It’s Thursday, so that means I’ve enjoyed another week of great school lunches. This week I was at all junior highs so they didn’t over fill my plates. On my island, all the food for elementary and junior high schools are prepared at one central location, then trucked to each school. Every school gets a trolley with sets of containers for each grade. Homeroom teachers’ food is included with their students’, but the rest of us have a separate teachers’ service. They always seem to put in a few extra servings in case people show up, so (usually the male P.E. teachers, but sometimes others) a few people get a bit extra. It seems each group of teachers has a different idea of who needs more food =D.
Milk, Barley Rice, Miso soup with shitake mushrooms, fried egg with Mozuku (a kind of seaweed), stirfry sliced daikon and seaweed, and miso cookies (a present on one of the students’ birthdays… it’s a popular Kumejima treat) You might notice that this one is arranged improperly. The ‘polite’ method would be to have rice on the left and soup on the right, with the other dishes farther away. I give it a pretty solid 5 on the Japan scale… where else are you going to see eggs like that?
Milk, rice millet, fish tempura, cabbage chanpuru, daikon and seaweed soup, shikuasa (sour lime) jelly. This one might just be a 4.5. The shikuasa is a delicious lime variant that is all Okinawa and works great in drinks and desserts. I’m not sure when flour came into use in Japan, but tempura is pretty Japanese. Even this type of chanpuru has more of a Japanese influence than say, goya champuru.
Milk, barley rice, mushroom soup, shrimp and vegetable boiled dumplings, and vegetable oyster stirfry. This one gets a 5… Shrimp dumplings… hmm what do you think?
Milk, Vegetable soup, cream spaghetti with meat and veg, custard filled waffle…. Well, there goes that nice Japanese lunch streak. This one has gaijin written all over it, not that it wasn’t Japanized and tasty. I’m still confused by the waffle desert being paired with pasta. The pasta had a nice cream and cheese sauce. The waffle was maple flavored and cold (but in a good way) from having been frozen. The soup was consomme.
Ok… now you know just how non-Japanese that meal was… I actually knew everything in it without resorting to a dictionary.
Milk, barley rice, stirfry vegetables, “lightly simmered” soup (さわにわん), and Karipori Fish (Karipori is the sound it makes when you eat it, so roughly ‘crunchy small fish’). This one was a challenge to translate to English. The fish dish is one I see on the menu every couple of months. Its mini fishes, whole, with peanuts and a semi sweet glaze binding them together. They’re crunchy, and you eat them bones, head and all. I had to ask a teacher what the soup meant, and then we had to check several dictionaries. It comes down to veggies in a nice light broth that was tasty… No recipe on this one for you. It gets a 5.
My favorite for this week was Friday’s lunch. I’m a sucker for tempura and I’m also a big fan of Shikuwasa. Which one do you think YOU would like LEAST?
Known as hagaki in Japanese, post cards are even bigger in Japan than they are elsewhere in the world. Post cards are used for different events, such as catching up with old colleagues after moving, or to make announcements, but the most popular use is for new years greetings. While people do call or visit, in Japan New Years is generally spent with the immediate family so cards are a useful way to keep in touch with friends and extended family.
The Japanese post office facilitates New Years delivery by holding the specially designed New Years hagaki until New Years Day. Japanese patrons can give their hagaki to the post office through December and be sure that the recipients will receive them after the first.
Hagaki come in many designs, from simple blank cards for custom designs to be printed on, to unique artwork ordered months in advance. The post office has a catalog of new designs ever year that can be ordered and customized to make preparation easier. Labeling 30, 40, 50 or more cards can be tricky, even with computers so the designed and customized options can be a huge time saver. Of course many people simply print their own to ensure unique and meaningful cards. Even those that are ordered usually have a few specific words for the recipient hand written in.
Often the designs will flow around the zodiac animal for the New Year. 2012 is the year of the dragon, so many in this year’s catalog feature variations on dragons or sea-horses, a Japanese variant on the zodiac.
***For 2013 check out my post on custom nengajo***
If you live in Japan, you’ll definitely want to consider sending hagaki to help build closer relationships with your friends, family, and co-workers. It’s not a requirement, but getting hagaki can be a pleasant surprise. Its a good way to show you understand a bit of Japanese culture.
One side of the hagaki will be metered with a red stamp, serial numbers (blurred below) and boxes for the postal codes. If you buy them from the post office, the “stamp” price is included in the cost when you order them. If you buy them from elsewhere, you might have to apply your own stamp.
The destination address goes vertically to the far right, followed by the recipient’s name. Put one number of the postal code in the red boxes above. This helps ensure fast delivery since the numbers are computer-read. The return address can be printed in smaller font to the left under the stamp. Again your postal code should go in the boxes.
The other side of the hagaki is for your greeting and messages. If you order a designed card they will come printed with your information on the front as well as the design. Most have some combination of “Happy New Year” or the traditional Japanese “oshougatsu omedetou” お正月おめでとう or “akemashite omedetougozaimasu” 明けましておめでとうございます。
The rest of the space you can fill in a personal message. If you buy blank cards, you can fill the area in with pictures of yourself, or family so that friends can see how you’re doing. The messages are usually a mix of good wishes for the coming year, and updates on the past.
