then mixed that broth with a big bucket of shaved ice.   It was absolutely horrendous, there was a peel-like bitterness that I could not escape.  I tried to add sugar and all that resulted was a bad drink that tasted like peel + undissolved table sugar.  Then I poured ‘passion fruit’ syrup from my aborted Hurricanes at the Crayfish Boil.  That also just added more to the sweet note, but the bitter/peel note was undiminished.  Ling liked it, but I poured mine down the drain.

Ling was telling me about their visit to one of our friends who has a 1yo girl.  While they played Luke hit her on the head with a toy hammer, so she cried.  He didn’t really know how to respond (this often happens when he does things impulsively [he is 21 months after all]) and sort of stood there sheepishly, distressed by Alissa crying and wondering what Ling and Alissa’s mom would do.  The poor little guy doesn’t have a lot of tools in his emotional response toolbox, so he used that one that normally gets the best response from us:  he started tap dancing and making a hopeful smile.

There are a pile of Japanese restaurants at Robertson Quay. We went there tonight and ate a restaurant (forgot the name) that serves “Taiwanese Food in Japanese Style.”  Best dishes were a crab/bamboo/vegetable omelette.  Their gyoza was ok, though not teriffic.  Had Dan Dan Mein which was pretty darn good.  Ordered a taiwanese spring onion omelette which I thought was horrible (like an old, tough, oily prata) but for some reason Ling LOVED it.   Briefly, i guess I’m not making this sound like such a great restaurant, but we actually did enjoy it and would go back.

Popped next door to ‘The Chocolate Factory’ and had a cake and a coffee.  The chocolate candy room had some really beautiful candies on display.  The place was really busy though (9pm on  a Saturday night) and the French  chocolatier looked… umm…. prickly, so we figured we’d come back some other day to pick over the chocolate selection.

Tomorrow I am doing a test-run of okonomiyaki recipes.  Didn’t realize that the batter-binder uses not only flour, but a starchy stick Chinese yam.  I’ve found a lot of good recipes and guides, so I think i have a fighting chance of making some on-spec okonomiyaki.

What else?  Still hovering around 76.8kg.  I didn’t go light the last few days (yakitori last night) and haven’t been running, plus I fell behind on my Japanese.  Doing some catch-up tuition with なおこせんせい　(my teacher, Naoko) and my membership at the hote health club next door start imminently, so i can swim at lunch time.
A bunch of travel coming up.  Hong Kong and Dubai the final weekend of this month.  Japan in mid-April i think.  Next weekend hosting a small party to finish off the last of our three frozen hokkaido tarabakani king crabs. That will be bittersweet.  The Okonomiyaki party is mid-April.  Around April 30th will probably host a deep-friend turkey as three of us have birthdays on April 29 or 30.

Living off Toby’s Estate beans I brought back from Sydney.  The Espresso Rico is their best espresso blend by far.  I spilled some of a ristretto yesterday, and it was almost black as lacquer. Really good, chocolaty stuff, perfect for milk-based espresso drinks.  I need to get some green beans to play with in my iRoast2 after I use up my current stock of beans.

On the advice of a Japanese friend of my sister-in-law, we visited this family-style, family-run Japanese restaurant near Darling Harbour, after taking Luke to the Sydney Aquarium.

It looks shabby, like a bad and greasy Chinese restaurant selling “economical rice” to hobo’s. But it only looks old and tired because it’s old and established, run by a Japanese couple, the Oka’s, for many years. It turned out to be very tasty. Half the customers were Japanese, which was also a good clue.
I order Katsu Curry and Ling called a salmon/avocado maki. In a restaurant that looked like this, I thought hers was a brave choice, but she said it turned out to be really good, especially against the standard of other “family” Japanese restaurants we’ve eaten at. My katsu curry was good, the gravy looked rough and from scratch, and had good seasoning. The rice tasted good, too, as if it had been cooked in mineral water.

We ended up calling another dish we saw several people eating, tempura soft-shelled crab. This tempura is not light-colored in the Edo-style, it’s more old fashioned which is darker. Tasted good, no hint of grease-logging, and was sprinkled with a nice, crisp dressing and served on some salad.

My biggest regret? Not ordering the kara-age (deep fried chicken). I saw numerous people call the dish, it’s clearly good. The chicken looked mouth-watering. It was served (oddly) on a bed of penne-like pasta, then sprayed down in a light matrix of Japanese mayonaise. Not exactly healthy-looking, but must taste fantastic.

