Winter Food

It's almost Christmas. Sort of, but that is what I am teaching now, anyway. Basically it means memorizing how to say mistletoe and reindeer in Japanese (yadorigi and tonakai), but it's fun, and who doesn't like getting Christmas cards. That reminds me, mad props to mom for sending me Christmas stuff. There is a package which should be put in the mail tomorrow, but getting to the post office here is often a pain.

Here's one awesome thing ma sent me:

Gingerbread Peeps! They are actually gingerbread flavored, too. Peeps are slowly becoming candy appropriate for any holiday. People often talk about how my generation grew up with the internet, and that this shapes our outlook like no other generation's before, but I think it is Peeps. We grew up with these, too. And they are so much better than Facebook it is almost ridiculous. She also sent some other Christmas-themed Peeps, but I don't feel like photographing them, and I already ate one of the boxes, anyway.

Human shaped food is surreal.

The cup is filled with wheat (barley? the character can be either) tea. I found a bag containing something like 54 jumbo sized bags for super cheap, so I got it for these cold nights. It is generally below freezing in my house during the night. The important thing, though, is that it has some sort of incredibly happy old guy on the bag, so I can only assume it has some sort of magical health effects. I hope so, anyway, because I've been drinking like ten cups of it a day, which works out nicely because the bags are huge and can be used to make multiple pots of tea before losing flavor. Crazy.

It's not all candy here, though sometimes I am given enough snacks with tea/coffee to constitute a fourth meal. Here's some soup and rice I made which is pretty boring, but check out the little fish. Neat. Oh, yeah, I went fishing today with a special ed student and it was sweet. I caught one. Awesome.

Maybe it is weird that this is enough to excite me now. This is bread. Just plain white bread, uncut. I was so happy to find bread that wasn't only 4-6 slices of bread cut to be about 1.5-2 times the size of normal sandwich bread. You wouldn't think you would miss sandwiches, but there you go.

Here's an odd one. It seems to be fake champagne (still with .02% alcohol) marketed to kids for Christmas. I chose the keroppi one over the hello kitty or pokemon because I have a thing for frogs and I don't know all the newfangled pokemon. It's pretty good. I'm still confused as to it's purpose. As a side note, I think kero, kero is the sound that frogs make here.

Behold this. Japan is so far ahead of us in flavor technology, it is incredible. That bag has "beekoneggu" written on it, for those who can't read backwards katkana. Yes, they are bacon and egg flavored chips. And they actually taste like it, too, which is awesome. The can is a new seasonal brew from sapporo which is supposed to be white wine-like beer made with hops from New Zealand or something. It was darn good, but apparently the convenience store has no faith in it, because they are selling it with the cheap beers. Joke's on them!

Japan is so crazy. That's it for now.

Wasabeef

"'WASABEEF' has grown up with customers. We hope everybody to enjoy this grown-up and exciting taste!"

Also, mayonnaise-flavored shrimp things and some booze. I stopped by James's to pick up the brown bottle, which I had left there after Thanksgiving (actual held on a Sunday), and a couple of his students were there. They also happened to be some of my students. One of them remarked that I am Santa. Last time I checked, Santa drove a sleigh, not a Daihatsu Mira. Also, I don't remember Santa coming to people's houses to take things. The moral of the story, though, is that even when you think that shochu is sake and warm it up mistakenly, it is good. The other moral is that snack companies know far more about making delicious chips that taste really nothing like either of the two flavors that they have claimed to combine than they do about English grammar.

Answers

Thanks to all who took the little loanwords quiz. Here are the answers.

Shaapen, シャーペン, means mechanical pencil. It is a shortened form of sharp and pencil put together.

Hochikisu, ホチキス, means stapler. It's called that because of a dude named E. H. Hotchkiss. I didn't actually feel like reading that page, so it may be crap.

Hoomu, ホーム, actually means platform, as in a train platform. Yes, apparently the word platform was too long for Japanese people.

Pasokon, パソコン, indeed does mean personal computer. It's just shortened and stuck together.

Baito, バイト, was really unfair to ask, I suppose, since I made it seem like these would be English. It's actually a shortened form of arbeit, meaning work, if my German is right (which I am not going to check). The Japanese use it to mean part-time job. Weird, eh?


This is a pretty much unrelated picture of a box of Christmas doughnuts I bought the other day. The writing is backwards, but if you can read katakana, you can probably make out that it does indeed say kurisumasu doonatsu, クリスマス　ドーナツ, so I'm not lying. Also the picture of doughnuts with santas and reindeers all over the place is kind of a giveaway.

The Japanese conception of Christmas is excellent. This is a country with something like <1% of the population identifying as Christian, but Christmas stuff is popping up all over. All my students know who Santa-san is and seem to look forward to this holiday for the sole purpose of getting stuff. I don't blame them.

The Japanese conception of doughnuts is awful. They are tiny and dry and, like everything here, individually wrapped for no reason. I think the guys who run food companies here are the people that they based Captain Planet's villains on because it is as if they are going out of their way to hurt the environment for no other reason whatsoever.

Loan Words

So, the Japanese love loanwords, mostly from English. Of course, sometimes the words they end up with are just weird. Here's a little quiz. Feel free to guess what these words are in English in the comments. No fair if you already speak Japanese.

1. shaapen

2. hochikisu

3. hoomu (that's a double "oh" sound, not like "ooh!")

4. pasokon

5. baito

Good luck.