If good will isn’t enough to get you to your local post office, each card doubles as an entry in a yearly sweepstakes. Every year the post office gives prizes away based on the serial numbers in on the card. You might end up giving your boss or friend a tv, trip, or cash.
Here’s a special bit of Okinawan Culture. Today happens to be the winter solstice (冬至). Throughout Japan many families will offer rice at their butsudan (family shrines) and pray for good health in the coming year. In the mainland they will offer white rice.
Okinawa has its own traditions, influenced by Chinese culture. Here they offer a type of fried rice called juushi (じゅうし). Since it is a special occasion they add a blue potato called ta-mu- in hogen（田芋 or たーむー). All together the offering is called toujijuushi (冬至じゅうし）。
Today for school lunch we had a bowl of toujijuushi and it was delicious. In fact it all disappeared before I could get a photo of it. So if you live in Okinawa, and today you had fried rice with bits of blue potato, now you know why. It’s the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year.
Long ago Japan was known in the West as China was known until only a few years ago, as makers of cheap products that would quickly break. After years of its manufacturing sector suffering under the stereotype, Japanese industries invested in quality control procedures and reasearch and eventually won a new image as creators of quality precision and heavy industrial items. Toyota went from a foreign brand few Americans would buy to the leader in hybrid technology.
This image is still alive today, though the world has and is changing. Many Americans expect Japanese households to have the same appliances, features, and functions that found in the west. While its true that there are still equitable levels of technology for the various income levels throughout society, several Japanese customs keep Japanese appliances unique.
So why should you care about what differences in appliances between Japan and the west? The answer is that those differences offer insights into the culture, and might help you understand Japan a little better, especially if you’re going to live there.
My experience is based on teacher housing which would likely equate to a middle-income family back in the States. So far the only items I’ve found that are truly similar are microwaves and toaster ovens. This means that the vast majority of items found in Japanese homes are quite different from their Western counterparts.
In order to understand why appliances are different, its helpful to understand Japanese houses. While things have certainly changed, like many aspects of Japan, the uniqueness can be traced back centuries.
Japanese houses are traditionally rather drafty. Long ago fire, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters meant houses needed to be cheaply made so they could be replaced easily. High levels of humidity also meant that iron nails were a poor option for building. Many Japanese houses were constructed in a way that enabled them to be completely disassembled, or quickly rebuilt. Instead of nails, interlocking joints (like puzzle pieces) joined various beams together, and roofs were straw that could be easily replaced. What’s more, since it rains so often in Japan, flooding was always an issue, so floors were built raised. This also allowed air to circulate under the floor boards, helping air move.
Japanese houses were built so that whole walls could be removed to catch faint breezes in the summer. This also helped reduce the chance of mold growing in the humid climates. By changing and adjusting sliding doors, the temperature of the house could be easily regulated. Since houses were built cheaply and quickly there was rarely any insulation or double walls, making the houses drafty, even in winter.
Today most houses are made of concrete to protect against earthquakes and worse, but they still have. Since space is limited, many people live in mansions, like apartments in the States. Yet even though building materials have changed, some aspects of Japanese design have remained. There are still raised floors that often have vents outside. Many also have large windows or sliding glass doors where possible that can be opened to catch breezes. This and other aspects of modern Japanese housing, aspects that have their roots in the farming villages of years past, drive the unique aspects of Japan’s consumer society…
One of the biggest differences in appliances, especially for those from warmer climates, is the lack of central air. In Japan, air conditioners are two separate unites connected by hoses. Half the setup is a boxy fan that sits outside, and the second half is an internal unit about three feet wide that is placed somewhere near the ceiling of a room inside. Though they vary in efficiency, they generally do a very good job cooling one standard tatami room, and a very poor job on any further rooms. For a Japanese apartment, or even house, its common to have only one air cooler to three rooms or so.
Why not cool the entire house? Power in Japan in expensive. Since Japan is an island nation with few resources, oil and coal have to be imported. Nuclear power has long been unpopular and its future is still in doubt after Fukushima. Even in the southern prefectures, like Okinawa, many people can’t afford to keep even the smaller Japanese units running as much as they would like. The reasons go deeper though.
Think back to the history of Japanese houses. They are not sealed the way Western houses are against the elements. Trying to keep an entire house at a constant temperature would be wasteful, expensive, and highly inefficient. Central air is just as wasteful in the West of course… though since houses are generally larger, it would likely be more of an initial investment to equip each room with its own cooling unit.
So what does the differences in design say about Japan? I venture to suggest it says that on the whole, Japan is more worried about efficiency and the cost of waste. That many Japanese are more likely to adapt to the seasons by opening their windows, relying on technology only when temperatures rise beyond livable.
This is the first in a series of posts in which I will explore what Japanese appliances have to offer us about Japan’s culture and history.