51 Druitt St, Sydney

Phone (02) 9283 0606

I bought three packs of noodles that look like what I’d conventionally call ‘Ramen’. I have no idea what the differences are — they look identical and their ingredient list is identical:

Nishiyama Jukuseimen Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white
Nishiyama Komugi Men Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white
Nishiyama Tsuke Men Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white

It keeps getting deeper. Now it’s obvious to me that I cannot get by in Japanese just knowing the kana.  I need to learn the kanji as well.  The baseload kanji corpus that all high-schoolers in Japan theoretically learn is called the jouyou kanji. It’s a set of 1,945 characters that they learn over the course of nine years.  Of course I am on a different schedule.

Went to Kinokuniya bookstore tonight to check out their books on learning Kanji.  I bought the most intriguing book I could find, ‘The Kanji Handbook‘ by ‘Vee David’ published by Tuttle Language Library. Sadly it is one of the few books with a really miserable Amazon product page.

The book seems to try to introduce a lot of innovative learning strategies for a non-japanese adult to learn kanji, as opposed to a Japanese child.  There is a total mismatch there, as I have complex thoughts with poor grammar/vocab, while a kid has simple thoughts to correspond with their simple grammar/vocab. Consequently they teach the words in a different grouping and order.

Some of the things they do are, frankly, weird or idiosyncratic, but I am willing to give them a shot.

The first thing he does is something called “KanjiHybrids” which is giving out words that are hybrids of kanji and english. For example, 四our, for the character for “four”.

Then he combines groupings of similar characters into a terrible little rhyming couplets formed with these KanjiHybrids, for example:

四our 匹nimals in the 西estern corrall.  (four animals in the western corrall)
There you have kanji that look quite alike. Practicing these sets of verses repeatedly is supposed to train me to recognize and remember their fine differences, as well as cement my knowledge of the characters’ meanings.
Anyway, that’s the idea and this is what I am working on.  In the meantime, chewing away with the vocab (I 95% mastered the set I was complaining about the other day). I bought a few more grammar books that seemed to have more exercises and explanations than the one I have.  At least can vary my practice a bit — they all have to cover the same stuff sooner than later.

The wife of a friend/colleague of mine in Tokyo has been in hospital for close to a week now, so today I wanted to send a bouquet of flowers on behalf of Ling, Luke, and I.

I asked the office administrator in Tokyo about this, as I figured I could easily stray into a “you sent a what to a who in a where!?” situation.

She said the two strong guidelines for sending flowers to someone sick in Japan are:

1. No ’strong smelling’ flowers like lillies. (Are lillies strong?)
2. No flowers in pots, because pots are things you’d grow a tree in, trees have roots, and thus you are implying the person is going to be in the hospital for a long time.

So I simplified the guidelines for her, “So I should order flowers that don’t smell good and die quickly” ?

The answer was, “mmmmm basically…. yes.”

This started out as a post about my iPod. It had a lot of zombie podcasts I couldn’t get rid of regardless of how much sync’ing I tried to do.  A surgical strike via Windows Explorer solved the problem and now my 2GB iPod Nano has a nice balance of JapanesePod101 podcasts and music.

I continue to study Japanese.  My attendance at class has been fine except for one night I had to skip in order to collect a prescription for Luke’s …ummmm … foreskin infection (ouch!).  I learned katakana myself because I got annoyed having to refer to the teacher’s legend. For some reason the syllabus doesn’t require us to learn katakana, however lots of vocabulary is in katakana.  Anyway, that was comparatively trivial.   Where am I now?

I haven’t mastered all the vocabulary in the chapters we’ve covered.

Trying to memorize the words off the long lists we have doesn’t work well for me.  I transcribed the vocabulary onto blank business cards used as flashcards. That seems to be a lot more effective. I probably have a hundred cards right now.  Something I’ve just realized is that I master words much more quickly if I cover them in dosages of 10-15 cards at a time, preferably in clusters of words that have something to do with each other.  I was trying to chew through chunks of fifty words at a time and found it terribly inefficient.

Given the stack of non-mastered words I have left, I should be able to knock it off by tomorrow evening.

One note is that presently I am not learning the Kanji, only the kana for each word. Kanji will be a separate effort.

I need/want more practice writing and speaking sentences using the grammar we’ve been taught. 

The class offers little time for much practice speaking and the assignments we’re given are relatively brief and don’t punish me with enough of the rote practice I feel I need.  I’ve been trying to “run laps” myself and write lots of sentences using the vocabulary and sentence constructs I know, but it doesn’t feel as exhaustive, exhuasting, or as thorough as I desire.  I think the solution will be to get a personal/private tutor to come by and work me over once or twice a week.

I was annoyed by my inability to competently operate my Canon G90 Wordtank

But now I see that the key is to learn kanji stroke order, so that will be a little side-project for  when I get tired from the more important vocabularly memorization and grammar practice points.  There are so many japanese language resources on the web that it seems almost sinful to pay money for a book on writing kanji.

I haven’t done much with my alternative learning tools lately

I’ve been too busy to have the time for other textbooks like my Manga-based tutorial and I haven’t spent much time listening to JapanesePod101 lately.  I’ve been running to work a few times each week, but I find listening to Glenn Gould play Bach has been the most comfortable companion, moreso than rock or Japanese lessons at any rate.  But now that I have my ipod de-constipated, I will fill it with a better range of practice material and so should steal an extra 15-20 minutes per day for study.

I guess that’s it for now. I have a stack of green flashcards howling for my attention.

I was very excited when I bought my Canon Wordtank G90. It has a stylus that lets you write kanji on the screen and then it deciphers it for you.

Theoretically.

I struggled to use it while I was in Japan. I had high hopes that when I returned to Singapore I would figure it out, write a nice little guide, and then translate away. It’s been much more of a slog than that. I have enormous difficulties writing kanji that it recognizes.

Tonight I was trying to practice with it, using some of the simpler kanji from lessons from JapanesePod101. I was trying to write, for instance,　せんのう　’Emperor of Japan’. (*) 　The first character I could write relatively easily, it’s simple. The second I struggled for fifteen minutes. In vain. I could never get it to work. I’d either run out of time or it would just misread whatever I was writing.

I know the wordtank kanji recognition is sensitive to stroke order. I looked at some quick stroke order primers and my brain had a buffer overload.

In distress, I called on Ling to come show me how she’d write it. She took one glance and dashed out a (I thought) shabby-looking copy of what I saw on the original kanji. I tried several time to replicate that order on my wordtank and failed. Ling grabbed the pen, scribbled her kanji scrawl, and the computer recognized it instantly and accurately. ugh.

So I guess I really will have learn how to write these stroke orders. Any good primers on this? Ugh.

(*) For some reason the Microsoft japanese keyboard system doesn’t know or recongize the kanjii for せんのう。 Dunno why. Maybe I’m using it wrong, but none of the options work, whether I try to browse the options individually on せん　and のう　　　or together as せんのう. I tried to cut-and-paste that kanji from adobe, but when I pasted it, all it showed was “??”.

---

So the answer really does seem to be “learn stroke orders.” I found a few sites that illustrate the stroke order for basic kanji. The Wordtank quite dependably recognizes these when I follow the correct order.

My colleagues in Tokyo generally eat as a pack that dashes out between trading hours for a no-nonsense thirty-minute meal somewhere. Each time I go there, at least once per week they go to various Chinese restaurants for something they call Tan Tan Mian.

Most restaurants cook the dish differently from each other, but my favorite manifestation of it is as a quite-spicy soup in a thick broth strongly tasting of peanuts and sesame. The noodles are fairly plump.

Looking around the web for decent recipes for it I find many that seem to be a much more meaty/less brothy recipe. It looks more like a bolognaise sauce than noodles in a hearty broth.

I’d like to make exactly what I eat at the best place I’ve tried in Tokyo, but I guess that is going to take some experimentation because I don’t see much consistency among the recipes.

Ingredients I am guessing I’ll need:

• Some of these recipes call for “Szechuan red peppercorns,” or “huajiao” (”flower pepper”) in Chinese. These give Szechuan food its distinctive taste. Cayenne or red chili peppers are NOT interchangeable with Szechuan peppercorns! Huajiao is inexpensive and can be found in many Chinese specialty groceries stores.
• My guess is the sesame/peanut taste principally comes from using tahini. Not sure if there is a Chinese variation to Tahini. Most tahini I’ve bought is more of a North African ingredient.
• Wheat noodles.  Not sure if buckwheat counts.  I guess I could try soba, but I remember the noodles being thicker, more substantial than soba. So perhaps udon is a better choice. I like udon more, anyway, and is also made from wheat.
• Ya Cai or some other preserved vegetable. I can always find something decent from a Japanese grocer.  They love preserved vegetables too.

I guess this will be a weekend experiment at some point. All the sesame paste and noodles doesn’t make for an especially low-calorie meal, so I shouldn’t hurry to do this.

Bought two Hokkaido Tarabakani たらばかに King Crab from Isetan today.  I believe the Hokkaido species are red king crabs.

Not going to do much preparation for them…  just prepare some ghee with garlic,  some lemon, and hopefully some freshly-grated horseradish cocktail sauce (I don’t care if cocktail sauce sounds cheezy or not).   If I can find a nice ripe mango I’ll slice one up to accompany it.

Other dishes?  Dunno. I bought some bonito flakes, some dried kelp, dried hotate (scallops), some kana surime (fish/crab paste), and white miso, so I will probably brew up some sort of soup, too.

I scrambled yesterday and for several hours studied the Japanese katakana alphabet, used to phonetically spell foreign words. This morning I did the last few letters and found that on long series of electronic flashcards I score about 95% and usually half the errors are typos from answering too fast.

This compares to a few weeks for me to properly memorize all the hiragana. Why the difference? I’m not sure. The katakana doesn’t look naturally easier to remember than the hiragana.

The obvious answer is that I just didn’t push learning the hiragana fast enough, or once having learned the hiragana, I had the confidence to master the katakana, so I wasn’t sheepish about moving briskly. Alternatively I was wondering if I started to expand some dormant chunk of my brain muscle, so I truly could memorize the katakana faster.

One other point is that when mastering the hiragana, I also forced myself to master writing it, rather than simply recognizing it. I’ll bet that my writing isn’t as sharp or fast on the katakana. However, even if it’s only 85%, I am sure that within two hours I can have that to the same %95+ mastery level.

Anyway, now this liberates me substantially to move on to reading a lot more stuff. I have a book ‘Writing Katakana’ by Jim Gleeson that has a lot of phonetic word translation exercises, so it will be useful to go through that. *Note to anyone that buys that book… do the exercises in pencil, not pen like me, so that the exercises are reusable.

Still working at it. My trip to Tokyo meant I missed the first two classes, but that was ok, as they started teaching them hiragana, which I had already been teaching myself. I am pleased to say that I know all the hiragana now

あいうえおかきくけこさしすせそたちつてとなにぬねのはひふへほまみむめもやゆよらりるれろわをんわを

(there iare more than these, but they’re either just accent mark variations that sound different ふぶぷ　or short combinations to make a sound きょきゅきゃ）

Anyway, I’ve got this class twice a week for two hours starting at 720pm. It’s always a race to get there on time but I’ve managed. This was a particuarly tiring week, and on wednesday night I was vvvvvery close to flaking, but at the last minute I decided to do the right thing and went. Glad I did as the teacher, young japanese girl, adds new stuff every week, so falling behind would be bad.

The instruction seems ok, but am glad i am sticking with my plan to keep my training hetergenous. The grammar instruction is good but the examples in the textbook are dry as dirt. Really lifeless dialogs and vocabulary. This is where japanesepod101 is so much more interesting. I also don’t get much practice getting to speak. I’m thinking about finding a tutor to once a week go through speaking exercises so that I can actually do the stuff out loud, rather than only write things out on paper. There seems to be a huge difference between properly writing a sentence on paper and saying it out-loud on the fly.
My biggest suprise has become my biggest annoyance. She says we do not have to learn katakana (phonetic alphabet for foreign words  ex:カキコクコ　サシスセソ　etc ). But the textbook is full of foreign names and other katakana, so I have to use her legend to check the words. It’s really irritating. I have decided tol quickly learn katakana  to solve the problem.  I want to know it anyway so I can read more signs and labels.

I wish i could report as much success in my running and diet. The first part of this week was largely grueling and I was going to bed three hours later than normal. I’m taking a three-day weekend (Ling’s birthday on monday) so I should be able to catch up on all this.

While in Tokyo, Ling visited Kappabashi District bought me some onigiri molds and a hangiri for preparing Japanese sushi rice. A hangiri is a round, shallow, flat-bottomed bowl made of cypress woood an bound wtih copper bands. It helps quickly dissipate extra moisture and evenly cools the rice. Tonight I used it to mix in the furiake for my onigiri.

Onigiri are essentially triangular rice balls mixed with flavorings and fillers often wrapped in crispy nori or grilled with some sesame oil then brushed with  shoyu.

Using my molds I made onigiri tonight and I used a new bottle of furikake (a mixture of sesame seeds, bonito flakes, seaweed, and other seasonings, often including, apparently, msg). Tonight’s furikake was great; it had wasabi mixed in it (japanese horseradish). I don’t care for the noxious nose of wasabe, but this was just enough of a hint only to be nice smell with none of the ammonia-like punch. Onigiri fillings? Zapped some unagi (eel) from the freezer, some pickles, and another really nice garnish, some sort of preserved sea kelp with fish roe. They were the nicest onigiri I’ve made yet.

I also grilled one onigiri in a pan with some sesame oil. It was pretty nice, although I wish I had brushed on more shoyu before eating it.
I enjoyed this furikake so much that sometime I’m going to make my own.
That was the extent of my cooking this week, riceballs and liquifying some fruit in a food processor to mix with seltzer water. I brought home some Christmas wines from work, and briefly considering making some sort of braised beef recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but didn’t really have the mood or the appetite for an all-afternoon kitchen job.

I was sitting in the office (48th floor) talking to a colleague when I heard someone say “earthquake!” then I stopped and realized, “oh yeah, the floor really is shaking…” I guess the tremors felt much faster than I expected. Higher frequency?

Anyway it really did occur as shown on the Japan Meteorological Agency’s site. (Apparently earthquakes are a meteorological phenomenon?):

Earthquake Information (Information about Seismic Intensity at each site)
Issued at 13:27 JST 09 Jan 2007

Occurred at (JST)	Latitude (degree)	Longitude (degree)	Depth	Magnitude	Region Name
13:18 JST 09 Jan 2007	36.1N	139.8E	80km	4.3	IBARAKI KEN NANBU

4.3 Is apparently considered a ‘light’ earthquake.

Under everyone’s desk is a white hardhat you’re supposed to put on in a serious earthquake. I’ve been searching for four days here for a winter hat that will fit me. The largest I’ve found is 60cm, and that is still many cm from working.  So good luck on finding a hard plastic hat that will either! haha

One good way to find cool stuff in Tokyo is to set off on meaningless missions. So this morning I found the location for the flagship Muji store and browsed what was playing on the arts scene. Nothing grabbed me by the throat for attention, so I semi-arbitrarily chose the Boroboro Dorodoro Exhibition - The Return of Japanese Subculture at the Watari-Museum of Contemporary art.  There were two artists showing there,

Misaki Kawai, Taylor McKimens 

American McKimens had one 3-d display that looked like water leaking from the roof, falling and puddling on the floor. It looked nice and was clever.  He uses primitive materials (they look like cheap, strong tempra paints) but paints in a very heavy, simple, bright style, so it works.  I didn’t care for his paintings, they didn’t click with me.  Strange pictures of blobs and of hairy male torsos in underwear.

Kawai had a really cool 3-d display too. Even Luke enjoyed. it was an exceptionally large 3d diorama (is that a contradiction of terms?) of some sort of fantasy space house.  It was made, also, of terribly primitive materials, but painfully detailed.  Her use of lighting and sound gave the display a warmth and life and reality it would have otherwise been lacking.  I wonder what they’ll do with it once the display is over? It’s huge and brittle.
Venue: Watari-um, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art
Schedule: From 2006-10-14 To 2007-01-28
Address: 3-7-6 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001
Phone: 03-3402-3001 Fax: 03-3405-7714

From here we bumbled through side streets to Harujuku. It was nice to go through Harujuku from the side because we got to see a lot more of the tiny little fashion places I’ve always hear about, not just the big retail stuff  running into the main intersection.

I bought a Canon Wordtank G90 Electronic Dictionary at Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku today. I chose the G90 instead of the V90 because the V90, although it will pronounce words for you, only does it for the Chinese dictionary. I have no interest in Chinese, so there’s no reason to pay the extra money.
The G90 has an English ‘quick reference’ but I don’t think it’s complete, or at least not thorough. The ‘quick reference’ is perhaps 15% of the entire manual, the balance being in Japanese. For example, it is mentioned that you can turn the menuing to English from the setup menu. It’s up to you to figure out where the setup is. Ha. Also didn’t explain how to get to the “draw some kanji/kana on the screen”. (There is a small icon you need to click) Perhaps some day I’ll write a proper manual with screen shots for the thing and stick it online.

Anyway was just playing with it to see how it worked. Of course the first thing I did was enter “fuck” into the English-to-Japanese dictionary. It does auto-complete. Wow. A lot of results:

1. fuck
2. fuckable
3. fuck-all
4. fucked-
5. fucked-up
6. fucker
7. fuckface
8. fuckhead
9. fucking
10. fucking A
11. fucking hell
12. fuck-in-law (even I don’t know what this one means)
13. fuck me
14. fuckoff
15. fuckpig (this wins the ‘Total Completeness Award’ — don’t think I’ve heard this term since university)
16. fuck-up
17. fuckwit

Anyway, I’ve only had the thing for a few hours, and don’t have much more to say about it yet.

Next week I will be working in Tokyo. Stealing some fun out of it, so on Friday night Ling, Luke and I fly up and then will fly back the following Sunday night. I’ll have to work during the week, but at least it will be a break. It’ll be an exercise in schedule flexibility for Luke, too, something we haven’t tinkered with much.

I’ve always been disgusted with myself for being mono-lingual. It’s especially noticeable in Singapore where nearly everyone speaks a second (or third) language to some degree. It’s especially frustrating when I’m in Japan, because I could get more out of my trips if I could communicate better at restaurants, stores, and on the street.

I have new responsibilities in my job that justify frequent trips to Tokyo.

These factors precipitated in me deciding to learn Japanese. It sounds plausible. I have the motivation to learn it as well as the means. Now the trick is to avoid mistakes of my past.

Spanish in high school. Well, this was simple, I didn’t have any motivation to learn it, except to meet absolute minimum foreign language requirements for university admittance. No loss anyway, I had no interest in Latin America and I am sure the quality of the instruction was lamentable.

Russian in university. I took a year’s Russian in university and by the end of the second semester had lost interest in it. It became increasingly clear I wasn’t going to Russia, the hot young teacher from the first semester was replaced with an old hag in the second, and the classes were quite rote, from a textbook. Most of the class was written.

Chinese with tutor and language programs. This soon went nowhere. My wooden ear and iron tongue do very poorly with the tones. I did have a (flaky) tutor but it wasn’t a very engaging education. Boring repetitive dialogues from old textbooks. I also tried some of these expensive Pimsleur-style cassette-based programs. They’re even more useless — boring as hell and with no one giving any feedback to what you’re saying.

Remembering these lessons, my approach to learning Japanese is:

• Hetergenuous study material. Not sticking with a single course, book, or program, otherwise it gets stale and frustrating.
• Speaking practice. Speaking practice seems essential to internalizing this
• Daily practice. Need to do something every day.
• Observable progress. I need to be able to see results.

So my current training regime is:

1. Signed up for the popular Singapore Japanese Cultural Society beginner Japanese program. I took the ‘intensive’ course, which is two hours twice a week and finishes in six months rather than one year. It will prepare me to take the Japanese Language Proficiency level four exam (the lowest level. Levels 2 and 1 reflect good fluency in Japanese).
2. Bootstrapping myself in learning the kana (hiragana, katakana) characters so that I can read the texts. I originally thought I could get away without bothering to learn how to read and write Japanese, but I soon realized that was folly. Anyway, learning the characters does give a nice feeling of progress. In just a week or so I’ve learned all the hiragana (あいえおう　。。。　らりろるれ）　so that has been a rewarding program
3. Bought a couple different textbooks with audio practice to mix up the normally boring introductory lessons. I bought the AJALT “Japanese For Busy People” program, as I saw that the Singapore Japanese Association uses that as their textbook.
4. Bought some unusual books for when I’m tired of the standard texts, including “Japanese in MangaLand” which is a pratical guide for people trying to learn Japanese to read Manga comics. I’m not especially interested in Manga, but the material comes in from a different angle and mixes things up a bit. It’s also got some practical elements the other books are missing.
5. Subscribed to JapanesePod101.com. RogerWarez pointed me to this site. It’s absolutely phenomenal. They have dozens of short 8-15minute long mp3 podcasts I can listen to on my PC or iPod that give short lessons in beginner Japanese. Lots of good word practice. Their program is marvelous because the material and examples they use are actually alive, contemporary, and interesting. The site is free, but I bought a subscription to have access to their ‘Learning Center’ which has supplementary texts and support information, as well as some flash-based flashcard systems. I used that extensively in learning the hiragana.
6. Then of course, I go to Tokyo as frequently as possible.